Racial formations as data formations

This commentary uses Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that new technoscientific processes are instituting an ‘end to race’ as a provocation to discuss the epistemological transformation of race in algorithmic culture. We situate Gilroy’s provocation within the context of an abolitionist agenda against racial-thinking, underscoring the relationship between his post-race polemic and a post-visual discourse. We then discuss the challenges of studying race within regimes of computation, which rely on structures that are, for the most part, opaque; in particular, modes of classification that operate through proxies and abstractions and that figure racialized bodies not as single, coherent subjects, but as shifting clusters of data. We argue that in this new regime, race emerges as an epiphenomenon of processes of classifying and sorting – what we call ‘racial formations as data formations’. This discussion is significant because it raises new theoretical, methodological and political questions for scholars of media and critical algorithmic studies. It asks: how are we supposed to think, to identify and to confront race and racialisation when they vanish into algorithmic systems that are beyond our perception? What becomes of racial formations in post-visual regimes?

Americans performing Afro-Brazilian maracatu and afoxé : Navigating Race, Religion, Appropriation, and the Potential of Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Austin, Texas is home to one of the largest Brazilian music scenes in North America. Significantly, the vast majority of participants are white Americans and the genres performed are almost entirely Afro-Brazilian. This setting presents a unique opportunity for Performance-as-Research into the embodied performance of transnational racial formations. This article examines teaching, learning, and performing maracatu-nação and afoxé, musics explicitly linked to Afro-matrix religions. I ask what Austinites typically learn about Brazilian society and the religious significance of the music they perform, highlighting the disjuncture that exists between the commonly held view of Brazilian genres as fun and sexy dance music, and the social justice concerns—racism, cultural appropriation, and religious intolerance to name a few—at the core of maracatu and afoxé. I trace how performers navigate their own concerns about religious expression and respectful engagement, including debates around the cultural appropriation of maracatu-nação in Brazil. I argue that experiences gained in performance are essential components in implementing anti-racist pedagogies that advance efforts to optimize cross-cultural understanding and sustain engagement with communities by facilitating collaborations between culture-bearers, academics, and artists.

A Moment of Reckoning: Transcending Bias, Engaging Race and Racial Formations in Slavic and East European Studies

Race and racial formations and categories define global systems of power and are not bound by history or culture. Nevertheless, with few noted exceptions, race as a category of analysis has largely been rejected and rendered inapplicable within Slavic, east European, and Eurasian Studies. This unwillingness to expand categories of critical analysis has created a void in our area and field of study, shaping a false sense of racelessness. Without the inclusion of race critical theories into our classrooms and scholarship, our students are left with minimal tools to address difference and social exclusion. In this article, we turn to critical perspectives to highlight some ways that race is being meaningfully incorporated into scholarship about the region. We illustrate why engagement with race and racialization is helpful for analysis, urgent, and necessary. Finally, we also address how our field can better prepare students as they engage these subjects.

In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of racial slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability.

Sexual Harassment or Volunteer Work?

This article applies the notion of affordance to analyse affective, intersectional emergence of differentiated whiteness in the context of East to West migration after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. I draw on autoethnography and memory work, juxtaposing encounters with two elderly, white, single and physically impaired Danish men in their homes in 2004 and 2014. Cleaning Ole’s apartment in 2004, I was invited to provide sexual services, passing as a sexualized, too young, unemployable female Eastern European love migrant of limited social value. In contrast, interviewing Carsten for my PhD in 2014, I came across as able-bodied, middle-class researcher, progressively feminine and fluent in, perhaps even, Danish. I heard no sexual undertones in Carsten’s invitation to ‘visit again’, instead perceiving it as a suggestion to become a voluntary visitor. Analyzing the affective flows in these encounters, I trace how markers of difference intersect to afford different whitenesses. I discuss how whiteness functions as an affordance, accumulated over time, emerging in situated, affective encounters and constraining bodies’ possibilities for interactions, movement and becoming. The article contributes to research on whiteness and intersectionality and to scholarship that explores emergence of ‘Europe’ by examining relations between centre/periphery and racial formations.

Racism in multicultural neighbourhoods in Chile: Housing precarity and coexistence in a migratory context

Chile is one of the countries with major destination flows from Latin America. In such a context, new distinctions and racial formations have emerged, establishing different forms of social exclusion and racism that are performed in the everyday interaction and socio-cultural practices that take place in residential neighbourhoods. This research is based on one of the most multicultural boroughs in Santiago, Recoleta, historically located in a territory called ‘La Chimba.’ The aim is to examine the intercultural coexistence in increasingly multicultural neighbourhoods in the context of South-South migration, in order to discuss the emerging social conflict, understanding how housing policies and limited access to decent housing by migrants reproduce everyday racism. Drawing on a larger research project that consisted in a 17-month ethnography, 70 in-depth interviews and two focus groups with migrants and Chileans between 2015 and 2018, this article shows and discusses how public spaces are racialised through social practices and interactions, and how the making of ‘race’ in urban spaces have an impact on the way in which migrants inhabit and navigate urban spaces and negotiate their ‘right to the city’ in the everyday.

Multiracial Categorization, Identity, and Policy in (Mixed) Racial Formations

This article examines recent developments in the literature on multiracial categorization, policy, and identity—one that has grown as data on multiracial populations have become widely available, particularly in the United States since the enumeration of multiple race responses was instituted in Census 2000. Significant new research takes advantage of the data generated by the Census providing new insights to questions and claims about the meanings of mixedness and racial boundaries in the United States that were largely speculative even a decade ago. Though this review focuses primarily on issues related to how state enumeration of mixed race populations reflects and engenders particular identity and group configurations, I also discuss emerging research on interracial intimacy—intermarriage and interracial births—the phenomena from which contemporary attention to multiracial categorization and identity arise. An increasingly internationalist discussion is challenging long-held interpretations of the meaning of intermarriage and multiracial identification for understanding emergent racial formations.