Introduction to the Special Issue: Far from Colorblind. Reflections on Racialization in Contemporary Europe

European history is to a significant extent also a history about racialization and racism. Since the colonizers of past centuries defined boundaries between “civilized” and “savages” by applying value standards in which the notions of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion were interwoven and imposed on human beings perceived as fundamentally different from themselves, racialization became deeply inherent in how (white) Europeans viewed the world, themselves, and others. In this Special Issue, we assume that colonialist racialization constitutes the base of a persistent and often unreflective and indirect racism. Implicit value systems according to which white people are automatically considered as more competent, more desirable, preferable in general terms, and more “European” translate into patterns of everyday racism affecting the self-image and life chances of white and non-white Europeans. In this introductory article, which defines the conceptual framework for the special issue, we contest the idea of a “post-racial” condition and discuss the consequences of ethno-racial differentiation and stigmatization for racialized groups such as Black Europeans, European Roma, and non-white migrants in general. Finally, we argue for the need to further problematize and critically examine whiteness.

Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power

This paper takes the development of the British town planning movement as its starting point to explore a series of challenges for the discipline’s historiography. The emergence of the professional field involved the circulation of ideas beyond the metropolitan core to colonial territories with spatial interventions that were deemed both physically and morally beneficial. The paper explores the role played by the discipline in developing spatialized forms of ethnic and racial differentiation within colonial territories. I conclude that British planning has largely ignored its own historiography, including the colonial legacy, enabling the discipline to assert its role as a socially progressive profession.

THE MAKING OF A NEW RACE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY IMPERIAL IMAGINARY

This article contends that understandings of race and practices of racial differentiation underwent a significant epistemological shift around the first decades of the twentieth century. It reaches this conclusion via consideration of a dog breeding programme conducted by the statistician and hereditarian theorist Karl Pearson. In 1913, Pearson proclaimed that he, along with his collaborators Edward Nettleship and Charles Usher, had created a ‘new race’ of dog. Notable for its complete absence of hair pigmentation, this race appeared to demonstrate the potential that experimental animal breeding had for imperial policy-making. In differentiating his dogs from the Pekingese spaniels from which they had been produced, Pearson sought to show that ‘foreign’ animals could be made to approximate British racial standards. In Pearson's wake, animal breeding became an increasingly persuasive means by which scientists sought to legitimate racial contentions. By the 1920s, established anthropocentric approaches to human differentiation had begun to be replaced by new, animal-centred techniques and practices. Whereas nineteenth-century conceptions of race had primarily been articulated in relation to the study of human bodies, in the new race of the twentieth century, differentiation would involve study of and experimentation with bodies of all kinds – animal and human.

‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ and the Australian border-industrial complex

What functions do the securitization and the militarization of the border serve under ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Australia? Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian government has also increasingly sought to outsource, privatize, and offshore the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities, whilst simultaneously engaging in increasingly authoritarian interventions via the militarization of border control. This article seeks to problematize these developments by constructing an emergent cartography of the various links between the ongoing processes of neoliberal structural adjustment, and the intensification of the policing and punitive apparatuses of the Australian border-industrial complex. Accordingly, using theoretical insights gleaned from emergent work on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ and from race critical theory as a cue, I outline in this article three functions of the border within punitive approaches to immigration control under neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia: first, as an apparatus of ongoing colonial power; second, as a technology of racial differentiation through its functioning as a ‘filter’ that privileges certain migrant bodies over others, and as an ‘insulator’ against popular dissent; third, as a site of profit and accumulation for transnational capital.

Black Atlantic (Dis)Entanglements: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Spain

The work of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright provides a unique entry point into an under-studied area of Black Studies: the Spanish role in the construction of racial categories and racially determined practices. My essay examines how Hughe’s and Wright’s reactions to the Hispanophone world were mediated through the issue of race. While Hughes articulates a de-othering or entanglement with his surrounding space, Wright colludes in a historical process of racial differentiation of Spain and things Spanish. Hughes’s writings on the Spanish-speaking world and the 1936–1939 Civil War address issues of race and coloniality and precede current historiography’s recognition of the conflict as a racialized and colonial event. Wright, Hughes’s near contemporary and one-time co-author, provides an intriguing – if problematic – vision of Francoist Spain in his travelog

White Noise: Composition, Colonization, and Colour

This paper examines the links between Western music, Western metaphysics, and Western imperialism. Taking Derrida's reading of "White Mythology" and "Violence and Metaphysics" as its point of departure, the paper explores the relationship between the theories and practices of musical composition formalized in Europe in the eighteenth and finalized in the nineteenth century, and the theories and practices of race, racial differentiation, and empire that coincide(d) with it.

From the Margins to Centre Stage: ‘Indian’ Demonstration Effects in Malaysia’s Political Landscape

This paper traces senses of injustice among Indian Malaysians which found expression in the ‘illegal’ Hindraf rally in Kuala Lumpur in 2007. While underlying ethnic and racial differentiation has been rendered through law in the post-colonial nation-state, the focus here is on a specific locality: resettlement flats for Indians displaced for the construction of Malaysia’s federal government administrative centre, Putrajaya. Ex-plantation workers are shown to be symbolically peripheral (to the spectacular ‘national landscape’ of Putrajaya) and to have experienced everyday forms of ethnicised marginalisation. The rally in the commercial heart of Kuala Lumpur—involving tens of thousands of Indian Malaysians from across peninsular Malaysia—mobilised what were previously largely localised grievances such as those associated with the Putrajaya estate evictions. It is shown how this ethnic transgression not only contests the ‘second-class’ position of Indians in Malaysia, but may also contribute to a redrawing of the ethnic contours of Malaysia’s legal and political landscape. More broadly, the Hindraf events also serve as a reminder that rights and social justice claims expressed in key urban centres continue to have important national-scale dimensions, even in an ostensibly neo-liberalised global economy.

Erasure, Convergence, and the Great Divide: Trends in Racial Disparity in Middletown

Although Robert and Helen Lynd later identified the color line as the deepest division separating Middletown's people, data on the city's black population were purposely excluded from their analysis, and therefore blacks are not represented in the 1920s baseline which Middletown provides for subsequent community studies. Indeed, the reader must simply take the Lynds’ word for the importance of the racial divide, for their decision to restrict their analysis to white citizens means that its dimensions remain unspecified save for a few illustrative examples. Yet the erasure is neither total nor final. Many characteristics of the city's black population in the early decades of the century are retrievable, some via census and other statistical data and others through historical sources and retrospective interviews. This paper draws upon census data to estimate the dimensions of Middletown's racial divide over the years. For the period 1977–1999, the census data are supplemented by survey data from high school students, and trends in racial differentiation in selected student attitudes are examined. Findings are mixed and only partially support the model of convergence, or a trend of declining racial differentiation in Middletown. For many indicators, including several with long–term or intergenerational effects, continued racial disparity is apparent. Substantial vestiges of the “great divide” remain, and there seems little prospect of their pending resolution.