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Race And Reconciliation
Essays From The New South Africa
Daniel Herwitz
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A meditation on the lessons to be learned from South Africa’s transformation in the wake of apartheid

Justice, truth, and identity; race, society, and law—all come into dramatic play as South Africa makes the tumultuous transition to a post-apartheid democracy. Seeking the timeless through the timely and trying to find the deeper meaning in the sweep of events, Daniel Herwitz brings the vast resources of the philosophical essay to bear on the new realities of post-apartheid South Africa—from racial identity to truth commissions, from architecture to film and television.

A public intellectual’s reflections on public life, Herwitz’s essays question how the new South Africa has constructed its concepts of reconciliation and return and how its historical emergence has meant a rethinking, reimagining, reexperiencing, relabeling, and repoliticizing of race. Herwitz’s purpose is to give a philosophical reading of society—a society already relying on implicitly philosophical concepts in its social and political agendas. Working through these concepts, testing their relevance for reading society, his book itself becomes a part of the politics of definition and description in the new South Africa.
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Race and Sex in Latin America
Peter Wade
Pluto Press, 2009

The intersection of race and sex in Latin America is a subject touched upon by many disciplines but this is the first book to deal solely with these issues.

Interracial sexual relations are often a key mythic basis for Latin American national identities, but the importance of this has been underexplored. Peter Wade provides a pioneering overview of the growing literature on race and sex in the region, covering historical aspects and contemporary debates. He includes both black and indigenous people in the frame, as well as mixed and white people, avoiding the implication that "race" means "black-white" relations.

Challenging but accessible, this book will appeal across the humanities and social sciences, particularly to students of anthropology, gender studies, history and Latin American studies.

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Racial Americana, Volume 104
John L. Jackson, Jr., ed.
Duke University Press
If sociologist and cultural critic W. E. B. Du Bois proved prophetic about the twentieth century and its color lines, the beginning of the twenty-first century has given rise to divergent pronouncements about the potential of race relations and racial discourse in American society. Older categories of black victims and white victimizers hardly seem up to the task of making social sense out of today’s complex racial issues. Racial Americana explores new modes of racial theorizing that provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the social facts that underpin race (as belief system, as common sense, and as biological mythmaking), examining what those underpinnings forewarn about the future of social difference in the United States.

Imagining America’s racialist future, the diverse contributors to this special issue—anthropologists, sociologists, historians, poets, and literary critics—offer their conceptualizations of race today, discuss how racial ideology has changed through the years, and explain its continuing ability to morph according to geopolitical, cultural, and economic strictures. Essays focus on how notions of race have helped constitute varied definitions of Americanness in the past and the present; offer critiques and recuperations of antiessentialist efforts; excavate the affective links between racism and patriotism after September 11; examine how race and gender intersect in the lives of African American jazz musicians; and determine what Du Bois's earlier arguments say about contemporary representations of “Latinidad.”

Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Tess Chakkalakal, Theodore A. Harris, John Hartigan Jr., Sharon P. Holland, John L. Jackson Jr., Marcyliena Morgan, Vijay Prashad, Don Robotham, Nichole T. Rustin, Brackette F. Williams

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Racial Castration
Managing Masculinity in Asian America
David L. Eng
Duke University Press, 2001
Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L. Eng examines images—literary, visual, and filmic—that configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer.
Eng juxtaposes theortical discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Fanon with critical readings of works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Linmark. While situating these literary and cultural productions in relation to both psychoanalytic theory and historical events of particular significance for Asian Americans, Eng presents a sustained analysis of dreamwork and photography, the mirror stage and the primal scene, and fetishism and hysteria. In the process, he offers startlingly new interpretations of Asian American masculinity in its connections to immigration exclusion, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, multiculturalism, and the model minority myth. After demonstrating the many ways in which Asian American males are haunted and constrained by enduring domestic norms of sexuality and race, Eng analyzes the relationship between Asian American male subjectivity and the larger transnational Asian diaspora. Challenging more conventional understandings of diaspora as organized by race, he instead reconceptualizes it in terms of sexuality and queerness.
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Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil
Michael Hanchard, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
Bringing together U.S. and Brazilian scholars, as well as Afro-Brazilian political activists, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil represents a significant advance in understanding the complexities of racial difference in contemporary Brazilian society. While previous scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to quantitative and statistical research, editor Michael Hanchard presents a qualitative perspective from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and cultural theory.
The contributors to Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil examine such topics as the legacy of slavery and its abolition, the historical impact of social movements, race-related violence, and the role of Afro-Brazilian activists in negotiating the cultural politics surrounding the issue of Brazilian national identity. These essays also provide comparisons of racial discrimination in the United States and Brazil, as well as an analysis of residential segregation in urban centers and its affect on the mobilization of blacks and browns. With a focus on racialized constructions of class and gender and
sexuality, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil reorients the direction of Brazilian studies, providing new insights into Brazilian culture, politics, and race relations.
This volume will be of importance to a wide cross section of scholars engaged with Brazil in particular, and Latin American studies in general. It will also appeal to those invested in the larger issues of political and social movements centered on the issue of race.

