The Chilean exception: racial homogeneity,mestizaje and eugenic nationalism

Scholarship on race in Latin America has overwhelmingly characterized racial mixture as a unique feature of the political and social landscape there. Studies of eugenics in Latin America especially highlight the relative pragmatism regarding race mixing in contrast to eugenics elsewhere. However, an acceptance of race mixing did not preclude the persistence of racial hierarchy among Latin American racial theorists. Examining the development of eugenics in Chile, this article reveals how notions of racial plasticity existed alongside that of racial superiority. Specifically, it contends that Chilean racial exceptionalism in the early twentieth century was predicated on the idea that some types of racial mixture were better than others. Conveniently for Chileans, their mostly indigenous and European ancestry was one such preferred combination. Yet, racial mixing was only desirable insofar as it resulted in a homogeneous national population. This combination of ideas functioned much like white supremacy in other parts of the world. Using historical texts, popular and medical periodicals, and visual images produced between 1900 and 1950, this paper will demonstrate how race science in Chile reconciled the nation’s history of racial mixture with its claims to racial homogeneity and superiority relative to the rest of Latin America.     

“Per la conservació de la raça catalana”: The Catalan Eugenics Society (1935–1937)

This article expands on existing work done on the Catalan Eugenics Society and its focus on Josep Vandellós, a demographer and organiser of the Society. It places the Catalan Eugenics Society within the growing volume of work on the international, particularly “Latin” eugenics movement. In doing so, it explores discourse on questions of “race,” immigration and “national” identity as refracted through the nascent eugenics movement and the political concerns of the time in Catalonia. In particular, the article assesses the question of “racial mixing” between Catalans and Spaniards from other regions and argues that, rather than rejecting miscegenation outright, Vandellós valued certain mixes as part of a eugenic project to fortify and maintain the Catalan “race” in the face of population loss and the dissolution of Catalan identity.     

Desirable and undesirable migrants. Disease,eugenics, and discourses in modern Buenos Aires

Immigration was a central feature in the making of modern Buenos Aires. Elites celebrated the massive presence of immigrants but also voiced concerns about the arrival of certain groups perceived as potentially dangerous to the making of a healthy, modern “Argentine race.”Eugenic discourses rationalized those concerns around the idea of desirable and undesirable immigrants. People with tuberculosis were part of the latter. These discourses, however, were merely discourses, either not implemented in practice or mostly inconsequential. This article underlines the importance of being cautious when historical narratives of eugenics are only based on discourses.     

THE REISCHAUER MEMO: Mr. Moto,Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers

This article offers a critical reading of a recently discovered memorandum authored by Edwin O. Reischauer in September 1942. Already at this early date in the war, Reischauer proposed retention of the Japanese emperor as head of a postwar “puppet regime” that would serve U.S. interests in East Asia. He also argued that Japanese Americans had until then been a “sheer liability” and that the United States could turn them into an “asset” by enlisting them in the U.S. military. He reasoned that Japanese American soldiers would be useful for propaganda purposes – that is, to demonstrate to the world and particularly the “yellow and brown peoples” that the United States was not a racist nation. The article interrogates the racial thinking behind such utilitarian proposals for the Japanese emperor and Japanese Americans and considers the memorandum within the broader context of the wartime foundations of the postwar U.S.-Japan relationship, the characteristics of postwar Japanese studies, the decision to mobilize Japanese Americans as soldiers, and the shifting place of Japanese Americans in the management of U.S. race relations during and after the war.     

Is It Race,Class, or Gender? The Sources of Perceived Discrimination in Brazil

Observers have long noted Brazil's distinctive racial politics: the coexistence of relatively integrated race relations and a national ideology of “racial democracy” with deep social inequalities along color lines. Those defending a vision of a nonracist Brazil attribute such inequalities to mechanisms perpetuating class distinctions. This article examines how members of disadvantaged groups perceive their disadvantage and what determines self‐reports of discriminatory experiences, using 2010 AmericasBarometer data. About a third of respondents reported experiencing discrimination. Consistent with Brazilian national myths, respondents were much more likely to report discrimination due to their class than to their race. Nonetheless, the respondent's skin color, as coded by the interviewer, was a strong determinant of reporting class as well as race and gender discrimination. Race is more strongly associated with perceived “class” discrimination than is household wealth, education, or region of residence; female gender intensifies the association between color and discrimination.     

