Empowerment Practice in Canada and the United States

Abstract

This article discusses the legacy of colonialism and racism in Canada and the United States. It shows how this legacy, combined with a market-oriented philosophy to social and economic issues and policies, has resulted in major, persistent social problems in both countries. It goes on to argue that an empowerment-oriented approach, by restoring policy issues, and therefore social justice issues, to the core of social work, can help the profession address these problems more efficiently. The article concludes by examining three particular challenges related to empowerment-oriented practice: creating partnerships; working with and in communities, and finding optimal ways of integrating all levels of social work practice.     

杜波依斯对白色性的阐释与批判

在《黑人的灵魂》中,美国黑人学者杜波依斯开创性地对美国黑人的尴尬身份做出了犀利明确的诠释,他们从出生便带着“帷幕”（Veil）,天赋着“双重意识”（Double Consciousness）采认识自我,观察世界。透过帷幕,杜波依斯也一直用犀利的笔锋阐释并批判着白人的灵魂,解读出白色皮囊背后的殖民欲望,经济渴求与阶级利益。作为白色性研究（Whiteness Study）领域的早期代表性学者,杜渡依斯对白色性的阐释与批判至今依然影响着人们对种族问题的思考。     

19世纪下半叶哈萨克比司法制度的变迁

19世纪下半叶 ,哈萨克传统司法体制成为沙俄殖民化改造的重要对象 ,比则成为此类改造的中心。本文以这一时段沙俄诸部殖民立法为基本史料 ,考察比司法权利与地位的衰变 ,探讨哈萨克民族司法传统在沙俄殖民化进程中的解体过程。     

Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity

ABSTRACT

Indigenous sexual and gender minority people have been identifying as two-spirit since 1990 and are reclaiming traditional Indigenous gender terms such as nádleehí or agokwe. At the same time, Settler-dominated communities are undergoing a cultural shift toward challenging binary categories of sex and gender, causing some Settler governments to adopt a multi-gender framework reminiscent of the Indigenous systems they aimed to erase through colonial systems and practices. This article examines how shifts in Settler gender frameworks relate to traditional and contemporary understandings of gender in Indigenous nations and how Indigenous gender systems support resistance to ongoing colonization.     

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.     

Ambivalent Islam: the identity construction of Muslims under Portuguese colonial rule

This article wishes to contribute to the study of the historical processes that have been spotting Muslim populations as favourite targets for political analysis and governance. Focusing on the Portuguese archives, civil as well as military, the article tries to uncover the most conspicuous identity representations (mainly negative or ambivalent) that members of Portuguese colonial apparatus built around Muslim communities living in African colonies, particularly in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The paper shows how these culturally and politically constructed images were related to the more general strategies by which Portuguese imagined their own national identity, both as ‘European’ and as ‘coloniser’ or ‘imperial people’.

The basic assumption of this article is that policies enforced in a context of inter-ethnic and religious competition are better understood when linked to the identity strategies inherent to them. These are conceived as strategic constructions aimed at the preservation, protection and imaginary expansion of the subject, who looks for groups to be included in and out-groups to reject, exclude, aggress or eliminate. The author argues that most of the inter-ethnic relationships and conflicts, as well as the very experience of ethnicity, are born from this identity matrix.     

Postcolonial guilt and national identity: historical injustice and the Australian settler state

In nations with a record of historical injustice, guilt about the past is deeply implicated in both efforts towards reconciliation and the construction of national identity. This is as true in notionally postcolonial nations, where past injustice is often denied or avoided, as it is in situations where conflict and injustice have been more recent, overt or visible to the rest of the world. Taking the Australian case as an example, this article considers the dimensions of historical collective guilt, and explores the implications of that guilt for contemporary national identity in postcolonial nations. It argues that until a nation is able to deal with social psychological barriers to addressing historical injustice, it is likely to construct and maintain a narrow and defensive form of nationalism.     

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.     

Can't hold us back! Hip-hop and the racial motility of aboriginal bodies in urban spaces

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.     

Bringing Exile Home: Review of Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (eds) Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual

This recent collection of essays pays tribute to Edward Said, but is no hagiography. It explores the salience of concepts such as the public intellectual, exile and worldliness in his life and work. It considers the strengths and the limits of his vision, his passion for European high culture and classical music and his relative disinterest in popular culture and visual and electronic communication. It connects settler colonialism in Palestine and the US with Australia (where most of the contributors are located), while unsettling notions of ‘exile’ and ‘home’.