The First Black President: Barack Obama, Race, Politics, and the American Dream

Posted in Barack Obama, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2015-05-07 19:37Z by Steven

The First Black President: Barack Obama, Race, Politics, and the American Dream

Palgrave Macmillan
October 2009
208 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780230618619
Paperback ISBN: 9780230621145
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9780230101197

Johnny Bernard Hill

The First Black President is a critical and passionate reflection on the political and historical implications of an Obama administration concerning the issue of race in America. I intend to argue that Obama’s rise to political power has forever changed the contours of race relations in the country as many hail the new age of a “post-racial” society. Yet, what I also show is that an Obama presidency could further complicate real racial progress and could set race relations back in the country for decades to come if not viewed in the proper context. I demonstrate that the Obama presidency must be celebrated as a historical triumph based on America’s racist past, yet the struggle for equality, justice and freedom must also intensify with recognition of its global consequences. The problem of race in America no longer just affects its own citizens but impacts cultures around the globe.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter 1. We Shall Overcome: Obama and the Civil Rights Movement
  • Chapter 2. Obama and Race in America
  • Chapter 3. A Black Man in White America
  • Chapter 4. Obama, African Diaspora and the New Meaning of Blackness
  • Chapter 5. Race, Power and Technology in the New Millennium
  • Chapter 6. Obamanomics and Black America
  • Chapter 7. Why Obama will Change the World
  • Chapter 8. An Obama Administration and the Black Agenda
Tags: , ,

Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines

Posted in Africa, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, South Africa, United States on 2013-11-19 22:55Z by Steven

Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines

Palgrave Macmillan
November 2013
208 pages
3 illustrations
5.500 x 8.500 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-137-36492-0, ISBN10: 1-137-36492-0

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

America’s new millennial interest in multiraciality coincides with South Africa’s post-apartheid push towards greater visibility as the Rainbow Nation. Here, Diana Adesola Mafe argues that the recent celebration of the mulatto as an avatar of positive change for multiracial nations like South Africa and the United States overlooks the complex global trajectories that resulted in this watershed moment. Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature examines the popular literary stereotype, the tragic mulatto, from a comparative perspective. Mafe considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization. The result is a transnational dialogue between these respective national literatures, both of which use tragic mulatto fiction as a locus for broader questions about race and belonging.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Tainted Blood: The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ Tradition
  • 1. God’s Stepchildren: The ‘Tragedy of Being a Halfbreed’ in South African Literature
  • 2. ‘An Unlovely Woman’: Bessie Head’s Mulatta (re)Vision
  • 3. ‘A Little Yellow Bastard Boy’: Arthur Nortje’s Mulatto Manhood
  • 4. Tragic to Magic?: Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit
  • Conclusion: Playing in the Light
Tags: , , , , , ,

Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective

Posted in Africa, Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States on 2013-03-28 13:16Z by Steven

Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2000
186 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-312-23219-1
ISBN10: 0-312-23219-5

Mark Christian, Professor of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Multiracial Identity provides an accessible account of the social construction of racialized groups. Using both primary (in-depth interviews) and secondary data, four nations are examined: the UK, US, South Africa, and Jamaica. The author discusses how little attention has been traditionally been given to theorizing multiracial identity in the context of white supremacist thought and practice.

Table of Contents

  • Foreword–Diedre L. Badejo
  • Part I: Theorizing Multiracial Identity
    • Toward a Definition of Identity
    • Multiracial Identity as a Term in the 1990s
    • Historical Theories of ‘Mixed Race’ Persons
    • Contemporary US Theories in Multiracial Identity
    • Contemporary UK Theories in Multiracial Identity
  • Part II: Speaking forThemselves (I)
    • How the Liverpool, UK Respondents Define Themselves in a Racial Sense
    • Parental Influence in the Construction of a Racialized Identity
  • Part III: Speaking for Themselves (II) Shades of Blackness
    • Is Wanting to Change One’s Physical Appearance an Issue?
  • Part IV: South Africa and Jamaica: “Other” Multiracial Case Studies
    • South Africa and the Social Construction of “Coloureds”
    • Jamaica in Context
  • Part V: Assessing Multiracial Identity White Supremacy and Multiracial Identity
    • Social Status and Multiracial Identity
    • Nomenclature Default and Multiracial Terminology
Tags: , , , , ,

