In their talk, “Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Homeland in Germany,” Nitzan Shoshan and Sultan Doughan examine the rise of right-wing extremism in Germany to understand the relationships between heimat, or “homeland,” conceptions of race and difference, and implications of a post-Holocaust world. Shoshan discussed heimat as a central tenet to German identity that is informed by past traditions of German nationalism, and indicative of how various social groups experience and perceive difference. Doughan then analyzed how both German nationalism and a post-Holocaust understanding of anti-Semitism as the pinnacle of persecution are utilized to ignore institutional racism and inhibit the use of racial rhetoric. Ultimately, they addressed a very important question: how can the tension between the universality of rights as asserted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UHDR) and the failure to protect said rights for non-Jewish groups in Germany be resolved? And how do nationalism, anti-Semitism, race, and racism come into play?
Continue readingCategory: Spring 2021 Events
On April 28, Dr. Jonathan Rosa spoke as the final speaker for the semester in the Tufts Anthropology speaker series “Global Racism, State Violence, and Activism.” Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature. His talk, titled “American Apprehensions: A Semiotics of Racial and Linguistic Profiling” focused on the institutionalization of racial and linguistic hierarchies. By drawing on techniques from linguistic anthropology and semiotics, Rosa demonstrated how the co-naturalization of language and race, where certain linguistic patterns and usages are perceived to reflect someone’s racial identity, reflect the institutionalization of whiteness as the unmarked ‘normal’ against which all differently racialized communities are compared against, and subsequently marked as ‘other.’
Continue readingLaurence Ralph’s talk “Global Reckonings with Torture” built on his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence to examine corporeal connections and theoretical divergences in the torture enacted in Chicago police departments and in Guantanamo Bay. His presentation attended to the physical and conceptual legacies of police violence in Chicago, his own approach to ethnographic research, and the interplay of dialogues around domestic and international torture.
Ralph traces his work to analyze and address police violence back to community meetings in which he participated in Chicago, where residents transformed individual experiences of violence into mechanisms of police accountability, particularly through invocations of Jon Burge’s legacy. Burge was a police captain for the Chicago police who frequently employed torture to force confessions, and while his practices were a widely known open secret, they were publicly named during a civil suit by Andrew Wilson. Closely associated with Burge’s regime of torture is a particular device known as the Black Box: a hand-cranked electric generator connected to alligator clips used to elicit confessions. The physical Black Box surfaces in survivors’ rememberings as an icon for potentially memorializing the individually distinct, but fundamentally shared, experiences of torture; as Andrew Holmes, an outspoken torture survivor, says, “the Black Box is everything.”[i] Additionally, Ralph outlines a conceptual Black Box to explain the pattern of Chicago police maintaining silence around the known practices of torture. This theorized Black Box captures their refusal to explore why or how the regime of torture persists, but rather signals their acceptance that fear of retribution and a presumed criminal culpability is adequate justification for violence. Burge figures infamously within the memory of the Chicago residents with whom Ralph dialogues throughout The Torture Letters, but he also serves as an apt example, Ralph argues, of how police torture is maintained as an open secret through inaction and silence/ing of police officers.
Continue readingAt the Global Racism, State Violence, & Activism event on February 5th, 2021, speakers Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese discussed the book they had jointly co-edited: Black Food Matters. Hanna Garth had previously written on food systems in Cuba, formulating a politics of adequacy that emphasizes food availability in terms of how communities define what an ‘adequate meal’ is, as well as emphasizing the labor of acquisition in food systems. Ashanté M. Reese had written on food systems in D.C. and their relations to race, specifically of how Black people survive within an anti-Black food system. We will trace the event’s discussion from the background behind the editing of Black Food Matters to varying interpretations of what food justice means, the ‘climate of anti-Blackness’, and the ties between relationships, ethnography, and emotion.
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