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The essay reads Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism through Sianne Ngai's category of the "stuplime". Unlike the noble emotions elicited by the Kantian sublime, the stuplime causes the ugly feelings of tedium, excitation, fatigue. In the Kantian sublime, viewing subjects experience an overwhelming feeling which impresses on them their own inadequacy; in my reading of stuplime orientalism, the "Orient" becomes the object of this "inadequacy". This shift from inadequate subjects to inadequate objects is one manifestation of the political valence of the stuplime, a means by which control is maintained both of the "Orient" as a colonial project and of the orientalist's mind. As Ngai argues, however, the political potential of ugly feelings is always ambivalent: stuplime orientalism can therefore also be coopted through curation of stuplime orientalist detail, which I deploy in the second half of this essay to read Jade Snow Wong's memoir, Fifth Chinese Daughter. Resisting the urge to summarize Jade Snow Wong's exhaustively descriptive rice passages, I delineate an alternative interpretation to the prevailing view that she merely self-orientalizes, instead suggesting a reading that engages histories of denigrated racial formation and labour precisely through, and not in spite of, stuplime orientalist detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant theoretical approach to exploring ethnic and racial inequality in marketing and consumer research focuses on discrete acts of discrimination that stem from social psychological causes (e.g. prejudice, stereotypes, and negative racial attitudes). It holds limited explanatory power for meso- and macro-structural phenomena that also generate racialized outcomes. An implication is that ethnic and racial inequality can be portrayed as something imposed on market systems rather than a routine feature of their functioning. In response, I introduce and synthesize two variants of Racial Formation Theory (RFT) and propose it as a useful theoretical approach for addressing whether and how organizational and institutional actors in market systems engage in goal-directed action that allocates resources in ways that challenge (or reinforce) ethnic and racial oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harold Maurice Baron (1930–2017) was a researcher and organizer of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965–1967) who made important contributions to racial formation theory and the broader theorization of the relationship between racism and capitalism. Baron produced notable contributions to the study of racism throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as his essays "The Demand for Black Labor," "Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism," and "Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s." I argue that Baron can be productively read as a radical geographer, and in turn, that his corpus offers important theoretical reflections for the task of building antiracist geographies. Baron produced a "geopolitical" interpretation of racism in the United States, highlighting how racist practices were used as problem-solving measures by the hegemonic institutions of postwar capitalism, most notably the capitalist state (at multiple scales), capitalist production, and the imperative to manage the unemployed and racialized poor (particularly via civil society institutions). In this article, I outline Baron's research project as it evolved throughout his life, and offer a geographical interpretation of his work, highlighting his relevance to contemporary theoretical projects within human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory instrumental case study provides a nuanced look at campus policing and its relationship to the well-documented perpetuation of racial inequality in U.S. higher education. To accomplish this broad goal, the study examines the experiences and perceptions of campus policing with one group, Black undergraduatemen. Combining the theoretical perspectives of racial formation theory and boundaries, the major themes describe (a) how race is embedded into campus police practices, namely campus crime alerts and identification checks and (b) social practices utilized by Black undergraduates to evade campus police harm. The analysis supports the perspective that campus policing represents a racial project due to how race is a marker for granting or limiting access to the university and the benefits of campus police protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the racial formation of Filipino communities in Louisiana from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. Topics discussed include the observations made by Filipino intellectual Sixto López regarding the race relations between Filipino fishermen and other white inhabitants in the region, the settlement of Filipinos at Bayou St. Malo village, and the forms of racial segregation and violence associated with the American South particularly Louisiana.