“Without Flinching”: Facing up to Race in Liberal Italy

This article examines the development of racial discourses in Italy during the process of unification and in the following years with respect to some of the fundamental issues experienced by and facing the new nation. Anthropologists and criminologists proselytised the new “science” purporting to have discovered a novel hermeneutic for how Italy should be imagined, moulded and propelled into the future. In this article, the test case provided for how race was engaged within the Italy emerging out of the process of unification is that of the “Assabesi”, six black inhabitants of the small tract of land Italy had acquired in Africa in 1869, who were brought to Italy and displayed at the 1884 National Exhibition held in Turin. As Italy embarked on a period of extended colonial expansion, the questions of race, otherness, citizenship and boundaries became ever more pressing. Through an examination of the vicissitudes and debates surrounding the Assabesi's sojourn in Italy, the article seeks to demonstrate that while racism was one option in how Italy's new black subjects could be categorised and eventually ruled, it always had to contend with powerful and sustained counter‐arguments.     

Opposition to immigration in contemporary Russia

The study examines sources of opposition to immigration in contemporary Russia. It distinguishes between two types of opposition to immigration: exclusionary attitudes based on national membership and exclusionary attitudes based on race or ethnicity, directed exclusively at foreigners with non-Slavic or non-European origins. Findings indicate that a quarter of ethnic Russians can be classified as “racial exclusionists”; they are willing to admit immigrants who share a race/ethnic group with most of Russia’s people but object to the admission of racially/ethnically different immigrants. Another 42% of ethnic Russians are classified as “total exclusionists”; they object to immigration of all foreigners, regardless of their race/ethnicity. Multivariate analysis focuses on the impact of perceived collective vulnerability, human values, and socio-demographic attributes. Opposition to immigration in Russia is further situated within temporal and cross-national comparative perspectives. Apparently, exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants who share a race/ethnicity with most Russians increased between 2006 and 2016.     

Toward a “Modernizing” Hybridity: McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers,McAdoo’s Minstrels,and Racial Uplift Politics in South Africa, 1890–1898

This essay focuses on Orpheus McAdoo, an African American performer/entrepreneur who contributed to late nineteenth century Black Atlantic cultural formations. In the 1890s, he brought two tours to South Africa, the first of which was a singing troupe based on the Fisk Jubilee model. The second tour included a non-traditional minstrel show. This essay addresses McAdoo’s attempts to present racial narratives that countered the prevailing race discourse of the South African colonies. During both tours, McAdoo disseminated a specific variant of uplift politics. Racial uplift politics developed in the postbellum era as a middle-class African American response to notions of black backwardness. Advocates of racial uplift believed that discourses which advanced the notion that blacks were incapable of fully participating in modern democratic societies, could be challenged with images of black civility and refinement. McAdoo was a proponent of uplift politics, and he used the stage as a means to spread these notions in South Africa. McAdoo was able to successfully merge uplift politics with minstrelsy, two concepts that often seem incompatible. Furthermore, McAdoo was also aware of the three-tiered racial classification system of South Africa, and how it could be used to his advantage. In a “spectacularly opaque” gesture, McAdoo claimed to be “Coloured” American so that he could gain access to the cultural and social capital of mixed race identity.     

“English Institutions and the Irish Race”: Race and Politics in Late Nineteenth‐Century Australia

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English‐speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the “White Australia policy”, minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely‐reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an “alien” race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English‐speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous “white” settler society.     

“Clamoring Blood”: The Materiality of Belonging in Modern Ainu Identity

The tension between silence and vocalization, embrace and rejection, of Ainu ancestry has been a key factor in negotiating Ainu subjectivity since Ainu territories were colonized in 1869. As early as 1799, expressions of Ainu ethnicity were alternately cloaked and exaggerated as Japan vacillated between assimilation and segregation policies in eastern Hokkaido Ainu communities. Officially recognized as Japan's indigenous peoples in 2008, Ainu subjectivity has become increasingly politicized as the state and other stakeholders seek to define Ainu ethnicity for future legislation. Today Ainu belonging is frequently gauged by bodily metaphors of a vocalized blood. Cultural sensibility and blood are often conflated in Ainu discourses of identity: Ainu revivalists report that a sensation of “clamoring blood” (J: chi ga sawagu) inspires them to revisit ancestral memories and begin fashioning Ainu identities. Historically, intra-Ainu relations were not bound to blood but instead embodied in material expressions, such as invisible cords for women and crest-like emblems for men, symbols that enabled flexibility where needed. Since the twentieth century, the hyper focus on blood raises the specter of colonially imposed rhetorics of eugenics, assimilation policies, and specifically, the problem of race. Relatedness in the Ainu community is not exclusively defined by “consanguineal relations”; rather, a long history of adopting ethnic Japanese children and non-Ainu into Ainu families renders complex the question of identity. This article assesses how immutable notions of racial difference intersect with self-determination and current articulations of Ainu identity.     