Contributors
. Benedita da Silva, Nelson do Valle Silva, Ivanir dos Santos, Richard Graham, Michael Hanchard, Carlos Hasenbalg, Peggy A. Lovell, Michael Mitchell, Tereza Santos, Edward Telles, Howard Winant


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Racial Resentment in the Political Mind
Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A thought-provoking look at how racial resentment, rather than racial prejudice alone, motivate a growing resistance among whites to improve the circumstances faced by racial minorities.

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to help racial minorities stem from racial prejudice. They argue that racial resentment arises from just-world beliefs and appraisals of deservingness that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in America in ways more consequential than racism or racial prejudice alone. 

The culprits, as many White people see it, are undeserving people of color, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at Whites’ expense—a worldview in which any attempt at modest change is seen as a challenge to the status quo and privilege. Yet, as Davis and Wilson reveal, many Whites have become racially resentful due to their perceptions that African Americans skirt the “rules of the game” and violate traditional values by taking advantage of unearned resources. Resulting attempts at racial progress lead Whites to respond in ways that retain their social advantage—opposing ameliorative policies, minority candidates, and other advancement on racial progress. Because racial resentment is rooted in beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness, ordinary citizens, who may not harbor racist motivations, may wind up in the same political position as racists, but for different reasons. 
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Racial Revolutions
Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil
Jonathan W. Warren
Duke University Press, 2001
Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the Indian population in Brazil as increasing numbers of pardos (individuals of mixed African, European, and indigenous descent) have chosen to identify themselves as Indians. In Racial Revolutions—the first book-length study of racial formation in Brazil that centers on Indianness—Jonathan W. Warren draws on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews to illuminate the discursive and material forces responsible for this resurgence in the population.
The growing number of pardos who claim Indian identity represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. For centuries, the predominant trend had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favor of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors—including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity—have prompted a reversal of racial aspirations and reimaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognize and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group.
Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation building, and state violence.

Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

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Racism on Trial
The Chicano Fight for Justice
Ian F. Haney López
Harvard University Press, 2004

In 1968, ten thousand students marched in protest over the terrible conditions prevalent in the high schools of East Los Angeles, the largest Mexican community in the United States. Chanting "Chicano Power," the young insurgents not only demanded change but heralded a new racial politics. Frustrated with the previous generation's efforts to win equal treatment by portraying themselves as racially white, the Chicano protesters demanded justice as proud members of a brown race. The legacy of this fundamental shift continues to this day.

Ian Haney López tells the compelling story of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles by following two criminal trials, including one arising from the student walkouts. He demonstrates how racial prejudice led to police brutality and judicial discrimination that in turn spurred Chicano militancy. He also shows that legal violence helped to convince Chicano activists that they were nonwhite, thereby encouraging their use of racial ideas to redefine their aspirations, culture, and selves. In a groundbreaking advance that further connects legal racism and racial politics, Haney López describes how race functions as "common sense," a set of ideas that we take for granted in our daily lives. This racial common sense, Haney López argues, largely explains why racism and racial affiliation persist today.

By tracing the fluid position of Mexican Americans on the divide between white and nonwhite, describing the role of legal violence in producing racial identities, and detailing the commonsense nature of race, Haney López offers a much needed, potentially liberating way to rethink race in the United States.

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Raising the Dead
Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
Sharon P. Holland
Duke University Press, 2000
Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death’s relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.
Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.
Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.
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Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas
Edited by Helen Gilbert and Charlotte Gleghorn
University of London Press, 2014
Indigenous artists frequently voice concerns over the commodification of their cultures, a process acutely felt by those living with the consequences of colonialism. This timely book, which features color illustrations throughout, examines the ways in which contemporary indigenous peoples in different parts of the Americas have harnessed performance practices to resist imposed stereotypes and shape their own complex identities. Essays by leading academics and practitioners show the vibrancy of a wide array of indigenous arts and cultural events in the United States, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Canada, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Belize. As well as analyzing performance idioms, the authors trace the circulation of creative products and practices as commodities, as cultural capital, and/or as heritage. Making reference to aesthetic forms, intellectual property, and political empowerment, these essays weigh the impact of music, festivities, film, photography, theater, and museum installations among diverse audiences and discuss ways in which spectacles of cultural difference are remodeled in the hands of indigenous practitioners.
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Reconstructing Dixie
Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South
Tara McPherson
Duke University Press, 2003
The South has long played a central role in America’s national imagination—the site of the trauma of slavery and of a vast nostalgia industry, alternatively the nation’s moral other and its moral center. Reconstructing Dixie explores how ideas about the South function within American culture. Narratives of the region often cohere around such tropes as southern hospitality and the southern (white) lady. Tara McPherson argues that these discursive constructions tend to conceal and disavow hard historical truths, particularly regarding race relations and the ways racial inequities underwrite southern femininity. Advocating conceptions of the South less mythologized and more tethered to complex realities, McPherson seeks to bring into view that which is repeatedly obscured—the South’s history of both racial injustice and cross-racial alliance.

Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race, gender, and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography. She examines modes of affect or ways of "feeling southern" to reveal how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging cultural studies critique, Reconstructing Dixie calls for vibrant new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and reinvigorated southern studies.

Reconstructing Dixie will appeal to scholars in American, southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American, media, and women’s studies.

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Red, White, Black, and Blue
A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia
William M. Drennen Jr., Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr.
Ohio University Press, 2004
Red, White, Black, and Blue began as a collaborative memoir by William M. “Bill” Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. As boys they played on the same Little League baseball team and experienced just one year together as schoolmates after the all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated in 1955. After that, class, race, and choice separated their life experiences for forty-five years. In 1992 both had returned to Charleston from lives mostly lived elsewhere. They decided to work together on a memoir of growing up through the trauma of desegregation. Their aim was to foster understanding between their distinct cultures for themselves and for their own and future generations. Dolores Johnson, in editing the two texts, observed two very different modes of expression: Bill Drennen’s narrative is threaded with references that connote wealth, status, and personal privilege; Kojo Jones’s memoir is interwoven with African American signification, protest, and moral outrage. The stories of their Appalachian upbringing in homes less than a mile apart are anecdotal in nature, but their diverse uses of the English language as they endeavor to communicate shared memories and common meanings reveal significant cultural connotations that transform standard American English into two different languages, rendering interracial communication problematic. Dr. Johnson’s analysis is to the point. Red, White, Black, and Blue is a groundbreaking approach to studying not only cultural linguistics but also the cultural heritage of a historic time and place in America. It gives witness to the issues of race and class inherent in the way we write, speak, and think.
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Remaking the Citizen for New Times
History, Pedagogy and the Amar Chitra Katha
Deepa Sreenivas
Seagull Books, 2024
An accessible cultural and literary critique of the right wing in India.
 
How does orthodoxy maintain its power over culture? In Remaking the Citizen for New Times, Deepa Sreenivas explores how the Amar Chitra Katha, a widely read comic series started in 1967 in India, influenced the historical and national consciousness of young readers in a conservative direction. Tacitly blaming Nehruvian welfarism of the time for the moral decline of the nation, the Amar Chitra Katha emerged as a literary articulation of the Indian right’s Hindu-nationalist ideology in a modern, bourgeois guise. To renew Hindutva hegemony, the comic series gave orthodox ideas a new sheen, both in its form and content, merging Western comic styles with Indian visual storytelling traditions on the one hand, and combining mythological characters with political figureheads into harmonious narratives on the other—making it difficult to sift history from myths and legends. Sreenivas deftly argues that these mythological-political tales emphasized the instructive rather than the informative potential of history, encouraging neoliberal values such as merit and hard work while ignoring caste or class as systemic issues.
 
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The Returned
Former U.S. Migrants’ Lives in Mexico City
Claudia Masferrer
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
In the first two decades of the 21st century, more than two million Mexican migrants returned to Mexico from the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people who returned to Mexico was so large that, for the first time in at least fifty years, more people entered Mexico from the United States than entered the United States from Mexico. Many of these migrants were destined for urban areas, and we know little about how they fare after they return to cities. In The Returned, sociologists Claudia Masferrer, Erin R. Hamilton, and Nicole Denier examine the experiences of returned migrants in Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Masferrer, Hamilton, and Denier draw on interviews with former U.S. migrants living in Mexico City to better understand the experience of return migration to urban areas. Each of the migrants they spoke with lived in the United States for long periods with noncitizen status during the last four decades. During this time, U.S. immigration policy became increasingly focused on restriction and enforcement, which made it difficult for migrants to safely move back and forth across the border for work or to visit family without documentation. The authors find that upon their return, migrants in Mexico City felt disoriented and lost and had difficulty adapting to a massive urban environment where there is little support for returnees. They struggled to translate their work experience from their time in the U.S. to find quality jobs. Additionally, many found their family lives upended as they reunited with or formed families in the U.S.. Some found themselves separated from family members still in the U.S. with no ability to legally visit them. Others brought their families back to Mexico, some of whom were U.S. citizens and had never been to Mexico before. They, too, struggled to adapt and integrate to life in Mexico City.

