Deconstructing Racial Democracy: A Personal Quest to Understand Social Conditioning about Race Relations in Brazil

Although considerable work has been done about racial democracy in Brazil, scant information is available regarding the mechanisms by which social conditioning related to the myth of racial democracy is reproduced among those in power. In order to better understand race relations in Brazil, we must include perceptions of those who are in power. I was born and raised by a white, privileged family in a traditional Brazilian state. My family comes from a long line of coffee growers who have always interacted with many oppressed African Brazilian employees. As a privileged white Brazilian woman I have wide access to white privileged Brazilians and I can provide a unique perspective on race relations in Brazil. This auto-ethnographic research project used ethnomethodology and visual ethnography to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the assumptions about race relations in Brazil held by me, my family, and those African Brazilians who interact directly or indirectly with my family and me? 2) How do these assumptions influence my subjective understanding of and responses related to race relations in Brazil? 3) How do these assumptions influence the interactions between myself, my family, and those African Brazilians who interact directly or indirectly with my family and me? Data included journal entries, an in-depth interview of my life history, and photographs collected over 40 days in a traditional state in Brazil. Data analysis identified five main themes: 1) blackness versus whiteness; 2) gender, power and sexuality; 3) mechanisms maintaining practices that reproduce oppression; 4) power of social conditioning; and 5) normative expressions of agency against racial democracy ideology.     

‘Mixed’ Japanese-Filipino identities under Japanese multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

The ways in which multiculturalism is debated and practiced forms an important frame for ‘mixed’ ethnic identities to take shape. In this paper, I explore how young migrants of Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ parentage make sense of their ethnic identities in Japan. My key findings are that dominant discourses constructing the Japanese nation as a monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation leave no space for diversity within the definition of ‘Japanese’, creating the necessity for alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. Japanese multiculturalism does not provide alternative narratives of Japaneseness but preserves the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity by recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries. Lastly, these categories have not been actively questioned by my respondents. Rather, they show flexibility in adopting these various labels – haafu, ‘mixed roots’, Filipino, Firipin-jin – in different contexts.     

跨国瑶族家庭语言使用现状研究——以泰美刘家四代人为个案

本文采用了实地调查法和问卷调查法,考察了刘家泰国和美国四代人的语言使用现状及其演变,并分析了不同国家及其社会文化对瑶族语言使用的影响。文章主要包括四部分:1.概括了世界瑶族的分布和历史迁徙,以及刘家四代人的居住地区;2.泰国和美国的刘家人的生活方式,以及泰、美社会文化对其语言使用的影响;3.刘家四代人的语言使用状况,包括:四代人的文化程度、年龄、家庭语言使用现状、周围的语言环境及四代人的语言使用条件和变化;4.刘家四代人的双语和多语言生活的发展和演变,总结了四代人母语与兼用语的关系。本文认为,刘家的前三代使用的语言形式是多语种类型,而第四代人的语言类型变为双语或单一语言,母语使用语言衰退,并转换成居住国的通用语;刘家四代人所使用的母语和兼用语相互竞争,但又和谐共处。     

Recycling the idea of race: socio-political agenda,transnational business culture,and diversity management in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article intends to contribute to the line of studies that critically addresses diversity management, bringing the Brazilian experience into the discussion. It aims to demonstrate how large Brazilian companies and transnational corporations operating in the country have been recycling the idea of race in order to cope with the greatest politicisation of debates on the racial issue within the Brazilian public sphere since the late twentieth century. This phenomenon is related to changes in the political actions of the black movement in Brazil, which since the same period has been absorbing the new socio-political agenda existing within the global network of anti-racism advocacy. This is an agenda in which two purposes have a central importance: the battle against racial inequality and the demand for affirmative action policies. The data presented in this paper are part of broader research in which, by means of the biographical method and the ethnographic fieldwork, the social trajectories and career paths of two generations of Brazilian black executives were analysed.     

