Theorizing race and settler colonialism within U.S. sociology

Settler colonialism expands race and racism beyond ideological perspectives and reveals the links between historical and contemporary racialized social relations and practices–the racial structure–of American society. In this article, we define settler colonialism, highlight sociological scholarship that uses settler colonial theoretical frameworks, and explore ways in which this work enriches, intersects with, complicates, and contradicts key assumptions within the sociology of race.     

Decolonial Hip Hop: Indigenous Hip Hop and the disruption of settler colonialism

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Detroit has gone through many changes – or so it appears. From streets lined with vehicles made by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors and driven by the nearly 2 million people who called the city home in 1950 to certain parts of the city looking like ghost towns; from a population that dwindled to 670,000 to the revival of downtown. Yet, what has been remarkably consistent is the invisibility of the Motor City’s Indigenous population. Indeed, Indigenous erasure, combined with rhetoric and policies that continue to marginalize and subjugate African Americans in Detroit, create a place rooted in multiple colonialisms. This essay examines how Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists resist settler colonialism through art, creativity, and culture as well as the practices of Detroit 2.0, a rhetoric and policy used by Detroit elites to reimagine it as a place of opportunity. By making visible the connections between blackness and indigeneity, as well as by linking the struggle of colonized peoples in Detroit to those in Palestine, Indigenous artists are not only asserting their humanity and challenging the longstanding idea of their erasure, but also constructing pathways for artists and activists to disrupt the effects of multiple colonialisms that continue to marginalize people of colour in urban areas. Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists make socially conscious music and also participate as activists in the city of Detroit. They serve as a window onto contemporary Indigenous identity, represent an exemplar of the urban Indigenous experience, and combine activism with art in a variety of ways.     

Gangs,gangsters, and the impact of settler colonialism on the Latina/o experience

As the largest minority group in the United States, Latinas/os have experienced a long history of discrimination, prejudice, and stigmatization as gang members. A contemporary survey of law enforcement agencies reported that Latinos continue to be the largest proportion of any racial or ethnic group involved in gangs. To describe such a pattern, the framework of settler colonialism will be utilized to describe differential experiences based on race, gender, and how structural inequalities vary by region and time. Latinas/os have been particularly impacted by segregation, second‐class treatment, and policies considered racially neutral. Gangs provide a topical area for examining patterns of racialization and social control. The authors of this article will outline the research literature on gangs and how settler colonialism has impacted the Latina/o population regarding the origination of gangs, reasons for joining, behaviors and activities, and the process for leaving these groups. The authors emphasize decolonization strategies including reducing structural inequalities and thereby reducing gang membership and risky behaviors. Until this can be accomplished, the authors hope for human rights, labor equity, and religious organizing efforts that can form into social movements of collective empowerment and justice.     

Tamworth, Australia's ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rurality, and resident reactions

Since the 1970s, Tamworth has become well known as Australia's ‘country music capital’. Its annual Country and Western Music Festival has become the leading event of its type in Australia, attracting over 60,000 visitors every year. The festival, and country music more generally, have become central to the town's identity and tourism marketing strategies. This article discusses the social constructions that have surrounded Tamworth's transition to ‘country music capital’—of the ‘rural’, and of ‘country’—within the context of debates about the politics of place marketing. Textual analysis of promotional material and built landscapes reveals representations of rurality (or ‘senses of the rural’). In their most commercial form, representations of rurality converge on a dominant notion of ‘country’, quite different from the ‘countryside’ and ‘rural idyll’ in England. This dominant, or normative ‘country’ forms the basis of imagery for the festival, the Town's marketing strategy, and associated advertising campaigns by major sponsors. It is predominantly masculine, white, working class and nationalist. But links between musical style and discourses of place are complex. Colonial British histories, Celtic musical traditions and North American popular culture all inform ‘country’ in Tamworth, dissipating nationalist interpretations. Normative constructions also contrast with other, heterogeneous ruralities in Australia, that include the lived experiences of rural Australians, and on stage—in country music—where multiple ‘ruralised’ identities are performed. Even those who stand to benefit from place promotion have been uncertain about country music and ‘the country’, because of associated discourses of Tamworth as ‘hick’ and ‘redneck’. In the final section of the paper, reactions of residents to constructions of Tamworth as country music capital are discussed, via the results of a simple resident survey. In contrast to previous studies of the disempowering politics of place marketing, Tamworth residents were on the whole supportive of the new associations and images for the town, despite ‘hick’ connotations, as it has become a centre for ‘country’, and for country music. Reasons for this are explored, and resistances discussed. The result is a complex and entangled politics of national identity, gender, race and class, where meanings for place are variously interpreted and negotiated.     

