Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy

Systems, features, figures: Approaches to language and class vs. language and race

“…It often concentrates on contexts in which the term “race” is prominent—like Nazi Germany, South Africa, Cuba, Brazil, and the US—and on the experiences of those who are understood as racialized. Presenting race in this way, as a historically and geographically delimited phenomenon, runs counter to scholarship that argues that race and racialization are “constitutive of all modern relations,” a sediment of European colonialism that prefigures nation, sexuality, and class (Beliso‐De Jesús & Pierre, 2020: 66). This is one of the tensions in the field—whether race is about experiences, understandings , and processes of racialization and about figures like racists , or whether it is about formations of dispossession that operate across broad geographic and temporal timescales and are not anchored in the intentional acts of individuals.…”

Decolonizing Visual Anthropology: Locating Transnational Diasporic Queers‐of‐Color Voices in Ethnographic Cinema

“…By revisiting films from Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón‐Muntaner, and Richard Fung, I call for a much‐needed expansion of existing boundaries of ethnographic film and visual anthropology. Building on recent critiques of heteronormative patriarchal whiteness of anthropology (Basu 2008; Behar 1993; Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre 2020; Merryman 2020; Rana 2020), I ask: What does inclusion look like for ethnographers of color, for immigrants, for queers‐of‐color, for people like me?…”

“…When developing curriculums, curating film festivals, and offering peer‐review feedback, I make a sincere effort to address this absence. Unfortunately, like many other queers‐of‐color scholars, I feel pretty powerless when confronted with disciplinary hegemonies and regimes of power that work to sustain existing racial and gender hierarchies (Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre 2020). As Junaid Rana (2020, 99–101) recently pointed out, the history of anthropology is steeped in global white supremacy, Enlightenment values, and Christian theology.…”

“…2017). Questioning the hegemony of whiteness and heteropatriarchy within ethnographic film and visual anthropology echoes the recent calls to “recognize and interrogate how the discipline of anthropology participates in practices and ideologies of white supremacy” (Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre 2020, 70; see also Bonilla and Thomas 2020), as well as broader societal conversations we are currently engaged in on the subject of racial justice along with LGBTQI+ and Indigenous rights.…”

Response

“…As ‘we’ continue to report, however, anthropology remains an intellectually gated community. Only a tiny fraction of African-diasporic scholars, equating to tokens, are included in syllabi (Beliso-De Jesus and Pierre 2019). Diasporic, subaltern, women or ‘Excentric’ (Harrison 2008) anthropologists must retain self-respect for their own, historically distinct, imaginations and abundantly published intellectual traditions, whether or not whites are deaf to them.…”