This essay focuses on the the American commercial publishing industry's contribution to the ongoing process of racial formation in the 21st century. Responding to laudatory claims about publishing's increased diversification and drawing on a corpus of book deal announcements, this essay considers the racial discourse circulating through the institutions that produce and promote contemporary literature: how are race and ethnicity represented by an industry whose controlling interests and presumed customers are predominantly white? Which stories, by which writers, make it through the bottleneck of acquisition—what traits do they share, what narratives do they promote, and what, by extension, are the "authorized" stories of race and racism in the United States? Even as more books by or about people of color are considered commercially viable, presumptions about audience demographics (including race, socioeconomic status, and gender) have led to the perpetuation of stereotypical narratives about race and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zainichi Koreans are the descendants of colonial subjects who migrated to Japan from 1910 to 1945, when Korea was part of the Japanese empire. In 1952, the Japanese state stripped them of their nationality status and left them stateless. Like racial minority groups in other societies, Korean descendants still face systemic discrimination in contemporary Japan. Although they were colonized by a non-European power and are not physically distinct from the dominant Japanese population, their situation is often compared to that of African Americans. Yet, for scholars who think that race is necessarily based on "phenotype," anti-Korean oppression cannot qualify as an instance of racism in Japan and the comparison with Black Americans is misguided. This article explores the intellectual and political issues at stake in debates over the use of racial comparisons—what I call the "racial politics of comparison." Examining the views of scholars and Zainichi Korean activists, I show how the latter have drawn inspiration from the Black liberation struggle and built alliances with African Americans in order to resist oppression. I argue that their unique situation forces us to revise the role attributed to phenotype in current definitions of race and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Kan Gotanda’s I Dream of Chang and Eng (2011) is a fictional imagining of the lives of the conjoined Siamese twins Chang and Eng who lived in the United States in the nineteenth century (1811-1874). The play dramatizes the twins’ ascent from monstrosity to social acceptance. Gotanda draws on the transformation of the twins’ status from the exotic poor aliens to the naturalized Americans who own plantations and black slaves and are married to white women at a time in which naturalization of ethnic immigrants was prohibited and interracial marriage was a taboo. This study utilizes Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory and a disability studies framework to analyze Gotanda’s play, proposing that the mutation of the image of Chang and Eng and the redefinition of their disability provide early examples of America’s paradoxical treatment of race and body to serve cultural, national, and political tendencies. The intersection between race and disability in the case of Chang and Eng questions, disturbs, and alters racial and body hierarchies, and confirms that both race and disability are social constructs that take different shapes and meanings in different socio-political contexts.

Drawing upon racial formation theory, this paper argues that Korean adoption was part of a racial project that advanced the model minority myth, helping shape what it means to be Asian in America. This focus on Korean adoption as part of the foundation of the model minority myth departs from traditional renderings that concentrate exclusively on Japanese and Chinese Americans. It also addresses the exclusion of Korean adoptees from Asian immigration history. In making this argument, I incorporate historical context and draw upon Korean adoptee adults' online survey responses (N=107) and in-depth interviews (N=37) to examine the multiple domains that enacted this racial project, including policy, family socialization, and interpersonal interactions, and the effect on Korean adoptees. Implications of this racial project are discussed in relation to contemporary adoptee deportations and citizenship rights advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional gentrification literature has meaningfully demonstrated how economic inequality is perpetuated in urban settings, but there has been a limited understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Drawing from participant observation, interviews, and digital ethnography in the barrio of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that were collected over five years, this study examines how gentrification functions as a racial project and supports new forms of racialization to maintain uneven development along racial lines. Examining the ways that racial formation processes unfurl at the local scale expands conventional understanding of racial formation theory and practice while, simultaneously, illustrating the centrality of place in race-making. This study finds new race and class formations are developed by casting the barrio itself and significant portions of the Mexican American population as "honorary white." Despite colorblind and post-racial ideologies espoused in majority-minority cities like Los Angeles, this landscape fostered emerging racial formations alongside gentrification processes which have increased racial, political, and economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fintech and digital financial services involve the delivery of financial products and services through technology. Fintech companies are part of a financial lending infrastructure claiming to offer an alternative to 'big banks', and are often touted as digitally disruptive technology that is rapidly reshaping financial inclusion agendas and improving the lives of the poor. For many refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Kenya, fintech is often the only viable option for credit or microfinance aid. While refugees are often excluded from credit, the spread of fintech as a solution for direct peer-to-peer aid transfers from the Global North to refugees has resulted in the uneven distribution of credit access and livelihood