Are hafus ‘dirty’ or ‘special’? Negotiating mixed-race identities among Japanese-Indonesian youths in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This is one of the first papers to examine the experiences of mixed-race individuals who have one Japanese parent, commonly referred to as ‘hafu’, living outside of Japan. Specifically, it analyzes the experiences of Japanese-Indonesians living in Indonesia who have attended an overseas Japanese school and an Indonesian or international school in Indonesia or elsewhere. Japan’s dual positioning – as inferior to the West and superior to the Rest – impacts upon the experiences of mixed-race individuals in varying ways depending on the predominant discourse operating at the school. At the Japanese school, the discourse of Japanese superiority, which draws on both the cultural legacy of Japanese imperialism and contemporary regional socio-economic hierarchy, deemed the hafus as inferior in relation to their Japanese peers for not being ‘pure’ Japanese. At the Indonesian school, the regional hierarchy deemed the hafus as superior in relation to their Indonesian peers. In these cases, mixed-race individuals find themselves on opposite ends of Japan’s dual positioning. Finally, at the English-medium international school, the cosmopolitan discourse that privileges mixedness (and western cultural capital) at times inverted the positionality of those who were of mixed descent in relation to their Japanese peers. The paper discusses the way hafus submit to, negotiate or challenge the prevailing discourses through the use of varying strategies (sometimes depending on gender) such as performing Japaneseness or bicultural competence, constructing social distance, or physically fighting. Furthermore, the paper extends the application of methodological transnationalism to analyze the way multiple regional and global discourses intersect to simultaneously and situationally affect hafu experiences.     

An invisible minority? Return migration and ethnicity in Okinawa*

This paper examines ethnic return migration in Japan by looking at a particular case – that of people of half-Okinawan parentage returning to Okinawa, referred to in this paper as the Nisei. By going beyond conventional theories that entice people to return migrate to their ethnic homelands, I also look at issues regarding nationality and how the category of ‘Japanese’ tends to conflate race and ethnicity, thus creating boundaries as well as ‘invisible minorities’. I also explore how ethnicity and nationality intersect using this particular case and how these intersections are actually created and enabled through processes of migration. In line with this, I also discuss how ‘Japanese’ and ‘half’ are both ascribed and self-ascribed identities, and how each of these two categories delineate ‘boundaries’ and hence engage in ‘boundary-making process/es’.     

Rewriting dominant narratives of the academy: women faculty of color and identity management

Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth, and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.     

Smothered to (un)death: on identity and the European court of human rights as an administrator of human life

Human rights have become one of the most important tools for construction of identities in our era. Perhaps the most important in this process is the right to private and family life which is the most commonly invoked right in cases involving the most fundamental aspects of human life, such as marriage, abortion, surveillance and genetics. This article provides an overview of how the European Court of Human Rights deals with these biopolitically sensitive cases in the condition of indeterminacy of human rights. It is argued that the understandable reluctance of the Court to pronounce anything on these matters and its consequent use of the margin of appreciation doctrine, with the sole exception of valorization of life as such – as survival – leads to reinforcement of the link between the sovereign and bare life as well as the dominance of fixed, already-existing identities over the multiple, blurry identities of the whatever being. This has detrimental consequences for the constantly ongoing process of construction of the self, always in a state of becoming.     

State power and the role of education in the constitution of natives’ subjectivities: the Druze in Israel

Collective identities are largely conceived as the essence of human subjectivity, the basis of moral collectivities and the code by which people tend to relate to histories and current affairs. Michel Foucault, notwithstanding, argued that identities are the product of power relations. Through various techniques, such as the classification of populations to certain categories, the hierarchical ordering of these categories, the allocation of differential treatment to those who occupy the various categories and the association between belonging to particular categories and certain jobs and means of living, regimes establish group identities. This process of sorting out, we argue, is the beginning of a laborious endeavor whose final goal is to institutionalize the new identities in the consciousness of the wider public as natural. Education is thought to constitute an essential tool by which regimes inculcate the young generations with constructed identities. Despite that, hegemonic discourses are not stable; rather, they are constantly challenged by all sorts of groups who speak in the name of silenced histories or moral claims. In line with these insights, we aim in this article to trace the Israeli methods employed to constitute the Druze as a distinct ethnic category, which is different not only from the Muslims, a faith community to which they affiliated until 1961, but also from the Palestinian-Arab minority. Particularly, we aim to look at the role that the educational system has played in the constitution of Druze separate identity.     

