3. Racial Boundaries

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-65
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Hilde Roos

Opera, race, and politics during apartheid South Africa form the foundation of this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a so-called colored cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Time of Apartheid charts Eoan’s opera activities from its inception in 1933 until the cessation of its work by 1980. By accepting funding from the apartheid government and adhering to apartheid conditions, the group, in time, became politically compromised, resulting in the rejection of the group by their own community and the cessation of opera production. However, their unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera lead to the most extraordinary of performance trajectories. During apartheid, the Eoan Group provided a space for colored people to perform Western classical art forms in an environment that potentially transgressed racial boundaries and challenged perceptions of racial exclusivity in the genre of opera. This highly significant endeavor and the way it was thwarted at the hands of the apartheid regime is the story that unfolds in this book.


Author(s):  
Hannah L. Walker

Springing from decades of abuse by law enforcement and an excessive criminal justice system, members of over-policed communities lead the current movement for civil rights in the United States. Activated by injustice, individuals protested police brutality in Ferguson, campaigned to end stop-and-frisk in New York City, and advocated for restorative justice in Washington, D.C. Yet, scholars focused on the negative impact of punitive policy on material resources, and trust in government did not predict these pockets of resistance, arguing instead that marginalizing and demeaning policy teaches individuals to acquiesce and withdraw. Mobilized by Injustice excavates conditions under which, despite otherwise negative outcomes, negative criminal justice experiences catalyze political action. This book argues that when understood as resulting from a system that targets people based on race, class, or other group identifiers, contact can politically mobilize. Negative experiences with democratic institutions predicated on equality under the law, when connected to a larger, group-based struggle, can provoke action from anger. Evidence from several surveys and in-depth interviews reveals that mobilization as result of negative criminal justice experiences is broad, crosses racial boundaries, and extends to the loved ones of custodial citizens. When over half of Blacks and Latinos and a plurality of Whites know someone with personal contact, the mobilizing effect of a sense of injustice promises to have important consequences for American politics.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

As measured by mass evacuation of cities, yellow fever provoked more fear and panic than any other epidemic disease in US history. This chapter concentrates on two of the most devastating epidemics in US history, yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 and in Memphis in 1878. Despite different times, medical ideas, and cultural horizons, their socio-psychological effects were similar: they began in chaos and with acrimony, but quickly sentiments turned, sparking abnegation and compassion that united these cities across ethnic, class, and racial boundaries. In both cities, the protagonists of the new waves of compassion were young men, and in Memphis yellow fever relief centred on established men’s social clubs as well as creating new ones.


2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Feliciano ◽  
Rennie Lee ◽  
Belinda Robnett
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 718-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Vargas ◽  
Jared Kingsbury

Author(s):  
Paul Allatson

This issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies comprises five articles in its general essays section, and two works in its creative works section. We are delighted with the inclusion of the first three essays: “‘A Bit of a Grope’: Gender, Sex and Racial Boundaries in Transitional East Timor,” by Roslyn Appleby; “Undermining the Occupation: Women Coalminers in 1940s Japan,” by Matthew Allen; and “Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature,” by Rumi Sakamoto. These essays were presented in earlier formats at the two-day workshop, “Gender and occupations and interventions in the Asia Pacific, 1945-2009,” held in December 2009 at the
Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS), University of Wollongong. The workshop was convened by Christine de Matos, a research fellow at CAPSTRANS, and Rowena Ward, a Lecturer in Japanese at the Language Centre, in the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong. The editorial committee at Portal is particularly grateful to Christine and Rowena for facilitating the inclusion of these essays in this issue of the journal. Augmenting those studies is “Outcaste by Choice: Re-Genderings in a Short Story by Oka Rusmini,” an essay by Harry Aveling, the renowned Australian translator and scholar of Indonesian literature, which provides fascinating insights into the intertextual references, historical contexts and caste-conflicts explored by one of Indonesia’s most important Balinese authors. Liliana Edith Correa’s “El lugar de la memoria: Where Memory Lies,” is an evocative exploration of the newly emergent Latin(o) American identifications in Australia as constructed through self-conscious memory work among, and by, a range of Latin American immigrant artists and writers. We are equally pleased to conclude the issue with two text/image works by the Vancouver-based Canadian poet Derek Symons. Paul Allatson, Editor, PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 296-325
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen

This article explores how, and why, the capacity for civic responsibility and civility of conduct became a central discursive and practical battleground in the colonial world. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in colonial and apartheid South Africa, where the putative benefits of self-government along separate racial lines became a crucial component of apartheid. Starting from a brief conceptual history of civility and colonialism, I argue that the principle of self-government was a central pivot of apartheid. I explore how the celebrated Civics movement that eventually brought apartheid down fostered civic ties and “ethno-civility” in a formerly Indian township in Durban from the 1970s to the 1990s. This legacy of ethno-civility has, however, turned out to be a major obstacle to the forging of relationships across racial boundaries in post-apartheid society. Deploying two ethnographic vignettes from this township, I argue that the ideals of global religious community today have taken the place as a promise of universality of mediation between groups and racial communities that the Civics movement used to occupy during the apartheid era. Yet, religious identities are unable to overcome deeper formations of racial and social difference.


2019 ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji

This chapter compares the discursive strategies that black-white couples and their families drew on to navigate the integration of black spouses into white extended families. White Carioca families engaged in more openly racist opposition, racist humor, and/or indirect insults to express discomfort with blacks marrying into the family. In an “irony of opposition,” past race-mixing in Carioca white families did not shield black spouses from these sentiments. This countered the myth of racial democracy in which color is not an impediment to interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, Carioca respondents were less likely to report resistance in white families than Angelino couples. U.S. couples' higher rates of domestic migration resulted in less integration of black spouses into white family life than among Brazilian couples, whose tight-knit family relationships led to black spouses' greater incorporation. Los Angeles couples understood white family members as using the discourse of “expressing concerns” about the relationship, then moving to more overt discouragement of marrying black partners. Couples understood this “expressing concern” discourse as an attempt at social desirability on the part of white family members, emblematic of U.S. “color-blind” racism.This chapter shows how intermarriage can leave white supremacy, anti-blackness, and racial boundaries intact within the family.


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