support. Through fintech, private citizens and groups in the Global North are able to disrupt and subvert refugee assistance, deeming some worthy of aid while others face ongoing exclusion. While fintech remains a hopeful source of greater efficiency and empowerment, the direct transfer of aid money masks profit and corporate power by only extending assistance to those refugees who are appropriately entrepreneurial, that is to say those who will start small businesses and pay back their loans. This paper argues that processes of financial inclusion carried out by and through fintech are still distinguished largely by exclusion. In so doing, this paper highlights a theoretical position that refugee governance is embedded in racial forms of capital accumulation and expropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why haven't students been expected and required to study curricula beyond the Eurocentric perspective? This paper argues for equitable inclusion and representation in curricula and pedagogical practices for the discipline of dance in higher education and explicates why it matters to the discipline's collective identity. Subsequently, this argument suggests that the racial formation in the history of America's education system, including dance education, from the early 1900s through the mid-1930s, is a direct result of its ongoing monocultural and ethnocentric paradigm. Understanding how race has contributed to dance's history and development as a discipline in the academy could offer a resolute path toward a paradigm shift away from its historically ethnocentric model. Faced with debates about essentialist nationalism versus broader enterculturalism, my historiography of dance in higher education intends to offer a critical approach to revisioning strategies necessitating more culturally relevant pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging as a racial formation under specific socio-historical conditions, white supremacy enacted racial projects that institutionalized terror as a function of its hegemonic rule. From the war capitalism of the settler colonialist period in North America to the racial capitalism of that same time frame, extermination of Native Americans and enslavement of people of African descent became instruments of institutionalized white supremacist terror. From colonial to contemporary times white supremacist savage war and white racial framing of policing reinforced institutionalized white supremacist terror. Nonetheless, resistance to and deconstructions of white supremacy contested and continues to contest those racial projects and that white racial frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the Transatlantic Conversations workshop about early American studies which was held by the Society of Early Americanists and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies in Mainz, Germany on October 4-6, 2019. Topics discussed include maritime and transoceanic studies, visual and material culture, and comparative racial formations.

In this paper, we examine the experiences of lower division transfer students at a diverse island campus. We conducted this study to increase our understanding of why lower division transfer students are one of the most at-risk populations in relation to completing their education at Island University. The question "how might the institution better serve these students in order to increase retention" guided our research process. The intended goal was practical—to create new programming that facilitated the process of transferring to Island University and increased student retention—specifically in relation to lower division transfer students. The conclusions drawn from the data also have important implications for a more general understanding of the problem of creating socially just educational systems, which is highlighted by the issue of student retention—especially on diverse campuses that serve economically disadvantaged communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the racial formation of Mongols in The King of Tars, a fourteenth-century Middle English romance, in relation to the Syrian geopolitics and Latin European historiographical records that inspired its composition. Because the romance features overt instances of racialized physiognomy, such as skin color changing across confessional lines and the normalization of whiteness for the Christian body, scholars have overlooked how race operates in the text in less visible ways. Critical interest has largely focused on the familiar, oppositional binary of Christendom versus Islam that characterizes the crusade romance genre, thus emphasizing how the text demonstrates a racialization of religion in the period. However, by analyzing the romance in relation to its historiographical source material, this essay reveals how the less visible, yet still present, Mongol figure — represented principally through the Princess of Tars — operates within a nexus of eastern alterity that drives the colonialist fantasy of Muslim conversion and genocide. The essay coins the term "exotic ally" to describe this particular racial construction of Mongols and capture how a romance that is often read through a white-black and Christian-Muslim binary of racial-religious conflict is engaged in a much more complex process of racial thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the concept of racialization against its critics. As the concept has become increasingly popular, questions about its meaning and value have been raised, and a backlash against its use has occurred. I argue that when "racialization" is properly understood, criticisms of the concept are unsuccessful. I defend a definition of racialization and identify its companion concept, "racialized group." Racialization is often used as a synonym for "racial formation." I argue that this is a mistake. Racial formation theory is committed to racial ontology, but racialization is best understood as the process through which racialized – rather than racial – groups are formed. "Racialization" plays a unique role in the conceptual landscape, and it is a key concept for race eliminativists and anti-realists about race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the german philologist, Kuno Meyer for establishment of a school of Irish philology, biculturalism and transnationalism. Topics include intersection of different racial formations, monolithic monoculture and masculinity and traditionally feminine personifications of Ireland.

