‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation

This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.

Colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in the global economy: a review article

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stratification economics respectively to challenge mainstream understandings of racial hierarchies. After first outlining the strengths and key insights of each book, the author discusses how they could be expanded in a more radical manner, along the lines of anti-colonial, decolonial and black Marxism. She argues that in order to understand how racial hierarchies are connected to the development of capitalism, further engagement with radical scholarship that sees race and class as co-constituted would be required.

Colonial policy studies in Japan: racial visions of Nan'yo, or the early creation of a global South

This article examines Japanese colonial policy studies (shokumin seisaku gaku) with a particular focus on its relationship with the distinct region of ‘Nan'yo’ (the South Seas). Specifically analysing the works of Takekoshi Yosaburo (1865–1950), Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933) and Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961), it seeks to uncover the ways in which the exponents of this study area accounted for Nan'yo based on their conceptions of race. It also shows how they inflicted envisaged racial hierarchies on the southern Pacific and how such attempts were related to colonial policy debates behind the practice of Japanese imperialism. Part of the findings point out that Takekoshi's and Nitobe's comparable projections of strict racial hierarchies on the Malays served to justify the southward colonization of the Japanese. Yanaihara's depiction of Nan'yo islanders as radically underdeveloped was tailored to championing Japan's sustained espousal of the League Mandate. The article argues that their accounts of Nan'yo formed part of a transnational knowledge chain about colonial and racial victimization. Like their western counterparts including Gustav Le Bon, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul S. Reinsch and J. A. Hobson, they built purported racial pyramids with the tropical areas at their bottom, the bulk of which correspond to today's global South. They have been accomplices in this colonial present.

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

Farmer Wants a (Swedish) Wife

In this article we discuss discourses of white mobility in reality television, a genre whose problematic post-racial and neoliberal discourses have long been exposed. Moving beyond the widely researched Anglophone media landscapes, we interrogate the discursive construction of white mobilities in the Swedish romance reality show Bonde Söker Fru – Jorden Runt (TV4, 2019–2020) [Farmer Seeks Wife – Around the World] where Swedish North-to-South migrants working as farmers abroad seek a partner from Sweden through the assistance of reality TV. By focusing on the discursive and visual strategies through which the show perpetuates racial hierarchies, we discuss the colonial imaginaries, the absence of border policies (such as residency, employment, or integration), and the significance of individual migratory preferences in the mobility discourses. We identify three forms of white mobility – the tourist, the adventurer, and the philanthropist – and show that migration is depicted as something reversible, an adventure, and a possibility for self-development, rather than a life-long decision with high stakes.

Convivial reflexivity in the changing city – a tale of hospitality or hostility?

The article interrogates whether citizens’ (embodied) encounters with migrant populations (newcomers and settled) enable or hinder convivial reflexivity in a multicultural city of compounded crises. Convivial reflexivity refers to the embodied process of identity-making that is rooted in the context of everyday life and emerges at the juncture of embodied encounters with the Other and the intense mediation of migration that shapes citizens’ perceptions and practices. The article draws on a four-month intense ethnographic study in an Athenian neighbourhood and reveals how, even in a very tense environment of crises and intensified racism, everyday encounters in the city could mediate class solidarities and support the emergence of networked commons against national and racial hierarchies. The article aims to move beyond claims of conviviality as a natural outcome of urban encounters, and instead to reveal a convivial reflexivity that understands urban encounters as an assemblage of cognition, affect and embodiment.

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Travelogues are a rich medium through which to explore observations of everyday culture and rituals, perceptions of the world order, and narrative strategies of othering. In this paper, I turn my attention to travelogues written by East Africans (coastal Swahili Muslims, diasporic Shi’i and Parsi South Asians, and Christian Ugandans) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the authors come from different religious groupings, cultural-linguistic backgrounds and socio-economic milieus, they travel the same routes within East Africa and, occasionally, also to Europe or even as far as Siberia. I argue that the texts (including journals, retrospectives, and ethnographies) must be read as documents of East African cosmopolitanism. Mobility enables the authors to subvert the imperial world order by re-framing it narratively according to their own religious identity. This gives rise to reflections on humanity, equality and the beauty of knowledge, but not to the exclusion of racial and religious bigotry within and between the non-European communities in East Africa. In my analysis, I tease out narrative patterns, observational styles, and literary tropes present in the texts across religious boundaries. As all the texts were either commissioned by Europeans or edited by their translators before publication they do not document naively ‘authentic’ perspectives of East Africans, but reflect the complexities of communication within strict racial hierarchies. In concluding, I discuss the potential of religion to invert colonial centres and peripheries: European metropoles become places of exotic fascination while the familiar practices of co-religionists can turn the ‘hinterland’ into centres of learning.

Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state

In this article, I ask three key questions: First, what is the relationship between militarism and race? Second, how does colonialism shape that relationship to produce racial militarism on both sides of the imperial encounter? And, third, what is the function of racial militarism? I build on Fanon’s psychoanalytic work on the production of racial hierarchies and internalization of stigma to argue that militarism became a means through which the European imperial nation-state sought to mitigate its civilizational anxiety and assert itself at the top of a constructed hierarchy. In particular, I argue that European militarism is constituted by its colonization and historical constructions of the so-called Muslim Orient, stigmatized as a rival, a threat and an inferior neighbour. However, this racial militarism and civilizational anxiety is not only a feature of the colonial metropole, but also transferred onto colonized and postcolonial states. Drawing on examples of racial militarism practised by the Syrian regime, I argue Europe’s racial-militarist stigmas are also internalized and instrumentalized by postcolonial states via fleeing and transferral. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that racial militarism has three main functions in both metropole and postcolony: the performance of racial chauvinism and superiority; demarcation of boundaries of exclusion; and dehumanization of racialized dissent in order to legitimate violence.

Dual Language as White Property: Examining a Secondary Bilingual-Education Program and Latinx Equity

This critical race ethnography examines a secondary-level dual-language (DL) program, a bilingual-education model thought to provide Latinxs educational equity. Drawing from a three-stage recursive analytic approach, I present evidence that a DL program’s policies and practices valued offering Latinx youth biliterate schooling only so long as DL was available and advantageous to Whites—which ultimately excluded some Latinx students from bilingual education and/or accessing its benefits. I theorize DL functions as white property when DL perpetuates racial hierarchies and preserves the value of a white racial identity, thereby maintaining Whites’ inequitable material accumulation. I problematize the logic of DL—highlighting that DL has the elitist tendencies of world-language education—and assess DL’s potential to deliver educational justice to Latinxs.

A Question of Race: Ana Tijoux’s album Vengo

This article hones in on the question of ‘race’ in hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux’s album Vengo (2014), which anticipates, in a musical format, the social demands which would emerge years later in Chile’s Estallido Social. More specifically, it dissects the ways in which this socially-engaged rapper transcodes (Hall, “Representation” 270) the racialized categories of ‘indio’ and ‘the south’ from a position of colonial difference (Mignolo 61). I argue that, by adopting this subversive and historicizing semiotic strategy, she casts these oppressive labels into productive political subject positions from which to level received racial hierarchies rooted in colonialism and reinforced by neoliberalism. They offer the individuals who are classified as such a blueprint to mobilize themselves and enact alternative ways of being; to come up for their rights; and to resist the inequalities that are perpetuated and naturalized by a system of organization which ranks them as inferior.