Mixed Race Identities

Posted in Books, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2013-03-26 03:54Z by Steven

Mixed Race Identities

Palgrave Macmillan
2013-08-02
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780230275041

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, UK

In recent years, Britain has witnessed a significant growth in the ‘mixed race’ population. However, we still know remarkably little about this diverse population. How do young mixed race people think about and experience their multiracial status? What kinds of ethnic options do mixed race people possess, and how may these options vary across different types of ‘mixes’? How important are their ethnic and racial identities, in relation to other bases of identification and belonging? This book investigates the ethnic and racial options exercised by young mixed race people in higher education in Britain, and it is the first to explore the identifications and experiences of various types of mixed race individuals. It reveals the diverse ways in which these young people identify and experience their mixed status, the complex and contingent nature of such identities, and the rise of other identity strands, such as religion, which are now challenging race and ethnicity as a dominant identity.

Contents

  1. Exploring ‘Mixed Race’ in Britain
  2. Racial Identification: Multiplicity and Fluidity
  3. Differential Ethnic Options?
  4. Does Racial Mismatch in Identification Matter?
  5. Are Mixed Race People Racially Disadvantaged?
  6. How Central is ‘Race’ to Mixed Race People?
  7. Rethinking Ethnic and Racial Classifications
  8. Conclusion: What is the Future of ‘Mixed Race’ Britain?
Tags: , , ,

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2012-12-31 02:03Z by Steven

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico

Palgrave Macmillan
October 2012
330 pages
DOI: 10.1057/9781137263223
ebook ISBN: 9781137263223
Paperback ISBN: 9781137263216
Hardback ISBN: 9781137263230

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History
University of Washington

In their quest for greater political participation within shifting imperial fields—from Spanish (1850s–1898) to US rule (1898-)—Puerto Ricans struggled to shape and contain conversations about race. In so doing, they crafted, negotiated, and imposed on others multiple forms of silences while reproducing the idea of a unified, racially mixed, harmonious nation. Hence, both upper and working classes participated, although with different agendas, in the construction of a wide array of silences that together have prevented serious debate about racialized domination. This book explores the ongoing, constant racialization of Puerto Rican workers to explore the ‘class-making’ of race.

Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Racial (Dis)Harmony in Puerto Rico
  • I. Slavery and the Multiracial, Racially Mixed Laboring Classes
    • 1. Becoming a Free Worker in Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico
    • 2. Liberal Elites’ Writings: The Racial Dissection of the Puerto Rican Specimen
    • 3. Race and the Modernization of Ponce after Slavery
  • II. Changing Empires
    • 4. US Rule and the Volatile Topic of Race in the Public Political Sphere
    • 5. Racial Silencing and the Organizing of Puerto Rican Labor
    • 6. Deflecting Puerto Rico’s Blackness
  • Conlusion: The Heavy Weight of Silence
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

INTRODUCTION: Racial (Dis)Harmony in Puerto Rico

It is a theory with no foundation. She does not know what bomba is. Our bomba is a fusion of many races and cultures: Indigenous, Spanish or European, and African. This is the only authentic one. Everything else is just an invention.
—Puerto Rican performer Modesto Cepeda, April 13, 2005

After my first semester in the United States, I was desperate to leave the mainland and return to my home at the urban core of the northern city of Bayamón, Puerto Rico. My family and friends welcomed me with many gatherings, some in the San Juan area and others in my family’s hometown of Yaucoin the southern part of the island. Everyone peppered me with questions about life away from home. On one of these occasions, a relative asked me if I had become friends with other Puerto Ricans. I answered that I had become very close to a Puerto Rican black woman. I did not realize that I had spoken openly about blackness, instead of the customary muffled modalities that many islanders often employ, until my relative responded, “Then she is not Puerto Rican! Only the americanos would make reference to a person’s skin color.” My relative’s response was surprising to me because in our extended family, antiblack racism had been at the heart of many conflicts, despite (or because of) our racially mixed heritage.

