He Named Me Malala: connecting the historical,the local,and the global

My essay highlights how this (otherwise excellent) documentary film He Named Me Malala suffers from a historical amnesia in failing to connect the historical, local, and global/Western factors that have set the political-social context within which occurred the Malala incident in 2012. This is because the documentary – exposing the voice of a Pakistani female activist as a postcolonial/global agent – does not look into the historical-colonial, Cold War, or the post-Cold War dynamics that have set the ‘context’ within which the theme of the documentary unfolded. My essay addresses these issues of historical amnesia, arguing that to better comprehend the Malala incident (and broadly the issue of gender violence in Pakistan’s socio-cultural context) it remains imperative to connect how factors of power, politics, and vested interests have intersected at historical, local, and global levels to explain the 2012 Malala incident.     

Humour in the Ancient World

Since the ending of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, the international concept of racism, first initialised in the 1930s, has been inscribed in an unacknowledged conceptual double bind. Western political culture has inherited a hegemonic concept of racism that foregrounds those meanings associated with the anti‐fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern anti‐colonial critiques centred on Western Imperialism. This can be taken to suggest a divergence within a western tradition of critical thought that in one of its guises occurs between the view that ‘‘race’ thinking’ resembles ideological exceptionality and the contrary view that ‘race relations’ approximates colonial conventions. The present essay explores the extent to which these views are constituted conceptually and dialogically in opposition and divergence. This is defined as racism's conceptual double bind. In other words, the international concept of racism is doubly bound into revealing its imprints in nationalism and concealing its anchorage in liberalism; or recognising extremist ideology while denying routine governmentality. The essay, therefore, asks the following: is it im/plausible to deny that there is an inescapable conceptual double bind between these differing conceptualisations of racism that has been ignored by the dominant social science traditions in the West? The idea of a double bind in the concept of racism, reiterated throughout this essay, is not to be confused with the proposition that there are two concepts of racism. On the contrary, during the twentieth‐century conceptualisation of racism, there have rather been two distinct orientations, the hegemonic Eurocentric and the subaltern De/colonial, based on conflicting yet dialogical paradigmatic experiences of the referent of racism.     

Poetry after Guantanamo: M.I.A.

The recent work of the Sri-Lankan-British musician and sonic ‘curator’ known as M.I.A. (real name: Mathangi Arulpragasam) is considered as a commentary on atrocity and read alongside the well known essay ‘The Storyteller’ by Walter Benjamin and comments on Auschwitz by Theodor Adorno. The storytelling here is updated for a contemporary context where global war impacts us all, more or less visibly, more, or less, acknowledged. It is argued that the controversy over M.I.A.'s Romain Gavras video Born Free is exemplary of the predicament of art in the face of violence, crisis and terror – with this track, and video, M.I.A.'s work faced a storm of criticism which I want to critique in turn, in an attempt, at least, to learn to make or discern more analytic distinctions amongst concurrent determinations of art. A careful reading of Adorno can in the end teach us to see Born Free anew.     

Colonial laboratories,irreparable subjects: the experiment of ‘(b)ordering’ San Juan's public housing residents

This article provides a genealogy of the discourses that shaped the public housing policies of the mid-twentieth century in the US island colony of Puerto Rico. In the 1950s and 1960s, a conversation arose between government officials, social science experts, and the local press about how to fix social inequalities by ‘ordering’ mostly black and mulato, economically dispossessed families residing in shantytowns and barrios. This led to the establishment of caseríos (housing projects) as places where the government would attempt to ‘modernize’ residents through architectural design, planning, and social betterment programs. Because the caseríos did not address the structural causes of inequalities of power and wealth in the island, they failed in lifting residents out of poverty. From the mid-1960s onwards, a host of writings blamed caserío dwellers for the failure of the projects, attributing it to their purportedly dysfunctional – and nearly incorrigible – ‘culture of poverty’. This perpetuated a particular characterization of Puerto Rican economically dispossessed people as incapable of political or social agency without the guidance of elite Puerto Ricans and the ‘benevolent’ American colonial metropolis. It also led to the subsequent ‘bordering’ of caseríos spaces with walls and checkpoints, which in turn reproduced the branding of public housing residents as irreparably dysfunctional and ‘criminal’.     

