Narratives of ‘mixed race’ youth in South Korea: racial order and in-betweenness

South Korea has long been regarded as a country with a single ethnicity. Honhyeol, which literally means ‘mixed blood’ in Korean, exemplifies this orientation. In recent years, the number of ‘mixed race’ children in the country has been on the rise due to the increase in international marriages, particularly between Korean men and foreign women. Drawing on the personal narratives of 56 youths (aged between 9 and 17) obtained from three essay contests, this article examines how, why, and in which contexts the racial hierarchies of ‘mixed race’ children in Korea are constructed. Narratives of ‘mixed race’ children and their peers show that a ‘hierarchical racial order’ – characterized by a color-coding system that simultaneously operates along the lines of national origin – is channeled into ‘mixed race’ people’s everyday lives, thus shaping their identity constructions.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

‘An Injurious Effect on the Neighbourhood’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Decline and Racialised Class Identities in Late Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

Spatial narratives of neighbourhood decline – stories about threats to neighbourhood resources – were crucial in reinscribing racialised class boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1894, white middle-class property owners in San Francisco’s Powell Street district protested the Board of School Directors’ decision to relocate the city’s only Chinese public school to a condemned building in their neighbourhood, leading to the renovation of the school’s existing structure within Chinatown and new efforts to restrict both Chinese and Japanese urban settlement. I analyse this event to show the importance of space for the race–class intersection. Protesters described the financial, social and moral costs of living near a Chinese school, thereby establishing racial criteria for middle-class identity and mobility. Theories of racial space must consider discursive links between race, class and space because spatial narratives that reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities help to maintain the racial order.     

The thanatic strain. Kojève and Rosenzweig as two readers of Hegel

In my essay, I focus on Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit as a peculiar thanatic interpretation of Hegel. Kojève’s apology of death is so powerful that it can only suggest a new form of a religious cult, a new philosophical theology which, because of its semi-secular appearance, we should rather call a cryptotheology. I want to demonstrate that, indeed, we deal here with a cryptotheological divinisation of Thanatos where the so-called ‘frontier experience of death’ replaces the Judeo-Christian revelation. Kojève claims that this tendency already begins in Hegel in whom revelation, albeit a central notion of phenomenology, is given a characteristic, thanatico-immanentist twist. In the first part, I concentrate on Hegel and his interpretation given by Kojève; then, I present a brief overview of the thanatic strain in Kojève’s French pupils; and finally, in the second part, I return to Hegel, but his time read through the lenses of Franz Rosenzweig who dared to oppose the thanatic tendency of twentieth century philosophy. The Star of Redemption inaugurates this opposition – a distinctly modern Jewish ‘vitalistic strain’ – by returning to the original idiom of revelation and offering us a neues Denken, a ‘new thinking.’ But this new vitalism, grown out of the polemic with the ‘thanatic strain,’ does not constitute a simple repetition of the nineteenth century Lebensphilosophie; equally critical of the Kojèvian ‘overestimation of death’ and of the old forms of vitalistic thinking, it paves the way to a highly innovative late-modern philosophy of finite life which – as I will argue here – is something we very badly need today.     

Rhythms of consumption

The emergence of queer theory has posed an incipient and significant challenge to the essentialism which has typically characterized theories of sexuality. In an attempt to eschew the totalizing effects of the categories ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’, queer theorists advocate a subjectivity which celebrates sexual difference without concern for achieved or ascribed characteristics. It is this remarkable capacity for inclusivity, attributed most immediately to the gender and race neutrality of ‘queer’, which is of particular interest here. More specifically, this article examines queer subjectivity's relation to a liberal humanist discourse whose purported universality requires the production of abstract, sovereign subjects without concern for their social location. The article in turn examines how the liberal premises which underlie queer subjectivity actually facilitate the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while undermining similar attempts to resignify racial epithets. Far from being a neutral subject position which ensures the liberty and autonomy of its inhabitants, the racial epithet here reinscribes the difference which the ‘queer’ subject and its liberal humanist prototype are perpetually trying to mask. I contend that it is this discrepancy in the capacity to mask difference – via a proximity to or distance from the liberal subject – which permits the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while racial epithets continue to remain taboo in the cultural mainstream.     

Challenging a culture of racial equivalence

We live at a time when our understandings and conceptualizations of ‘racism’ are often highly imprecise, broad, and used to describe a wide range of racialized phenomena. In this article, I raise some important questions about how the term racism is used and understood in contemporary British society by drawing on some recent cases of alleged racism in football and politics, many of which have been played out via new media technologies. A broader understanding of racism, through the use of the term ‘racialization’, has been helpful in articulating a more nuanced and complex understanding of racial incidents, especially of people's (often ambivalent) beliefs and behaviours. However, the growing emphasis upon ‘racialization’ has led to a conceptualization of racism which increasingly involves multiple perpetrators, victims, and practices without enough consideration of how and why particular interactions and practices constitute racism as such. The trend toward a growing culture of racial equivalence is worrying, as it denudes the idea of racism of its historical basis, severity and power. These frequent and commonplace assertions of racism in the public sphere paradoxically end up trivializing and homogenizing quite different forms of racialized interactions. I conclude that we need to retain the term ‘racism’, but we need to differentiate more clearly between ‘racism’ (as an historical and structured system of domination) from the broader notion of ‘racialization’.     

