Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave rebellion in modern history; it created the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas. This book tells the story of how enslaved Africans forcibly brought to colonial Haiti through the trans-Atlantic slave trade used their cultural and religious heritages, social networks, and labor and militaristic skills to survive horrific conditions. They built webs of networks between African and 'creole' runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color through rituals and marronnage - key aspects to building the racial solidarity that helped make the revolution successful. Analyzing underexplored archival sources and advertisements for fugitives from slavery, Crystal Eddins finds indications of collective consciousness and solidarity, unearthing patterns of resistance. Considering the importance of the Haitian Revolution and the growing scholarly interest in exploring it, Eddins fills an important gap in the existing literature.

The Politics of Hope and Fear in a Future of Less Work

The Conclusion turns to the daunting political challenges that already face big redistributive programs like those advanced here, and that will be refracted through the prism of automation. Popular anxiety about job losses might even exacerbate the divisive ethnonationalist politics that have taken hold in much of the United States (and beyond). The chapter argues for the importance of cultivating a stronger narrative of cross-racial solidarity and shared interests, and for the distinctive capacity of labor unions, grounded as they are in the fertile medium of shared work, to credibly propagate that narrative. And it argues that the strategy proposed here—centered around securing decent work (but less of it) for all—offers a broadly appealing program around which to organize diverse workers. The chapter, and the book, concludes with reflections on the future of capitalism, and the varieties of capitalism, in a future of less work.

Unity in Malaysia through Religion and Culture

Malaysia is band together not just by culture, patriotism, and government efforts but also by a shared understanding of many faiths. But, the future seems to be unsafe due to economic, social and environmental vulnearability in recent times. To overcome this situation, we must proclaim our duty to one another, to the larger community of life, and future generations, mainly via the practice of our faith. Racial solidarity should be fostered via culture and religion. Unity through understanding diverse religions and cultural practices can be fortified via education such as vision school concept, teacher’s role at the school and the education system.

Becoming White in a White Supremacist State: The Public and Psychological Wages of Whiteness for Undocumented 1.5-Generation Brazilians

This study draws on in-depth and longitudinal interviews with twenty-nine 1.5-generation Brazilian immigrants, all of whom can pass as white and experienced illegality in young adulthood. I argue that they benefit from what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “the public and psychological wages of whiteness”. That is, white and white-passing, undocumented 1.5-generation Brazilian men and women can largely navigate public space without being stopped, questioned, arrested, detained and/or deported. Additionally, they benefit psychologically—as they gain confidence due to perceived whiteness, even as their immigration status would render them vulnerable to exploitation in the labor market and deportation. These public and psychological wages of whiteness can facilitate social and material gains. I argue that there are three mechanisms by which they experience the wages of whiteness. First, whiteness brings assumed innocence. Second, white racial solidarity with other whites facilitates opportunities and protection. Third, some 1.5-generation Brazilians actively construct whiteness to accrue the public and psychological wages. These findings challenge the master status perspective of illegality and underscore the importance of an intersectional framework for understanding immigrants’ varied experiences with illegality, bringing to light the quotidian, gendered practices and identities that sustain the structures of white supremacy.

Pitching Gender in a Racist Tune: The Affective Publics of the #120decibel Campaign

This article analyses the changed structures, actors and modes of communication that characterise ‘dissonant public spheres.’ With the #120decibel campaign by the German Identitarian Movement in 2018, gender and migration were pitched in a racist tune, absorbing feminist concerns and positions into neo-nationalistic, misogynist and xenophobic propaganda. The article examines the case of #120decibel as an instance of ‘affective publics’ (Lünenborg, 2019a) where forms of feminist protest and emancipatory hashtag activism are absorbed by anti-migration campaigners. Employing the infrastructure and network logics of social media platforms, the campaign gained public exposure and sought political legitimacy through strategies of dissonance, in which a racial solidarity against the liberal state order was formed. Parallel structures of networking and echo-chamber amplification were established, where right-wing media articulate fringe positions in an attempt to protect the rights of white women to be safe in public spaces. #120decibel is analysed and discussed here as characteristic of the ambivalent role and dynamics of affective publics in societies challenged by an increasing number of actors forming an alliance on anti-migration issues based on questionable feminist positions.

