The 1982 Voting Rights Act Extension as a “Critical Juncture”: Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and Republican Party-Building

Republican support for the 1982 Voting Rights Act (VRA) extension is a puzzle for scholars of racial policy coalitions. The extension contained provisions that were manifestly antithetical to core principles of the “color-blind” policy alliance said to dominate the GOP. Recent scholarship has explained this puzzling decision by arguing that conservatives were confident that the VRA's most objectionable provisions could be undone by the federal bureaucracy and judiciary, while absolving Republicans of the blame of being against voting rights. This article suggests that the picture is more complicated. Applying the concept of “critical junctures” to the 1982 VRA extension, the article highlights the importance of actors’ contingent decisions and reveals a wider range of choices available to political entrepreneurs than has been conventionally understood. Highlighting differing views within the Reagan administration, this article also identifies a wider range of reasons why Republicans supported the act's extension, including career ambition, party-building, policy agenda advancement, and genuine commitment, rather than simply a defensive stance as implied by recent histories.

Fluchtgepäck

Based on the expansive correspondence of the eminent philologist Eduard Berend (1883–1973), this essay reconstructs the multifaceted history of his exquisite Jean-Paul-collection, which, in 1957, became a cornerstone of the newly established Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach. Upon the invitation of the DLA, Berend, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had spent 17 years in exile in Geneva, was able to continue his work on the historical-critical edition of the works of Jean Paul (born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763–1825), one of Germany’s most prolific writers of the Classical-Romantic period. The Prussian Academy of Sciences had commissioned the critical edition in the Weimar era, and Berend had begun work on it in 1927. But, as a result of Nazi racial policy, he had been removed as the editor in 1938. The return of Berend and his Jean-Paul-Archiv mark the beginning of the DLA’s history as an exceptional research center not just for exile literature but also of and for exiled scholars.

Race(ing) towards Legal Literacy for (Im)migration amidst COVID-19

Historically and contemporarily, immigration laws have disproportionately affected immigrant faculty and students of color because they often inadvertently function as racial policy. (Critical) legal literacy enacted via a bottom-up approach can help to address such laws. Higher education institutions, organizations, labor unions and associations are uniquely positioned to use critical legal literacy as a tool of advocacy for immigrant faculty and students of color amidst the adverse effects of COVID-19.

Racial Reparations against White Protectionism: America's New Racial Politics

After more than half a century in which American racial politics has been structured primarily as a clash between two rival “racial orders” or “policy alliances,” the longstanding coalitions are transforming into ones centered on significantly new themes. The racially conservative “color-blind” policy alliance is, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, becoming an alliance promising “white protectionism.” The “race-conscious” policy alliance is, with the mobilizations around the slogan of Black Lives Matter, becoming an alliance focused on “racial reparations” to end “systemic racism.” These new, even more, polarized racial policy alliances have counterparts across the globe, and they are likely to shape political life for many years to come.

Re-education as Ethnocide. Beyond the Nazi Concept of “Umvolkung”

The paper deals with re-education as one of the hidden symbols of modernity using the example of National Socialist nationality politics. It analyses a theoretical concept behind the National Socialist ethnic and racial policy in East Central Europe, especially in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It presents the concept of Umvolkung as a theoretical basis on which it was possible to think of a significant part of the Czech population that met the racist criteria of the National Socialists, that it was originally the German population who lost its national identity during the centuries. The concept should also help to develop a strategy to re-educate the people of the Protectorate, and in the long run it should eventually lead to ethnocide, i. e. to disintegrate or directly destroy the Czech collective national identity. One of the key figures in shaping the concept was the young Nazi scholar Hans Joachim Beyer (1908–1971), who came to the Protectorate on the advice of the Deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich and headed the most politically influenced Science Foundation in Czech Lands (Reinhard Heydrich Foundation for Scientific Research in Prague). In order to justify the future National Socialist Germanization policy, Beyer developed a new theory of the origins of the Czech people in collaboration with the anthropologist K. V. Müller.