In Skin Theory, Cristina Visperas identifies how the captive body in the postwar era is positioned as the ideal test subject. She does so through a thorough interrogation of Albert Kligman’s primarily dermatological human experiments at Holmesburg Prison to argue that racial capture enables the research enterprise. Suturing conversations in Black studies, science and technology studies, and carceral studies, each chapter reads objects in relation to these experiments to argue that grounding its brutal procedures was a visual culture enabled by the figurative uses of the skin.
Keyword: anti-Blackness
Editors’ Introduction
In this introduction, the editors continue their reflections on scholarly editing in the pandemic, welcome two new co-editors, and announce a grant-funded initiative that builds on Lateral Forums. This issue features three regular articles, book reviews, and the first installment of a special section, “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry,” which builds on the “Cripistemologies of Crisis” special section, edited by Theodora Danylevich and Aly Patsavas, last year.
Review of How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce (Duke University Press)
How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind offers a poignant study of what author La Marr Jurelle Bruce calls “mad methodology,” extending care and consideration to Black artists historically, fictionally, and contemporaneously rendered mad by oppressive anti-Black capitalist discursive practices. Reflecting on the creative practices of Buddy Bolden, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Dave Chappelle, among others, Bruce provides a clear-cutting analysis of the ways normative cultural logics work to figure Black art and protest as inherently mad.
Introduction: Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa
In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic studies, and Middle East area studies have approached questions of race and racism in this geographic region with renewed critical vigor. Recent work deconstructing anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in the Americas and Europe has put these patterns of discrimination into intersectional conversation with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. New historical efforts have drawn attention to the legacies of slavery in the Ottoman, Persian, and Arab Empires, working to understand how forms of racialization and racial hierarchization predated and were exacerbated by the arrival of European imperial forces. At the same time, activists in the region draw attention to prevailing racism against migrant laborers, marginalized indigenous populations, and others as the afterlives of colonialism, war, austerity, and revolution carry on. Together, this academic and activist work asks for attention by leaders, community members, and scholars of this region to the particularities of racecraft in the region: How are “Blackness” and “whiteness” constructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish speaking worlds? What are the obstacles to discussing and identifying race particular to the histories of this region, its peoples, and its histories? This forum uses close readings of popular culture and political discourse across the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) in pursuit of these questions and others.
The Myths of Haji Firuz: The Racist Contours of the Iranian Minstrel
Every year, around the arrival of the Spring equinox, Iranians in Iran and in diaspora will recognize a minstrel named Haji Firuz with his Nowruz jingle. The inclusion of Haji Firuz during Nowruz festivities has been questioned and challenged for decades; where some will point out his connections to anti-Blackness, others will defend Haji Firuz, arguing that his face is only covered in soot from fires also associated with the holiday. This article contextualizes these arguments as a part of a larger discourse of denying racism in Iran and, more poignantly, erasing Iran’s history of slavery altogether. This article addresses the consequences and pitfalls of defending Haji Firuz’s blackface performance, and its implications for the broader Iranian community.
An (Un)Marked Foreigner: Race-Making in Egyptian, Syrian, and German Popular Cultures
This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by examining how race becomes socialized in and through the production and presentation of Arab culture in two ethnographic case studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. Both these case studies center the “foreigner” subject as one who embodies proximity to white power and delimits the boundaries of such power. We argue that the category of foreigner is thus a racialized construct that not only complicates the Black–white binary of race relations but strategically evades explicit discourses and practices of racecraft that are violent, discriminatory, and exclusionary. By provincializing critical race theory through the particularities of Arab lived experience, we illustrate how local social categories are entangled with historic legacies of empire and contemporary global logics of racialized difference while remaining sensitive to how conceptions of difference exceed Euro-American categories of race. Our work therefore directs attention towards alternative enactments of racialization within the Global South.
On Blackness and the Nation in Arabic Hip Hop: Case Studies from Lebanon and Libya
In this contribution, Chris Nickell and Adam Benkato think together about the mobilization of Blackness in Arabic hip hop from two different contexts: a rap battle in Beirut, Lebanon and music videos from Benghazi, Libya. In both, hip hop artists confront Blackness with the nation through the Afro-diasporic medium of hip hop. Although the examples we consider here participate, in several ways, in hip hop’s larger generic functions as a globalized Black medium of resistance, they also bolster pre-existing discourses of race and racism, anti-Blackness in particular. We argue that this seeming contradiction—instances of anti-Blackness appearing in an iteration of a Black expressive form—is in fact a feature, not a bug, of the flexible way the genre works. We have paired these two examples, which we describe and analyze individually given their differing social contexts as well as our differing research focuses, in order to glimpse the discursive level at which racecraft functions.
