Out of Place, Out of Mind: Min(d)ing Race in Mad Studies Through a Metaphor of Spatiality

This article examines the racial politics of Mad Studies in Canada through a metaphor of spatiality, underscoring the urgency of an antiracist Mad Studies paradigm. Drawing on critical race scholarship which situates “madness” as reliant on and informed by white supremacist and colonial logics of rationality and reason (Bruce 2017), I foreground claims made by critical race scholars of racialized madness as contingent on and informed by histories of slavery, genocide, and everyday realities of racism and racial violence which an anti-racist Mad Studies project must contend with. By locating the racialization of Mad Studies within a metaphor of spatiality, I heuristically problematize the “space” available for racialized subjects to re/claim madness within contemporary Mad Studies paradigms. I conclude that in failing to rigorously unpack the relations of race which undergird understandings of madness, and to challenge the presence of white supremacy in the Mad Studies discipline, scholars potentially perpetuate a colonial project of “othering” and consequentially maintain the systems of psychiatric violence they seek to undo. Centralizing race in Mad Studies exposes the workings of white supremacy in logics of violence against Mad people more broadly and is thus necessary to an anti-racist and anti- oppressive Mad Studies project.

The Name of the Hobbit

This chapter takes as its focus the collapsing of fantastic medievalism and palaeontology in the narratives surrounding the discovery of homo floresiensis, the petite hominin species which has been called ‘the hobbit’ since it was uncovered in a cave on the island of Flores in 2003. The chapter analyses how homo floresiensis came to be seen through the prism of the globally exported medievalist fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth novels and their film adaptations. The medievalizing of the Flores hominin exposes the capacity for ‘the medieval’ to stand in for ‘deep time’ and the primeval past. The chapter also examines the racial politics underlying this episode, arguing that the framing of the Asian hominin within Tolkien-influenced medievalism constructs a limiting image of a globally conceived humanity. It reminds us that global medievalism has the potential to reinforce rather than unsettle the Eurocentric legacy of the Middle Ages in the modern world.

From the “Beginning”: Anglo-American Settler Colonialism in New England

In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States.

“Companions”

The documentary Crip Camp presents a 1970s summer camp for disabled youth as a place of friendship and political dialogues that spawned the American disability rights movement. The film also represented Camp Jened as a haven of racial harmony and inclusion. Jened was not the only American micro-community of disability solidarity and political possibilities that also involved questions of racial politics. Scholars have criticized disability activists and disability studies scholars for neglecting problems of racial oppression. This historical study examines three examples of empowering disability subcultures in twentieth century America: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Warm Springs rehabilitation resort from the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s, the Rolling Quads at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, and Camp Interdependence in California in the 1980s. The article interrogates the racial politics of these egalitarian communities.

'When you score you're English, when you miss you're Black': Euro 2020 and the racial politics of a penalty shoot-out

Through an analysis of the fortunes of the England national football team in the Euro 2020 tournament, this article offers a critical assessment of the politics of race, nation and belonging in sport. While racist reactions to three Black players who missed penalties in the final revealed the contingent belonging of Black footballers within racially exclusive definitions of Englishness, the article argues that it also provided an opportunity for an alternative politics of national belonging to be expressed. This takes at least two significant forms: firstly, the political confidence with which Black players and their white allies are speaking out publicly against racism; secondly, the support and solidarity shown to Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho resulting in an English solidarity that is expressed through an avowed rejection of racism. The article concludes that a shared solidarity in sport maybe found, not in the arrogance of national pride or success, but rather, in how players, managers and fans conduct themselves in moments of failure.

Ancient Egyptians in Black and White: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ and the Hamitic Hypothesis

In this essay, I consider how the racial politics of Ridley Scott’s whitewashing of ancient Egypt in Exodus: Gods and Kings intersects with the Hamitic Hypothesis, a racial theory that asserts Black people’s inherent inferiority to other races and that civilization is the unique possession of the White race. First, I outline the historical development of the Hamitic Hypothesis. Then, I highlight instances in which some of the most respected White intellectuals from the late-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century deploy the hypothesis in assertions that the ancient Egyptians were a race of dark-skinned Caucasians. By focusing on this detail, I demonstrate that prominent White scholars’ arguments in favor of their racial kinship with ancient Egyptians were frequently burdened with the insecure admission that these ancient Egyptian Caucasians sometimes resembled Negroes in certain respects—most frequently noted being skin color. In the concluding section of this essay, I use Scott’s film to point out that the success of the Hamitic Hypothesis in its racial discourse has transformed a racial perception of the ancient Egyptian from a dark-skinned Caucasian into a White person with appearance akin to Northern European White people.

The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.