Eugenics and the modern woman on trial in Spain: from the Primer curso eugénico (1928) to the trial of Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (1934)

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Spanish supporters of eugenics encountered unprecedented opportunities to propagate their ideas and influence public discourse. This article argues that, following the collapse of the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1930, images of modern femininity were used to promote eugenic ideas to new audiences and the mujer moderna (modern woman) imagined as a key consumer of the modernist ideology of race regeneration. The association of Galtonian doctrine with new models of modern femininity affected an increase in the popularity of eugenics, evident in records of the extraordinary professional advancement of adolescent propagandist for eugenic reform, Hildegart (1914–33). Nevertheless, the capacity of Spanish eugenicists to propagate their ideas and shape social reform remained limited due to lingering anxieties about the dangers of popularising scientific knowledge about sex and reproduction among those who might be classified as “unprepared” on the basis of their age and gender.     

Managing “Self‐Preservation”: Charles Pearson's National Life and Character and the Early Australian Commonwealth

In National Life and Character (1893), Charles Pearson argued that the breakdown in “character” threatening social cohesion in Britain was a phenomenon that was replicated on a global scale in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological progress that characterised the industrial revolution in Britain had stimulated urbanisation, and unleashed, Pearson claimed, a “bestial element in man”, degrading the quality of civic and economic life, and leading to a rising population of “stunted specimens of humanity”. Most analyses of National Life and Character focus on its fear of non‐white races and influence on policies of racial restriction; we argue that National Life and Character is a more ambitious work of political economy preoccupied, as Pearson observed, with the “self‐preservation” of the white European race, grappling with the tension of managing a potentially degraded population as new forms of state intervention, decline of traditional religious faith, and global expansion transformed white society, leaving it declining into a “stationary state” and vulnerable in the face of the rising non‐European peoples. These concerns were shared by many of the architects of Australian Federation, influencing the policy initiatives of the post‐Federation period.     

“Be a Mighty Hard Message”: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Exploration of Whiteness in the Post-Apartheid Classroom

In post-apartheid classrooms students sometimes regard systemic racial oppression as distant history. They often note that they “did” apartheid at school. This paper considers how teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved can prompt a profound self-examination in both black and white South African students. Beloved demands the active participation of the “born free” generation in a deliberate, serious engagement with the traumatic historical past. Furthermore, Morrison’s interrogation of white behavior, white constructions of black people, and the threat of racialized violence that whiteness contains within it, can productively challenge white racial identity. Teaching this novel has provided some insight into the continued articulation of white privilege and aversive racism among white South African students. Some are unnerved, express resistance, or refuse the novel’s inquiry into race. I discuss how I encourage my students to heed Morrison’s call to engage with historical memory so as to move towards a more viable future.     

Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa: Interrogating Images of Whiteness and Blackness in Black Literature and Culture

The public outcry against President Jacob Zuma’s labeling of black ownership of pet dogs as fundamentally “unAfrican” in 2012 and the academic debates around Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s proposal in 2011 for a 1% reparative wealth tax on whites is further evidence of the continued necessity of whiteness studies today, despite South Africa’s independence from a racist Afrikaner regime and its movement towards a nonracist society. Yet, the authority, agency, and normative value of whiteness continue to work covertly within an intellectual critique embedded in standardized interrogations of images and imaginations of race and culture. Kopano Matlwa’s popular debut novel, Coconut, is a necessary, self-reflexive commentary on the interdependent nature of racial inquiry. While critics typically read the novel as resoundingly critical of contemporary blackness, they fail to see its simultaneous evocation of the necessarily porous, performative, and continuously evolving character of race and culture generally. This paper acknowledges Matlwa’s concern with a superficial postapartheid blackness, but also argues that Coconut’s complex invocation of black culture exposes the impossibility of imaging and imagining blackness without imaging and imagining whiteness. In the continued satirical fetishization of whiteness, racial essentialism is destabilized and whiteness is positioned as an inevitable mirror on and of blackness. As such, the paper simultaneously questions the efficacy of “whiteness” studies that suggest the possibility of establishing separate and exclusive studies on race and culture.     