‘Can you get more American than Native American?’: drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race

ABSTRACT

Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that drag as an art form can reproduce the racial and colonial logics of the settler state. The paper traces the workings of settler colonialism that shape drag creativity through the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. To do so, I theorize how Raja, the winner of season 3, performed, imitated, and appropriated indigeneity. I argue that Raja’s act as the ‘Native,’ after Lumbee drag queen Stacy Layne Matthews’s elimination from the show, demonstrates how queer people of colour can become complicit in settler colonial processes. The paper is a call to rethink drag creativity beyond assumed transgressive aesthetics, and to critically engage with racial and settler colonial formations.     

Navigating communities: race,place, and travel in the history of maritime Southeast Asia

This paper examines intersecting notions of distance, place and community across Insular Southeast Asia for the last several hundred years. The piece is not an attempt to chronicle all these affiliations over time and space, but is rather an effort to re-think how people have moved in Southeast Asian history, who they did this with and why. The essay is divided into three parts. The first section looks at some of the meanings of place in the last five centuries, as place has pertained to communities in ‘centers’ and maritime ‘peripheries’, as well as in several supposedly discrete arenas. The second section focuses on people, and how different communities in Southeast Asia have envisioned the terms and conditions of movement in divergent ways. The last third of the paper concentrates on period, or how conceptions of community, distance and travel have changed over time. It is hoped that this essay will show how all three of these variables – people, place, and periodization – have intersected in specific, complicated ways in shaping local notions of ‘community’.     

White settler death drives: settler statecraft,white possession,and multiple colonialisms under Treaty 6

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by arguing that the 1870 Hudson’s Bay Company charter and transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada helped to make past imperial violence an ongoing settler colonial terror structure into the present. It argues that this transition from imperial to settler colonial control of territory is best understood by using a multiple colonialisms framework, to examine the ways in which heteropatriarchal family structures transitioned from Indigenous-European to white settler kin networks that crystallized whiteness as a racialized means to control land as private property. Following Kanien’kehá:ka feminist scholar Audra Simpson’s work, I suggest that this territory’s multiple and overlapping colonial histories (French, English/British, and Canadian) are a crucial lens through which to understand the historical and ongoing formation of Canada as a white settler state, and that these histories still relationally drive anti-Indigenous violence and the settler killing of Indigenous peoples today. The essay concludes by arguing that the seeming daily placidity of white settler violence against Plains Indigenous peoples under Treaty 6 ultimately supports a relational violence that supports a killing state and its armed citizens in the name of protecting private property for white settlers.     

‘Where are you from?’: Identifying place1

Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place‐related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passages in focus groups in which participants say where they are from, shows that participants generally take the question and answer as routine, and then shows the ways the interaction develops when this routineness is broken, amended, or called into question. When a participant revises their statement of where they are from, they adapt to what they see as the knowledge and stance of their interlocutor, they re‐present themselves, and they create possibilities for further talk, defending, telling stories, or showing entitlement to an opinion. I argue that the ways people answer this question, interactively, can tell us about them, and us, as well as about their map of the world.     

