‘Stepbrothers from the Middle East’: negotiations of racial identity among Jewish-Israeli immigrants in Toronto

This paper explores the complex negotiations of racial identity experienced on migration. Working from a series of 48 interviews with racially diverse Israeli immigrants to Toronto, and drawing on literature on the assimilated Canadian-born Jewish population, I contrast the racial histories of Canadian and Israeli Jews – groups whose identities have historically crossed intersections of race, ethnicity and religion. By exploring the participants’ accounts of being differently whitened and blackened in Israel and Toronto, and their own interpretations of and responses to these processes, I expose the spatial contingencies of racial hierarchies, meanings and identifications. I also introduce the under-studied Mizrahi/Sephardi Jewish community – who are demographically prevalent in Israel yet largely unknown in North America, and are subject to complex racial and ethno-cultural tensions in both spaces – into discussions of Canadian Jewishness.     

Of “madness,” against Babylon: A story of resistance, (mis)representation,and paradox in the Caribbean

This article provides a postcolonial feminist account of the complex politics of the Earth People, an anti-systemic movement in Trinidad and Tobago who organised against the post-independence status quo during the 1970–1980s. The purpose of the piece is twofold. Firstly, on a scholarly level, it endeavours to (re)tell a theoretically-driven empirically-based story of the nuances that surfaced during the Earth People's resistance to “Babylon” (i.e. racial capitalism, Western institutions, rise of a post-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie). Secondly, on a political-epistemological level, we are countering conventional ways Caribbean people, histories, social movements, and the region at large are documented, studied, and ultimately written about within mainstream academia. To do so, we outline the fraught politics of (mis)representation that arise in established ethnography, with specific care afforded to the perspectives and political agency of participants from the movement. Our analysis emerges out of fieldwork guided by critical race theories, decolonial critique, feminist ethics, and community collaboration. Our methods included archival research, focus groups, oral histories, go-along interviews, and narrative inquiry with former members of the group. In general, the piece historicises the Earth People's efforts to evade and defy colonial norms, capitalist logics, and Westminster state power by “returning to nature.” Further, we offer a synopsis of movement's worldviews, social relations, and ideological standpoints, which despite being episodically paradoxical and not adopted widely throughout the Caribbean, merit further respective attention and critical scrutiny apropos regional posterity and orthodox academic knowledge production.     

黑水靺鞨思慕部探索

本文反对唐代“黑水”是指穆棱河与乌苏里江及其支流的观点,认为黑水是指黑龙江中下游段。结雅河下游发现的考古遗迹族属是黑水靺鞨之思慕部,不是从松花江迁移到结雅河下游流域的粟末靺鞨。靺鞨思慕部文化具有草原文化的成分。靺鞨族人种是复杂的、多源的。思慕部墓葬人骨得出的人种类型只能代表思慕部,能否代表黑水人种,或代表全体靺鞨人种,还需要新的对比材料。     

Reporting oppression: mapping racial prejudice in Anti-Caste and Fraternity, 1888–1895

This paper presents a close reading of the reports of racial oppression that appeared in issues of two periodicals, Anti-Caste and its successor Fraternity, between 1888 and 1895. Edited in Street, Somerset, these periodicals created an extensive political geographical imagination by mapping international cases of racial prejudice. Although critical of the British empire, neither Anti-Caste nor Fraternity demanded the destruction of the British empire. In a tactic similar to that used by early Pan-Africanists, the papers’ narratives desired an end to the expansion of the British empire and an increase in the respect for and conditions of those who were ruled ‘under the British Flag’. However, Anti-Caste’s focus upon racial inequality across the United States as well as the British empire enabled it to create a distinctive critique of racial prejudice across the English-speaking world. Its criticism of the imperial project combined with support for human brotherhood allowed the paper to develop a framework for debates on racial prejudice that drew together criticisms of labour laws in India, the removal of people from their lands in Southern Africa, the racial segregation of public transport in the United States and the restriction of Chinese labour in Australia.     

Intimate bordering: Intimacy,anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border

This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.     

Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians

By focusing on the key book‐length studies of the Apollo program that landed American astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, this essay seeks to evaluate the historiography about Apollo in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, dividing the subject into five major areas. The first area is the foreign policy and public policy antecedents of Apollo and its immediate ramifications; some of these efforts have yielded significant studies. The second area involves the evolution of space hardware, in many instances these are overwhelmingly detailed studies of rockets and other space flight technologies. Third, there is a great fascination with the astronauts and their actual flights, and a rich tradition of memoir and narrative exists in this arena. The fourth area receiving attention from historians of Apollo and the lunar voyages emphasizes the history of science, in which much of the focus is on the scientists, scientific findings from the voyages of discovery, and the use of this evidence in developing larger theories about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Finally, and increasingly so in the last 20 years, the Apollo story has been recontextualized through social and cultural investigations of its meaning in modern America. Assessing the five major areas enumerated above, this essay also offers some possibly fruitful avenues of future research.     

AIDS as Occupational Hazard: Racial Mixing and Historical Space in Malaysia's Multinationals

In Malaysia, bangsa, a term blending race and ethnicity, structures modes of social and political‐economic organization that reflexively challenge and reinforce the significance of race, not just to the country's three main groups but to the construction of risk as well. Tracing this reflexivity, the author bridges a historical rendering of Malaysia's colonial‐capitalist incorporation with an ethnographic unpacking of its social artifacts: notions of space, place and race that confer on factories a high‐risk label for HIV/AIDS. It traces how multinational corporations, as landscapes of multiracial modernity, are both the quixotic trophies of Malaysia's global integration and a source of social dread. Risk is ethnographically shown to be more a sociohistoric dynamic than a statistical probability, reflecting ideas of racial individuation and ideals of social stability and cultural immiscibility anchored in colonial governance structures of nineteenth‐century Malaya and operative in contemporary Malaysia.     

The origins of the 'Manifesto of racial scientists'

This article examines the origin, development and controversies concerning the 'Manifesto of racial scientists', the document published in July 1938 that laid the foundations for the forthcoming racial policies of the Fascist regime. The article seeks to explain Mussolini's rationale for adopting a racial ideology in the first place, and for including within this ideology such diverse (and contradictory) concepts as the 'Nordic Aryan' racial identity of Italians; the 'purity and uniqueness' of the 'Italian' race; anti-Semitism; anti-Africanism; and a 'biological' definition of race. These concepts, in general alien to traditional Italian thought, provoked a backlash among some prominent Italian scientists and Fascists of such magnitude as to throw the entire program of racial propaganda in disarray for the remainder of the regime's existence. The article also highlights the career of Dr Guido Landra, the actual author of the Manifesto, and considers the extent to which his ideas influenced the text. Questo articolo esamina l'origine, lo sviluppo e le controversie relative al Manifesto degli Scientisti Razziali. Il documento fu pubblicato nel luglio del 1938 e fornì la base ideologica per i successivi programmi razziali del regime fascista. L'articolo tenta di illustrare il motivo principale per cui Mussolini adottÒ un'ideologia razziale e incluse in tale ideologia concetti diversi e contraddittori come l'identitÀ razziale "Ariano-Nordica" degli Italiani; l'eccezionalitÀ e la pureza della razza italiana; l'antisemitismo; l'anti-Africanismo; e una definizione biologica del concetto di razza. Questi principi, che in generale sono contrari agli ideali comuni italiani, provocarono un contraccolpo, in grande scala fra molti scientisti italiani di fede fascisti e portarono il programma di propaganda razziale a uno stato di confusione per il resto dell'esistenza del regime. L'articolo esamina anche la carriera del dottor Guido Landra, il vero autore del Manifesto, e considera fino a che punto le idee di Landra influenzarono il contenuto del testo.     

“Better to kill them off at once”: race,violence, and human rights in antebellum western state constitutional conventions

My paper argues that delegates to antebellum western state constitutional conventions, in both slave and free states, expressed violent, even homicidal ideas about free black people. They predicted and described mass exterminations, lynching, and even a race war. These delegates sought to enshrine coercive measures in their state constitutions, including re-enslavement and forcible removals, and they employed ferocious language to support their arguments. My paper explores the delegates’ efforts to mount legal and constitutional justifications for violence toward free black people. I compare the language in antebellum western conventions to coeval debates in other regions. Although no state legitimized lynching, let alone genocide, these debates provide a useful window into the delegates’ efforts to find constitutional justifications for the removal – or even extermination – of free black people from the new western states.