Browsing by Subject "Racialization"
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Item Destabilizing racialized geographies : the temporality of Blackness in Puerto Rico(2016-05) Machicote, Michaela Andrea; Arroyo, Jossianna; Leu, LorraineIn this thesis I analyze the way in which the de-colonial construction of Puerto Rico, and subsequent acquisition by the US as a territory, came to inform and create a whitened identity through the confinement, historicization of African influence, and erasure of Puerto Rico's Black population/heritage component via the narrative of mestizaje and mulataje. I look specifically at Loíza; Loíza is a city celebrated by Puerto Rico as a site of authentic Blackness and exemplifies efforts by the state to commodify and restrict the movements of Black Bodies. It is in these marginalized and racialized spaces that I explore the possibility of self-making and Black identity in Loíza, Puerto Rico.Item Dispersions : black communities and urban segregation in Porto Alegre, Brazil(2006-12) Pólvora, Jacqueline Britto; Vargas, João Helion CostaIn Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the entrance of the city, the Workers Party (PT) implemented a re-urbanization project called the Entry of the City. This project included an investment in urban infra-structure and formalization of “informal” spaces where 3200 poor families live, most of them Black and Afro-descendent people. These families were removed from their original places and were settled in housing projects in the same neighborhood. This dissertation is a study of the historical processes of inclusion and exclusion, and removal and resettlement of Black families in Brazilian urban spaces. I use Porto Alegre both to discuss general trends of racial politics in Brazilian urban spaces and to discuss how poor and Black people are continuously involved in historical processes of racialization promoted by the Brazilian society. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Entry of the City, this dissertation analyzes different levels of racialization of Black people and their spaces, as well as different levels of segregation within segregated areas. This dissertation is divided in four sections in which I demonstrate: a) the history of urbanization of Porto Alegre and the genesis of the formation of this space as a process of removal and dispersion of Black families; b) the contemporary processes of this history that disperse and segregate Black people; c) how everyday life of the Entry of the City reinforces the processes of segregation of Black people despite the generalized poverty that affects the residents of that area; and d) how common senses about Black families and other poor people are expressed in the local newspaper and contribute to racialize Black people as well as poor neighborhoods. This dissertation presents three main arguments: first, I argue that race is an independent category that must be used to analyze urban segregation in Brazil. Second, Porto Alegre displays a disperse segregation instead of configuring ghettos in its space. Third, the exclusion and segregation of Black families within segregated areas is because of and constitutive of the dynamics of the racialization processes of Black families that are present in Brazilian urban spaces.Item Leaving the United States for the "land of liberty" : postbellum confederates in Mexico(2011-08) Kinney, Emily Rose; Guridy, Frank Andre; Butler, MatthewAt the end of the US Civil War, thousands of former Confederates refused to live in a Reconstructed South, packed up their belongings, and left the country. The vast majority of these Southerners went to Mexico, Brazil and British Honduras. This thesis focuses on a settlement of Confederate families in Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico. By studying one settlement in depth, I demonstrate that the migrants were not all economic refugees or war refugees who uniformly returned to the United States. Instead, it shows the complex ideologies that prompted the creation of the settlement and promoted its development. The efforts of the settlers hinged heavily on race, making the settlement an important place to examine the way that race is created and utilized internationally. Accustomed to framing themselves as white in opposition to US blacks, the Southerners in Mexico had to reconstruct their whiteness in opposition their non-white Mexican neighbors. At the same time, they shaped an exoticized form of whiteness for their “Spanish” Mexican neighbors in order to prove to their friends and family in the United States that Mexico was a sufficiently civilized place.Item Racialization, representation, and resistance : Black visual artists and the production of alterity(2003-05) Harrison, Bonnie Claudia; Walker, Sheila S.Racialization, Representation, and Resistance: Black Visual Artists and the Production of Alterity queries the relationship between Black visual representation and Black social and cultural politics. For the past two centuries Black visual artists throughout the African Diaspora have painted, sculpted, and filmed images of blackness inspired, funded, and otherwise supported by progressive patrons and institutions. Largely produced outside of mainstream art worlds, these visual representations focused on Black social and cultural politics and Black alterity more than mainstream tastes or stereotypes. As the coherence of Black social and political movements and resources declined in the late twentieth century, however, commercialization and the mainstream art world had increasing influence on Black visual culture. These changes created intense resistance and debate about the politics of visual representation throughout the Black Atlantic, particularly in the United States, Cuba, and the United Kingdom. Ethnographic observations, interviews, and gallery talks with artists in these three nations, including John Yancey, Vicky Meek, Marcus Akinlana, Kara Walker, Michael Ray Charles, Gloria Rolando, Anissa Cockings, and Andrew Sinclair, along with cultural and historical comparisons, provide fresh insight into the relationship between Black visual representation and contemporary Black social and cultural politics.Item Rednecks, revivalists and roadkill : the construction of whiteness in an Appalachian town(2010-08) Baker, Hannah Rose Pilkington; Hartigan, John, 1964-; Stewart, Kathleen C.This report examines the construction of whiteness in Appalachia through a close study of two New Year’s Eve celebrations in a small community in Brasstown, North Carolina. By examining these two celebrations, I draw out questions of race and racialization that have been largely overlooked in the study of Appalachia and illustrate the connections between the construction of a whitewashed Appalachian identity and the construction of an equally pale national identity. This report challenges the idea that Appalachia as a region is “racially innocent” and therefore does not play a role in discussions of race in America. On