Who Remembers those “Undocumented Minors”? Locating the Genealogy of the Oppressed in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends

We can always look upon the intersection of history and events as an exciting façade, full of deceptions, half-baked truths, and awkward reconciliations in the framework of cultural studies. The Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017) attempts to trace the evolution of a set of social, political, and cultural circumstances that are pregnant with significance in the traumatic past of millions of Latin-American children refugees in the United States. First, the article will unpack how Luiselli’s impalpable domain tries to connect the unresolved experiences of the violent wounds of those children’s deportation and dislocation from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico with their unfortunate encounters in the foreign land. Second, it will attempt to dismantle, disrupt, and deconstruct the construction of America as a heteroglossic space around the challenges of those displaced children by displaying some questions addressed to them at the immigrant court. Finally, the proposed paper will critically scrutinise how this non-fictional work follows the creeping imperialist approaches of the United States through the hazes of childhood recollections, making a heartfelt appeal to everyone to halt discrimination, racial hatred, and poisonous ignorance. Applying Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer, such a study will bring to the fore the dialectics of postcoloniality in the United States, where undocumented children’s claims to identity formation and self-determination processes would be at odds with the more comprehensive national identity in contemporary times.

Racist Victimization, Legal Estrangement and Resentful Reliance on the Police in Sweden

Scholarly literature offers much insight into aggressive policing of racial minorities. However, research is not equally extensive regarding the experiences of racial minorities with law enforcement when police response might be decisive for their sense of recognition and protection as a community. Bridging debates from critical race studies, hate crimes and legal cynicism, this paper addresses how policing of racist victimization is experienced by members of racially targeted communities in Sweden. Drawing on interviews with people having personal and/or vicarious experiences with racist victimization, I analyze resentful reliance on the police through the concept of legal estrangement. While most respondents describe police treatment in somewhat positive terms, there is a shared resentment at the police due to the lived experience that racism often remains undetected. Previous interactions with law enforcement also pave the way for accumulated skepticism toward the utility of the policing of racial hatred. Disenchantment with law enforcement notwithstanding, reliance on the police manifests a will not just to be recognized as a victim, but also to make the pervasiveness of racism more visible.

Hate crimes and the law: Introducing caste hatred as a public order offence

The UK government has been provided with evidence that minorities who are of South Asian origin suffer discrimination based on ‘caste’ which is a particular characteristic of Indian sub-continental culture and society. It is prevalent in the Hindu diaspora in the UK and beyond. The issue that needs to be addressed is whether caste hatred can become part of any statutory definition of criminal law that will bring it on the same level as religious and racial hatred. This requires an analysis of the general category of hate crimes with a focus on the racial and religiously aggravated offences. The article examines several trends within the domestic legislative framework and case law as well as international law. It is proposed that caste should be considered as part of race for the purposes of hate crimes and that in the UK jurisdiction specifically Section 9 of the Equality Act 2010 should be amended to include caste as part of race which will then lead to caste hatred falling within the definition of a racially aggravated hate crime.

Religião e política: a participação pentecostal na esfera pública brasileira

This article is an attempt to briefly describe the current participation of Pentecostals in the Brazilian public sphere. I use the term tentative because it is not easy to discuss the Brazilian Religious Field and its power relations, controversies and tensions. In fact, in recent years, Pentecostal groups have shown themselves to be more visible, mainly due to social networks and communication networks on TV, radio and internet. This article is an effort to present this context based on the problem: How could Christians, especially evangelicals, support a Federal Government that defends destructive and non-social policies? How could Pentecostal believers reaffirm social inequality, through ethnic-racial hatred, the denial of gender diversity and the subjection of women to the authority of men? To answer these questions, I describe part of the debate proposed by Brazilian literature on Pentecostalism and present some of the main evangelical leaders aligned with the conservative agenda of the current federal government. Finally, I declare that the literalist hermeneutics that goes back to the texts of the Hebrew Bible do legitimate and authorizes policies of social inequality and violence against communities in situations of social and economic vulnerability.

El aliento de la vida

In today's cruel times, human beings struggle to breathe for avoidable and unavoidable reasons. Some are victims of racial hatred and police brutality. Some have been struck down by COVID 19 and die an agonizing, lonely, labored death. I am asking whether some might be spared the horror of helplessly fighting for that most elemental necessity, the breath of life. And, maybe, some of their partners might be spared the unbearable memory of being asked "Why won't you help me?"

Donald Trump’s Incendiary Rhetoric and Hate Speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma Rally on June 20, 2020 Put the United States on the Verge of Racial and Cultural Division

Anti-racial vilification legislations exist on a wide range and are supported by civil organizations as well as the two major political parties in the United States. As Public concerns about expressions of racial hatred exacerbated lately, racial derogatory comments and racial violence were evident in several areas in the U.S and became part of daily rhetoric. It seems that these legislations consolidated counterproductive effects and gave rise to racial differences rather than encrypting them. Furthermore, hate discourse was encumbered by the residue of long history of slavery and racial segregation. The American president who is supposed to be the role model for the common American man and woman failed to take the lead and proved to lack commands of leadership as well as initiatives of healing the nation in the midst of the present state of unrest and confusion. He has been abusive and having no commands of domestic policy. His discourse failed to live up to the expectations of the American people in suppressing racial and discriminatory remarks. On the contrary, he brags of being racist and bluntly uses hate expressions. In addition, he tries to systematize and institutionalize racism and discrimination. By using racist hate speech utterances as well as hate-speech acts, the president appears as a person with modest linguistic commands as his poor knowledge of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of his utterances is prevalent. The analysis of Donald Trump’s hate-speech-acts can be identified as raising validity claims which enact discrimination and support inequality in society.

Problems of Assimilation and Difficulties of Becoming a Man in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman

This article attempts to explore the obstacles of an African American in becoming a Man in the white community in LeRoi Jones’s play Dutchman. In doing so, it analyzes the text from African American perspective, which is a black cosmological lens applied to critically examine African American history, culture and the literature, primarily with its focus on cultural assimilation and its aftermath. LeRoi Jones, also known with his new name Amiri Baraka, in this play exposes how the black Americans fall victim of racial hatred in the process of assimilating themselves with the mainstream white ways of life. The major argument of this article is an African American’s process of assimilation with the white culture is not only a detachment from his/her origin but also his/her failure to be accepted by the new culture. It argues that in adopting a new culture, a colored American is twice the victim of his/her past and the present. To justify this stark predicament of colored American population, the article briefly looks back at the situation of the American blacks in the 1960s. It ponders on the entire behavior of Clay, a twenty years old black boy in the play, his fondness in choosing to imitate the white world as a model. His craze for white way of life is reflected in the dress up he is putting on, his mastery over the use of cosmetic language of the whites, his eating of apple given by Lula, a thirty years old white lady who morbidly tempts him for sexual intercourse, his attempt to forget his own ancestral history to make him look more like an American than a descendent of slave. The article also analyses Lula’s stereotyping of Clay and the way she dictates white values and norms.