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- Convenors:
-
Thiago Pinto Barbosa
(Leipzig University)
Sina Emde (Leipzig University)
Catherine Whittaker (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Mihir Sharma (Universität Bremen)
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- Chair:
-
Judith Albrecht
(Humboldt University)
- Discussants:
-
Katharina Schramm
(University of Bayreuth)
Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths, University of London)
- Format:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract:
Renewed calls to address racism within anthropology have often been met with resistance. This roundtable discusses how the discipline could be better aligned with anti-racism, tackle the rise of racist discourses, and contribute to intersectional justice.
Long Abstract:
Racism has been a contentious topic in anthropology. While cultural anthropology is often perceived in its historical foundation as a progressive response to scientific racism, recently various critical voices have called attention to the blindspots of the Boasian liberal anti-racism as well as to the overall need to address the many legacies of racism in anthropology. Essentializing conceptualizations of difference, Eurocentric biases, the colonial imprint in our methodology, and the lack of diversity among scientific staff are examples of persistent matters of concern in our discipline. Furthermore, the current global political context calls for an increased analytical attention to racism. In Germany particularly, the political mainstreaming of anti-migration discourses as well as the rise of anti-Muslim racism and its affectively loaded interlocking with anti-semitism demand serious anthropological engagement – if anthropology is to be response-able vis-à-vis political and societal concerns. However, initiatives to align anthropology with anti-racism often face reticence or even resistance by some in our scientific community, at the same time that critical scholarship on racism and colonialism has been increasingly targeted by reactionary currents.
To question such difficulty, this roundtable convenes practitioners of anthropology (including SKA and EE) to discuss their experiences, strategies, and hopes in regards to the critique of racism (with)in anthropology. We will ask: How did/does/can or should anthropology respond to racism? How can we anthropologists build a more inclusive community of practice and anchor our discipline in an anti-racist path? Further, how can anthropology contribute to intersectional justice?
Accepted contributions:
Contribution short abstract:
Centering Whiteness as a subject of study in anthropology shifts the focus to privilege, offering a strategy to unpack systemic inequality. This approach challenges norms by showing how racism sustains both the disenfranchisement of BIPOC and the empowerment of White people.
Contribution long abstract:
Anthropology, due to its colonial legacy that is very present today, is not like some other disciplines. In comparison to history, for instance, where foregrounding subaltern or lower-class subjects, non-European countries, or simply not looking through the eyes of the “victor” is considered decolonial/anti-racist, this is almost the norm in anthropology. However, unlike history, this does not automatically render anthropological work decolonial or anti-racist. In situations where a White anthropologist is studying among non-White interlocutors, critiques have suggested methods such as co-authorship or giving back to the community as a reparative or justice-oriented strategy. Other cases where a non-White anthropologist is studying within their own community are generally considered less problematic, although their credibility to maintain critical distance from their “own culture” has become suspect. Although there are so many other ways of “doing anthropology,” these two archetypes have vastly made up the canon as well as how we discuss the ethics of field research. In both cases, the study objects are considered non-White people, the anthropological subject par excellence.
Within this juncture, I propose the study of Whiteness in anthropology as a decolonial/anti-racist strategy. If anthropological fieldwork always has the potential to do harm and disempower our interlocutors, why not take this risk among interlocutors whose power positions can take it, while making inequality and injustice visible? In this case, anti-racism is not only about showing how racist inequalities disenfranchise BIPOC but also about how they enfranchise White people.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper discusses the limitations and risks of researching (anti-)racism as an affected person and how anthropology as a discipline can respond to this and create a safer environment for this group of anthropologists.
Contribution long abstract:
Fieldwork is often strenuous, but after my nine months of fieldwork in Cape Town, where I researched the construction and the effects of racialized, especially Whitened spaces, I was more than exhausted. The main reason for this could be that one of the methods I applied was action research. I used my Black body as a research object to try to understand and disrupt the complex dynamics of Whitened and exclusionary spaces. For example, by going into shops or cafés known for treating Black customers unfriendly, or by walking through a predominantly White neighborhood.
Although this method helped me to grasp these spaces, especially with regard to embodied knowledge, it also made me vulnerable. It exposed me to countless situations of racism, causing me to experience subtle and explicit forms of racial violence.
This paper questions the costs, limitations, and risks of (anti-)racism research as an affected person. It also offers suggestions and possible approaches for how the discipline can prepare, support, and guide PoC scholars (especially junior scholars) who are conducting anti-racist research, and how it can create safe(r) environments for them during fieldwork and beyond.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on my experience researching and teaching on racism and whiteness in the U.S., Germany, and Italy, I reflect on how the blind spots of liberal anti-racism manifested themselves in these different contexts during divisive political times. I conclude by discussing ways out of this impasse.