Working from the premise that theatre and performance can yield valuable insights about the operations of race, this article explores the dramaturgical strategies Lydia R. Diamond deploys in her 2014 comedy, Smart People, to interrogate the complexities of racial politics in the twenty-first century. I trace how, through the intertwined narratives it weaves for its four protagonists, Smart People engages important debates about the rebiologization of race, the psychic costs of stereotyping, and the vexed representational politics of US theatre, thereby bringing into sharp relief the ways in which narratives of racial progress obscure the material ramifications of race in contemporary life. Even as it trades in the signs of progress the United States has made on race matters, Smart People illustrates for its audiences why a proper reckoning with racial formations, ideologies, attitudes, practices, and beliefs remains as urgently needed as ever. In so doing, the play participates in and extends a long tradition within black expressive culture of using theatre and performance to provoke social action and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists of 'race' studying 'coloured' racial identity in South Africa have exclusively focused on its socio-historical invention throughout the colonial and apartheid eras and its continuity in post-apartheid South Africa as it relates to South African nationals. What has been missing in the literature, however, is how coloured identity is being navigated by foreign-born non-South African nationals in post-apartheid South Africa, such as refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants more generally. Furthermore, migration scholarship in South Africa has paid little attention to this phenomenon to date. This article addresses this lacuna by interviewing first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers residing in Cape Town to explore the extent of their attachment to coloured racial identity in their everyday lived experiences. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to examine the lived racial self-identification patterns of the participants. Convenience and snowball sampling were utilised to select study participants. This article forms part of the results from a larger project. Sixteen participants were recruited and three major themes identified: (1) awareness of one's phenotype; (2) adopting spouse and offspring's racial identity; and (3) embracing colouredness as a positive racial identity. The article argues that, in everyday life, coloured racial identity, which was historically created to categorise South African citizens, is being adopted by refugee and asylum-seeker communities for whom coloured identity was never socio-politically constructed. It is also argued that extra-somatic social and perceptual factors informed the racial self-identification choices of the participants rather than their racial phenotype, which has traditionally informed the racial self-identification practices of South African citizens. Furthermore, the participants redefined coloured as a positive racial identity, effectively displacing negative discourses associated with coloured racial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racialization scholarship identifies the state as a primary site of racial formation. Most of this research envisions the state as a uniform entity, with race-making occurring at a single level of political action. Analysing Latino racialization in immigration debates in Alabama, we argue that state-driven racialization occurs at multiple levels of governance. Although Alabama's 2011 HB56 is widely recognized as state-enforced Latino racialization, we find that the bill resulted from mutually reinforcing racialization practices and policies that played out at multiple levels of immigration governance. These findings not only present a revisionist history of HB56, they suggest that any account of states and racialization requires a nuanced and complex understanding of the state, its institutional structure, and its operations. Individual state institutions may do different work as race makers, but race-making efforts by federal, state, and local actors interact to produce both racialized subjects and racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges academic explorations of Orientalism as an interaction between a white West and an Asian East within the context of American Buddhist communities. Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels. It argues that black Buddhists' writings rework Orientalist discourse to empower black Buddhists within predominantly white communities. These writings challenge assumptions that the normative Buddhist subject is white, male, and heteronormative. Additionally, they portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the "Other" to the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the changing significance of racial theories in the writings of Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth century Philippines. Works by Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced (Quioquiap), and Antonio Barrantes show how racialised understandings of colonial society in the Philippines evolved, from an initial dismissal of hybridism and rejection of mestizos to assertions of the innate superiority of the 'white race' and advocation of a rigid separation between local communities. These developments are considered in the context of the rising popularity of biological determinism alongside an influx of Spanish emigrants into the Philippines. The Spanish settlers used biological determinism to proclaim their role as the sole purveyors of both 'progress' and of a kind of egalitarianism. This article describes these debates and arguments, analyses their inconsistencies, and addresses the Filipino elite's responses to the settlers' racial theories. These responses are read not simply as part of the development of Filipino nationalism, but as reflective of rivalries within the Spanish colonial community in the Philippines, where the locally born found additional reasons to support anticolonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latino political integration into the American body politic is a theme that has entered the public agenda recently. Political leaders, researchers, activists, and media organizations have devoted tremendous energy to understanding the U.S. Latino demographic and its potential political influence. However, there are also tremendous racial and socioeconomic differences, along with varying political and citizenship histories, in American Latino communities. But instead of considering all of these variables, Spanish language ability and other cultural similarities have been treated as signifiers of community homogeneity. This article uses a critical framework to analyze how official political communication from American presidents has worked