the contrary, I show that Appalachia’s position as a site of production of a national culture and identity means that in the context of Appalachia, race and racialization demand scrutiny as a means for understanding what “whiteness” is.Item ¡Saludando al tambor! : el nuevo movimiento de la Bomba puertorriqueña(2015-05) Abadía-Rexach, Bárbara I.; Gordon, Edmund TayloeDrawing upon Critical Race and racialization theories, this dissertation aims at providing a different approach to “The New Puerto Rican Bomba Movement”. Bomba is a musical genre of African roots developed in Puerto Rico upon the arrival of African populations during the slave trade in the sixteenth century. In the last two decades, a proliferation of Bomba groups and schools performing and teaching this peculiar rhythm has taken place. Through the study of Bomba, I seek to contribute to the understanding of racial dynamics in Puerto Rico, and their intersectionalities with class, gender, and national discourses. Through extended participant observation of Bomba performances, unstructured and structured interviews with Bomba musicians, teachers, and scholars and archival research, my purpose is to question and explore constructions of race in Puerto Rican music, and show how processes of racialization operate both socially and politically in the island. In this sense, Bomba will allow me to analyze how Puerto Rican national identity has been constructed in recent years, which elements have been adopted as a national heritage and which have been forgotten or rejected. At the same time, it will shed light on how national discourse aligns or deviates from current social conditions and racial relationships. Through the case study of “The New Puerto Rican Bomba Movement”, I attempt to unravel two interrelated paradoxes: (1) despite hegemonic discourses on Puerto Rican nationalism, which portray the Puerto Rican subject as mixed race, most Puerto Ricans self-identify racially as white or Black. (2) Based on the assumption of a racially mixed national subject, Puerto Rico reaffirms itself as a racial democracy, “The great Puerto Rican family”. This discourse contrasts with daily speeches and practices that emphasize racial exclusions and inequalities. Paradoxically, despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are considered a racially mixed nation, in the 2000 Census, 80.5 % self identified as white, whereas 8 % chose to identify as Black. A decade later, the results of the 2010 Census showed that 12.4 % of the population identified as Black and 75.8 % as white.Item The American Muslim Dilemma: Christian Normativity, Racialization, And Anti-Muslim Backlash(2012-10-19) Kamran, OmarThis thesis investigates the continued hostilities and increasing backlash against the American Muslim community in the United States from a critical perspective that centralizes the racialization of Muslims and Muslim looking-people. The increasing anti-Muslim backlash against American Muslims warrants the need for a critical examination and analysis of the roots of this backlash and why, almost 11 years after September 11th, 2001, conditions for Muslims and Muslim looking-people are worsening. The term Islamophobia has been conceptualized and defined differently by various scholars, contributing to an analytical dilemma of how Muslims rationalize and resist anti-Muslim backlash. Therefore, the concept of racialization provides a fuller perspective and understanding as to why Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs, South Asians, and African Americans have been subjected to rising suspicion, surveillance, imprisonment, and violence in a post 9/11/2001 era. This thesis posits the notion of the white Christian Normative, an inherent Christian bias embedded deep within the racialized social system of the United States. This Christian Normative has its roots in the colonial confrontation between European colonizers and Indigenous populations in what is now considered the United States and has maintained its significance in impacting the life chances of non-white non-Christian minorities ever since. This thesis argues that it is the Christian normative that drives and sustains the anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. The anti-Muslim backlash that is growing stronger in the United States is also theoretically conceptualized within this thesis. This thesis utilizes qualitative data collected from 23 in-depth interviews with Arab and South Asian American Muslim college students between the ages of 18 to 35 years from the Midwest as its empirical basis.Item The Racialization of Day Labor Work in the U.S. Labor Market: Examining the Exploitation of Immigrant Labor(2012-10-19) Murga, Aurelia LorenaIn early October 2005, just over a month after Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast region of the United States, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin asked local business leaders how he was to ensure that the city was not overrun by Mexican workers. These remarks vocalized the concerns of many regarding Latino immigrant workers to post-Katrina New Orleans. Likewise, they foreshadowed the obstacles faced by Latino reconstruction workers in the city. This dissertation examines Latino day labor participation in New Orleans, Louisiana by focusing on the racialized experiences of immigrant reconstruction workers. There is an established literature on racial/ethnic immigrant labor market inequality, addressing Latino wage penalties and occupational segregation as well as recent studies focusing on the gendered and racialized experiences of Latina and Chicana domestic workers in the U.S. However, established demographic research on day labor participation in the U.S. has failed to capture fully how day laborers experience "race" and how this has impacted their integration into the labor market. The broad questions guiding this dissertation are: "What are the racialized experiences of day laborers?"; "How does the process of racialization shape the work experiences of day laborers?"; "How do day laborers negotiate these experiences and interactions with co-workers, employers, and their community?" This dissertation focused on a 23 month ethnographic research and 31 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Latino day laborers in post-Katrina New Orleans. This research underscores the crucial role that Latino day laborers play as non-standard workers in a racialized labor market, historically organized along a black/white continuum. The findings demonstrated day laboring is a process that takes place in racialized spaces, where day laborers exert emotional work. Findings also demonstrated how "race" impacts the day-to-day work experiences of day laborers, and how immigration status is a racialized social characteristic that allows for exploitation of immigrant workers. Finally, this dissertation examined the resistance strategies used by day laborers, and their organizing efforts toward achieving social justice in post-Katrina New Orleans.