Chapter 9. The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line

2013 ◽  
pp. 151-168
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Twenty First Century

“A Syrup of Passion and Desire”

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Tuszynska
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This article examines the politics of transgressive pleasure and desire in Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseille, as a response to what Achille Mbembe, departing from Foucault’s notion of biopower, has termed necropolitics. In the novel, the interlocking hegemonic systems of racism and capitalism function as mechanisms of necropower—the power of determining whose lives are deemed worthy and whose bodies are deemed disposable—which is executed through the procedures of mutilation, surveillance, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Foregrounding the titular “romance,” McKay’s novel features characters who engage in romantic and sexual relationships that subvert the expectations of heteronormativity, sexual economy, and the color line. Anticipating the twenty-first-century theories that locate sovereign power in the body, McKay politicizes and radicalizes desire as a response to the racialization, criminalization, and dehumanization of his novel’s lumpen characters.

scholarly journals Race, Nation, and the Color-Line in the Twenty-First Century: A Du Boisian Analysis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Nationalist Movements ◽  
American Nationalism ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Veil

Abstract This article argues that Du Bois’s tripartite framework consisting of the Veil, souls, and double-consciousness helps us analyze and understand the resurgence of racialized nationalism today. I juxtapose Du Bois’s early writings on German nationalism and antisemitism with his later writings on American nationalism and anti-black racism to demonstrate how antisemitism in Germany and anti-black racism in America function as constitutive elements for their respective nationalist discourses at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that Du Bois’s analysis of the “double problem” of German nationalism served as an important precursor of his theory of the “double problem” of American nationalism. Du Bois’s concepts, when taken together, provide a still-relevant framework through which to understand contemporary expressions of racism and xenophobia that typify emergent nationalist movements in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Review Article: The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (2018) by Dipesh Chakrabarty

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shikha Vats ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Review Article ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Line P ◽  
Entire Planet

W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) had famously said that the problem of the twentieth century “is the problem of the color-line” (p. 13). Dipesh Chakrabarty declares, in this new volume, that the question of the twenty-first century will be that of climate crisis. The major events of the twentieth century, including the processes of imperialism, colonization, and globalization led to widespread migration of people all across the globe framing new intersubjective equations such as oppressor-oppressed, privileged-marginalized, mostly along what Du Bois called ‘the color-line’. The major fallout of this colonial and capitalist project in the last century has been global warming which is set to affect the entire planet and hence needs to be at the forefront of all policy decisions in the twenty-first century. In order to grapple with this new age of the Anthropocene, whereby human beings have become a geophysical force capable of altering the course of the planet, Chakrabarty urges a rethinking and reformulation of the discipline of history

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