Indigenous identity construction: enacted upon us,or within us

ABSTRACT

This commentary essay questions, theorizes, explores and grapples with the phenomenon of the creation of racial, social and cultural identity: in childhood as Native American identity is negotiated from others; and in adulthood as Native identity is constructed from within. ‘Indigenous Identity Construction: Enacted upon Us, or Within Us?’ is a commentary piece focused around Native American identity and how it is formed both through childhood and into adulthood. I analyze and interpret my experiences and understanding of my identity formation as an indigenous person- which usually is left out of the socio-political notions of modernity. Conceptualizations from ‘othering’ racial identities are discussed along with indigenous ontologies constructed within land and water. Through metaphorically revisiting past racializing incidents this piece continues working through the idea of othering and induction into whiteness in childhood, but also focuses on how indigenous identities might be constructed and sustained in adulthood. Efforts to model the indigenous assertion of self-determination and decolonizing the mind was used to re-present thoughts on the construction of Native American identity     

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical (‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’) subordination of the European Roma (so-called ‘Gypsies’), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of ‘the Roma’ as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about ‘Europe’, ‘European’-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies.     

Popular Culture and Politics: Whispers and the ‘Dramaturgy of Power’ in Kenya

Popular culture has become one of the most visible sites of critical social and political interpretation in post-colonial Africa. It is a site where an alternative public space is created and where various discourses; social, economic and political are invariably debated and negotiated. In many ways its various forms reflect, other times allegorize, fundamental transformation in society. In Kenya, a weekly newspaper column, Whispers, written by one of the country's most prolific fiction writers Wahome Mutahi, became arguably the most visible site of social, cultural and political expression for the last two decades, at a time when freedom to such expression was highly constrained by the state. The column echoed life in Kenya in all its banality but also in its distinctiveness. It interrogated a range of issues but most profoundly, the ‘performance of power’ in the country. Drawing from a pool of cultural resources and various forms of social and political culture, Whispers made legible the ambiguous interactions of ‘political performance’ in Kenya, how the subject population and the polity are all actors in a contradictory carnival of ‘mutual zombification’ which is at once empowering and disempowering. This paper engages with how fiction lays bare the intricacies of ‘political performance’ in the African postcolony using Kenya as a case study.     

‘From badness to sickness’:1 the role of ethnopsychology in shaping ethnic hierarchies in Israel

This article explores the role of the psychological sciences in depoliticising processes of ethnic demarcation and marginalisation within the Jewish population in Israel. It shows how the psychological sciences have provided the scientific foundation by which cultural domination and subordination have been essentialised. The study traces the ways in which ethnopsychological discourse has changed its contours over time. Early ethnopsychological discourse provided an overt link between the ‘cultural backwardness’ and ‘psychological impairment’ of the Mizrahi Jew. In light of broad social and political transformations, in the more recent model the overt ethnic signifier was silenced, and the Mizrahi ‘impaired mind’ appeared to be detached from its ethnic roots while being attributed to the same ethnic population. Both ethnopsychological forms have focused on the individual's ‘special needs’ and ‘inherent psychological impairment’, obscuring the role of social and political forces in shaping social gaps in Israeli society and reinforcing the hegemonic discourse of nurture. The latter has provided a negative mirror image of the modern Ashkenazi secular Israeli Jew following Western cultural models of self‐control as the universal index of health and progress. This study is based on both primary and secondary sources as well as on my in situ observations.     

