Books by Maria Elena Indelicato
Peer Reviewed Publications by Maria Elena Indelicato
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2024
Building on theoretical framings in critical race and queer studies, this article focuses on the ... more Building on theoretical framings in critical race and queer studies, this article focuses on the first female prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, as an entry point to examining the current alignment between far-right populism, anti-gender movements, and White supremacist conspiracy theories in Europe. First, considering the contradictions that female leaders of far-right populist parties seem to negotiate, this article compares Meloni’s communication strategies and political interventions to those of her counterparts in Europe. Second, employing the concept of ‘productive racism’, the article examines Meloni’s birth rate agenda and related ambivalent stance towards ‘migrant’ women. In so doing, this article first demonstrates how existing theoretical frames, developed to examine current entanglements between feminist, anti-gender, and anti-immigration discourses, fall short of explaining why ‘gender’ can be used to ‘stick’ ‘migrant’ and queer subjects together, characterising both as threats to the sexual order of Europe. Even when ‘migrant’ women are depicted as hopeless victims, populist far-right leaders appraise them as either aberrant or otherwise deficient mothers. The article concludes by urging scholars of far-right populism, migration, and religion and their intersections with gender, to adopt race as a primary category of analysis and, therefore, consider that it is race that makes gender ‘stick’ as the common enemy of disparate political actors.
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2023
I must admit that reading your book Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Pol... more I must admit that reading your book Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics was a challenge. On one hand, I think the task you took up in the book of examining the current state of hate against identity politics – i.e. the many critiques that give shape to it as well as the mourning fantasies for an imagined lost past and/or political unity that never existed but nevertheless sustain such critiques – is itself daunting. On the other hand, the historical methodology you adopt in the book to undertake this task, while also using a wide array of theoretical paradigms to explain the ‘fractures’ that have animated what you call ‘revolutionary times’ across various historical periods, resulted in a very dense analysis that requires concentration from the reader. To be honest, I never thought that I'd read a book about disproving anti-identity politics stances across the political spectrum that is also about Abolitionism, the Suffragettes, Women’s Liberation, nineteenth century white working class struggles against Jews and Chinese people in Britain and the US, the electoral strategies of Donald Trump, and twentieth century racist riots. Since this book is as much about proving anti-identity politics wrong by using histories of women and trade union movements as testimonies of ‘fractures’ that have always existed as showing the potential of the politics of identity to bridge across divisions, truly it was hard to grasp the depths of the arguments brought forward. In this regard, I have a few questions that would help me, and possibly other readers, to understand your work better.
Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2022
Settler colonies such as those in Australia during the nineteenth century were rife with myths. O... more Settler colonies such as those in Australia during the nineteenth century were rife with myths. One myth in particular bears witness to a complex matrix of colonial relations, in which race and gender intersected in the definition of who could be counted as a “respectable” member of the settler population. “Neither black nor white,” the Chinese were invariably disliked by Aboriginal peoples. The present essay takes this myth of racial antagonism as the starting point for an analysis that disentangles the discursive strategies that white settlers adopted to assuage anxieties concerning their identity from the practices that Chinese migrants adopted to uphold their right to settle (in) Victoria. To do so, this essay first charts the liberal, British, imperial order that enabled the mass migration of Chinese men to Victoria, and then maps the counter discourses that were mobilized against the unbridled movement of those men. Second, it examines the measures that were taken to curtail Chinese arrivals (1854–1863) and, by using gender as heuristic, it deconstructs the concomitant myth that the Chinese were “sojourners.” Last, by approaching settler colonialism as a regime that capitalizes upon the aspirations of oppressed groups, this essay illustrates the ways in which ordinary Chinese men turned their characterization as passive recipients of violence into respectability by contraposing themselves against a third racialised and gendered population group: Irish women.
