Racism: Less is More

Racism has been in sharp decline in recent decades yet the word, as accusation, is used more than ever. The word/idea needs to be more restrictively defined and kept for when it is really needed. When almost everyone is a racist, no one is. To this end we need to distinguish more clearly between the greater comfort people often feel among familiar people and places and active hostility towards outsider ethnic groups. We also need a more discriminating language to describe the spectrum of discrimination. Prejudice, clannishness—even in some instances discrimination itself—should be regarded as sentiments and behaviours that are distinct from proper racism.     

Writing the Story of the Last Nawab of Bengal’s English Family

On 15 May 1870, the Nawab of Bengal married Sarah Vennell, a seventeen-year-old English chambermaid, in a Shia Muslim wedding ceremony, making her his fourth permanent or Nikah wife. They lived in England for ten years, and had six children. The Nawab’s liaison with what British officials called ‘a woman of mean extraction’ was a contributing factor when he was persuaded by the British government to abdicate in1880, give up many of his claims and allow the permanent abolition of his title. In that same year the Nawab formed a liaison with another maid and later returned to India with this maid and his and Sarah’s four surviving children, leaving Sarah in England. Their youngest son, my grandfather, changed his name and emigrated to Australia in 1925. This essay describes my gradual discovery in Australia of my Indian ancestors and the issues I confronted when trying to write their story. It includes an extract in which I describe my grandfather’s childhood in India.     

Global populism and its 1890s Southern United States antecedent: the vexing case of Thomas E. Watson and William Faulkner’s literary intervention

ABSTRACT

Contemporary global populism combines systemic critique of power inequities with a politics of resentment. This conjunction under conditions of modernity gives rise to populisms whose twenty-first-century manifestations markedly exhibit features of Southern variants of the 1890s populism that briefly convulsed United States politics. Volatile mixtures of systemic critique and resentment politics, of progressive and proto-fascist tendencies, are vividly illustrated in the career of Thomas E. Watson (1856–1922), a prominent Georgia lawyer and politician whose populist rhetoric moved from advocating racially inclusive class solidarity to embracing virulent racist nativism. This trajectory, revelatory of susceptibilities to nativist authoritarianism also prominent in many currents of contemporary global populist politics, raises the question of whether and how literary art and humanities scholarship might work to disentangle justified revolt from reactionary resentments. William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) and The Hamlet (1940) offer diverse models of such efforts.     

Anti‐immigrant,politically disaffected or still racist after all? Examining the attitudinal drivers of extreme right support in Britain in the 2009 European elections

The elections to the European Parliament (EP) held in June 2009 marked a breakthrough for the extreme right British National Party (BNP), while in other European states extreme right parties (ERPs) similarly made gains. However, the attitudinal drivers of support for the BNP and ERPs more generally remain under‐researched. This article draws on unique data that allow unprecedented insight into the attitudinal profile of ERP voters in Britain – an often neglected case in the wider literature. A series of possible motivational drivers of extreme right support are separated out: racial prejudice, anti‐immigrant sentiment, protest against political elites, Euroscepticism, homophobia and Islamophobia. It is found that BNP support in the 2009 EP elections was motivationally diverse, with racist hostility, xenophobia and protest voting all contributing significantly to BNP voting. The analysis suggests that the BNP, which has long been a party stigmatised by associations with racism and violent extremism, made a key breakthrough in 2009. While racist motivations remain the strongest driver of support for the party, it has also begun to win over a broader coalition of anti‐immigrant and anti‐elite voters.     

The persecution of German Romanies: the case of Osnabrück, 1933–46

Studies of racial persecution in Germany, particularly during the Nazi period, now appear on almost a daily basis, so that every victimized minority has received attention. Antisemitism remains the main focus of research but the Romanies have now begun to attract scholars. While historians have studied Jews in virtually every location and over short time periods, they have tended to examine the situation of the Romanies at the national level using a longer time frame, recognizing the continuities of racial persecution that link the Nazi years with the rest of the twentieth century. Panayi brings out these longer-term patterns by focusing on the case of Osnabrück. He begins with an account of the historiography of Romanies at both the local and national level, and contrasts this with the general attention that German history of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the Third Reich, has received. The narrative then moves on to use the limited information available on the Osnabrück Romanies to carry out a detailed examination of the realities of their everyday life and the attitudes of the authorities towards them in the town between 1933 and 1946. Panayi’s study falls into the German social history approach of Alltagsgeschichte, which uses the specific to draw out the realities of the general national picture.     