Comparing postcolonial identity formations: legacies of Portuguese and British colonialisms in East Africa

Colonial ties constitute the basis upon which Indian migration to the UK occurred. In the post-war years, while Punjabi migrants more than fulfilled the gap in expanding British industry, Indian elites also arrived to take up professional jobs. During the 1960s and 1970s, in a context of increasingly restrictive (and racially politicized) immigration legislation, there was a significant settlement of the so-called East African Indians, among them an important percentage of East African Gujaratis who had close links with England long before the processes of Africanisation began. Since the 1990s, those East African families also were the ‘hosts’ of a considerable number of Portuguese Indians of Gujarat origin, most of whom had been born in Mozambique during the colonial period and had lived in post-colonial Portugal. This paper will attempt to show how different experiences of intersubjectivity between colonizers and colonized in British and Portuguese African colonial contexts still constitute a source of (re)invention and pluralization of identities within post-colonial Gujarat diasporas settled in the UK. An analysis of these narratives in process will serve to underline the significance of dialectic processes of remaking colonial and post-colonial experiences in order to understand post-colonial identity formations, their ex-tensions and in-tensions, as well as the identity strategies of postcolonial subjects to deal with ‘old’ and ‘new’ multicultural dilemmas.     

A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African-American Vote in the 2004 Election

This essay explores how the concepts of shame and fidelity, in their relation to race, racism, electoral politics, might be thought with reference to the African-American vote in the 2004 presidential elections. Fully cognizant of the increasing ‘numerical’ irrelevance of African-Americans as an electoral constituency, this essay argues for their participation, a participation not grounded in the liberal American politics of material and symbolic ‘expectation’, in the elections as a felicitous political event.

…?suffering produces patience, and patience produces fidelity, and enduring fidelity produces hope, and hope does not disappoint. (Romans 5.2)     

The ‘nuclear family paradigm’ as a marker of rights and belonging in transnational families

This article examines the legal regulation of transnational families in the context of family reunion. In defining the legal categories of ‘family’ and ‘child’ the law bases its understanding of the family and family life on the image of the nuclear family, which is perceived as a fundamental and natural unit of society. This understanding of the family, the ‘nuclear family paradigm’, has important implications for transnational belonging. This article focuses on these implications in the context of family reunification. In the case of a married minor child, the ‘nuclear paradigm’ is used to legitimate a line of legal reasoning that takes into account neither human rights norms nor the social reality of relatedness. Yet in certain other cases of family reunion, namely in the case of (suspected) marriages of convenience, the social reality of the relationship is a decisive factor determining the right to family reunion. The argument presented in this article is that through the ‘nuclear family paradigm’, the conceptual framework of private law concerning recognition is smuggled into public law and treated as universal while at the same time the legal reasoning on family reunion remains quite capable of examining de facto family life in order to refuse the rights that would otherwise follow from recognition of a marriage.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

The emergence of Alevism as an ethno-religious identity

ABSTRACT

Alevism has been regarded as a contested identity which is difficult to define because of its ‘syncretic’ character. Attempts at definition have been overwhelmed by essentialist approaches as well as different political agendas since the fifteenth-century Ottoman period. This paper aims to trace the history of Alevism with a particular focus on historical sources such as the Velāyetnāmes and the organization of ocaks and dergahs. The paper argues that we shall see Alevism as an ethno-religious identity which is formed under different social conditions and emerged through the complexities of the organization of ocaks in a vast territory encompassing different ethnic groups.     

The Power of Ethnic Nationalism: Foucault's Bio-power and the Development of Ethnic Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Although the ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ brands of nationalism are frequently contrasted, the origins of the civic/ethnic dichotomy remain under-theorised. By building upon Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, this article argues that, during the eighteenth century, the articulation of power shifted across the board from a pre-modern control over the ending of life, to a modern expression of power as control over the production of life (dubbed ‘bio-power’ by Foucault). Given the Foucauldian claim that power is built upwards from ‘its most infinitesimal mechanisms’, it is suggested that expressions of bio-power were first enacted in that social structure most amenable to biological manipulation—the family—and then expanded upwards towards the widest understanding of a kin collective—the ethnic group. As the shift to bio-power took hold, so too did visions of the political nation-state begin to take shape in Eastern Europe. A fusion of doctrines of self-determinism with the expression of power as ‘control over the production of life’, then saw the ethnic nation-state gain credence as a social and political construct in Central and Eastern Europe. This article takes Romania as a case study through which the mechanisms of this exploratory argument can be illustrated.     

