Consciousness and Unconsciousness

Contemporary sociological theory frequently prioritizes that which is consciously known over thoughts, feelings and motivations that are beyond conscious awareness. Consciousness, being immediately measurable, resonates with the still often positivistic orientation of mainstream sociology. Unconsciousness, by contrast, is messy, resisting apprehension through conventional methodological approaches. Whereas many scholars have responded to this inscrutability by dismissing the importance and even the very existence of unconscious processes, this chapter seeks to highlight the significance of both consciousness and unconsciousness for the study of social life. We begin by illuminating how such pivotal sociological thinkers as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Bourdieu have implicitly grappled with the unconscious mind. From there, we turn to a brief history of more explicit theorizations of unconsciousness, tracing the ideas of core psychoanalytic thinkers like Freud, Jung and Lacan alongside more socio-psychoanalytic theorists like Fromm and Fanon. Finally, we demonstrate the ongoing relevance of unconsciousness to sociological inquiry by highlighting contemporary theorists who have used the unconscious to account for social problems from racial domination to interpersonal violence. Ultimately, we call upon sociological theorists and empirical researchers to adopt a more multidimensional approach when analyzing the multiple dimensions of social reality.

Rage Renegades

After mentioning briefly the term “rage renegades” in Chapter 4, this chapter provides a more in-depth elaboration and evaluation. “Rage renegades” refers to allies with Lordean rage. They are rage renegades because although their privilege and place in a white-supremacist society is meant to guarantee that they will be complicit or engage in racism as a way to maintain racial domination, they instead show outrage at such a society. In doing so, they rebel against a racist system that was designed to benefit them exclusively. But rage renegading can also go wrong when it reinforces the same white supremacy that the rage aims to challenge. This chapter describes four ways in which this misdirection can happen as well as provides some suggestions for how to steer clear of it.

Historicizing White Supremacist Terrorism with Ida B. Wells

In light of increasing white supremacist violence in the United States, calls to identify such violence as terrorism have surged in public discourse. Federal and state agencies have taken up these demands and included white supremacy in counterterrorism and national security policy. While this classification appears to remove the racist double standard in applications of the terrorism label, it has come under criticism for obscuring the history and distinctly U.S. American roots of white supremacy, on the one hand, and expanding the harmful and typically racially coercive consequences of U.S. counterterrorism, on the other hand. There is, however, a robust yet neglected tradition in U.S. racial justice activism that uses the language of terrorism to make sense of white supremacy. By examining this tradition, this essay offers a more nuanced assessment of the dangers and possibilities of classifying white supremacy as terrorism. Specifically, I look at Ida B. Wells’s analysis of lynching as racial terrorism to recover an alternative narrative of white supremacist terrorism. I argue that the understanding of white supremacy as terrorism in her writings not only exposes the partisan use of these terms and their complicity in constructing a narrowly circumscribed and biased public knowledge about racial domination, but also reveals some mistaken assumptions of the current debate. This essay thus sheds new light on a neglected discourse of white supremacist terrorism and makes it relevant for contemporary purposes.

The racial constitution of neoliberalism

Prevailing scholarship on neoliberalism fails to recognise that it generates its own distinctive forms of racial domination. Influential analysts such as Wolfgang Streeck, David Harvey and Wendy Brown assume or argue that racism exists today because neoliberalism’s defeat of racial legacies is incomplete. This ignores how racism is reconfigured in ways that are specific to the historical moment of neoliberalism and dependent on a distinctive and substantial intellectual and political hinterland. A consideration of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution reveals a contradiction in neoliberal thought between its aspiration to establish a universal market system and its dependence on particularist ideas of western cultural pre-eminence. This ideological contradiction correlates with the fact that globalisation produces masses of surplus populations which are of no market value. A racial idea of culture is the means by which neoliberalism manages and works through its own limitations. Above all, ‘race’ provides a means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and ‘unexploitable’, bearers of entitlements and bare life.

Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

The Whiteness of Communication Studies

This chapter examines the role of data and whiteness in American social life. It aims to critique the 'cognitive economy of racial domination' as it manifests in this broad area of scholarship. Conceptualizing the reverberations and continuations of this domination requires temporarily setting aside the general canonical literature in communication theory. Directly and indirectly, it builds upon those who have also critiqued previous iterations of this racial domination. This includes Stuart Hall, who theorized identity as indeterminate, laden with multiplicities that are always in a process of becoming, Paul Gilroy, who did much to show how identity was connected to the development of circuits of accumulation during the course of modernity, and Sut Jhally, whose longstanding analysis of race in American media culture is the benchmark for any meaningful critique of contemporary life. In the last two decades, demographic shifts and hiring trends in the US and UK academic systems have taken some of the sharpness from the whiteness of communication theory. However, this does not mean that marginalization does not continue. Curriculums and faculty compliments do change, but they do under the long shadow of an Anglo-American colonial present where concurrently amnesia of and nostalgia for Pax Britannica justifies Pax Americana. The chapter addresses issues like misrecognition and ideology, and undertakes a study of the considerable amount of violence required to maintain racial hierarchies, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Relações étnico-raciais: construção da dimensão pedagógica do cinema negro e a afirmação positiva da africanidade

The article demonstrates the centrality of the academic concern, in the discipline Ethnic-Racial Relations, which is given by an observation of the different Brazilian filmographies. A Chanchada was the paroxysm of the stereotype of racial inferiority of the image of the Iberian-Afro-American as a rural ethnic demand of Amerindian heritage in the progress-averse Jeca Tatu. To affirm the racial superiority of the imagetic hegemony of the Euro-hetero-macho-authoritarian as a sign of divine perfection expressed in the priest as God's representative. Racial domination determined by the power of euroheteronormativity. Cinema Novo was the trend that the black man became an aesthetic referent in the Marxist-influenced Glauberian realization. In the syntax of Cinema Novo in the semiotics of class struggles, the black man is a proletarian expression and the white man configures the bourgeoisie. The ontological struggle to affirm the positive image of minorities is a projection of class struggles. In Black Cinema, the Africanity that is a reference in Cinema Novismo conquers the position of subject in this cinema as the author of its own history. It concludes that it is in the Pedagogical Dimension of Black Cinema, as epistemic cinema that the minority builds the image of positive affirmation representing the visual of the decanted place of speech, as inclusive contemporaneity, overcoming the excluding anachronism.

The Impact of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: From the Communal to the Individual

Slavery is a state of extraordinary physical, scholarly, passionate, and otherworldly hardship, a sort of terrible life. This paper targets investigating how the way of life of white bigotry endorsed official frameworks of separation as well as a perplexing code of discourse, conduct, and social practices intended to make racial domination genuine as well as normal and inescapable. In her magnum opus, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison depicts the dehumanizing impacts of subjection on the past and memory of her courageous woman. Morrison has committed her scholarly profession to guaranteeing that dark experience under, and because of, subjection would not be left to understandings exclusively at the directs of whites. This investigation shows how Toni Morrison has prevailing with regards to uncovering the physical and mental harm perpetrated on African American individuals by the ruthless brutality that comprised American subjugation. The paper, in this specific circumstance, researches how the memory and the past of the courageous woman go about as destroyers of her protective presence.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter steers a different course, reflecting on some of the ways that time and history have underpinned visions of Anglo-America. It outlines a discourse of racial union which was usually predicated on a specific account of both space and historical temporality. The chosen people — whether designated Aryan, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, or English-speaking — was imagined as superior to all others, their greatness ordained by their unique historical trajectory and extant racial characteristics. They had been, and remained, the pioneers of human progress. This historical story produced stratified global geography: the vanguard of modern humanity was concentrated in specific places, chiefly Britain and its past and present settler colonies in North America and the South Pacific. Ultimately, the chapter discusses W. E. B. Du Bois and T. E. Scholes' ideas about race and empire. While the steampunk literature renarrates the history of Anglo-modernity by erasing the primacy of the United States, Afro-modernists sought to destabilize the historical validation of racial domination, clearing the ground for imagining alternative futures.

Machine Dreams

This chapter focuses on the proleptic literature of war and racial order. Writings dedicated to imagining future conflict contain some of the most elaborate attempts to envision an Anglotopian future. The chapter identifies a distinct shift in content between the 1880s and the end of the century, from a common figuration of the United States and the British Empire as antagonists to one in which they are often united in the attempt to govern the globe. It starts by teasing out some of the similarities and differences between American and British narratives, before turning to Stanley Waterloo's Armageddon, a popular American tale of a racial union in which the former colony supplants the “mother country” as the dominant partner in a mission to stabilize a chaotic world. Ultimately, the chapter concludes with a reading of William Cole's The Struggle for Empire 2236, one of the first “space operas,” which the author read as an ambivalent attempt to critique the will to power underpinning the quest for racial domination.