Black Skin, White Tourists

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Valecce

Sand Dollars (Dólares de Arena) is a 2014 coproduction by Dominican film director Laura Amelia Guzmán and her husband, Mexican film director Israel Cárdenas. This film portrays two main characters: an older French woman, Anne, who is visiting the island as a tourist, and a young black Dominican woman, Noeli. The plot centers on the sexual and emotional relationship that arises between the two women. In this article, I explore the race and class relationship between the black bodies and the white bodies—taking as a point of departure the lesbian relationship—and the ways in which they are represented on screen. To do so, I enter into dialogue with Franz Fanon’s text, Black Skin, White Masks, offering a queer interpretation of this work, in which female bodies are a largely ancillary focus, and female homosexuality is ignored entirely. As such, this article will use Fanonian theory in order to highlight the intersectional nature of cultural taboos in contemporary Dominican Republic, such as sex tourism, blackness, lesbianism (and queernessin general), and to explore the way in which the film navigates these topics. 

Image & Text ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kudzaiishe Peter Vanyoro

ABSTRACT This article seeks to critically analyse how intersections of race and class shape representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife, a South African online magazine. It focuses on QueerLife's '4men' section and how its content represents classed and raced gay identities. My argument is that QueerLife forwards racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle, which reinforce homonormalisation within what is known as the "Pink Economy". Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to read the underlying meanings in texts and images, the article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to urban, white, middle-class gay-identifying communities in South Africa. The article also demonstrates how, when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife, exceptionalism mediates their visibility in this online magazine. Overall, the findings demonstrate how Black and white gay bodies are mediated online and how their different racial visibilities are negotiated within the system of structural racism. Keywords: Class, gayness, Pink Economy, QueerLife, representation, racism.


Author(s):  
Janine Jones

One way of understanding the white man’s burden is as a waste management problem. The White West abjected Africans and people of African descent, thereby enacting and enabling their perception and treatment as a form of waste. The value of black waste to white Western economies is discernable in the metaphysics of a white imaginary of black abjection. It is necessary to elucidate that metaphysics, which reveals the structure of a humanist discourse that imagines black bodies as alienated from language, and the degradation entailed by such alienation. For example, when Africana people today chant “Black lives matter,” they do so against the historical perception and treatment of black people as waste.


Author(s):  
James L. Newell

The chapter takes its point of departure from the fact that scandals of the kind considered in the previous chapter are important in driving efforts to tackle problems like corruption because they create the public pressure needed to ensure they are taken seriously. Against this background the chapter considers, first, the conditions under which measures to tackle corruption are likely to be more or less successful, bearing in mind that any given measure may work well in some contexts, less so in others. Then it asks about the conditions under which the authorities’ efforts to tackle corruption will be greater or lesser – bearing in mind that in order for the authorities to make any attempt to combat corruption, they have to be aware of it; they have to want to combat it, and they have to have adequate means to do so. Finally, in light of the factors influencing the efforts the authorities are likely to make in tackling corruption, the chapter considers what they are actually doing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 874-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seema Arora-Jonsson ◽  
Mia Ågren

Environmental organizations play an important role in mainstream debates on nature and in shaping our environments. At a time when environmental NGOs are turning to questions of gender-equality and ethnic diversity, we analyze their possibilities to do so. We argue that attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity in environmental organizations cannot be understood without insight into the conceptualizations of nature and the environment that underpin thinking within the organization. Serious attempts at diversity entail confronting some of the core values on nature-cultures driving the organization as well as understanding the dimensions of power such as class, gender, and race that structure its practices. We study what nature means for one such organization, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, and the ways in which thinking about nature dictates organizational practice and sets the boundaries of their work with diversity in their projects on outdoor recreation. We base our analysis on official documents and interviews, analyze how “diversity” and “gender-equality” are represented in the material and reflect on the interconnections as well as the different trajectories taken by the two issues. Our study shows that the organization’s understanding of nature is a central and yet undiscussed determinant of their work with diversity that closes down as much as it opens up the space for greater inclusion of minorities. We argue that for environmental organizations wanting to diversity membership, a discussion of what nature means for people and their relationships to each other and nature is vital to any such efforts.


2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-108
Author(s):  
Ze'ev Levy

AbstractThe story of the Aquedah represents one of the most moving stories of the Bible. Most modern discussions on it take their point of departure from Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. I shall do so too in this essay, which focuses on the relations between ethics and religious belief and tries to show that Kierkegaard misinterpreted the story. The inquiry analyzes philosophical responses to the Aquedah from Philo and Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers until the present. It underscores its paradoxical implications, including a structuralist analysis and comparison of the Aquedah with the biblical story of Yephta's daughter. The final conclusion asserts that what Kierkegaard extolled, Judaism condemns as sacrilege.


