Diversity, identity and belonging: women's spaces of sociality

Questions of identity, diversity and senses of belonging have been central to debates about multiculturalism, citizenship and social cohesion. However, there are few studies which specifically examine women’s spaces of sociality and how these have contributed to new formations of identities. Developed from feminist and post-colonial theorisations, and drawing on empirical interview data from a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, this paper explores identities for (primarily) ‘White’ and ‘South Asian’ women through the intersections of gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity with culture, religion and sexuality. It asks what aspects of identities, affiliations, ambivalences or antagonisms are manifested in particular contexts of socialising, and explores how the processes of social identification are played out in informal contexts of socialising. Through a rich source of interviews carried out in London, it demonstrates how postcolonial spaces of sociality in a major international city can be places of intimacy and bonding for women as well as places where ‘difference’ is constructed, enforced, resisted and performed

Abstracts from the Twenty-First Annual Conference - Race, Class, and Gender

Abstracts From the Twenty-First Annual Conference National Association for Ethnic Studies Race, Class, and Gender March 3-6, 1993 Red Lion Hotel, Salt Lake City, Uta

Depoliticised ethnicity in Tanzania: a structural and historical Narrative

Much of the literature on ethnicity in Africa regards ethnicity as a central cleavage and associates its politicisation with civil war and deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Tanzanian society is not structured by this cleavage, making it an outlier among African states. Despite the negative impact of politicised ethnicity, little is known of the circumstances through which it germinates and comes to have negative consequences, or how it can be suppressed in Africa. The present article attempts a comprehensive analysis of the structural and historical factors that have made the move away from politicisation of ethnicity in Tanzania possible. It provides an eclectic structural and historical explanation that attributes lack of ethnic salience in Tanzanian politics to a particular ethnic structure, to certain colonial administrative and economic approaches, and to a sustained nation-building ethos. The argument results from a critical analysis of secondary material on ethnicity and the politics of Tanzania

El Otro Encuentro: Gigi Oltavaro-Hormillosa’s Neo-Queer Precolonial Imagining

This essay examines the performance and video art piece Cosmic Blood, by Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, a queer Colombian and Filipina American artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It argues that Cosmic Blood is a performative intervention into dominant modes of reading the racialized and gendered Filipina body, as well as a critique of absolutist notions of national and ethnic belonging. Cosmic Blood challenges the inherent heteronormativity and masculinism of dominant notions of nation and kinship, accomplishing this imaginative intervention by its retroping of the past through a lens of queer desire. Within Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s retelling of the moment of first contact, queer bodily desire is the locus of power relations between colonizer and colonized. In this vision of the past, the figure of the Filipina is presented as a desiring subject, resisting the overdetermined tropes of woman as nation, territory, and land that are both a legacy of colonization, and a persistent narrative within contemporary articulations of national and diasporic belonging. In doing so, Cosmic Blood presents a possibility for forms of belonging that exceed the absolutism of race, ethnicity, and nation, while also imagining a utopian vision of the future that critiques the material conditions of the present

Review of Race Scholarship and the War on Terror

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship. The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project

When You Can\u27t Quite Place Me

I’m relatively used to being asked the question “what are you?” It’s a strange question because it can mean so many different things. I’m a human? I identify as a female. I’m a college student. I’m an American. But I never say those things, because what they’re really asking is this: what race are you? [excerpt

Dominant ethnicity: from minority to majority

This article argues that the world is in the midst of a long-term transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity. Whereas minority domination was common in premodern societies, modernity (with its accent on democracy and popular sovereignty) has engendered a shift to dominant majority ethnicity. The article begins with conceptual clarifications. The second section provides a broad overview of the general patterns of ethnic dominance that derive from the logic of modern nationalism and democratisation. The third section discusses remnants of dominant minorities in the modern era and suggests that their survival hinges on peculiar historical and social circumstances coupled with resistance to democratisation. The fourth section shifts the focus to dominant majorities in the modern era and their relationship to national identities. The article ends with a discussion of the fortunes of dominant ethnicity in the West

Report back from the ‘race’, ethnicity and post-colonial studies PhD summer symposium

This summer the LSE Sociology Department and Social Policy Department jointly hosted the fifth annual Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies PhD Symposium—a unique academic network and space where PhD students exchange ideas, present new work and receive constructive feedback from leading scholars and work collaboratively across disciplines and institutions