After years of archival research on racial struggles in Puerto Rico, I find myself repeatedly recalling this one exchange, one of many others that have a similar pattern. Perhaps I recall it because of the array of important questions my relative’s response elicits about Puerto Rican immigration, US colonialism, national identities, constructions of whiteness/blackness/racial mixture, and gender (all of which I will explore in the pages of this book). But, most probably, this moment is fixed in my mind because I was struck by the quick and effective way in which my cousin silenced me when I acknowledged my friend’s cherished sense of self as a black Puerto Rican woman. There was no better strategy to shut down a possible conversation about the historical and contemporary realities of racialized marginalization than (a) to deem race, racialization, and racism as foreign matters, specifically as US phenomena, and (b) to question one’s commitment and love to the Puerto Rican nation. My own commitment was already in question; I too was quickly becoming an outsider. Given this oft deployed silencing device, this book is particularly attentive not to reify a Latin American paradigm of race relations or a US model. Instead, Puerto Rico’s move from Spanish to US rule provides a unique opportunity to flesh out some of the sociocultural and political processes that made necessary the organization of knowledge about racialized marginalization along the lines of opposite racial paradigms. To do so, it is imperative to look at silencing and racialization practices historically, as well as investigate the many struggles that elicited these practices. In the following pages, I explore a few key historical moments between the 1870s and 1910s when silencing became especially urgent in politics. It is worth noting that the reasons for and the modes of containing race talk have continued to shift and change after the period under scrutiny in this study…

…I aim to uncover the ways in which the history of slavery, the processes of emancipation, and the nature of colonialisms in Puerto Rico contributed to the contradictory construction of national and racial discourses at different historical moments since the late nineteenth century. For more than a century after emancipation in 1873– 76, government institutions, academic studies, and cultural organizations have reproduced the idea that Puerto Rico is a unified nation—despite its colonial relation to Spain and later the United States—whose people originated from a mélange of three cultural roots: the indigenous Taínos, Africans, and Spaniards. This national discourse holds that because these races mixed harmoniously to create the Puerto Rican race/nation, racial conflict has never existed on the island. In fact, the lack of racial conflict defines Puerto Ricanness. Therefore, to address issues of racialized exclusion or to express/embrace a racialized sense of self is understood by most Puerto Ricans as antinational. Paradoxically, the Puerto Rican dominant classes have persistently underscored the white, Hispanic experience as the main thread that provides coherence to the history of the Puerto Rican people. In this discourse of the nation, the presumptively racially mixed, harmonious society ensures the unity of all social classes. Yet that discourse also preserves the rights of white Creole men as political and social superiors, and consequently, the struggles and aspirations of those deemed or self identified as black continue to be systematically marginalized.

The attempts to silence discussions about racialized domination (especially the persistent denial of racism) and the corollary suppressions regarding individual and communal racialized histories coexist with Puerto Ricans’ everyday antiblack racist practices and racialized talk. Most Puerto Ricans, however, do not recognize their everyday references to racialized markers of difference— mostly derogatory remarks about blackness— as a product of and form sustaining racialized domination. To explore this tension I have chosen the analytics of silence, where silence means something other than total absence. I am here interested in both the attempts to shape or prevent talk and the partial and fragile silences produced through such endeavors. Hence, as I explain later in this introduction, silence is communicative in nature, comprising a wide array of practices that were, in fact, generative of more talk.12 The many disruptions of silences and the other idioms elaborated to advance mobilization for social justice also fostered talk on race. As such, the practices of censorship shaped (creating gaps, voids, misrecognition, and euphemisms, among others) but did not impede the talk of race. Conversely, efforts at repressing the talk of race have indeed prevented sustained conversations about racialized domination because these could crystallize into projects for sociopolitical transformation. This book seeks to track both the fraught processes through which silences are constantly reconstituted and the overall effect of a plurality of silences, intended and unintended, which have prevented open discussions about racialized domination…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Tags: , ,

The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won

Posted in Barack Obama, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-12-30 04:01Z by Steven

The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won

Palgrave Macmillan
August 2010
178 pages
DOI: 10.1057/9780230111790
ebook ISBN: 9780230111790
Paperback ISBN: 9780230103511
Hardback ISBN: 9780230314603

Baodong Liu, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Utah

This book examines the historical election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president from the perspective of racial relations. To trace the effect of time, Liu links Obama’s multiracial winning coalition to the two-party system and the profound impact of racial changes since 1965. Contrary to the popular momentum theory which emphasizes the early victories in mainly two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, this book demonstrates that state context matters. Obama’s electoral performance in a state is better explained by its level of racial tension, rather than the emotional need of Americans to elect a black president.