‘Vorkuta is the capital of the world’: people,place and the everyday production of the local

This article considers the relationship between people and place in the everyday production of the local. Based on empirical research with young people in Russia's far north it offers an empirically substantiated argument that processes of deterritorialization do not necessarily imply the disembedding of people from either the national or the local. Drawing on discursive psychological approaches to the construction of nationhood, the article demonstrates how national and local patriotisms are produced through a post‐Soviet project of nationalism and an active programme of flagging the city by the city administration. Through an exploration of the everyday manifestation and articulation of ties between people and place, however, it also suggests some of the limitations to theories of the everyday discursive production of nationhood. Connections to place, it is argued, are not only unconscious or linguistic expressions of discursively produced subjects, but emotional and sensual responses to the material (urban space, nature, climate) and symbolic (hymns, flags, historical narratives) environment. This suggests the need to conceptualize place as a site of the active production and enactment of subjectivity, which is itself not only the product of language and discourse but of experience, affect and ‘matter’.     

Theorizing the institution: foundations,duality, and data

Although a central construct for sociologists, the concept of institution continues to elude clear and full specification. One reason for this lack of clarity is that about 50 years ago empirical researchers in the field of sociology turned their gaze downward, away from macro-sociological constructs in order to focus their attention on middle-range empirical projects. It took almost 20 years for the concept of the institution to work its back onto the empirical research agenda of mainstream sociologists. The new institutional project in organizational sociology led the way. Since then, scholars in this tradition have achieved a great deal but there is still much more to accomplish. Here, future directions for research are considered by reviewing how the concept of the institution has come to be treated by mainstream philosophers, sociologists of science and technology studies, and social network theorists.

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Public relations,indigeneity and colonization: Indigenous resistance as dialogic anchor

Cultural communication has been put forth in the context of globalization and the emergence of Indigenous movements as a framework for dialogue to be carried out by organizations (Love & Tilley, 2014). Concepts of Māori communication for instance have been foregrounded in the public relations literature to anchor strategies of effective engagement through dialogue, leading to the building of trust in Indigenous communities (Love & Tilley, 2014). Similarly, Indigenous engagement has been foregrounded as a key resource in achieving global sustainable development (Dutta, 2013, 2019). This turn to Indigenous cultural communication is broadly situated in the framing of indigeneity as a category to be developed within frameworks of dialogue and engagement, constituted within the structures of transnational capitalism (Dutta, 2019).Drawing from Dutta’s (2008) theorizing of the cultural sensitivity and culture-centered approaches to communication, we critically interrogate the hegemony of Indigenous dialogue as a strategy deployed by dominant organizations. Whereas cultural sensitivity incorporates cultural characteristics to serve organizational goals, cultural-centering serves as an anchor for collaborating with cultural communities at the margins in building “communicative infrastructures” for voice. Arguing that superficial markers of culture incorporated into engagement is a communicative inversion that serves the colonizing tools of transnational capital, we attend to culturally centered communication strategies of engagement that are grounded in resistance and emerge from within the voices of Indigenous movements that are increasingly threatened by ever-expanding colonial missions of globalization.Comparing across two case studies, one about the struggle of the Dongria Kondh in the Odisha state of Eastern India against mining capitalism, and the other a critical review of the use of Māori cultural knowledge in the public relations literature, we articulate indigeneity as a site of resistance within the meta-theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (Dutta, 2008, 2011). In conceptualizing Indigenous resistance as an agonistic anchor to communication, we attend to the impossibilities of dialogue, and simultaneously to the role of communicative infrastructures in inverting neoliberal hegemony. Dialogue is radically transformed, not in generating consensus but rather in its capacity to disrupt the neoliberal status quo through the presence of Indigenous voices. Indigenous resistance “renders impure” the ontological category of dialogue, on one hand, attending to the limits of dialogue, and on the other hand, turns dialogic tools into the hands of Indigenous social movements. Dialogue as a communication infrastructure located materially within Indigenous resistance movements turns the power of communication into the hands of Indigenous communities.     

