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Antisemitism is a continuous and present problem in Germany, as opinion polls, crime statistics, and the experience of Jews show. While the violent attack on a Halle synagogue in 2019 illustrates how anti-Muslim racism and antisemitism are intertwined, in contemporary discourse the two phenomena are often pitted against each other. This is also because current German debates about antisemitism are inevitably linked to migration, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as well as struggles over the role of Holocaust remembrance. Attempts at joint campaigning are often overshadowed by competition for victimhood and debates around an "imported antisemitism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this "post-postracial" world that conveniently equates Blackness with race—and, in so doing, perpetuates the false notion that white people are raceless beings—it is not always the case that whiteness is rendered visible and thus presented through theater as a category that necessitates critical examination. Yet, with Keene , which traces Kai and Tyler's interracial love story and riffs on Shakespeare's Othello , Anchuli Felicia King accomplishes this difficult task by creating a deeply engaging play that is color-conscious, as opposed to "colorblind," especially with respect to whiteness. In this satirical and timely dramatic work, King invites her audience to consider racial identity and socio-cultural belonging as she highlights negative and damaging aspects of predominantly white professions—academia and performance art—that extend beyond Shakespeare Studies and the theater world. Through Tyler's historically informed dreams, aspects of nineteenth-century Black actor Ira Aldridge's life appear in vivid detail, ultimately revealing life parallels of (sexual) objectification, anti-Black racism, isolation, and betrayal between Tyler and Aldridge, parallels that resonate with the trajectory of Shakespeare's tragic titular character Othello. Thrown against the sharp, racist white backgrounds of their respective worlds, backgrounds so sharp that they hurt physically, psychologically, and emotionally, these three Black male figures stand out, much like the Actor character in Keith Hamilton Cobb's dazzling play American Moor. Considering the dramatic Black genealogy that has developed from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from Othello to Keene , this essay examines the "productive discomfort" generated by King's art. This article challenges white people, and all who operate with internalized white supremacy and anti-Blackness, to examine themselves and interrogate their own racist ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"What exactly does it mean for race not to matter?" Lisa M. Anderson's 2006 essay delivers a profound and far-reaching answer: that, in the "colorblind" dreams of American life or of the theater, the disappearance of race signifies merely the disappearing trick of whiteness. Theater engages what Patricia Hill Collins terms "controlling images," and the power of these shaping fantasies means that we keep, and must keep, answering the question, in shifting contexts. This essay examines two productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream produced in the same year, one in North America (Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington DC), one in South Africa, (Artscape, Cape Town), with particular attention to the casting and presentation of the lovers. In 2012, Ethan McSweeney cast a white Hermia and Lysander and a black Helena and Demetrius for his DC production, dividing the lovers into two (hierarchical) classes occupying different worlds: a creative class (privileged, rebellious, liberal, and white) and a consumerist class (aspirational, fawning, conservative, and black). In this arrangement, with casting and design working together to "tell a story," interracial love was staged as mismatching, a swerving from the natural bias—notably, both after and before the love potion is administered. Fred Abrahamse's South African production of the same year told a very different story, favoring interracial love and a playful awareness of sameness and difference, and showing the lovers not worlds apart but part of the same world. However, here too class and economics (and race) matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that claims of "colorblind" casting detract from the social justice potential of Shakespearean adaptations. Instead, it is precisely through recognizing the history inscribed on bodies, especially through racial difference, that contemporary performances have the potential to challenge audiences to confront ingrained forms of discrimination and the legacies of privilege and of violence we have inherited. A race-conscious interpretation of the casting of Sophie Okonedo as Margaret of Anjou in The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses (2016) allows audiences to consider how the privileges of white masculinity have been linked to the ability to access, own, exchange, and seize the bodies of others. The recognition of the connections between tyranny and white male privilege, furthermore, alerts viewers to the ways the romance of seduction narratives have been used to mask sexual coercion and violent encounters. The tropes of seduction that center on the willing submission of the seduced—which have been commonly used to describe the dynamics between Margaret and Suffolk as well as Anne and Richard—mitigate a sense of the women's lack of self-determination, and turn scenes of coercion into erotic challenges that prove the masculinity of white men. A race-conscious interpretation of the BBC series of the Henry VI tetralogy and Richard III , then, prompts audiences to think critically about women's consent in the midst of civil war and imperial conquest, and helps viewers to realize how seduction narratives have cultivated white male privilege by dignifying subjugation and validating the vulnerability and dispossession of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the ideology of colorblindness swings between the visual and the verbal, it sharply magnifies the challenges black artists already confront in navigating between the problems of image and the problem of language. I submit that, in the post-Reagan contemporary period, the proliferation and diversification of "black graphics" (works that function to make blackness visible by foregrounding text and/as image) indicate the heightened stakes of black artistry within a social context dominated by colorblindness. By examining how different artists have negotiated this context, we stand to enrich our comprehension of contemporary black culture and the innovative modes of resilience demanded of—and produced by—those who are determined to represent their vision of a world in which black freedom is becoming/possible. This essay takes up two such artists: Hank Willis Thomas and Renee Gladman, each of whom began developing their artistic practice within this period. In Thomas's work, we have the output of an artist who is deeply concerned about the ongoing impact of racial discrimination upon black people—indeed, who creates startling conceptual art of bold visual immediacy, intended to promote awareness and understanding of the absurdity and injustice of racism. At the heart of both the absurdity and injustice, in his view, is the fact that we—all of us—continue to attribute to the construct of "race" a reality it does not have. To what extent is this stance informed by the logic of colorblindness, and what might the implications of that logic be for his art? On a different note, Gladman's abstract, intellectually knotty art can also be understood as the product of a creative practice intended to explode the limitations placed upon black people. That said, one of the challenges her work presents is determining whether, when, and how her racial subjectivity informs art that does not often invoke "blackness" in the ways our society has encouraged us to expect. What do the "colorblind" stand to miss in works that seem to embrace its mandate of eschewing racial markers? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay contends that a 1950s-1970s shift from coercion- based to "consent"-based modes of US racial ordering corresponded to a contemporaneous shift from naturalistic to "post-naturalistic" modes of US racial identification. My sketch of these transformations points to the limitations of critical theories that work with naturalistic conceptions of race for understanding post-civil rights era US racial politics. While anti-black racism continues to tend toward naturalistic articulations, other racial exclusions and dominations tend to be enacted on post-naturalistic grounds. I conclude that the United States is a post-naturalistic racial rather than a post-racial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented on the 2006 American fictional book "Apex Hides the Hurt," by African American author Colson Whitehead. Topics within the book, including the renaming of a fictional U.S. town, the relationship between the U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the Governor of the Mass Bay Colony John Winthrop and Puritan allegory, are discussed. The topic of Whitehead as a postracial writer is also discussed.