Imagined Races: From Environmental Determinism to Geographical Authenticity in Twentieth‐Century Argentina

This article explores how Argentine intellectuals incorporated the natural environment into their accounts of the racial, cultural and political features of the nation. In the late nineteenth century environmental determinism, based on the assumption of a cause–effect relationship between geographical and racial factors, entered Argentina through three main routes: Lamarckism, Darwinism and Spencerianism. By the mid twentieth century, however, anti‐positivist philosophies had been fully incorporated into a body of work that analysed Argentina's socio‐historical foundations. This article examines the shift that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in how those seeking to define race incorporated the environment into their arguments. The raza was commonly taken to be synonymous with nation. Selected works by sociologist and legal scholar Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875‐1918) and by writer and ensayista Bernardo Canal Feijóo (1897‐1982) will be analysed as influential yet overlooked examples of how ‘the problem of Argentine culture’ could not be separated from the question of nature understood in terms of both physical and human geography. The goal will be to reveal, firstly, the extent to which the notion of the interior as geographical and anthropological desert deeply informed the political vision of the early national period in relation to race and nation and, secondly, how later interpretations of the nation recast American nature as a foundational element of cultural authenticity based on a sentiment of geographical belonging.     

Ecologies of relation: post-slavery,post-apartheid,and rethinking race across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.     

Equality and Postcolonial Claims of Discursive Injury

In Western Europe, individuals and groups increasingly claim that publicly enunciated denigrating racial discourse inflicts an injury upon them, and inscribe this claim under the rubric of equality. By adopting a method of claim‐centered critical theorizing, I discuss the possibilities and implications of reading “claims of racialized discursive injury” as claims to equality. A review of contemporary political theorists concerned with equality and injurious discourse establishes the democratic relevance of claims of discursive injury. A discussion of Judith Butler's theory of performativity then identifies the properties of the injurable subject and of discourse's power. Finally, I specify how a postcolonial stance enables us to grasp the actualization of discursive injury as it resonates between past colonial inequalities and threats of future exclusion or death. This equality‐focused reading sheds light on the transformative potential of claims of racialized discursive injury for resignifying equality in contexts marked by “race” and postcolonialism.     

“This country is rotten”: Australian Nurses in India during the First World War and Their Encounters with Race and Nationhood

This article examines the writings of the nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Services, who served in hospitals in India between 1916 and 1919. Their writings show that they practised differences along three lines: colour, culture, and space. The article reveals the plurality of female engagements with empire, highlighting the inherent irony in the imperialist machinations of white women from the dominion nation of Australia. It also demonstrates how these nurses make a “grave” and basic mistake — as expounded by Ernest Renan in his 1882 Sorbonne lecture — by confusing race with nation. It ultimately argues that the Australian nurses in India during the First World War had been set as pawns by their own government in the greater game of colonial power, by analysing one instance of sexual control, a “scandal” which was censored by the Australian government, but which demonstrated how the latter used gender inequalities as an essential instrument for the perpetration of colonial racism and imperial authority.     

解析日本“格文化”

日本民族自古以来,以单一民族,单一国家,单一语言的形式,生活在几个自然灾害不断的岛屿上,既不像大陆游牧民那样,为寻找新牧场而主动迁移;也不像大陆农民那样,因河流改道等旱涝灾害而被迫迁移;更没有出现过大规模移民造成的"混血"现象。游离于大陆之外的岛国人文地理环境,使日本民族成了在整个"地球村"都难以找到"亲朋好友"的"孤独者",抱团求生存的无奈,造就了其思维方式的整体性,各种"格关系"构成的"格文化"形成了日本的基本社会架构。当巨大的自然灾害摧毁了日本人对故土的眷恋时,"死里逃生"的欲望便会表现为"困兽斗"的对外侵略。因此,解析"格文化"是从深层破解日本民族历史和现实中种种表现因由的重要途径。     

TRANSLATING BANGSA MALAYSIA

This article seeks to interrogate the idea of “race,” nation, and multiculturalism in Malaysia from the perspective of cultural studies, in particular that of cultural translation and postcolonial theory. It employs the concept of cultural translation to examine the processes of cultural change and transfer both from the perspective of state policies and nationalistic discourses as well as the discourses and practices of the people. The central idea is to argue for a more flexible understanding of race identities in the move toward a conceptualizing of Malaysian-ness as a national and cultural identity that takes into account the social practices and experiences, imaginings, and expressions of the people. A reading of Yasmin Ahmad's film Sepet lends credence to the article's assertions about the emergence of trans-racial identities on the ground that contest the pedagogic stability of state-defined race identities. The article enters debates on the politics of race and identity in Malaysia through the controversial state-initiated concept of Bangsa Malaysia, which it here advances as an alternative model of multiculturalism and national belonging that effectively displaces the National Culture Policy as well as other hegemonic cultural formulations and political constructions.