List of Contents

  • Emotion and Rationality: An Introduction
  • Minimum Winning Coalition: the 2008 Presidential Election from a Historical Perspective
  • Racial Change and the Politics of Hope
  • The 2008 Democratic Primaries and the Presidential Selection Process
  • Building the Winning Coalition in Time
  • Building the Winning Coalition in Space
  • Winning the General Election
  • The Obama Racial Coalition: Conclusion
Tags: ,

The Commoditization of Hybridity in the 1990s U.S. Fashion Advertising: Who Is cK one?

Posted in Books, Chapter, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2012-05-27 20:10Z by Steven

The Commoditization of Hybridity in the 1990s U.S. Fashion Advertising: Who Is cK one?

in Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation
Palgrave MacMillan
September 2005
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-6533-2, ISBN10: 1-4039-6533-1

Edited by

Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College, Columbia University

Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita
University of California, Santa Cruz

pages 31-47

Laura J. Kuo

…an important caveat follows for postcolonial practices,namely the risk that hybridity might be re-colonised by the apparatus of power as either compensation for our losses,or as the velvet glove of enjoyment that goes hand in hand with the iron fist of exclusion. —Kobena Mercer

How does a concept like hybridity travel within different economies—between the academy, activist arenas, and the media, for example—and what forms does it take on within these smart mutations? Is the adoption of a complex concept like hybridity by the media the simple appropriation of culture by capital? The usages, travels, and permutations of hybridity are more complex and elaborate than a blanket confiscation of its political value. After all, capital is culture (among other things) and hybridity is another sign within postmodern commodity systems. By engaging the structure of these systems we can begin to identify the ways in which hybridity operates within—and in the service of—the dominant logic of postmodern capitalist neoliberalism, and its massive contradictions. In this essay I investigate hybridity as a site of possible transgressions of fixed identities, and as a potentially productive space that has been recolonized by market multiculturalism—a space that views everyone as mixed and thus elides structural differences and persistent hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Specifically within the context of advertising, hybridity becomes, atone level, a strategy that stabilizes discursive power relations within transnational capital. For example, there are complex relations between multinational corporations in the United States and U.S./Third World and gendered immigrant labor practices on the one hand, and the cooptation of political coalitional work on the other. At another level, images of hybridity in advertising generate value in a global world where these commodities circulate. Certainly, a racialized economic hegemony is stabilized through appropriations of racial diversity discourses within market multiculturalism. Yet it is too easy to declare that global capital exploits the labor of women of color in the Third World and in the United States, that advertising hides this exploitative relationship, and that the images therefore should be criticized and dismissed. Instead, I am interested in the way in which this practice of “hiding” constitutes a necessary vector of postmodern diference that enables the dominant logic of late capitalism, which inturn depends upon exploitation, appropriation, and difference. Advertising hybridity becomes complicitous with the act of hiding, yet at the same time images of hybridity open up new communities of possibilities for people who take up the ads within their specifics of home and place, looking toward new forms of identifications and affective communities withinc apitalism’s cultural logic.

The observations in this essay are based on the principal photograph of the cK one advertising campaign, which has been displayed prolifically on billboards and in magazines. This photo (see figure 2.1), which served as the prototype on which other early cK one ads were based, is called “Jenny, Kate & Company” in the Calvin Klein Cosmetics press packet. Using this ad as a sort of case study, I investigate how images of hybridity and multiculturalism in advertising serve to conflate race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and culture within a totalizing logic of neoliberalism. I call the discursive practice of homogenizing race, class, nation, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, andculture—and the elision of the specificities of their individual locations and their intersections—commoditized hybridity. Commoditized hybridity is a manifestation of a particular practice of the relentless marketing of race. It is informed by processes of consumption of race within postmodern capitalism. Commoditized hybridity also can be represented under the guise of “multiculturalism.”…