Transnational patterns among Asian American and Latina/o American children of immigrants from Southern California

A growing literature has examined the prevalence of transnational engagement among children of immigrants. However, few studies have been equipped to analyse underlying dynamics that serve to impede or perpetuate transnational practices among them in the United States. In this article, we compare transnationalism narratives between 1.5- and second-generation children of immigrants to more fully adjudicate enduring transnational ties over time. Our analysis of 134 interviews from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study suggests that children of immigrants from Southern California conceptualise transnational experiences in diverse but remarkably similar ways. The meanings attached to transnational behaviours and identities employ certain patterns, and are often related to strength of kin-based ties, ethnic language fluency, and levels of structural access to the homeland. Moreover, findings indicate that the second-generation is nearly as transnationally engaged as the 1.5-generation. This provides novel but limited evidence in support of claims that transnational ties are sustained across generations.     

Living in mobility: trajectories of Brazilians in Belgium and the UK

Within the social sciences, migration has traditionally been conceived of as a unidirectional, purposeful and intentional process from one state of fixity (in the place of origin) to another (in the destination). By mapping the trajectories of Brazilians who currently reside in Belgium or the UK, this article draws attention to a group of people whose mobile practices do not fit this definition. On the contrary, their experiences are marked by an ongoing mobility that consists of a multiplicity of potential routes, which are often unstable and which may be accompanied by changes in status. These Brazilians tend to ‘live in mobility’ in order to improve the quality of life at home. As such, leaving home becomes a strategy of staying home, which challenges what is usually evoked by the concept of ‘migration’, whereby ‘building up a new life elsewhere’ and ‘integration’ are seen as key. Whereas our respondents themselves have a more circular or mobile perspective, the receiving society discursively frames migration as one-way, and thus as a ‘threat’ that calls for social integration, control and the maintenance of national identity.     

读《三国志·倭人传》--曹魏与日本列岛诸国的往来

历史上,中国与日本的交往,大体以三国曹魏为界线。其前较少,中国正史对日本记载仅寥寥几笔;其后多起来。陈寿撰《三国志》首次为日本立《传》,当是重要证据。该《传》记载由中国前往日本的路线、里程,女王国的结构、物产、法制,日本人的服饰、发式、婚姻、丧葬习俗等,同时还记载了倭女王与曹魏6次使者交往及礼品、赏赐等。《倭人传》中某些记载需考证、辨别,但毕竟是研究早期日本及中日关系史的宝贵资料,在中日史学界都具有较高的学术地位。《倭人传》史料,大体来自王沈《魏书》和鱼豢《魏略》,前者为官修,故有条件使用大量官方史料。偌多官方史料源头,系曹魏赴日使者的两个《报告》和日本来华使者的提供。     

Fluidity amidst structure: multi-racial identity constructions across the life course of Malaysians and Singaporeans

ABSTRACT

Multi-racial identity construction is understood to be fluid, contextual and dynamic. Yet the dynamics of multi-racial identity construction when racial identities are ascribed and formulated as static by governments is less explored in psychological studies of race. This paper examines the dynamics of racial identity construction among multi-racial Malaysians and Singaporeans in a qualitative study of 31 semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify the different private racial identity constructions of participants who were officially ascribed with single racial identities at birth. Participants reflected on the overwhelming influence of the state and significant Others in limiting their ability to express their multiple racial identities when they were in school, and highlighted their capacity to be agentic in their private racial identity constructions when they were older. This paper shows that across the life course multi-racial individuals possess (1) the ability to adopt different racial identity positions at different times, (2) the ability to hold multiple racial identity constructions at the same time when encounters with Others are dialogical, (3) the reflexivity of past identity positions in the present construction of identities.     

