Military Service and Racial Subjectivity in the War Narratives of James Roberts and Isaac Hubbell

Author(s):  
James M. Greene

This essay explores how racist thought became tied to the history of early US political violence through the analysis of two narratives of the War of 1812, one written by a supporter of slavery and the other by an advocate of African American equality. It argues that divisions among the soldiers in the War of 1812 provided a symbol of the perpetual instability faced by a nation founded in revolutionary violence. In response, a discourse of white supremacy and racial purity would be remembered in the antebellum era as the source of affiliation between men that could balance this volatility. As they illustrate a cultural effort to define legitimate expressions of political violence as the exclusive right of a sovereign community of white men, these narratives reveal how racial divisions obscured the similar forms of exploitation experienced by both white soldiers and enslaved blacks in the service of an expanding nation state.

Author(s):  
Whitney Hua ◽  
Jane Junn

Abstract As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an overview of the unique racial history of Asians in the United States and analyzes the implications of dynamic racialization and status for Asian Americans. In particular, we examine the dynamism of Asian Americans' racial positionality relative to historical shifts in economic-based conceptions of their desirability as workers in American capitalism. Taking history, power, and institutions of white supremacy into account, we analyze where Asian Americans fit in contemporary U.S. politics, presenting a better understanding of the persistent structures underlying racial inequality and developing a foundation from which Asian Americans can work to enhance equality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Christian

Twenty years after Bonilla-Silva developed the analytic components of a structural race perspective and called for “comparative work on racialization in various societies,” U.S.-centric race theory continues to be mostly rooted in a U.S. focus. What is missing is a framework that explores race and racism as a modern global project that takes shape differently in diverse structural and ideological forms across all geographies but is based in global white supremacy. Drawing from Bonilla-Silva’s national racialized social systems approach, global South scholars, and critical race scholars in the world-systems tradition, the author advances a global critical race and racism framework that highlights two main areas: (1) core components that include the “state,” “economy,” “institutions,” and “discourses” and “representations,” as divided by “racist structure” and “racist ideology” and shaped by the “history” of and current forms of transnational racialization and contemporary “global” linkages, and (2) the production of deep and malleable global whiteness. With this framework, both the permanence and flexibility of racism across the globe can be seen, in all its overt, invisible, and insidious forms, that ultimately sustains global white supremacy in the twenty-first century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 539-545
Author(s):  
Jennifer E. McCabe ◽  
Jodie G. Katon ◽  
Erica Ma ◽  
John C. Fortney ◽  
Nancy K. Grote ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
Laura Lisabeth

Dreyer's English, by Benjamin Dreyer, the Senior Copy Editor for Random House, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style are two extraordinarily popular and commercially successful guides to English language usage that belong to a genre best described as discursive maps for language as racialized, classed and gendered territory. This review traces the history of these books to the nineteenth century "conversation handbooks" and etiquette guides that became popular in a time of shifting class boundaries Precise prescriptives for behavior and for polite conversation helped the aspirational middle-class groom themselves for genteel company. Many of these guides were published during the Reconstruction Era, and were filled with dispositions toward correct language that communicate a kind of outrage from fear of social, cultural and economic dispossession, a telltale mark of White Supremacy. These dispositions still exist in the rhetoric of both Dreyer and E.B. White and are carried through the structural racism of standardized English into educational spaces. Discourses of meritocracy are found in both the classroom and the global neoliberal workplace where "English has been turned into a product (in all senses of the word)..."Though the promotion of English is presented as a way of expanding one’s multilingual resources, it reduces one’s repertoire, as it is often learned/taught at the cost of local languages” (Canagarajah 13). As Canagarajah sees "multilingual communities [finding] spaces for voice, renegotiation, and resistance” (Translingual Practices 56), so can we make students aware of the gatekeeping and power of English by sharing its historical context.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Tasha Solomon

Scholars have argued that the early theoretical and historical discourses concerning concepts of rebellion and political violence within Islam, specifically Sunni Islam, developed during a time of conflict within the early Islamic Community.  In their quest for stability and desire for the preservation of order, early Muslim jurists used key moments in the history of the early Community, as well as doctrinal sources, in order to construct a theoretical discourse addressing rebellion and obedience to authority.  Similar to the methods of the early jurists, the construction of contemporary discourses concerning obedience and rebellion have been used by modern Islamic scholars in order to confront issues involving protesting and political violence, especially as they relate to contemporary events such as socio-political movements, dissent, and notably, the Arab Uprisings. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of these pre-modern and contemporary discourses and how their contexts influence Islamic legal approaches.


Religions ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abou El Zalaf

Existing scholarship has largely focused on the role of Sayyid Qutb’s ideas when analyzing the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent history. Perceiving Qutb’s ideas as paving the way for radical interpretations of jihad, many studies linked the Brotherhood’s violent history with this key ideologue. Yet, in so doing, many studies overlooked the importance of the Special Apparatus in shaping this violent history of the Brotherhood, long before Qutb joined the organization. Through an in-depth study of memoires and accounts penned by Brotherhood members and leaders, and a systematic study of British and American intelligence sources, I attempt to shed light on this understudied formation of the Brotherhood, the Special Apparatus. This paper looks at the development of anti-colonial militancy in Egypt, particularly the part played by the Brotherhood until 1954. It contends that political violence, in the context of British colonization, antedated the Brotherhood’s foundation, and was in some instances considered as a legitimate and even distinguished duty among anti-colonial factions. The application of violence was on no account a part of the Brotherhood’s core strategy, but the organization, nevertheless, established an armed and secret wing tasked with the fulfillment of what a segment of its members perceived as the duty of anti-colonial jihad.


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