Between Civilizations: One Side of a Dialogue

In the present global context, the ‘problem’ of religion in relation to gender has become predominantly about the situation of Muslim women and what this indicates about the state of our civilization. Thus, in such incidents as the death of Aqsa Parvez (age 16) in late 2007 in Toronto, Canada, Muslim women's bodies, as many scholars have argued, become the battlegrounds which clearly demarcate the line between the civilized secular modern nation and premodern religious fundamentalisms. In this paper, I want to extend this critical work by bringing in an analysis of the second or ‘homegrown’ generation as it is in this context, I will argue that national anxieties about Canada's global status as a tolerant multicultural nation are most pronounced. Drawing on the work of Asad (2003), Mahmood (2006) and Brown (2006), I will outline how conceptions of tolerance and secularism operate through culture to produce a racialized distinction between the civilized, modern citizen and premodern fundamentalist groups in the making of Canada as a white settler multicultural nation. In order to illustrate this concretely, I will carry out a critical content analysis of representations of Aqsa Parvez's death in the media, representations which clearly demonstrate the contemporary operation of secularism and tolerance in relation to multiculturalism and its particular intensity as it pertains to second generation Muslims. In the conclusion, I want to reflect on how we might rethink our understanding of violence against Muslim women in order to destabilize this powerful binaristic framing which continues to secure a white settler hegemony of ‘multiculturalism within a bilingual framework’ even as it obscures the power relations through which it sustains a racial hierarchy.     

Racial contestation and the emergence of populist nationalism in the United States

Much of the discussion surrounding nationalism still revolves around the ethnic versus civic nation divide. For purposes of this paper it is more useful to view the United States from the tri-modal perspective offered by Anderson, in which the United States is a creole (or settler) nation. All of Anderson's types can be seen as variants of ethnic nationalism. Kaufmann argues that the US evolved from ethnic to civic nationalism by the 1960s. This argument overlooks the importance of phenotype-based racism in the evolution of creole, or white settler colonial nationalism. We want to argue that US nationalism evolved from ethnic, to white racial nationalism in the interwar years. Since the 1920s, the political establishment has opted for civic nationalism that is based upon ‘white assimilationism’. This civic nationalism has been challenged by multiculturalism since the 1960s. In the context of a democratic political culture, the content of American nationalism has become ‘populist’ in the sense that it has come under popular contestation from the assimilationist right and the multiculturalist left. This populist nationalism includes aspects of ethnic and civic nationalism. Racial formation theory will be used to show that national identity may remain under ‘relatively permanent political contestation’ with racial cleavage as a major fault line in that contest. The issues of immigration and the treatment of Muslims since 9/11 will be addressed in order to make the case.     

The ‘new Chinatown’: the racialization of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Singapore

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to ‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity. I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power. Rather, Singaporean-Chinese' construction of a ‘new Chinatown’ ironically acts to displace them.     

Immigration,anti-racism,and Indigenous self-determination: towards a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary settler colonial

ABSTRACT

Anti-racist attempts to conceptualize Indigenous decolonial justice are preoccupied with the contested relationship between immigrant settlement and Indigenous self-determination. In the process, an ethically and politically driven practice of implicating immigrants onto the settler colonial project has emerged. Paying particular attention to the emerging concept of ‘immigrant settlerhood’ as a sign of severing of political economic considerations from theories of settler nationalism, I advocate for a comprehensive and concrete analysis that does not lose sight of the capitalist colonial project of simultaneous dispossession (of Indigenous people) and precarious incorporation/resettlement (of immigrants). Next, since notions of sovereignty primarily enact the conditions for exploitation of immigrants and impale them onto the settler project via anti-racist claims, I propose ‘no border’ politics as a conceptual tool for confronting settler colonialism. Finally, considering the centrality of land/place in Indigenous self-determination, I reflect on the possibility of a ground between Indigenous rootedness and diasporic placelessness. This essay thus makes an attempt to conceptualize an anti-racist politics that could meaningfully respond to the settler-colonial project of simultaneous recruitment/resettlement (of immigrants) and dispossession (of Indigenous people) without casting social justice demands of Indigenous peoples and immigrants as inherently oppositional.     

Will to love,will to fear: the emotional politics of illegality and citizenship in the campaign against birthright citizenship in the US

Anti-immigration activists argue that the broad inclusivity of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment is a national security concern that enables criminalized migrant mothers to give birth to citizens who can later harm the US through violence and resource consumption. Seeing this argument as representative of the problem of inclusivity inherent to citizenship in a liberal democracy, this essay asks how the children of undocumented and temporary migrants are constructed as what Mae Ngai calls ‘alien citizens.’ Drawing from Sara Ahmed's affective economy of emotion, I find that affect and emotion figure prominently in how citizens are made ‘alien.’ Specifically love and fear function as pivot points in the anti-birthright citizenship argument, wherein the ‘real citizen’ is ‘willed’ to love and be loved by the nation and to fear the nation's Others. Moreover, the emphasis on national feelings does not evacuate white supremacy or heteronormativity from its imagination of citizenship, but instead displaces these loci of power into feeling and affect. Thus, this essay claims that the birthright citizenship argument illustrates how national love and fear work in tandem to uphold, naturalize, and expand the racial and sexual exclusions inherent to citizenship in a nation-state.     