Commodification of place,consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China1

This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of place as it relates to globalization and mobility by examining the sociolinguistic construction of a tourism site. A former residential neighborhood, West Street in Yangshuo County, China, was gradually transformed into a so‐called ‘global village’ for domestic tourists partly through appropriating English as one semiotic resource. Positioning this place in the global‐national‐local nexus, this study shows that the promotion of West Street as a ‘global village’ is not only driven by globalization or westernization, but more importantly capitalizes on English as a stylistic resource that indexes the modernist aspirations of the Chinese people. This commodified sense of place is nevertheless negotiated by tourists as they activate and (re‐)work the social meaning of place through their discursive practices. This highlights how place is a social construct, constantly transformed in the process of socio‐historical change, and also mediated by people's conceptualization, imagination and experience. 本文从社会语言学角度考察一处旅游景点的建构,旨在增进在全球化和流动时代背景下对‘地域’ (place) 的理解。位于中国阳朔县的西街,通过把英语作为一种符号资源,从一个历史居民街区转变成为所谓的‘地球村’。本研究从全球‐国家‐地方三位连结的框架审视该地域,说明‘地球村’不仅仅是全球化带动下的地方经济发展策略,更重要的是借用了在英语作为一种语言风格资源在中国社会中的作用。然而,这种构建的地域涵义也同时被游客通过不同方式激活和改写。本文提出,地域是社会构建的产物,其涵义随着社会历史的变革,人们对地域的理解,想象和体验,而不断改变。[Chinese]     

The French in Algeria, Algerians in France: Bourdieu, colonialism, and migration

Bourdieu's early fieldwork which included field observation, statistical analysis, and the use of photography to capture, represent, and analyse Algerian society in its complexity, took place within the unusual context of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). A number of his photographs of Algerian life depict the physical dislocation of Algerian peasantry into shanty towns largely as the result of rapid socio-economic and cultural change introduced by French colonisation and war. Although this fieldwork was to fundamentally shape his subsequent oeuvre, substantive issues which arose out of this research including colonialism, racism, and migration, tended to disappear in his later writings. This paper will argue that Bourdieu's discussion of colonialism in his early work, together with arguments developed by his student and co-author, Abdelmalek Sayad, provide a basis for understanding contemporary processes of ethno-racial domination and migration.     

Legal indigeneity: knowledge,legal discourse and the construction of indigenous identity in Colombia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the creation of the indigenous legal subject in Colombia from the perspective of legal-knowledge regimens. It analyses the turn from medical psychiatric assessments to indigenous identity to anthropological discourses on cultural differences. This article describes the legal construction of the indigenous subject in two historical moments. On the one hand, in the context of formation of the nation-state in Colombia and, on the other hand, in the transition towards contemporary multicultural constitutionalism within which legal discourse creates taxonomies for the definition of identities and the recognition of special rights to people who claim to be indigenous.     

No place called home: the causes and social consequences of the UK housing ‘bubble’

This paper examines the key causes and social consequences of the much debated UK ‘housing bubble’ and its aftermath from a multidimensional sociological approach, as opposed to the economic perspective of many popular discussions. This is a phenomenon that has affected numerous economies in the first decade of the new millennium. The discussion is based on a comprehensive study that includes exhaustive analysis of secondary data, content and debate in the mass media and academia, primary data gathered from the monitoring of weblogs and forums debating housing issues, and case histories of individuals experiencing housing difficulties during this period. This paper is intended to provide a broad overview of the key findings and preliminary analysis of this ongoing study, and is informed by a perspective which considers secure and affordable housing to be an essential foundation of stable and cohesive societies, with its absence contributing to a range of social ills that negatively impact on both individual and collective well being. Overall, it is argued that we must return to viewing decent, affordable housing as an essential social resource, that provides the bedrock of stable individual, family and community life, while recognizing that its increasing treatment as a purely economic asset is a key contributor to our so‐called ‘broken society’.     

Theorizing with Archives: Contingency,Mistakes, and Plausible Alternatives

Qualitative Sociology - What are “good” kinds of archival evidence for theorizing? Surprisingly, the word archive and discussions of the archival process rarely appear in methods...