Fat, desire and disgust in the colonial imagination

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits. This tension between fat and ‘civilization’ was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed ‘primitive’ in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.     

Isomorphism,Institutional Parochialism,and the Study of Social Movements

This study investigates whether the field of social movements is occupied by parochial concerns. Using a content analysis of two prominent journals that study social movements – Mobilization: An International Journal and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social and Political Protest – it was found that the field is dominated by the study of Western movements, but is also relatively ‘worldly’ when compared to other academic sub-disciplines. Much work on the ‘global south’ is conducted by scholars who maintain personal associations and connections to regions of the world outside of the West. In addition, it was found that social movement scholars focus predominantly on the study of liberal movements as compared to conservative movements. The types of movements most commonly studied are also examined.     

The ‘gong beat’ against the ‘uncultured’: contested notions of culture and civilization in Mongolia

This article explores the Mongolian concept of ‘culture’ (soyol) and its transformation in the state socialist and post-socialist eras. The notion of culture and those without it – the soyolgui or ‘uncultured’ – played enormously important parts in the construction of the new society of the Mongolian People’s Republic. The history of the twentieth century shows a transformation of this highly normative concept from a category associated with teachings, doctrine, ethics and nurturing to one linked to modernist notions of hygiene, secular education, urbanism and cosmopolitanism. In addition, however, it became a category that included a set of historical styles and works thought of as national ‘cultural heritage’ (soyolyn öv). This was the result of a movement that in the late socialist period led to the critical re-evaluation of earlier Eurocentric uses of the ‘culture’ concept, and that sought new applications of the notion of ‘civilization’ – in particular by popularizing the metaphorical term ‘nomadic civilization’ (nüüdliin soyol irgenshil). I argue that these strands of thought have become central to the new nationalist politics of post-socialist Mongolia and form the basis of what remains by way of political orthodoxy, following the collapse of Soviet ideology.     

FIXING FAMILIES THROUGH TELEVISION?

Television has played a central role as a tool through which to imagine and re-imagine the South African nation, family and selfhood, and to ‘fix’ these same categories. From the apartheid state's blacking out of healthy everyday life images of black families, through the efforts of founding a ‘new’ nation using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to modern day therapeutic talk shows, television has progressively placed less salience on the ‘nation’ and more on family and interpersonal relationships within this social unit. Self-disclosure on television, especially through a talk show significantly called Relate, ironically reveals and occludes legacies of class and racial differentiations with their attendant socio-economic imbalances. Talking about personal affect to ‘fix’ one's problems on national television emerges as an instrumental undertaking that appears to benefit guests to the show but perhaps not as much as it does the production company and South African Broadcasting Corporation, suggesting that the participants are being exploited. Be that as it may, Relate emerges as an exercise in the interiorization of control, as well as an invitation to undertake serious dialogue about interpersonal intimacy.     

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale: a unique social engagement

Abstract

Art as a social engagement in the West can be dated back to the history of avant-garde art starting from the end of nineteenth century. Rooted in his own cultural background, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s socially engaged art project “Fairytale is more complex than the avant-garde strategy. The work Fairytale established a structure – “1=1,001”. That means on the one hand, the participants can be easily regarded everywhere in Kassel as 1,001 mobile works of art. All of them contribute to an entire work. In other words, the 1,001 people consist of one work. On the other hand, everyone is dealing with their personal issues independent of art. In this sense, the entire work can be divided into 1,001 personal experiences. This structure is based on three principles of Chinese philosophy Taoism – the duality between Yin and Yang, the dynamism between Yin and Yang, and the concept of “uselessness”. Positioning Fairytale within both Western theoretical as well as Chinese philosophical contexts, this essay is to analyze how Chinese philosophy shaped Ai’s strategy of social engagement and his cultural identity – Chineseness.     

Getting to know reality and breaking stereotypes: the experience of two generations of working disabled women

This paper sets out the results of a Spanish study of the experience and meaning of work among disabled women of two generations, with three types of disability (physical, visual and hearing). Performing a socially recognised activity such as a job is a source of emotional welfare and self‐esteem. Moreover, it confers a certain social status. For the participants in this study the kind of work involved, whether productive, paid and ‘extra‐domestic’ or ‘reproductive’, unpaid and done at home, acquires different meanings, since for disabled women, sexist stereotypes – already more or less accentuated in the culture – social attitudes towards disability and personal factors introduce relevant differences, while leading to conflicts and dilemmas that these women have to solve. At any rate, their sense of responsibility in performing all types of work should be emphasised as evidence of their sense of independence and personal competence, forming a keystone in their construction of a sense of identity and social integration.     