Renovating ethnic identity on Restaurant Makeover

Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular Canadian reality series broadcast on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as well as the Food Network Canada. In each episode, dining experts are hired by struggling restaurateurs (often ethnic) to ‘spice up’ the existing menu, ‘modernize’ the décor and, by extension, ensure the welfare of the (immigrant's) family. While the series is not explicitly directed at ethnic restaurants, it seems to be increasingly interested in ‘non-white’ establishments (i.e., Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc.). This participation in culinary multiculturalism may be symptomatic of wider political changes in immigration and ‘diversity’ in Canada. Based on the authors analyses of specific episodes this paper argues, firstly, the growing interest in ethnic cuisine on Restaurant Makeover can be read as a (neo)liberal response to an emerging conservative ‘multicultural’ agenda that recognizes migrants predominantly as laborers (as opposed to citizens) and, secondly, that behind its rehearsal of liberal benevolence is a skewed set of power relations that authorize the experts’ (re)construction, cultivation and containment of ethnicity.     

Desire for the desert: racialising white teachers’ motives for working in remote schools in the Australian desert

Abstract

Distinct from rurality, the Australian desert has long functioned as a signifier of remoteness in the dominant imagination; a product of spatialised binary relations between ‘progressive’ (white) mainstream or idealised white countryside, and disordered/dangerous Aboriginal periphery. Remoteness constitutes a complex racial dynamic that has historically mediated white teachers’ and missionaries’ desires to travel to the social margins. This article adopts a discursive understanding of remoteness to examine contemporary white teachers’ decisions to work in Aboriginal schools in the desert – decisions that are often articulated through unwitting recourse to the ‘three Ms’ or ‘tourist’. The article explores these identity constructs and how they enable different performances of whiteness. It examines how white people’s desires are often covertly raced but does not however, position the teacher as a priori racist. Rather, desire is theorised as a social construct in which subjects invest, which may at times contribute toward processes of decolonisation. This rendering moves beyond a logic of individualism and underpins the argument that recognising how these dynamics play out is vital with respect to understanding the place of white teachers inside remote Indigenous Education. Moreover, such insights are valuable for appreciating how whiteness continues to be reproduced in White Australia under a guise of good intentions.     

Education and national identity in a comparative context

A missing link in the voluminous chain of prior studies on Canadian versus American identity is a comparative analysis of the impact of social studies – especially civics – education on the construction of national identity in these two North American nation-states. This article analyzes curricular documents and secondary-level school textbooks to learn more about how social studies education contributes to constructing a sense of ‘being a Canadian’ versus ‘being an American’ north and south of the 49th parallel.     

Enoch Powell,empires, immigrants and education

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, an intervention that is still viewed as one of the most incendiary statements of the perceived decay and violence likely to follow legislation intended to assure minoritised British citizens of equal rights regardless of their ethnic origin. In this essay, Sally Tomlinson (one of Britain’s foremost multicultural theorists) reflects on Powell’s legacy and the contemporary scene where in the US, UK and across Europe, White resentment and fear is increasingly shaping ‘mainstream’ debates about nationhood, migration and education.     

Museums and the Utility of Culture: The Politics of Liberal Democracy and Cultural Well-Being

Contemporary museums exist as variously configured sets of institutional coordinates that aspire to function as popular, demotic spaces dedicated to representing a variety of experiences and modes of citizenship. In some cases, they can be seen as gesturing toward Yúdice's formulation, whereby recognizing the value of culture as a resource may facilitate or enable a new episteme that is ‘posthegemonic’ (from the ‘purview of the national proscenium’) and predicated on the withdrawal of the state from the public sphere (which also redefines the parameters of social agency). This post-Habermasian take on publicity has real implications for museums, which are, by and large, still functioning within what is, according to Yúdice, an exhausted model of citizenship.

This paper examines whether, in aiming to provide a much-publicized social advocacy role for indigenous peoples and source communities, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa might be seen as producing open and inclusive public spaces that encourage debate about what constitutes citizenship in postcolonial multicultural societies. I argue that a neo-Habermasian realm of association and interaction may be provided by cultural centre-like museums. However, I qualify this point by adding that this suitability also reveals the double-edged role of culture at the NMAI and Te Papa—where it is unclear whether culture provides a key resource for the state's social management discourses, or whether it is connected to discourses of development produced by—or in consultation with—communities.