An introduction: the predicament of Brazilian culture

‘Truth’ and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth‐century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific ‘truth’ and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio‐historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.     

Racialisation and racial formation in urban spaces*

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I try to clarify the notions of racialisation and racial formation and how they operate in the framework of nation states like Brazil. My main argument is that these processes are always constrained by the formation of social classes and national cultural repertoires even if transnational forces are important in nurturing them. I conclude by making a preliminary effort to unravel mechanisms and institutions which allow these processes of racialisation and racial formation to form part of the daily lives of black Brazilians in the context of class-structured urban spaces.     

Strict versus flexible categorizations of mixedness: classifying mixed race in Singapore and New Zealand

ABSTRACT

Classifying and recording population data along racial and ethnic lines is common in many multiethnic societies. Singapore and New Zealand both use racial and ethnic categories in their population records and national censuses, although on different scales, using different methodologies and to different ends. Mixed race identities are particularly difficult to classify within traditionally singular racial categories, and each country has dealt with this in various ways. This paper explores the effects of different forms of classification on mixed racial and ethnic identities. Narratives from 40 men and women of mixed descent highlight the tangible and intangible impacts of categorization along racial lines, and the ways in which mixedness can be tied with belonging. The contrasting examples of Singapore and New Zealand illustrate the ways in which individuals of mixed heritage navigate both strict and fluid forms of classification, and how stories of identity are closely intertwined with institutional classificatory structures.     

Gay,Mexican and immigrant: intersecting identities among gay men in Los Angeles

This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic research study of sexual identity formation among self-identified gay Mexican men in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Relying primarily on in-depth interviews with 24 gay immigrant men and extensive participant observation in Los Angeles, this research explores the intersection of sexuality, social class, ethnicity and immigration in the participants' daily lives and identity formation processes, the potential ways that transnational social networks shape their identities, and the ways that sexuality impacts the contours of their transnational networks. This article argues that the participants' identities as gay men are best understood as hybrid constructions that integrate elements of the gender-stratified activo/pasivo model of homosexuality and the object-choice gay model of homosexuality, and that the integration of these models into their identities is impacted by social class, geography, and immigration. Further, this paper argues that the subjectivities of the gay immigrant men in this study are best understood within a transnational intersectionality framework which conceptualizes identities as hybrid constructions that are produced through the interaction of several salient social forces.     

History-in-person: the cultural production of populism among Kentucky's small-scale family farmers

How does an ideology such as populism persist and shift across generations? How do people come to embody such an ideology? This article focuses on a grassroots community association to illustrate how enduring ideologies are culturally produced and transformed. Drawing on oral history interviews and field research with an organization of Kentucky small-scale family farmers, and drawing on Holland and Lave's (2001) concept of history-in-person, I argue that enduring ideologies and attendant identities persist and shift through contentious confluences of individual biographies, citizen's groups, and societal institutions. I contend that the history-in-person approach informed by experience-near data offers an insider's view useful to explaining how durable and contentious ideologies and identities persist and change over time.     

Exile,gender and identity: the short stories of Afghanistani author Maryam Mahboob

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the largest migration of the Afghanistani population in modern history. More than six million people migrated to neighbouring countries, and to North America, Europe and Australia. Among them were almost all of Afghanistan's female authors; some eventually returned, but others chose to remain in diaspora. Some stopped writing, while others have continued. Maryam Mahboob was the first Afghanistani female author to leave Afghanistan (in 1981). Her major works since then have dealt chiefly with the issues of women living in ‘Outlandia’. Having been treated as second-class citizens in Afghanistan, how do Afghanistani migrant women perceive their social status in a new environment? How has migration affected the lives of Afghanistani women of different generations? Have they assimilated with the new culture and adopted new identities, or have they retained their cultural identities and stayed in closed communities? How do these women perceive their ‘new home’ vis-à-vis the ‘old home-land’. What does it mean to be a female author from a Third World Islamic society living and writing in the First World? Why does Mahboob still write overwhelmingly about themes from her place of origin and in her native language, after so much time abroad?