The American Renaissance in the West: Capital, Class and Culture Along the Northern Pacific Railroad

ABSTRACT Wealth from western investments lit up the Gilded Age. East and West, it financed the mansions, balls and philanthropy that were integral to upper-class culture. Historians of capitalism have argued that a national upper class coalesced during the late nineteenth century and that the development of a common culture was essential to its formation. Much of this work has focused on the Northeast. How did this play out in the Trans-Mississippi West? This article explores the roles that architects and the buildings they designed played in the intertwined processes of class formation, capitalist expansion and the advancement of white settler colonialism in the American West. It begins in the early 1880s, when Henry Villard (1835–1900), president of the Northern Pacific Railway, launched an ambitious plan to complete the transcontinental railroad and enlisted the architects McKim, Mead & White and their assistant, Cass Gilbert (1859–1934), to design buildings of all kinds along the line — an unprecedented move for a new western railroad. It then follows Gilbert back to St Paul to examine two major projects, one for local clients and one for Villard’s colleague, the eastern capitalist William Endicott, Jr (1826–1914). As agents for eastern capitalists and their counterparts in the West, the architects and the buildings they designed activated in the West an elite aesthetic and professional culture initially generated in the Northeast. Operating across local, regional and national scales, they contributed to the expansion of capitalist markets, the formation of a national upper class and, more broadly, the processes of settler colonialism in a rapidly changing region.

Racial and ethnic diversity in higher education: White privileged resistance and implications for leadership

Extrapolating history is crucial to mitigating the current underpinnings of racial and ethnic inequities in higher education; however, to establish sustainable change, one must consider its fundamental origin. The inception of 15th-century white settler colonialism is at the epicenter of modern-day racial discrimination and the normalcy of oppressive practices in the United States' education system (US) of America. To understand white settler colonialism and its denigrating manifestations is to understand the dynamics between those in power and those who are subjugated. America's white settler colonialism's horrific ideology is insidiously depicted through torture, persecution, brutality, plunder, and pillage (Traore, 2004). This ideology is the foundation that breeds our society's racial and ethnic hierarchy, including in higher education. Racial discrimination in higher education creates a partisan, culturally divided learning environment, frequently normalized in academic leadership. The purpose of this paper is three-fold: (a) to examine normalized whiteness in higher education, (b) to examine how mere talk about diversity and inclusion inhibits disruption in power to transforming modern-day consciousness of inequities, discrimination, and racism, and (c) discuss action steps to promote leadership among black and brown raced individuals in higher education.

Black Skin, White Cameras

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.

Protecting Foreigners: The Refugee Crisis on the Belize–Yucatán Border, 1847–71

Taking mid-nineteenth century Belize as a case study, this article considers the role of migration in forming political, legal, and spatial geographies in a region with weak state institutions and disputed borders. The Caste War—a series of conflicts starting in 1847 in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán— resulted in the movement of thousands of people into the neighboring British settlement of Belize. This population movement reshaped the interface between the metropole and the settlement. This was a colony-defining moment in the development of Belize, leading to an extension of imperial control that eventually culminated in the transition to Crown colony in 1871. The refugee crisis was tied to broader Atlantic questions around asylum, law and empire. The benevolent treatment of refugees became the gauge of a “civilized” colony until the refugee crisis turned into a race crisis. This article examines how local administrators used a humanitarian discourse to enshrine white settler colonialism in a territory suddenly inhabited by a foreign-born multi-ethnic majority. The refugee label became a way to secure British sovereignty over the territory and its inhabitants, including non-British subjects, while extracting resources from the newcomers.

“Let’s help our own”: Humanitarian compassion as racial governance in settler colonialism

This article explores narratives of humanitarian compassion as rendered intelligible through the relational intersecting concerns about Syrian refugees and the suicide crisis in the Indigenous community of Attawapiskat, Ontario. Fuelled by a combination of anti-refugee rhetoric, racism and ongoing colonialism experienced by Indigenous people and communities, public and media discourse reveals how humanitarian governance is constitutive of the genealogy of settler colonialism. I suggest that examining the political genealogy of humanitarian governance in white settler colonialism assists in revealing the centrality of racial colonial violence in producing public and media discourse that is contingent upon the relational currencies of anti-refugee rhetoric, racism and humanitarian compassion. As expressions of a grammar of racial difference in liberal settler colonialism, these discourses ultimately reveal how racial colonial violence is constituted through the genealogy of humanitarianism. Este artículo examina las narrativas de compasión humanitaria entendidas a través de las preocupaciones interseccionales de relación sobre los refugiados sirios y la crisis de suicidios en la comunidad indígena de Attawapiskat, Ontario. Alimentado por una combinación de retórica antirrefugiados, racismo y colonialismo persistente experimentado por los pueblos indígenas, el discurso público y mediático revela que la gobernanza humanitaria es constitutiva de la genealogía del colonialismo de asentamiento. Propongo que un examen de la genealogía política de la gobernanza humanitaria en el colonialismo de asentamiento blanco ayuda a revelar la centralidad de la violencia colonial racial en la producción de un discurso público y mediático que es contingente a la moneda de cambio relacional de la retórica racista y antirrefugiados y de la compasión humanitaria. Como expresiones de la gramática de la diferencia racial en el colonialismo liberal del asentamiento, estos discursos finalmente revelan cómo la violencia colonial racial se constituye a través de la genealogía del humanitarismo.

Marx and the Indigenous

The "turn toward the indigenous" in social theory in the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx's critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Reimagining Girlhood in White Settler-Carceral States

We are deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to edit this special issue of Girlhood Studies, given that it is dedicated to rethinking girlhood in the context of the adaptive, always-evolving conditions of white settler regimes. The contributions to this issue address the need to theorize girlhood—and critiques of girlhood—across the shifting forces of subjecthood, community, land, nation, and borders in the Western settler states of North America. As white settler states, Canada and the United States are predicated on the ongoing spatial colonial occupation of Indigenous homelands. In settler states, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “the settler never left” (2012: 20) and colonial domination is reasserted every day of active occupation. White settler colonialism functions through the continued control of land, resources, and racialized bodies, and is amalgamated through a historical commitment to slavery, genocide, and the extermination of Indigenous nationhood and worldviews. Under settler colonial regimes, criminal justice, education, immigration, and child welfare systems represent overlapping sites of transcarceral power that amplify intersecting racialized, gendered, sexualized, and what Tanja Aho and colleagues call “carceral ableist” violence (2017: 291). This transcarceral power is enacted through institutional and bureaucratic warfare such as, for example, the Indian Act, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the child welfare system to deny, strategically, Indigenous claims to land and the citizenship of racial others.