Where Blackness dies: the aesthetics of a massacre and the violence of remembering

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Visual Mode ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Disproportionate Number

This article focuses on the presence of ‘Blackness’ in Latin America, and the role/location of ‘Blackness’ in the necropolitics of Mexico, in particular, as a visual mode of aestheticizing violence in the aftermath of the 2010 Tamaulipas massacre of 72 undocumented migrants. As an act of remembering the victims, Mexican journalists, writers, and activists created a digital altar: 72 Migrantes. Focusing on photography and narrative as visual frames of Blackness, this article analyzes the representation of Black bodies in the digital altar to conceptualize Blackness as: a constitutive part of violent landscapes; a symptom and supplement of that violence; and, conversely, the location itself from which to critique that violence. At stake is a call for Blackness to be read within hemispheric Latin Americanist visual studies as a locus for understanding antisociality and critical race theory by closely studying the role of the human, social death, and the aesthetics of remembrance. Over 10 years after the massacre, the arguments raised in this article both implicitly and explicitly underscore the need to conceptualize contemporary Blackness and death in the wake of the growing anti-racism activism, Black Lives Matter, and the disproportionate number of people of color who have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beyond Ferguson

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priscilla Ocen
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Criminal Procedure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Actor Model ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Local Residents

In this chapter, Priscilla Ocen responds to Mona Lynch’s essay by applying Lynch’s social psychology model to recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and to the problem of discretionary racism more generally. The chapter asks how a social psychology of criminal procedure might illuminate the situated and influential role of race on all the actors that make up the criminal justice drama, including not only police and prosecutors, but also local residents. Ocen argues that the “situated actor” model should take a page from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and include the historical and “macro-institutional dynamics” of race, because “individuals and institutions [in the criminal system] operate in particular political and historical contexts that are deeply racialized.” Ocen also points out that the subjects of the criminal system are themselves situated actors, whose interpretations and operationalization of criminal rules and norms should also be accounted for in empirically rich ways. Ultimately, the chapter makes the case that Lynch’s model and CRT would each gain much from thoughtful engagement with the insights of the other.

scholarly journals Policy as Punishment and Distraction: The Double Helix of Racialized Sexual Harassment of Black Girls

2020 ◽  
pp. 089590482098446
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Wilmot ◽  
Valentina Migliarini ◽  
Subini Ancy Annamma
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Double Helix ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
School Policy ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Racialized Sexual Harassment

Black girls’ experiences with sexual harassment in schools remain critically understudied. To mediate this void, this study explored the role of educators and school policy as disrupting or perpetuating racialized sexual harassment toward them. Using a disability critical race theory (DisCrit) framework, we argue educator response and education policy create a nexus of subjugation that makes Black girls increasingly vulnerable to experience racialized sexual harassment at the hands of adults and peers, while largely failing to provide protection from or recourse for such harassment.

Telling Stories That Never End: Valeria Luiselli, the Refugee Crisis at the US-Mexico Border, and the Big, Ambitious Archival Novel

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-193
Author(s):  
Valentina Montero Román
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Literary Techniques

This essay argues that Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019) experiments with literary techniques often associated with the “big, ambitious novel” to represent the pervasive problems created by US racial construction. More specifically, it contends that Luiselli's novel evokes the archive in its fragmentation, recombinant organization, and narrative multiplicity as a means for demonstrating the complexity and relentlessness of the refugee crisis and the constructions of Latinx difference that develop alongside it. Creating a recursive, referential narrative form, Lost Children Archive highlights the absences of refugee voices, attends to the histories of violence that have led to their disappearance, and refuses to posit an answer to how the story of the crisis ends. This analysis reroutes theories of the big, ambitious novel through discussions of archival recovery, immigrant maximalism, and historical revision developed in feminist and critical race theory, and suggests that big, ambitious novel strategies like polyphony, fragmentation, and centripetal connectivity are the provenance of women and people of color at least as much as they are the domain of the white men often associated with the form.

Using QuantCrit to Advance an Anti-Racist Developmental Science: Applications to Mixture Modeling

2021 ◽  
pp. 074355842110282
Author(s):  
Sara Suzuki ◽  
Stacy L. Morris ◽  
Sara K. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Statistical Technique ◽  
Mixture Modeling ◽  
Quantitative Methodology ◽  
Main Section ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Quantitative Analyses

How researchers use statistical analyses shapes their research toward or away from an anti-racist agenda. In this article, we demonstrate how developmental scientists can use the QuantCrit framework to critically examine the process of conducting quantitative analyses. In particular, we focus on mixture modeling to clearly demonstrate how the integration of QuantCrit can be achieved within a statistical technique. We first summarize the tenets of QuantCrit and how it has turned the lens of critical race theory onto quantitative methodology. Second, we provide a summary of the key concepts of mixture modeling. The main section of the article is organized according to three “moments” that occur in quantitative research: (1) development of the research question(s) and identification of analysis variables; (2) decision-making about the role of race in planned analyses; and (3) interpretation of the results through a theoretical framework. We describe each moment, illustrate how researchers can use QuantCrit principles within it, and offer as examples empirical articles from adolescent research where these strategies have been implemented during mixture modeling. It is our hope that readers will identify moments in their own analyses in which these (and other) principles could be applied.

The Black Travel Movement: A Catalyst for Social Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 004728752199354
Author(s):  
Alana Dillette ◽  
Stefanie Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Black People ◽  
Community Mobilization ◽  
Resource Mobilization ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Consciousness Raising

In response to the underrepresentation of Black people in the travel sphere, Black travelers have created their presence in the market – authentically representing and providing opportunities for Black travelers. This group of Black travelers has taken on the collective name of the Black Travel Movement (BTM). Informed by social movement and critical race theory, nine interviews were conducted to better understand what influences BTM leaders in their quest for social change. Three emergent themes resulted: Catalysts Lead to Self-Efficacy, Awareness Leads to Consciousness Raising, and Community Activation Leads to Resource Mobilization. As evident from our interviews with BTM leaders, discrimination, bias, racism, and inequities are ubiquitous and continue to create inhospitable and toxic touristic experiences and landscapes for Black and people of color. However, results reveal a cyclical model that highlights hope through activism and community mobilization.

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