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 readingAuthor: Department of Anthropology (Page 1 of 2)
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 readingThe speaker event, Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Critical Discussion, was held through an online forum due to the global pandemic circumstances and attended by over 150 students and faculty members at Tufts University. Dr. Jemima Pierre and Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, anthropologists from UCLA and Princeton University respectively, introduced the discussion by describing the research they’ve done together as well as the experiences they have had as women of color in the field of anthropology. Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús began by recalling a particular panel they had both spoken in, and described the overwhelming audience attendance at the panel, a large sum compared to that of previous years, as a general response to the recent election of Donald Trump. Many of the “concerned anthropologists,” as she put it, filled the audience of the panel on “White Supremacy” because they viewed the election of Trump as a resurgence of American white supremacy, ignoring the decades-present power dynamics of white hegemony already existing in the country. Addressing the field of anthropology as a whole, Dr, Beliso-De Jesús referred to a general “push back” from anthropologists on the issue of white supremacy, followed with a collective dismissal of the need for the subject to be acknowledged and tackled through dialogue and research. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús blamed some of this on the development of what ethnography has become: a small-scale, experience-based analysis which hinders anthropologists from addressing large-scale arguments regarding systems. The small-scale analyses in regard to white supremacist powers involve individuals and individual aggressions, while larger-scale analyses address the system, and the powers is creates as a whole. This idea of individual-level research and experiences compared to large systems is important to consider when discussing powers of white supremacy, and is a topic which we have covered in depth during class discussions by asking questions such as, what does it mean to look at the individual versus the group? How does this address power, and who represents or is being represented? Dr. Beliso-De Jesús described white supremacy as more than explicitly a system, or individual aggression, but rather a “modality through which social and political categories are lived.” This is a particularly interesting lens through which to view this salient system of perpetuating white hegemony as it conveys the ways it suppresses people and those in which it categorizes and separates people from one another. As we’ve discussed in class, Dr. Beliso-De Jesús attributed these systems of power, including racial patriarchy and gender dynamics, to white colonization. Dr. Pierre described the aggressions commonly viewed as parallel to white supremacy and white colonization through building blocks which create a “foundation for scaffolding for mundane acts of violence.” Dr. Pierre broke these down into what is within us, throughout the world, and in the field of anthropology. She began by describing the “within us” category as perpetuations of white power induced by the contents of our textbooks and curriculums in school and by what is “preached in the pulpits.” The foundations “throughout the world” involve the white European international power system developed through colonization and residing globally as a white-capitalist-dominated economy. The last foundation, involving the field of anthropology, brings us back to discussions we have had in class about racism within the field in terms of hiring policies as well as in terms of research and ethnographic methods.
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.
Continue readingProfessor and anthropologist LaShandra Sullivan has provided a new framework in which we can better understand Black LGBTI+ struggles, activism, and resilience in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In recent years, Brazil has seen significant increases in violence, especially against the Black, female LGBTI+ community. With the recent election of President Jair Bolsonaro, misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric has rapidly proliferated, thus promoting racist attitudes and hate crimes throughout the country. Sullivan eloquently described the term segurar to represent the practice that is characterized by ‘holding on and staying upright’; paving a pathway to one’s future endeavors. Notably, this notion of segurar is unevenly distributed throughout society, making staying afloat a challenging feat for some more so than others.
Continue readingMahtowin Munro is one of the leaders of United American Indians of New England (UAINE), an organization of Native Americans fighting for indigenous rights and against various forms of ongoing indigenous genocide. Some of Munro’s activism with the UAINE includes working for the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and organizing the National Day of Mourning. This talk, “Sinking Columbus and the Mayflower: Indigenous Struggles, Decolonization, and the Necessity of Solidarity,” was part of the larger series “Global Racism, State Violence and Activism,” organized by Tufts’ department of Anthropology, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, Women Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Race Colonialism and Diaspora. Amongst the dozens of insightful pieces of knowledge Mahtowin Munro gave during her talk, one of the most interesting points was the link between the forces that perpetuate settler colonialism and those fueling climate destruction. Munro made sure to emphasize the importance of recognizing indigenous resistance as unequivocally necessary to protect our planet.
Continue readingMariana Mora’s talk, “Cartographies of justice against the racial effects of preemptive criminalization and the politics of absence in Guerrero, Mexico,” discussed how the September 26th, 2014 case of the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa is reflective of larger state forces of dehumanizing and devaluing indigenous lives in Mexico. The violence against these youth is an active process of racialization and criminalization of poverty and indigeneity. Through her profound and moving talk and references to neoliberal policies and the official “narrative” of the September 26th disappearances, Mora focused on the portrayal of indigenous bodies in Mexico as lacking productivity and utility, in turn becoming disposable and devalued in the eyes of the state.
Continue readingOn October 8th, LaShandra Sullivan presented her work on Black Queer Feminism and the Politics of Revelry as a part of a speaker series on Global Racism, State Violence, and Activism. Her talk emphasized practices of state sanctioned violence and racism in Brazil and the resulting activist movements, as she provided historical context, vignettes, and analysis to discuss the contemporary social and political situation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, specifically related to Black and LBGTQ+ people. The event began with the introduction of Audre Lorde’s idea of the erotic: satisfaction, power, and fulfillment brought about by moments of joy. For Sullivan, studying joy through Lorde’s context helped explain how people survive amidst inherently violent conditions. She discussed the assassination of Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman known for her work in poor areas and shantytowns. Her murder resulted in extreme public outcry from certain quarters and drew attention to social movements and political activism in Rio de Janeiro. However, the focus of Sullivan’s talk was not the suffering nor structural inequality that exists within Brazilian society, but rather the communities that formed from these events and bonded through revelry.
Continue readingAs discussed in their paper, “Anthropology of White Supremacy”, Aisha Beliso-De Jesús and Jemima Pierre opened their talk with an analysis and reflection on their experience hosting a panel by the same title at the 2016 American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference. This panel, which highlighted the work of anthropologists of color and addressed “white supremacy as a long-standing global system of power that benefits all white people” and as an embedded system within the discipline of anthropology, was surprisingly well-attended for a topic normally relegated to the fringes of such conferences. The largely white and politically liberal audience of anthropologists in attendance were looking for answers to the recent election of Donald Trump in 2016 and were subsequently unsatisfied as the panelists “addressed white supremacy as a long-standing global system of power that benefits all white people” directly implicating the discipline itself as a part of these systems (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2016, 69). Their talk at Tufts held 4 years later, on the heels of another presidential election, was also highly attended, as professors from many departments, students, and others from the greater Tufts community logged on via zoom to hear these two scholars. Although the outcome of this election was different than the last, the audience on this occasion was decidedly more interested in asking the speakers about their work in relation to their own fields, in interacting with their methodologies and theories, and in relation to the movements for social and racial justice that once again have erupted across this country. This gradual paradigmatic shift can be seen in many ways on Tufts’ campus, whether it be through this speaker series, curriculum audits across the university, various forms of student activism, or the creation of new departments and fields of study. Although this shift in expectations and understandings for this event and in relation to other matters, it must be understood not primarily as a reckoning with the past four years of Trumpism but through the decades long work of BIPOC communities, activists, and academics, like Jemima Pierre and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús to usher in serious reflection, radical change, and reckoning within academic disciplines, institutions, and society at large.
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