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

Black Immigrants in the United States and the “Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studie

Race across the Atlantic : mapping racialization in Africa and the African diaspora

textBased primarily on comparative ethnographic research in Accra, Ghana and Washington, D.C., this dissertation is a multi-sited—textual, sociopolitical, and historical—investigation of processes of racialization as they construct notions of “Blackness” for communities in Africa and the African diaspora. I argue that the sociohistorical processes of racialization are such that they render analogous the experiences and relationships of continental Africans and those of African descent in diaspora. I engage both racial formation and African diaspora theorization to stress the political and intellectual import of understanding Black (racial) identity construction within a global context, a context that encompasses not only the “western” communities of the diaspora, but also the realities of peoples residing in the geopolitical space of the African continent. My objective in this project is to examine how racialization works to create global Black identities and the ways these identities are deployed and understood in a transnational context. The dissertation charts an “ethnography of racialization” and each chapter examines a specific site of racial identity formation. This project challenges the commonsense intellectual assumption that Africa and its peoples on the continent do not actively participate (in this contemporary (post)colonial moment) in the global discourses and practices of racial identity formation. It also shows that, as a global and hegemonic phenomenon, racialization significantly links Africa to its diaspora. This dissertation initiates a dialogue that I hope will help us rethink how we conceptualize the African diaspora and anthropological/ethnographic practice by delineating the central place of race in structuring the experiences of all “racializedas-Black” peoples. Thus, the dissertation is significant for African Studies, African Diaspora Studies, racial formation theory, transnational migration studies, and, more generally, anthropological theory and practice. It redirects diaspora theorization to include identity processes in contemporary Africa and, furthermore, it foregrounds the practices of race and racialization that, South Africa aside, have received less attention in the historiography and ethnographic studies of Africa than other processes of identification.Anthropolog

L'ensemble funéraire aristocratique de la Cime des Bruyères à Pulvérières (Puy-de-Dôme) : un témoignage des élites arvernes du IIe s. av. J.-C

National audienc