Antiracist Feminism and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times

The chapter analyses the establishment and expansion of antiracist feminism in the last decade throughout the Nordic region, with new groups, media sites, and public events organised, especially in the large cities. Keskinen examines antiracist feminist and queer of colour activism in which the main or sole actors belong to groups racialised as non-white or ‘others’ in Nordic societies. A fundamental argument developed in the chapter is the central role and potential of these emerging social movements in the reconfiguring of political agendas and tackling pressing societal issues, due to its capacity to overlap and connect the borders of antiracist, feminist, and (to some extent) class-based politics. The chapter further argues for the usefulness of theorising the neoliberal turn of racial capitalism as the societal condition in which feminist activism takes place.Peer reviewe

Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced

"The reason I stay here in Beijing is not for living. I‘m just working here"

Í kínverskum borgum býr fjöldi farandverkafólks sem gjarnan á uppruna sinn að rekja til dreifbýlis. Fólksflutningar innan Kína eru orðnir að föstu einkenni kínversks samfélags, en farandverkafólk flyst til borganna í þeim tilgangi að bæta lífskjör sín og sinna. Stjórnvöld settu á fót búsetuskráningarkerfi, svokallað hukou-kerfi, snemma á sjötta áratugnum til þess að stjórna efnahagslegri þróun og hamla taumlausum flutningum fólks til borganna. Vegna kerfisins býr farandverkafólk réttindalaust við bág kjör innan borganna og sú jaðarstaða mótar sjálfsmynd þessa fjölmenna hóps. Markmið þessa verkefnis var að fá innsýn í heim farandverkakvenna í Kína og fræðast um hvernig þær skilgreina sig sjálfar og eigin stöðu í kínverska borgarsamfélaginu. Við framkvæmd þessarar rannsóknar var notast við vettvangsathugun. Farið var í fjölda heimsókna á vettvanginn, Yaxiufatamarkaðinn í Peking, þar sem tekin voru viðtöl og fylgst með gangi mála. Viðtölin voru hálfstöðluð, en viðmælendur voru tólf ungar konur sem starfa á markaðnum. Vettvangsrannsóknin veitti rannsakanda ómetanlega innsýn í heim kínverskra farandverkakvenna sem nær langt út fyrir markaðinn. Helsti lærdómur rannsóknarinnar var að farandverkakonur taka að vissu leyti völdin í sínar hendur og stíga út fyrir rammann með því að freista gæfunnar á eigin vegum í borgum landsins. Þær ögra hefðbundnum gildum sem eru ríkjandi í dreifbýlinu og snúa aftur heim síðar með nýjar hugmyndir um hlutverk og stöðu kynjanna