“Incommensurate Ontologies”? Anti-Black Racism and the Question of Islam in French Algeria
In recent years, scholars and activists in France and the United States have questioned whether discrimination against Muslims constitutes a form of racism. In France, some on the left have claimed that religion is a category of belief and therefore should remain separate from discrimination based on skin color or other physical characteristics. In the United States, Afropessimist approaches insist on the specificity of anti-Black racism, rooted in the historical difference between the native and slave. This article, by contrast, argues that race and religion should be studied relationally and highlights how being Muslim exceeded the frame of personal conviction in colonial Algeria, where religious identity was the basis of a political and economic project that were constructed in their wake. The works of Frantz Fanon are particularly instructive in this regard, as he insisted on viewing Blackness as fundamentally relational and also drew on his analysis of anti-Black racism in mainland France to understand the dynamics of settler colonialism in Algeria. The porous line between religious and racial categories also sheds light on discussions of sectarianism in the Middle East more broadly, as colonial regimes irrevocably shaped the contours of the nation-state that were constructed in their wake. Postcolonial sectarianism inherited the intimate relationship between race and religion constructed by empire.
What is Whiteness in North Africa?
This entry sketches a matrix for conceptualizing race in/ and North Africa that takes Arabness, indigeneity, Islam, the Sahara, and slavery as orienting keywords. It suggests an approach to a geopolitically-grounded whiteness as social currency and aspiration that is both based in specific regional economic history and also reaches outward toward globally-circulating formations of racial hierarchy. Acknowledging the distinct legal, colonial, and state histories under and through which racialization has proceeded in North and Saharan Africa since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, this entry aims to draw out the ethical imaginaries through which bodies have been marked and categorized in this region. These ethical imaginaries have operated through their attendant languages, memories, and performances to enable racisms and colorisms with violent and enduring material consequences. Under the headings “Racialized Enslavement,” “Whiteness and Arabness,” “Race and the Sahara,” and “Race in North African Popular Culture,” I offer brief introductions to these discursive formations, histories, and conceptual intersections and offer suggested readings for each.
Review of Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania by Maile Arvin (Duke University Press)
Arvin explains how dispossessing Polynesians was predicated on a logic of settler colonialism inflected by white supremacy. Casting Polynesians as white—specifically, as “almost white”—as opposed to distancing Polynesians from Caucasians, simultaneously provided white settlers the justification they needed to occupy large swaths of Oceania and precluded Polynesians from enjoying the full set of rights available to non-almost whites. By establishing a clear racial continuity between settlers and Polynesians, possession through whiteness made whiteness indigenous to the islands; doing so “suited [settlers’] own claims of belonging to Polynesia while [also soothing] colonizers’ racial anxieties about those they dispossessed.” Throughout the book, Arvin argues that anti-Blackness was as pronounced and as integral in possessing Polynesians as whiteness and calls for future research that more centrally examines the specific and nuanced functions of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in Melanesian and Micronesian contexts.
Introduction: US Gun Culture and the Performance of Racial Sovereignty
This introduction examines gun culture in the United States and argues that it is a product of the longstanding practices of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and misogyny that have shaped life in the United States. Invoking an anthropological definition of culture, it argues that gun violence is a central facet of US political and social life and that performances of gun use and ownership, particularly when enacted by white men, embody a kind of “racial sovereignty,” or a violent limitation of the practical applicability of citizenship to those who promulgate whiteness, maleness, and violence as primary markers of full belonging in the civic community.
Good [Black] Guys With Guns: Performance and the Anti-Black Logic of US Gun Culture
This article examines the police shooting of twenty-one-year-old E.J. Bradford at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Alabama on November 22, 2018. After a brief investigation, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office absolved the officer who shot Bradford of any wrongdoing. Through a close reading of the Alabama AG’s report and a performance analysis of Bradford’s actions that night, this article argues that Bradford behaved exactly as he was trained to as a concealed carry permit holder and former enlistee in the Army. Bradford was the epitome of the NRA’s vaunted “good guy with a gun” who intervenes in a violent situation to save others’ lives. However, within the context of the United States’s gun culture, which envisions “good” gun owners as white and encourages police to rehearse responses that perpetuate anti-Black racism, Bradford was always going to be seen by police as suspect.
Multicultural Redemption: Crazy Rich Asians and the Politics of Representation
This essay examines the film Crazy Rich Asians and its surrounding celebratory discourse in order to consider the relationship between multicultural media production and contemporary power dynamics. Crazy Rich Asians has been exalted by the public as a win for diversity, representation, and racial progress. Yet the film is not an anomaly but part of a larger trend in mainstream U.S. television and film that have begun to proliferate shows with “diverse” casts and “progressive” storylines such as Black Panther, Master of None, and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, among others. I argue that the contemporary multicultural era has given rise to a common narrative of racial reconciliation, in which inclusion within hierarchy is rendered synonymous with redemption from racial violence. I term this narrative a “multicultural redemption narrative,” and suggest Crazy Rich Asians illuminates how it works. Specifically, this narrative does the discursive and ideological work of constraining the imaginative boundaries of liberation, such that liberation can only be imagined as wielding the very systems of oppression one seeks to escape.