Listening to melancholia: Alice Walker's Meridian

ABSTRACT

Alice Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), explores both the ways in which racist societies initiate and exacerbate melancholia and how this psychological dynamic can and must be overcome. The novel posits not a simple ‘cure’ but rather a process of questioning and learning from the past and one's painful attachments to it. In this way it negotiates scholarly concerns about psychoanalytic theory, as manifest particularly in literary criticism and critical race studies. Far from normalizing a form of identity focused on the past, this experimental novel depicts psychological transformation as an effort that requires the willingness to untangle the relationships involved in one's present, one's past and broader systems of social injustice.     

The dilemma of ‘racial profiling’: an abolitionist police history#

While the conquest of the world by the concept of ‘racial profiling’ was a major victory for activists, real victory for racial justice at the hands of the police was foreclosed, for the notion is a Trojan Horse. Snuck inside this term developed for radical purposes are distinctly conservative propositions. This paper analyzes the ways the individualizing implications of the concept of racial profiling mask the depth and reach of the state’s commitment to containing resistance and eliciting consent by deploying technologies of race. Against ‘racial profiling’s’ suggestion of incidental, improper police practice, this essay offers a history of the U.S. police that shows their deep and abiding commitment to reproducing race and racism. Tracing police history in relation to colonialism and slavery, the essay argues that the history of this fundamental instantiation of state racism leaves no hope for successful reform, but rather demands a practical and thoughtful commitment to police abolition.     

After Michael Banton: some reflections on his contributions to the study of race

ABSTRACT

A year after the death of Michael Banton, Solomos focuses on his contributions to the study of race and ethnic relations. Over a period that began in the 1950s and continued until his death on 22 May 2018, Banton continued to make important contributions to a number of scholarly areas, including the study of race relations in urban communities, the history of racial thought, policing and community relations, and the understanding of race equality policies. His work in all of these areas has helped to shape a field of scholarship and research, and is likely to remain a point of reference for future generations of researchers. In reflecting on Banton’s varied contributions Solomos argues that there is much to be gained from engaging with his work. He concludes by exploring some of the critiques of his key contributions.     

‘Strangers in their own land’: Powellism’s policy impact

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Solomos provides an account of the impact of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech on policy agendas about race relations and immigration. He argues that Powell’s intervention helped to shape policy frames around race and immigration in its immediate aftermath and beyond. By exploring the impact of the speech on the policy climate, his paper argues that perhaps the most important aspect of the speech is the way it helped to shape the policy agendas of both the Conservative and Labour parties, even as Powell himself was marginalized from mainstream politics. He concludes by suggesting that Powell’s intervention links up with contemporary debates and preoccupations about race and immigration.     

Antisemitic Europe and the ‘Third Way’: The Ideas of Maurice Bardèche

Abstract

Maurice Bardèche is an important neo-fascist writer whose ideas derive from those of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach. After 1945 he argued that right-wing thought had been ghettoized and even imprisoned by a post-Nuremberg liberal political establishment. In the face of a US military and cultural occupation of Western Europe and an encroaching Communist Soviet menace, Bardèche argued for a united European ‘third force’ to confront these two enemies. His dream was of a fascist-ruled Europe that would regenerate and defend the continent and the West against Communism and liberalism. Organic and idealist fascist states, without the faults of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, would implement a moral revolution, bolster economic affairs and prevent Europe being swamped by foreign goods, such as Asian electronics. He regretted Europe's membership of NATO and its being sucked into Cold War conflicts in the Middle East and in support of Israel. Europe's and fascism's enemies were blamed for all their ills, and a Jewish conspiracy was blamed for its campaign against the world whether in the guise of US financial power or through its control of Bolshevism, the latter being judged responsible for terrorism and subversion in the developing world. Bardèche was purely a warrior of the pen, and was important primarily for providing a link between fascism and neo-fascism and a training ground for new fascist writers in his journal Défense de l'Occident.