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution draws on my experience as an anthropologist who has researched the workings of racism and whiteness in the U.S. South and, since 2020, has been based at a German research institute focusing on critical studies of diversity and migration. Reflecting back on a decade of exchange and training across North American, Italian, and German academic institutions, I discuss some of the “blind spots of liberal righteousness” (Smith 2017; Lanari 2022) which, as I see it, stand in the way of forging an anti-racist anthropological praxis. These blind spots were revealed on occasion of major events shaking the world and the anthropological public sphere – from Trump’s 2016 election to the war in Gaza, yet they have long been part of daily life in these academic microcosms. They include a) instances of disciplinary “boundary-work,” whereby PhD students engaging with Black and Indigenous studies and other intellectual traditions are labeled “too radical” and encouraged to do “proper” anthropological work; and b) a tendency to project racism onto the actions of ignorant working-class voters and other “repugnant cultural others” (Harding 1991), be them Trump supporters living in Atlanta’s suburbs or “narrow-minded” residents of Italian small towns, both of them featured in my research. To consider ways out of this impasse, I turn to my experience teaching anthropology and (anti)racism at the University of Göttingen, reflecting on our collective efforts to recognize and name the multiple racism(s) structuring our worlds and build intersectional forms of “thick solidarity” (Shange and Liu 2018).
Contribution short abstract:
Taking the German Colonial Records housed by the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam as point of departure, I explore the possibilities of my ongoing ethnographic work to contribute to anti-racism and intersectional justice in anthropology.
Contribution long abstract:
Taking the German Colonial Records in the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam as ethnographic object and point of departure, I explore the possibilities of my ongoing research on violence, witnessing and gender justice between Tanzania and Germany to contribute to anti-racism and intersectional justice in anthropology.
The German Records present an archive of “violent differentiation” (Davis in Venkatesan 2019: 45) along the lines of race, gender and sexuality. I propose a set of possible approaches to the Roundtables’ questions, and to the overall question whether (and how) “anthropology [can] enable decolonization” (Venkatesan 2024: 1).
Firstly, and because “racism is a relational concept” (Mullings 2005: 684), an anti-racist (and anti-colonial) anthropology should center the praxis and theory of Tanzanian anthropology as a primary site from which to reframe existing anthropological narratives on ‘anti-racism’ and ‘intersectional justice.’
Secondly, in order to build a more inclusive community of practice and anchor our discipline in an anti-racist path, we should take seriously, and as part of our making of theory, the long-standing Tanzanian feminist activist political struggles against racism, colonialism and various injustices beyond the academy.
And finally, anthropology could contribute to intersectional justice by refusing to reproduce the “unequal relationship involving both accumulation and dispossession” (Mullings 2005: 685)” that the notion of ‘race’ represents by actively building alternative archives of anti-racist and gender justice histories that may help shift i.e. the accessibility to certain sources (such as the German Records) and support the redistribution and repossession of knowledge.
Contribution short abstract:
While we have an increased awareness in regards to racism and intersectionality, the dynamics of emotional labor, whiteness, and epistemic justice that play into these fields remain widely unaddressed on a structural level.
Contribution long abstract:
In my contribution, I want to reflect on the problem of racism and the need for intersectional justice in regards to emotional labor. While we have an increased awareness in regards to racism and intersectionality, the dynamics of emotional labor, whiteness, and epistemic justice that play into these fields remain widely unaddressed on a structural level. Anti-racism remains an add-on or the source of the problem because it is discarded as ideology. As long as we keep feeding this biased understanding and relationship between anti-racism and anthropology, intersectional justice will not be possible. On an academic level, where dominant methodological and theoretical discussions are still rooted in coloniality and whiteness, and on a structural level, where racism is most often addressed by BIPOC scholars and students in precarious positions, the racialization of emotional labor becomes apparent. Response-ability can lie within new forms of solidarity, scholarship, and commitment that reveal these underlying dynamics and racializations of emotional labor by applying antiracist and intersectional knowledge, on a structural level, for example through anti-racism standards for anthropology in regards to funding, research, teaching and compulsory anti-bias trainings.
Contribution short abstract:
Following Bhambra’s (2022) call, we propose a move toward a reparatory anthropology. Drawing on case studies, we explore what it means for the discipline to reckon with imperial and colonial histories, creating a framework for responsibility-taking that is anchored in an anti-racist imperative.
Contribution long abstract:
In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movements of 2020, calls for a ‘reparatory social science’ have become more pronounced. For Gurminder Bhambra (2022), a historical sociologist, a reparatory social science is a social science that understands present-day inequalities as the outcome of global histories of colonialism, slavery, and extractivism. This, for her, not only requires a reconsideration of the histories taken to be central to the ‘modern’ social sciences but a reorientation of our conceptual frameworks, such as a decentering of the all-too-often taken for granted framework of the nation state. Here, we ask what the call for a reparatory social science means for anthropology itself. Thus, we explore how reckoning with imperial and colonial histories creates a framework for responsibility-taking that aligns with anti-racist imperatives.
Drawing upon two contemporary case studies – the emerging jurisprudence of 'modern slavery’ in the UK, and Germany’s narrative of ‘Verantwortungsbewusstsein' - we argue that responsibility-taking not only implies a critical rejection of liberal logics of salvation and guilt that have infused the political discourses of our times, but calls for new methodological toolkits that move beyond classical participant observation. By presenting concerns, provocations and ideas for a reparatory anthropology, we directly contribute to the panel’s objective to work towards a more inclusive community of anti-racist practice within academia and beyond.