Fearing yellow,imagining white: media analysis of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a watershed event in the context of race, nation, and the law because it denied Chinese immigration into the USA for over 80 years. This paper analyses the media coverage of the Chinese in the San Francisco Chronicle during the year of the Act's passage. The theoretical framework of ‘Purity and Danger’ provides a starting point in analyzing how whiteness and nation are constructed as ‘pure’, while Chinese immigration is constructed as a ‘danger’ within a symbolic, racial and political manner. Discourse analysis was applied to the data for an intersectional investigation of race, class, gender, and nation, to determine how the discourse is organized thematically, as well as uncover ideological meanings in relation to how ‘fearing yellow’ also reflected ‘imaging white’ in media discourse.     

How the host nation's boundary drawing affects immigrants’ belonging

Across Western democracies, the place for newcomers in the host society is debated, involving often a questioning of immigrants’ belonging to their new nation. This article argues that immigrants’ feeling of host national belonging depends on how the host nation imagines its community and its concomitant boundaries. Utilising survey and country level data in multilevel regressions, immigrants’ belonging is found to vary significantly across the 19 countries included. A central contribution is the finding that citizenship policies do not explain this cross-national variation. Instead, what matters is the informal boundary drawing produced in the majority population's conception of what is important for being part of the national ‘us'. Thus, immigrants’ belonging is significantly greater when the majority population prioritises attainable criteria of national membership. In addition, these priorities are shown to have deep historical roots as immigrants’ belonging is greater in settler countries and in nations which democratised early. By showing that national imageries have consequences for a country's welcoming capacities, and by showing that these welcoming capacities are historically path dependent, the study contributes to the debate within nationalism studies about national identity's causal significance.     

Revision required: Reconciling New Zealand citizenship with Māori nationalisms

Governments in settler societies conventionally have regarded the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the equal rights of citizenship as an appropriate response to indigenous calls for justice. Yet, the state nation-building agendas behind citizenship sit in tension with indigenous nationalisms, which reflect an alternative form of nation-building not framed by the state. This article first identifies four major ‘citizenship regimes’ in New Zealand's history, noting that symbolic recognition of Māori nationalisms has been made without addressing the fundamental conflation of ‘nation’ and ‘state’. It then explores possible directions for revisioning New Zealand citizenship to overcome these historical limitations.     

Imperial Ghetto: People and Rituals in a South African Ghetto

In this paper, I demonstrate that the position of the postcolonial ‘Self’ in Malaysia is legitimized through inherited imperial mechanisms of power, both structural and ideological. The emergence of this ‘new-Self’ was situated in colonial discursive practices that positioned it as an ‘Other’ under British colonial rule. As such, this creates unexpected binds for the ‘new-Self’, particularly as it negotiates its relations with a number of ‘new-Others’. Up to the present, indigeneity has remained the main basis for legitimizing political power and the economic redistribution of wealth. However, this remains persuasive only when it is seen as primordial and timeless, essentially located in certain individuals in an unchallengeable manner. This basis of power, I argue, produces anxiety for the ‘Malay’ new-Self, for its claims to being essentially ‘indigenous’ come under questioning when Malay identity construction is set vis-a`-vis the Orang Asli (the ‘aborigines’ of the Malaysian Peninsula). I review the ways such anxieties have been managed in Malay responses to the Orang Asli, an ambivalent combination of acknowledgement, administration, rejection, and transformation. I argue that the ‘programme of progress’ that has been imposed upon the Orang Asli — which minimizes differences between them and the Malay ‘new-Self’ — masks the desire of the ‘new-Self’ for the impeccability and exclusivity of Orang Asli claims to indigeneity, a dual mimicry that continues to be repressed and transferred by constructing the Orang Asli as ‘not quite/not Malay’.     

WHO's MIND,whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics

This paper examines the Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development of the World Health Organization (WHO), or what it refers to as its MIND project, as it produces versions of human and human suffering. Arising at approximately the same time as decolonization began to occur, the WHO can be read as reflective of colonial history as well as a colonizing force in postcolonial times. Through an analysis of the WHO's publicly available material, we shall show how the MIND project is not only a product of, but also helps to produce the power of coloniality. In the WHO MIND project, professional disability knowledge is used to identify an emergent mental health crisis in need of Western medical intervention. Guided by Fanon's call to notice how assistance makes a subject ‘thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type,’ we examine the role of disability knowledge in the production of people ‘fit’ to survive in environments that reproduce coloniality. We show how the WHO MIND project can be read so as to reveal the restrictive and exclusive versions of the human that have arisen from the colonial past as our way to attempt to disrupt the developmental trajectory of the coloniality of the present.     