2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACK RUSSELL WEINSTEIN

In this article, I examine Adam Smith's theory of the ways individuals in society bridge social and biological difference. In doing so, I emphasize the divisive effects of gender, race, and class to see if Smith's account of social unity can overcome such fractious forces. My discussion uses the metaphor of “proximity” to mean both physical and psychological distance between moral actors and spectators. I suggest that education – both formal and informal in means – can assist moral judgment by helping agents minimize the effects of proximity, and, ultimately, learn commonality where difference may otherwise seem overwhelming. This article uses the methods of the history of philosophy in order to examine an issue within contemporary discourse. While I seek to offer an authentic reading of Smith representative of his eighteenth-century perspective, I do so with an eye towards determining the extent to which Smith anticipated central issues in modern multiculturalism.


Early Theatre ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morwenna Carr

Examining William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, William Heminge's The Fatal Contract, and Elkanah Settle's Love and Revenge, this article argues that the seventeenth-century English stage imagines blackness as fluid and transferable because of the materials used in its production. These cosmetics are imagined as being potentially moveable from one surface to another. The article considers the intersection between the materials used to recreate blackness and its semiotic values, focusing on the relationship between black bodies and female bodies. It argues that the materials used in the recreation of these bodies inform and are informed by the panoply of discourses surrounding them. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 359-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Thorpe ◽  
Kim Toffoletti ◽  
Toni Bruce

In this article, we take seriously the challenges of making sense of a sporting (and media) context that increasingly engages female athletes as active, visible, and autonomous, while inequalities pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, and class remain stubbornly persistent across sport institutions and practices. We do so by engaging with three recent feminist critiques that have sought to respond to the changing operations of gender relations and the articulation of gendered subjectivities, namely, third-wave feminism, postfeminism, and neoliberal feminism, and applying each to the same concrete setting—the social media self-representation of Hawaiian professional surfer Alana Blanchard. In aiming to conceptually illustrate the utility of these three feminist critiques, we are not advocating for any single approach. Rather, we critically demonstrate what each offers for explaining how current discourses are being internalized, embodied, and practiced by young (sports)women, as they make meaning of, and respond to, the conditions of their lives.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002193472098184
Author(s):  
Hugo Canham

Black bodies have been the site of devastation for centuries. We who inhabit and love these bodies live in a state of perpetual mourning. We mourn the disproportionate dying in our families, communities and the dying in the black diaspora. We are yet to come to terms with the death that accompanied the AIDS pandemic. Tuberculosis breeds in the conditions within which most of us live. We die from hours spent in the belly of the earth where we dig for minerals to feed the unquenchable thirst of capital. Malaria targets our neighbors with deathly accuracy. Ebola stalks west Africa where it has established itself as a rapacious black disease. It kills us. In the black diaspora, African Americans are walking targets for American police who kill and imprison them at rates that have created a prison industrial complex. Africans die in the Mediterranean ocean and join the spirits of ancestors drowned centuries ago. With South Africa as the point of departure, this paper stages a transcontinental examination of black death. It is animated by the following questions. What are the dimensions of black death, what is its scale and how is it mourned? What does the COVID-19 pandemic mean for we who are so intimately familiar with death?


Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Burris

The recent arrival in Israel of thousands of refugees from countries like Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan has triggered a spate of hate crimes and mob violence. Asked about these asylum seekers in 2012, Likud-party member Miri Regev called them a “cancer.” For this comment, she later apologized—not to the African asylum-seekers but to Israeli cancer survivors, and she expressed regret for comparing them to Africans. Around that same time, Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas Party told a reporter that “this country belongs to us, to the white man.” Continuing on, he stated that he would use “all the tools [necessary] to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains.” While the racial dynamics of Israel have been thoroughly examined with respect to both intra-Jewish tensions (Ashkenazi supremacy) and the Palestinian issue (white settler-colonialism), in this essay, I want to theorize Israeli whiteness with respect to the African refugees. Specifically, I will examine two recent Israeli documentaries dealing with African refugees—Hotline (dir. Silvina Landsmann, 2015) and Between Fences (dir. Avi Mograbi, 2016). Both openly demonstrate solidarity with the African asylum-seekers, but they do so in different ways, and if the former film leaves the racial hierarchies of Zionism intact, the latter works to shatter them.


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