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Examining the intersection of Palestine solidarity movements and antiracist activism in France from the 1970s to the present

 

For the pasty fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present.

Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts—novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives—that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations—in this case, France, the United States, and Israel.

Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.

WINNER OF THE SUSAN COLVER ROSENBERGER AWARD

A foundational work of educational history, Horace Mann Bond’s study reveals how race, labor, and power shaped Black schooling in Alabama—and why those lessons still matter today.

Originally published in 1939, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel by Horace Mann Bond is a pioneering work of educational and social history. Drawing on extensive data and firsthand observation, Bond explores how the economic structures of the cotton South and the industrializing North influenced the development of Black education in Alabama. He examines disparities in funding, curriculum, and access, while also highlighting the resilience and agency of African American communities in pursuing educational advancement. This reissued edition preserves Bond’s critical insights and remains a vital resource for scholars of African American history, education policy, and Southern studies.

A century and a half after the conclusion of the Civil War, the legacy of the Confederate States of America continues to influence national politics in profound ways. Drawing on magazines such as Southern Partisan and publications from the secessionist organization League of the South, as well as DixieNet and additional newsletters and websites, Neo-Confederacy probes the veneer of this movement to reveal goals far more extensive than a mere celebration of ancestry.

Incorporating groundbreaking essays on the Neo-Confederacy movement, this eye-opening work encompasses such topics as literature and music; the ethnic and cultural claims of white, Anglo-Celtic southerners; gender and sexuality; the origins and development of the movement and its tenets; and ultimately its nationalization into a far-reaching factor in reactionary conservative politics. The first book-length study of this powerful sociological phenomenon, Neo-Confederacy raises crucial questions about the mainstreaming of an ideology that, founded on notions of white supremacy, has made curiously strong inroads throughout the realms of sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, and often "orthodox" Christian populations that would otherwise have no affiliation with the regionality or heritage traditionally associated with Confederate history.

California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention—a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world's most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.

Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as "not as bad as the South." Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.

These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middle-class Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California's future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California's foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary and multiracial promise.

Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.

How Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world
 

While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. 

Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. 

Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force.