Search

This article keys in on antiblackness and distinguishes it from racism, laying bare the false universality of the Social and the Human: Racism takes place in the Social among the Human, while antiblackness continually casts Black people and Blackness out of those foundational modern categories whose definitions derive from the violent expulsion. To delineate, the article analyzes two paradigmatic texts that strive to deal uncompromisingly with antiblackness but through the language of racism: George Yancey's Who Is White? and "The Combahee River Collective Statement." The article concludes by suggesting the need for a Fanonian leap of invention and an all-encompassing abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces the special issue, which originates from a two-day symposium on race and transnationalism. It proposes a particular angle from which to consider the following seven articles and the study of race and racism in general. In response to sociology and neighboring disciplines’ mounting predictions of ‘Black exceptionalism’ and imminent assimilation of Asians and Latina/os into whiteness/non-Blackness, a two-part alternative approach is briefly suggested: (1) critically engage the most theoretically and politically challenging scholarship in Black studies (notably outside sociology) that asserts the singularity of anti-Black racism; and (2) think through the social positions of non-Black peoples of color in light of and not losing sight of the first part. An overview of the special issue follows. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reviews theoretical developments in the sociology of the US racial state since the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's groundbreaking Racial Formation in the United States. After briefly outlining their theory, it surveys the still diminutive literature and concludes by pointing to promising future directions, drawing on insights from other disciplines and incipient stirrings from within sociology. Destabilizing the unquestioned assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, the article reconceptualizes it as an empire-state. This turn establishes a firmer footing for the claim that the United States is intrinsically a racial state and yields a generative framework for reconsidering and stimulating scholarship toward more effective analysis and critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, the social sciences have turned decidedly away from essentialist and reductionist ways of theorizing race and its articulations with nation and class. Though invaluable in advancing the social-scientific study and critique of race and racism, this turn has led many to conceptualize race increasingly as an empty signifier whose articulations with nation and class are wholly a matter of contingency This article suggests that we reengage the project of theorizing the insistent, historically recurrent articulations of race, nation, and class without falling into the old traps of essentialism, reductionism, and ahistoricism. Taking colonial Hawai'i as an example, this article analyzes how these categories articulated to racialize Japanese and Filipino migrant labor differentially in the age of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, the social sciences have turned decidedly away from essentialist and reductionist ways of theorizing race and its articulations with nation and class. Though invaluable in advancing the social-scientific study and critique of race and racism, this turn has led many to conceptualize race increasingly as an empty signifier whose articulations with nation and class are wholly a matter of contingency This article suggests that we reengage the project of theorizing the insistent, historically recurrent articulations of race, nation, and class without falling into the old traps of essentialism, reductionism, and ahistoricism. Taking colonial Hawai`i as an example, this article analyzes how these categories articulated to racialize Japanese and Filipino migrant labor differentially in the age of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past two decades, the scholarship on prewar Hawai`i, particularly of its workers, took a much needed critical turn toward the study of racial and class confl icts, challenging the long-standing dominance of the assimilationist framework. However, an anachronistic deployment of a pan-Asian racial category and an attenuated conceptualization of racism have impeded the turn, an important consequence of which has been an inadequate grasp of the racial inequality and division between Japanese and Filipino workers. I argue that a key to overcoming these shortcomings is the abandonment of a unidimensional conceptualization of racism that underlies not only the study of Hawai`i but also much of the sociology of race. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, this essay seeks to demonstrate why and how Japanese and Filipino workers faced different racisms, different not only in intensity but in kind, and what differences they made in relation to the production and reproduction of working-class racial inequality and division. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]