The article discusses representations of Arabs and Muslims in U.S. mass media following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Particular focus is given to sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims. According to the author, these portrayals serve to depict the U.S. as an enlightened, postracial society while in reality reinforcing the logics used to legitimize racism in government policy and social practice. Details on the use of disclaimers and native informants in news reporting on Arab and Muslim societies are presented. Other topics include Muslim characters and the use of fictional Arab countries in television dramas.

An essay is presented that discusses media representations of urban violence among African Americans and Latinos in Chicago, Illinois in light of portrayals of Native Americans in the novel "Last of the Mohicans," by James Fenimore Cooper. Topics include the thought of theorist Frantz Fanon on colonial violence, the notion of a postracial society in light of the success of U.S. President Barack Obama, and the portrayals of middle class African Americans as decent people in an urban jungle.

An essay is presented that discusses reactions by U.S. black media outlets to the subprime mortgage crisis beginning in 2007. Topics include the minimization of the effects of racism by neoliberal and postracial perspectives, the history of African American media, and articles from black publications including the magazine "Black Enterprise" ("BE"), the internet publication "TheRoot.com," and the magazine "Colorlines." Emphases on personal responsibility are noted.

Between 1946 and 1958, Harlem was home to a small psychiatric facility, the Lafargue Clinic. An interracial institution run entirely by volunteers, the clinic helped expand mental health care into underserved African American communities. Relying upon extant case files, this article examines how the Lafargue staff handled clinical situations with African Americans. In its attempt to forge a new antiracist approach, the staff struck a balance between viewing Harlem patients as psychological products of their unique social context (social psychiatry) and applying modern psychiatric principles to African Americans without adjusting for racial or sociological difference (race-blind universalism). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "What Was African American Literature?" by Kenneth W. Warren is presented. It examines the relationship between race and gender, sexuality, and sex. The author also comments on the idea of post-racialism. Warren's analysis of the 2007 novel "Man Gone Down" by Michael Thomas is considered.