From race to citizenship: The indigenization debate in post-socialist Tanzania

Neoliberal economic reforms in post-socialist Tanzania heightened racial as well as anti-foreign hostilities, while liberal political reforms made possible the expression of these antagonisms in electoral politics. Newly formed opposition parties mobilized popular support by advocating anti-Asian indigenization of minority rights. This prompted the ruling party, which had initially denounced advocates of indigenization as racist, to alter its position. In doing so, ruling party leaders redefined the meaning of indigenization, shifting the focus of the debate away from racial issues and Asian control of the economy toward issues of free trade, foreign investment, and foreign economic domination. By implementing indigenization measures targeting non-citizens and featuring anti-liberal economic policies, including tariff barriers, local content laws, and restrictions on property ownership, the government faced the danger of losing international support from foreign donors and international financial institutions. The trajectory of the indigenization debate reveals the role of electoral competition and party formation in shaping race relations and national identity in post-socialist Tanzania. It suggests the need for event-centered studies of the way in which political identities are constructed in processes of conflict within the institutional arenas created by liberal political reforms. Ronald Aminzade is professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His publications concerning the social and political consequences of capitalist development includeBallots and Barricade: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830–1871 (Princeton University Press, 1993) andClass, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth Century Toulouse, France (State University of New York Press, 1981). He is also co-editor ofSilence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2001) andThe Social Worlds of Higher Education (Pine Forge Press, 1999). For making this research possible I would like to thank the University of Minnesota and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which provided support through National Science Foundation Grant #SBR-9601236. I am grateful to James Brennan, Susan Geiger, Erik Larson, Mary Jo Maynes, Marjorie Mbilinyi, Jamie Monson, Richa Nagar, Anne Pitcher, Eric Sheppard, Thomas Spear, Charles Tilly, Eric Weitz, Erik Olin Wright, and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.     

Thinking race,thinking development

This paper challenges the dominant 'colour-blind' stance of development, arguing that the silence on race is a determining silence, which both masks and marks its centrality to the development project. The aim of the paper is to set out a basic framework for exploring this further. Noting many continuities with colonial formations, it identifies three critical dimensions of development which need to be interrogated: its material outcomes; its techniques of transformation; and its modes of knowing. Its analysis of race emphasises the diversity of understandings and the fluidity between them which underlie both their potential for transformation and their resilience. Following Omi and Winant's work on the USA, development is suggested to comprise a process of racial formation, made up of a vast range of diverse and contradictory racial projects which link the meaning of ethnic, racial and national identities to material entitlements.     

Slavery and sloth: A study in race and morality

The Race Problem: Moral and Political Issues in International Perspective

Slavery and sloth: A study in race and morality     

Scientific racism,race war and the global racial imaginary

Abstract

The premise of this paper is the elucidation of a different ontology of global politics and order of the nineteenth century. International relations theory takes for granted a largely ahistorical state-centric ontology, which reifies a specific Eurocentric state and state-system as the embodiment of global politics. Instead, I focus on an alternative ontology of race, racial hierarchy and racial difference as significant for defining the content of an imperial global politics and order. My paper places into context the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as key intellectual elements in defining a political imaginary that influenced the politics of difference and violence. What I show is that this intellectual history reveals a global order that was fundamentally racialised and that global violence was understood and practiced as race wars.     

Manhunt Presidency: Obama,race, and the Third World

Abstract

President Obama’s commitment to a creedal narrative of American exceptionalism and his understanding of the Third World as a space of ontological deficit together made for a presidency that could neither mitigate the structural racism of the United States nor deflect a racist foreign policy premised on an unending war against terror. By examining the murders of two American teenagers – Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki – this essay argues that the very self-fashioning narratives that propelled Obama to the presidency of the United States rendered him incapable of effecting any substantive changes in the racism than animates its domestic and foreign policies.     

Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss race relations and power-building in Brazil. It is well known that the Iberian colonizers developed special ways of imposing their supremacy, dissimulating the skin color standards to provoke some type of beliefs about shade stratification among African descendents, indigenous and mixed-race people. For the first time in South America there are deconstructive projects of that colonial paradigm still alive and strongly embedded in the media landscape. However, new identity politics and attitudes have been emerging amidst this old social cognition. This paper will discuss some speculative thoughts and power-building scenarios on new representations and struggles derived from these lived forms that are emerging in the new racial formations in Latin America. The question is: what will nation-building in the midst of this changing imagery be like? This paper proposes that a civic pedagogy is the only answer to rendering this phenomenon visible.     

Presidents and minority set-aside policies: race,gender and small opportunities

This essay analyzes the impact of presidential leadership on minority set-asides policy. It traces the origins of the policy and shows how presidents have both promoted and reacted to changes in public opinion. It also shows how local politicians use set-asides to facilitate exchanges and cooperation with the business elites. The termination of set-aside policies will lead to a negative effect on government efforts to incorporate minorities into the economic mainstream.