…The cK one photos establish hybrid racial relations through biologistic portrayals of appearance. The staging of the models constructs whiteness as a racial essence cosmetically arranged with “other” racialessences in order to convey an impression of harmony/unity/solidarity. In this respect, cK one potentially closes off a space to discuss the different positions whites and people of color occupy in relation to practice,history, and social formations, and structures and relations of power.Through juxtapositions of differently racialized bodies in its ads—which are staged against a homologous black and white backdrop—cK one constructs a notion of multiraciality that postures as social diversity. The hybrid figures of 1990s fashion are bodies on which a racialized seamlessness/sameness is inscribed. The models in cK one photos are racially diverse, and when they are staged together they signify the currency of a multicultural decade. Their bodies are arranged together and “equalized” in a contrived dynamic through photographic distortion and a deliberate homogeneity of height, weight, pose, style, and expression that invokes a sense of cultural similarity, of oneness. The images are presented in black and white, creating a ground tone of similarity against which difference, as separation, is muted, and heterogeneity is emphasized. The models are always already in contact, integrated, and hybrid. They are aesthetically seductive—extremely cool, hip, and sexy—and they become part of the lure to cK one-ness. The models of color appear to be “one” with the white models, creating an illusion of common social and economic positions and cultural identifications. The commoditization of hybridity takes rich heterogeneous spaces of racial and cultural diversity and turns these spaces of promise against their potential, effectively disrupting their ability to spawn real social change. It recolonizes desirable and hopeful formulations of cultural hybridity and transforms them into weapons against the spectator. In short, these ads erase historical memory and social analysis, offering fragrance in return…

Read the entire chapter here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2012-05-12 03:06Z by Steven

Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos

Palgrave Macmillan
April 2005
352 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-6567-7, ISBN10: 1-4039-6567-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4039-6568-4, ISBN10: 1-4039-6568-4

Anani Dzidzienyo, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies
Brown University

Suzanne Oboler, Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

In this collection, leading scholars focus on the contemporary meanings and diverse experiences of blackness in specific countries of the hemisphere, including the United States. The anthology introduces new perspectives on comparative forms of racialization in the Americas and presents its implications both for Latin American societies, and for Latinos’ relations with African Americans in the U.S. Contributors address issues such as: Who are the Afro-Latin Americans? What historical contributions do they bring to their respective national polities? What happens to their national and socio-racial identities as a result of migration to the United States? What is the impact of the growing presence of Afro-Latin Americans within U.S. Latino populations, particularly with respect to the continuing dynamics of racialization in the United States today? And, more generally, what are the prospects and obstacles for rethinking alliances and coalition-building between and among racial(ized) minorities and other groups in contemporary U.S. society?

Table of Contents

  • Part I: Comparative Racialization in the Americas
    • Flows and Counterflows: Latinas/os, Blackness, and Racialization in Hemispheric Perspective—Suzanne Oboler and Anani Dzidzienyo
  • Part II: The Politics of Racialization in Latin America
    • A Region in Denial: Racial Discrimination and Racism in Latin America—Ariel E. Dulitzky
    • Afro-Ecuadorian Responses to Racism: Between Citizenship and Corporatism—Carlos de la Torre
    • The Foreignness of Racism: Pride and Prejudice Among Peru’s Limeños in the 1990s—Suzanne Oboler
    • Bad Boys and Peaceful Garifuna: Transnational Encounters Between Racial Stereotypes of Honduras and the United States (and Their Implications for the Study of Race in the Americas)—Mark Anderson
    • Afro-Mexico: Blacks, Indígenas, Politics, and the Greater Diaspora—Bobby Vaughn
    • The Changing World of Brazilian Race Relations?—Anani Dzidzienyo
  • Part III: The Politics of Racialization in the United States
    • Framing the Discussion of African American–Latino Relations: A Review and Analysis—John J. Betancur
    • Neither White nor Black: The Representation of Racial Identity Among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland—Jorge Duany
    • Scripting Race, Finding Place: African Americans, Afro-Cubans, and the Diasporic Imaginary in the United States—Nancy Raquel Mirabal
    • Identity, Power, and Socioracial Hierarchies Among Haitian Immigrants in Florida—Louis Herns Marcelin
    • Interminority Relations in Legislative Settings: The Case of African Americans and Latinos—José E. Cruz
    • African American and Latina/o Cooperation in Challenging Racial Profiling—Kevin R. Johnson
    • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions—Mark Sawyer
    • Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar—Silvio Torres-Saillant
    • Witnessing History: An Octogenarian Reflects on Fifty Years of African American–Latino Relations—Nelson Peery
Tags: , ,

Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery on 2012-04-04 23:23Z by Steven

Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue

Palgrave Macmillan
June 2006
408 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-7140-1, ISBN10: 1-4039-7140-4
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-10837-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10837-7

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Arlington

 

Winner of the Society for French Historical Studies 2007 Gilbert Chinard Prize!