Exposing her body,revealing the nation: the carnival vedette,black femininity and the symbolic order

This essay examines the significance of a ‘self-objectifying’ carnival performance that draws upon stereotypes of sexualized black femininity. The scholarship in this area has focused on whether performers reify or contest dominant stereotypes. I shift the lens from the performer to the audience. Specifically I examine fan responses to Rosa Luna (1937–1993), an Afro-Uruguayan Carnival vedette who became synonymous with Montevideo's annual Carnival from the 1950s until her death in 1993. In a nation that is Eurocentric, yet draws on aspects of Afro-Uruguayan culture for its identity, Rosa Luna became a national icon. Her performance embodied dual stereotypes of black femininity – the over-sexualized black woman and the black maternal. By turning to psychoanalytic theory, I argue that the performer is produced through the audience's desire. I suggest that the encounter with the vedette can be understood as a public ‘specular moment’ that activates the oedipal drama. Her performance reverberated with the symbolic ordering of sex, gender, and race hierarchies, provoking both the desire, and the disavowal of the desire, for black femininity. This insight draws attention to public performance as a site for the negotiation of desires that are structured through, and structure, hierarchical systems.     

White Australian identities and Indigenous land rights

Land has been central to debates about the relationship between Indigenous (First Nations) and non-Indigenous Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. How do white Australians understand Indigenous land rights? This paper draws on an empirical ethnographic study with rural people who self-identify as ‘white Australian’ to analyze the key discourses of land, identity and nation and the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia. The study found that white Australian discourses of nation and identity limit most of the respondents' ability to construct their identity in relation to Indigenous sovereignty.     

‘A town new and modern in conception’: non-racial dreams and racial realities in the making of Gaborone,Botswana

ABSTRACT

Botswana has long been praised for its financial and political achievements. High economic growth rates and uninterrupted democratic governance since independence in 1966 have led to Botswana's labeling as the ‘African Miracle’. Long before Botswana's emergence as a darling of Western development agencies however, Tswana elites and colonial officials also saw Botswana as exceptional: surrounded by states divided along racial lines, these individuals sought to construct a nation organized around principles of racial and tribal unity. Aspirations of non-racialism were to be exemplified in Botswana's newly constructed capital city, Gaborone. At the same time, underlying the planning vision for Gaborone was a competing set of narratives, practices and aspirations that undercut these lofty ideals and resulted in the creation of a city highly stratified by racial segregation. This essay identifies three complementary urban planning rationales that produced urban exclusion in Gaborone: the desire to build Gaborone as an administrative capital, borrowing from both colonial and indigenous Tswana traditions that privileged spatial divisions related to status and race, and the goal to build a ‘modern’ urban center to lead Botswana into the future. These tensions divided the city in ways both familiar and unexpected and set the parameters determining who counts as a legitimate resident of the city. The paper, therefore, seeks to explore how a city founded on an ideal of racial unity instead became a site of stark division(s).     

Performing colonial sovereignty and the Israeli ‘separation’ wall

As a structure that does not mark an actual border and is constructed primarily on occupied territory, the Israeli ‘separation’ wall is a unique space that functions as both border and borderlands. Here, I explore the wall as a performance of sovereignty which simultaneously constructs and de-constructs imaginings of the Israeli nation-state. On the one hand, I contend that the wall is a colonial production that draws a psychic line between a ‘civilised in here’ and ‘uncivilised out there’, fulfilling the double function of forging a perceived bounded, protective national enclosure at the same time as buttressing the necessity of controlling territory beyond the bounds of that enclosure. On the other hand, I argue that the complex relationship between settler and state materialised in the wall points to a blending of theology and politics in Israel, which threatens to empower a God-sanctioned politics that undermines state. In addition to promoting anxiety of the Palestinian ‘out there’, then, the wall is understood as also fostering an anxiety increasingly turned inward to the structures of the Israeli state itself.     

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.     

Commemorating the colonial Pilbara: beyond memorials into difficult history

The colonial Northwest of Western Australia was a harsh frontier, where demands for Aboriginal land, labour and knowledge led to dispossession, loss of rights, massacre and generations encumbered with the colonial legacy. In the Pilbara, there are some rare attempts to engage with this difficult colonial history, mainly in the form of heritage site interpretation and heritage trails. Overall, the difficult colonial history of the Northwest is poorly represented. Colonialism and its legacy are not effectively commemorated, nor are distinct local cultural and civic attributes highlighted as ‘lessons from the past’. In this paper, we explore the memorialization and commemoration of the Northwest's traumatic colonial history and consider a history of how heritage has been represented across the landscape. We suggest that the affective heritage of the Northwest especially cross-cultural or multi-cultural sites and histories can provide a basis for commemorating difficult colonial history or violent events that are underrepresented in dominant heritage regimes.