Entre cultura, solidariedade internacional e “mundo negro”: a negociação de sentidos na Présence Africaine (1955-56)

<p>Este artigo parte das publicações da revista cultural francesa e senegalesa, <em>Présence Africaine</em>, propondo pensar como esta última procurou se posicionar, partindo do mundo intelectual, como interventora na imaginação e no fomento de soluções políticas e culturais para inserir novos participantes, principalmente africanos, no concerto internacional, em diálogo com bandeiras de solidariedade internacional/racial entre perspectivas locais e globais. Por meio da análise de debates, comunicações e mensagens retiradas das atas do Primeiro Congresso de Escritores e Artistas Negros, investiga-se como a revista se apropriou de novas linguagens e possibilidades políticas disponíveis e legitimadas no pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial, conciliando-as, não sem dificuldades, a discursos internacionalistas de movimentos políticos anteriores, como a <em>Négritude</em> e o pan-africanismo.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave: </strong>presença africana | negritude | Pan-africanismo | História intelectual | Guerra Fria.</p><p> </p><strong><em>Abstract: </em></strong><p><em>This paper is based on publications of the French/Senegalese journal Présence Africaine and its intellectual stance in seeking to intervene in the design and dissemination of political/cultural solutions to include new participants (especially from Africa) in the international scene, in dialogue with the goal of international/racial solidarity goals at local and global levels. The paper examines debates, communications and messages from the annals of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in investigating how the journal appropriated new communicative strategies and political possibilities that emerged and were legitimized after World War II, in relation to the internationalizing discourses of previous political movements such as Négritude and Pan-Africanism.</em></p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>présence africaine | négritude | Pan-Africanism | Intellectual history | Cold War.</p><p> </p>

The Negro Labor Committee and the Dilemmas of Black Trade Unionism in New York City, 1925-1950

The Negro Labor Committee (NLC) was an organization of black and white trade unionists which sought to eliminate the barriers to labor market entry and trade union membership that black workers faced after their mass migrations to New York City during and immediately after World War I. The same organization existed under several different names between 1925 and 1969. As perhaps the only sustained effort in New York by a black-led organization to focus specifically on the problems of blacks as both workers and trade unionists, the NLC evokes considerable interest. Drawing on the NLC's written records, this paper argues that the NLC's overarching loyalty to the labor movement led it to underestimate the efficacy of organizing blacks through community institutions toward goals defined in terms of the community's interest. Thus, the NLC sacrificed racial solidarity for trade union solidarity, only to find that most white unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were more committed to the former than to the latter.

“Tan Yanks” and Black Korea

This chapter analyzes cinematic and journalistic depictions of the Korean War that centered on the role played by African American soldiers serving in integrated combat units. Heroic depictions of “Tan Yanks” in both the mainstream press and black newspapers highlighted the usefulness of an integrated military to the global ideological battle against Communism, especially in terms of winning “the hearts and minds” of the formerly colonized. This chapter demonstrates how the Korean War facilitated the articulation of an early version of the ideology that Melanie McAllister has termed “military multiculturalism,” which is evident in two Hollywood films from the 1950s: Pork Chop Hill (1959) and All the Young Men (1960). This chapter also addresses two strains of Orientalism that also surfaced on the pages of black newspapers: the first expressed an Afro-Asian sense of racial solidarity and intimacy with the Korean people as a nonwhite nation that had suffered under a Japanese colonialism that had been supported by US and European powers prior to World War II; the second took shape as a fascination with amorous relationships that had formed between black servicemen and Japanese female civilians prior to and during the Korean War and the interracial desires they embodied.