to create a purposeful Latino abstraction for political efficiency. It also analyzes public papers and speeches from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama to explore how presidents have constructed Latino pan-ethnicism through their rhetoric. To investigate this question, a qualitative content analysis of presidential rhetoric directed toward or about U.S. Latinos is conducted through a theoretical framework of Latino rhetorical styles. The data indicate that (a) Latino pan-ethnicism emerged in presidential rhetoric in the early 1990s, (b) Democratic presidents have deployed pan-ethnic rhetoric more consistently than their Republican counterparts, and (c) Latino pan-ethnicism is the dominant discourse in presidential politics today. This article concludes with a call for further investigation into the political construction of a Latino pan-ethnic identity, and it also contributes to the question of Latino inclusion in the United States by complicating traditional notions of assimilation and political acculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Few studies have focused on the role of Asian Americans in influencing how race is understood in affirmative action debates. However, accounting for the complicating presence of Asian Americans in the racial politics of affirmative action has become increasingly important. Informed by racial formation theory, this critical discourse analysis of selected amicus briefs from the Fisher v. University of Texas Supreme Court cases illuminated how Asian Americans attempted to racialize themselves in efforts to influence the affirmative action debate. Findings highlight a deep ideological divide between Asian Americans engaged in an ongoing discursive struggle over their racialization and affirmative action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyse how intercultural ideas, practices and policies inform Mexico’s current racial formation, and how racial categories and meanings are shaped under neoliberalism and the politics of recognition. I argue that the uncritical use of cultural and ethnic differences as the central focus of interculturalism reifies and reproduces the preoccupation with culture and ethnic differences characteristic of the racial project of mestizaje that held sway for most of the twentieth century. This focus on difference has silenced a much-needed discussion about how neither interculturalism nor multiculturalism has changed existing racial hierarchies and privileges nor curtailed the effects of racism and racial injustice on indigenous people and their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial narratives of neighbourhood decline - stories about threats to neighbourhood resources - were crucial in reinscribing racialised class boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1894, white middle-class property owners in San Francisco’s Powell Street district protested the Board of School Directors’ decision to relocate the city’s only Chinese public school to a condemned building in their neighbourhood, leading to the renovation of the school’s existing structure within Chinatown and new efforts to restrict both Chinese and Japanese urban settlement. I analyse this event to show the importance of space for the race-class intersection. Protesters described the financial, social and moral costs of living near a Chinese school, thereby establishing racial criteria for middle-class identity and mobility. Theories of racial space must consider discursive links between race, class and space because spatial narratives that reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities help to maintain the racial order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying racial formation theory, this research argues that when the political progressive ideology becomes the status quo, it loses its focus on "reform" and "progress" toward equity. Critical discourse analysis of media texts reveals how the ideology evolved into a "racial project" perpetuating institutional racism. When a moment of racial reckoning is presented to challenge the hegemonic politics in this case study, politicians, journalists, and engaged citizens employ discursive strategies to uncover privileges, call out (dis)trusting relationships, and reclaim the dominant narrative around what reform and progress look like. This work demonstrates how political communication unfolds when a progressively maintained infrastructure is revealed to be a system of oppression and where digital platforms allow for a substantial challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks back at a time before the emergence of Latino as a broad ethnoracial category in the U.S. in the 20th century. The author highlights the migration of Puerto Ricans to Chicago, Illinois, after World War II. He examines archives and scholarship on racial formation in order to explore the role of migration and citizenship in the formation of races in the country.

This article documents minority youth sense-making around the concept of diversity and the founding of a youth activist group that seeks spaces for policy thinking and protesting against racial inequalities in selective enrollment schools. Utilizing the sociological theory of racial formation and the concept of racial projects (Omi and Winant in Racial formation in the United States, 3rd edn, Routledge, New York, 2014), this article draws on data from a critical ethnography. The author argues that youth activists offer a critical perspective for researchers and policy-makers in the face of neoliberal school choice policy. Findings reveal that youth activists understand a lack of diversity as racial imbalance in high status schools, and that they expose structural inequalities that are embedded in policy structures and processes such as selective enrollment high schools. Implications are discussed to show how re-conceptualizing policy as a racial formation can bring structural and institutional racist practices into view in hopes of transforming district policies to offer access to high quality schools for all students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars across disciplines have argued that race and religion are co-constituted in part because of their historical relationship. The concept of racialization, particularly as it is housed in racial formation theory, is the way that most empirical research in sociology has approached analysis of this co-constitution. Such analysis however is often at the expense of empirically accounting for the historical relationship between race and religion. In this article, I argue for stronger empirical consideration of this historical relationship in research on racialization. I discuss what is at stake in deeper empirical analysis and what scholars gain by using religion as a starting point to understand racialization today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]