The authors use the experiences of return migrants to discuss policies and practices that would improve their lives and ease their reintegration. To help with the disorientation they experience, returnees proposed ongoing psychological support with mental health professionals who have knowledge and training in the social and legal issues that return migrants face. Return migrants also advocated for policies to enhance skill matching, job creation, and entrepreneurship, as many felt the occupational skills they developed in the U.S. were undervalued in Mexico. To address family separation, returnees argued for legal and policy reform to accommodate family reunification.
The Returned is an illuminating account of the difficulties faced by return migrants and their families in Mexico City.
 
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Rewriting Exodus
American Futures from Du Bois to Obama
Anna Hartnell
Pluto Press, 2011

Exodus, as a powerful narrative of liberation, has been a central imaginative touchstone in the black American struggle against US racism. This book traces the concept in a number of pivotal black thinkers, and explores its signficance for contemporary America.

The exodus story is a fitting allegory for the painful experience of exile that disproportionately afflicted African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it also provides compelling imagery for the triumphant election of Barack Obama in 2008. Building around these themes, Anna Hartnell traces the intellectual development of one of the defining narratives of black American thinking on social justice in the United States.

In placing black America at the centre of the study of US culture, Rewriting Exodus suggests new ways of thinking about America's relationship with the Middle East and the wider postcolonial world. Hartnell's groundbreaking contribution marks a vital new chapter in American cultural and political history.

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The Roma - A Minority in Europe
Historical, Political and Social Perspectives
Yehuda Bauer
Central European University Press, 2007

The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of social integration in Europe, as well as that of ethnic definition and the construction of ethnic-national identity constitute another principal pillar of the book. The complexity of issues involved, such as collective memory, myth-making and social constructionism, trigger intense debate among researchers dealing with Romani studies.

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The Roma in Romanian History
Viorel Achim
Central European University Press, 2004
One of the greatest challenges during the enlargement process of the European Union towards the east is how the issue of the Roma or Gypsies is tackled. This ethnic minority group represents a much higher share by numbers, too, in some regions going above 20% of the population. This enormous social and political problem cannot be solved without proper historical studies like this book, the most comprehensive history of Gypsies in Romania. It is based on academic research, synthesizing the entire historical Romanian and foreign literature concerning this topic, and using lot of information from the archives. The main focus is laid on the events of the greatest consequence. Special attention is devoted to aspects linked to the long history of the Gypsies, such as slavery, the process of integration and assimilation into the majority population, as well as the marginalization of Gypsies, which has historic roots. The process of emancipation of Gypsies in the mid-19th century receives due treatment. The deportation of Gypsies to Transnistria during the Antonescu regime, between 1942-1944, is reconstructed in a special chapter. The closing chapters elaborate on the policy toward Gypsies in the decades after the Second World War that explain for the latest developments and for the situation of this population in today's Romania.
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Roma-Gypsy Presence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
15th – 18th centuries
Lech Mróz
Central European University Press, 2016
This is an analysis of 166 original and previously unpublished documents dating from the very first mention of a Gypsy in 1401 up to the year 1 765. These documents range from royal decrees thru lawsuits to entries in municipal records. Some were written in Polish but many are in Latin, German or Ruthenian. They tell the story of not only the Gypsies living in Poland, but also of those who now live in Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine. Though Poland has not traditionally had a large Roma population, the author leads the reader through an eventful history of a people living on the margins of contemporary Europe. The historic documents illustrate a marked contrast to present stereotypes and popular media images and shows how the position of Roma/Gypsies shifted gradually from respected, wealthy and partly settled citizens of the early modern times, towards criminalized vagrants of the 18 th century.This is a careful interpretation and re-interpretation of documents pertaining to the Roma's past that will provide an enlightening historical perspective towards the re-evaluation and self-definition of the Romani people in contemporary Europe.
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Romani Liberation
A Northern Perspective on Emancipatory Struggles and Progress
Jan Selling
Central European University Press, 2022

Centered on the trajectory of the emancipation of Roma people in Scandinavia, Romani Liberation is a powerful challenge to the stereotype describing Romani as passive and incapable of responsibility and agency. The author also criticizes benevolent but paternalistic attitudes that center on Romani victimhood.

The first part of the book offers a comprehensive overview of the chronological phases of Romani emancipation in Sweden and other countries. Underscoring the significance of Roma activism in this process, Jan Selling profiles sixty Romani activists and protagonists, including numerous original photos. The narrative is followed by an analysis of the concepts of historical justice and of the process of decolonizing Romani Studies. Selling highlights the impact of the historical contexts that have enabled or impeded the success of the struggles against discrimination and for equal rights, emphasizing Romani activism as a precondition for liberation.

The particular Swedish framework is accentuated by a stimulating preface by the international activist Nicoleta Bitu, and afterwords by two prominent Romani advocates, the politician Soraya Post and the singer, author, and elder Hans Caldaras.

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