The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin,cultural studies,Marxist theories of art

This essay is a reflection on the circumstances that led me to a particular research project, on Cajun dance and music spaces, and also on the project's mutations through subsequent phases of development. Above all, this essay attempts to take stock of the difficulties – personal, scholarly, and theoretical – as well as the personal choices that have gone into developing an ongoing scholarly project. While I indicate the importance of the experiences of personal pleasure that originally inspired my research, I also show how the personal and the pleasurable often necessarily encounter tensions and even certain kinds of conflict when linked to a ‘disciplinary’ domain. This essay therefore traces a particular example of how ‘cultural studies travels’ both geographically within a life and disciplinarily within something that has come to be known as‘French cultural studies’.     

Second-generation Central Americans and the formation of an ethnoracial identity in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Whether Latinos in the United States are an ethnic or racial group is extensively debated. Some propose Latinos are an ethnic group on their way to becoming white, others contend Latinos are a racialised group, and an alternate perspective posits Latinos are an ethnoracial group. This study intervenes in this debate by examining the identities of second- and 1.5-generation Central Americans in Los Angeles, California. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews, I show Central Americans have an identity repertoire, which includes national origin, panethnic, racial, and minority identities. I also capture the situations and reference groups that influence the deployment of ethnic and racial identities. These results suggest Central Americans develop an ethnoracial identity. I argue Central Americans’ ethnoracial identity emerges from agency – subjective understandings of themselves and resisting invisibility in Mexican Los Angeles – and from structure – a racialised society, institutionally-created panethnic categories, and racially-based experiences.     

The Washington consensus meets the global backlash: shifting debates and policies

During the final two decades of the twentieth century, development theory and practice were dominated by a neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’. This article analyzes the shifting debate over that Consensus. The article focuses on the current ‘elite’ debate about the Consensus in an attempt to gauge the extent of change. It does so by coding primary research materials according to specific Consensus tenets to analyze (1) the individual and collective positions of several prominent, elite actors termed the ‘break-aways’; and (2) the editorial positions of leading publications that serve as key, elite ‘voices’. Washington Consensus tenets are broken into five categories: trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, financial liberalization and debt-crisis management. This analysis of primary texts leads to the Conclusion that the ‘Washington Consensus’ no longer prevails as an elite northern Consensus, and we are presently not only in a period of debate, but in the midst of a paradigm shift.     

‘Talking about us without us?’. A response to Neil Crowther

In Volume 22 Number 7 of Disability & Society Neil Crowther of the recently formed Equality and Human Rights Commission provided his interpretation of the current situation of disability politics in the UK. Besides acknowledging the pioneering role organisations controlled and run by disabled people had played in the struggle for the eradication of disabling barriers, he suggests that the challenges facing disabled people are increasingly different from those of the early 1990s, and that despite the incorporation of a disability rights agenda into the formal mechanisms of Government many disabled people remain amongst the most economically and socially disadvantaged in Britain. This he ascribes to the disabled people's movement's ‘ideological purity’ and failure to engage in productive partnerships with other disability organisations. Here we argue that these assertions are based on a lack of clarity of meaning and a partial reading of the difficulties encountered by the disabled people's movement as a consequence of its early success and the activities of the agencies he urges the movement to engage with.     

Prize Possessions: Transported Material Culture of the Post-Abolition Enslaved – New Evidence from St Helena

This article examines the artefacts of personal adornment recovered during recent archaeological excavations of a graveyard associated with the nineteenth century, British-run ‘Liberated African Establishment’ in Rupert's Valley, on the South Atlantic Island of St Helena. It presents evidence for the transportation of pre-enslavement cultural material, and identifies factors that may have affected the ability of captive Africans to retain personal effects. It also discusses the interpretative constraints that exist in identifying transported – as opposed to acquired – material culture in the context of the post-Abolition Transatlantic slave trade.     

Diffusion of Variegated Neoliberalization processes in Euro-Mediterranean policies: a strategic relational approach

ABSTRACT

Recent contributions to the study of neoliberalism have made considerable advances in transcending the dichotomy between understandings of the concept either as an ‘ideology’ or as a monolithic ‘structure’. In particular, the Variegated Neoliberalization (VNLT) approach has proposed an understanding of neoliberalism that relies on a path-dependent moment (i.e. the ‘uneven development of neoliberalization’) which is then followed by a path-shaping moment (i.e. the ‘neoliberalization of regulatory uneven development’). Such a perspective allows us to understand both systemic and contingent tendencies in neoliberalization processes across different geographies, transcending the socially constructed North–South divide. However, the VNLT approach has encountered a number of critiques, particularly in relation to its treatment of agency. In order to transcend these critiques and propose a more nuanced understanding of ways agents reflexively and recursively interpret and deepen – or refrain from deepening – neoliberal norms, I turn to the Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA) proposed by [Jessop, B. (2001). Institutional re(turns) and the strategic – relational approach. Environment and Planning A, 33(7), 1213–1235]. Through the SRA, it becomes possible to pinpoint both instances of ‘structured coherence’ and ‘patterned incoherence’ resulting from agential reflexivity in different contexts of neoliberalization. I will therefore turn to cases where these two patterns can be observed in the context of Euro-Mediterranean policies – that is, Morocco’s ‘structured coherence’ due to its internalized and deepening neoliberalization, and Egypt’s ‘patterned incoherence’ as a result of its still uneven development of neoliberalization.