In 1804 French Saint-Domingue became the independent nation of Haiti after the only successful slave uprising in world history. When the Haitian Revolution broke out, the colony was home to the largest and wealthiest free population of African descent in the New World. Before Haiti explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members both supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they created their own New World identity in the years from 1760 to 1804.

Table of Contents

  • The Development of Creole Society on the Colonial Frontier
  • Race and Class in Creole Society: Saint-Domingue in the 1760s
  • Freedom, Slavery, and the French Colonial State
  • Reform and Revolt after the Seven Years’ War
  • Citizenship and Racism in the New Republic Sphere
  • The Rising Economic Power of Free People of Color in the 1780s
  • Proving Free Colored Virtue
  • Free People of Color in the Southern Peninsula and the Origins of the Haitain Revolution
  • Revolution and Republicanism in Aquin Parish
Tags: , , , ,

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Philosophy on 2012-02-06 02:34Z by Steven

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2011
232 pages
ebook ISBN: 9780230305243
Print ISBNs: 9780230298286 HB 9780230318519
DOI: 10.1057/9780230305243

Amar Acheraïou

This book offers an accessible, in-depth analysis of hybridity as a practice, discourse, and ideological construction. Its scope ranges widely, encompassing conceptualizations of hybridity from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The views of such key figures as Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Virgil, Gobineau, Renan, and Tocqueville, as well as Bakhtin, Fanon, and Bhabha are all freshly reassessed. The ground-breaking perspectives provided reorient contemporary debates on hybridity and the ‘Third Space’. They significantly widen our awareness of the history of métissage and expand the methodological, conceptual, empirical, and ideological orientations of contemporary hybridity theorists.

Acheraïou deftly examines the questions of race, class, identity, binarism, postmodernist ideology, neoliberalism, and globalization. In particular, he recommends decolonizing postcolonialism, indicating ways to transcend the cultural and spatial turn predetermining current discussions of métissage, culture, and identity politics. Throughout, he analyzes hybridity in the light of globalization, suggesting how postcolonialism could become a genuinely counter-hegemonic mode of resistance to global neoliberal doxa.

Contents

  • Introduction
  • PART I Hybridity: A Historical Overview from Antiquity to Modern Times
    • 1 Métissage, Ideology, and Politics in Ancient Discourses
      • 1.1 Cultural, political, and scientific métissage in antiquity
      • 1.2 Reflexive and strategic hybridism
      • 1.3 Ancient literary, political, and philosophical perceptions of hybridity
    • 2 Myths of Purity and Mixed Marriages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
    • 3 Interracial Relationships and the Economy of Power in Modern Empires
      • 3.1 Syncretism in modern colonial politics and ideology
      • 3.2 Métissage: a double-edged colonial weapon
      • 3.3 Sexual politics, from tolerance to abjuration: the case of the British East India Company
      • 3.4 Hybridity as the space of the impossible: the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean
  • PART II Hybridity in Contemporary Theory: A Critical Assessment
    • 4 The Ethos of Hybridity Discourse
    • 5 Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space
    • 6 Class, Race, and Postcolonial Hybridity Discourse
    • 7 Postcolonial Discourse, Postmodernist Ethos: Neocolonial Complicities
    • 8 Hybridity Discourse and Binarism
    • 9 The Global and the Postcolonial: Uneasy Alliance
      • 9.1 An overview of globalization: hegemony and resistance
      • 9.2 Empirical and theoretical insights into postcolonial and global relationships
    • 10 Hybridity Discourse and Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism
    • 11 Decolonizing Postcolonial Discourse
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • Index
Tags: ,