I was asked to write an article for The Guardian about the horrendous racist cartoon of Serena Williams drawn by Australian cartoonist Mark Knight. Unfortunately, the headline used the word ‘ignorance’ which led some people to rightly point out that the problems of racism in Australia, or elsewhere, has nothing…
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I teach undergraduates at Western Sydney University, several hundreds of whom have, over the last five years, studied my unit, “The Racial State”. I chose this title to echo the seminal book of the same name by race critical scholar, David Theo Goldberg. My students have no problem identifying racism;…
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I was asked by Inference Review to write a response to an article by the German Marxist economist, Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Trump and the Trumpists‘. I thank Inference for the opportunity to write this response which I learnt a lot from. I am also very grateful that so many people have…
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After a few weeks silence due to other commitments, I am returning with the eighth blog post in the series to attend to the themes of borders and mobilities. My comments respond to Reece Jones’s book, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move which in sum I consider a good example of a lacuna I have observed at the heart of much critical thinking on the nature of borders – their overwhelming failure to consider the centrality of race. I will use the opportunity offered by the reading of this book to consider why I believe a race critical analysis should be central to work on borders and migration, what the dangers of ignoring race might be for an understanding of current urgencies. A broader question of what a reading which conceives of borders as inherently violent without thinking about the racialised nature of this violence means for our understanding of what the border does is one I leave for later on but which is triggered by the reading of this book to which the theme of violence is key. While my comments today will be relatively brief, I see these questions as being of major importance for my wider project on race and relationality; how can we suture in much of the vital work that is done in what we coul call ‘critical border studies’ into a framework that is attentive to race?
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This week we read Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, a book which takes seriously the role of Irish Catholics, Jews, African and South Asian migrants in the British left from the 1700s to the 1980s. I have committed to writing shorter blogs in the interests of leaving room for other work, so this week’s reflections are quite short and respond directly to the book’s content. In particular, I was interested in three elements of the book: the role of nationalism in the cooptation of the white working class into Britishness and away from internationalist class solidarity, the often unspoken significance of whiteness in the construction of class from a left-wing perspective, and thirdly, the legacy of politic; blackness and its discontents.
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This is the fourth blog post in my Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology series for my course at The New School Department of Sociology in Spring 2017. This week we are beginning to discuss books, mainly new works, in race critical studies. The rest of the syllabus is here (leave a comment if you want access to the Google folder with all the readings). This week we are beginning with discussion of Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. My review of the book can be read here. And you can listen to Aldon Morris discussing the book here. In this post, I attempt to link Morris’s discussion of Du Bois’s intellectual legacy for global sociology to a discussion of both the race blindness of sociology and, Zine Magubane puts it, its paradoxical foundations in wholly racial social contexts. I ask what Du Bois’s invocation to treat race as central, and not marginal, to sociology (and the social sciences in general) signals in terms of the challenges facing sociology today in the face of the pressing need for a truly global sociology attentive to the formational role played by race and coloniality. In this I am guided by the vital work of Gurminder Bhambra and would like to thank RCDS student William Borstall for suggesting the work of Zine Magubane on ‘America’s Racial Ontology’ which I did not previously know.
Comments closed“Racism is more objected to than understood in sociology” (Barnor Hesse 2014: 141).
“For the rest of his very long life, Du Bois was to be politically and theoretically as actively engaged in the global, world-systemic series of ‘gaze from below’ anti-color line, therefore anti-colonial cum antiapartheid struggles, as he was to be in his own ‘local’ U.S. one – a position Fanon would similarly adopt” (Wynter 2015: 51-2).
This is the third contribution to the Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology blog series. In it I look at the argument advanced by David Theo Goldberg (2009) that a relational approach to the study of race and racism reveals more than a comparativist approach does. I propose, however, that before being able to discuss the relative adequacy of either approach, we must have a good understanding of what is being researched when we centre race in accounts of historical or contemporary social, political and economic processes.
In 2014 I published an article, Postracial Silences: The Othering of Race in Europe, in a book I co-edited with Hamburg sociologist Wulf D. Hund, Racism and Sociology.
I examined work by mainstream ‘migration, ethnicities and minorities’ (MEM) scholars in Europe. Through institutes and departments often aligned with policy-making, these scholars often receive the lion’s share of the funding to research issues which, from a race critical perspective, are wholly about race. Yet their work mainly tends to neglect, elide or even deny the salience of race. In my view there are three main reasons for this:
Comments closedRace and embodiment in antiracism apps from Alana Lentin on Vimeo. I gave a talk at the 10th Somatechnics Conference – Technicity, Temporality, Embodiment – at Byron Bay, 1-3 December 2016 on the antiracism apps project I am co-researching with Justine Humphry. You can listen here.
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This Saturday, October 8th, I’ll be taking race and antiracism and the relationship between racism and Islamophobia with Yassir Morsi at the Lebanese Muslim Association. Save
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I was delighted to be interviewed for the latest issue of the German Journal für kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung by Juliane Karakayali. Claudia Garcia-Rojas (@ClaudiaStellar) was kind enough to create this quote from the interview which you can read here. Save
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