Postcolonial Studies, 2020
Defined as ‘borderlands’ by Tracey Banivanua-Mar, the sugar towns of North Queensland in the late... more Defined as ‘borderlands’ by Tracey Banivanua-Mar, the sugar towns of North Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were populated with a great variety of non-white ethnic minorities: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, ‘Malay’, Pacific Islander and later southern European. Instances of violence between these population groups have been recounted as if they were detached from the socio-historical conditions dictated by settler colonialism. Against this stance, this article examines the case of three South Sea Islanders attacking an Italian farmer in the city of Ingham in 1927. As the motive behind the incident remains unknown, the incident is recounted through the individual histories of those who were involved and against the wider context of anti-Italian migration sentiment. In doing this, this article demonstrates how these histories of presence in Ingham challenge the discursive rendition of the assault as a random act of violence and, accordingly, throw into sharp relief who could be counted as a permanent part of the Australian population. This article concludes by pointing to the necessity of examining similar instances of violence by setting them against migrants’ implication in the subjection of ‘natives’ and South Sea Islanders to the project of European replacement. When this implication is considered, violence can be theorised as much as a means that migrants, such as Italians, use to claim belonging as a technology settlers employ to manage ‘undesired’ populations.
Transnational Screens, 2019
This article looks at the ways childhood, animality and emotions are imbricated in the Chinese In... more This article looks at the ways childhood, animality and emotions are imbricated in the Chinese Indonesian film director Edwin's film: Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008). By examining their entanglement, it demonstrates how the director's use of childhood as a trope of becoming externalises the complex configuration of emotions embodied by Chinese in Indonesia. Further, this article explores this configuration as the subjective dimension of Sinophobia, here approached as the historical process of positioning Chinese Indonesians as an object of national disgust. Complementing this analysis, this article also examines Edwin's employment of a pig-imaginary to visually convey the affective effects of contemporary racism in Indonesia. This article concludes arguing that, by employing both childhood and animality, Blind Pig effectively troubles what Chineseness is by means of visualising how it feels from the embodied perspective of a minoritised diasporic subject.
Transnational Screens, 2019
China’s past status as a semi-colony and historical fragmentation into three main territorial ent... more China’s past status as a semi-colony and historical fragmentation into three main territorial entities has meant that defining what constitutes Chinese cinema(s), or indeed cinematic Chineseness, has always been at the forefront of heated debates surrounding transborder practice, production and conceptualisation. Such deliberations have intensified recently due to intensified efforts to render Chineseness a cultural signifier increasingly implicated with transborder cinematic products designed to compete with Hollywood on the global stage. The introduction to this special issue, entitled ‘Situating “Huallywood:” Histories, Trajectories, and Positionings’ opens up these debates to the field of transnational Chinese cinemas, setting out a range of new questions and perspectives that problematize established understandings of Chinese-Western cinematic relations.
Paedagogica Historica. International. Journal of the History of Education , 2018
In this chapter, we delve into the characterisation of international students as 'Confucian Herit... more In this chapter, we delve into the characterisation of international students as 'Confucian Heritage' learner. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, the authors develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West and civilised and yet authoritarian East. In mapping the deployment of such heuristic in the management of international affairs during and after historical colonialism, the authors moreover demonstrate how the derivative characterisation of international students as "rote," "dependent" and inherently "prone to plagiarism" learners has been used to explain racism without race-that is, epistemic exclusion of international students as a matter caused by factors other than race: lack of socially relevant cultural skills and communication barriers.
Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education , 2018
In this article, we develop a genealogy of international education studies' tenets of culture sho... more In this article, we develop a genealogy of international education studies' tenets of culture shock and skills deficit. To trace their emergence, the authors map the discursive shifts which underpinned cultural anthropology's involvement in the administration of U.S.' colonial, domestic and international affairs respectively in the early 1900s and 1950s. These shifts are concomitantly linked to the formation of the field of intercultural communication, which popularisation in the form of Hofstede model of "cultural distance" has structured international education when turning from a Cold War's tool of total diplomacy to an export industry. Taking the development of international education in Australia as a case study, we demonstrate how the shifts in the disciplinary fields aforementioned are best understood as an anti-racist strategy, which mobilisation of the concept of culture has led to the paradoxical evacuation of the heuristics of coloniality and race from the lexicon of intercultural contact between "Asian" international students and presumably white host institutions.
Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2016
For more than three decades, much debate in the English-language academy has been focused on defi... more For more than three decades, much debate in the English-language academy has been focused on defining Chinese cinema(s). The once dominant nation-state approach has been largely challenged, if not superseded, by the many theoretical perspectives characterizing cultural studies: post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism and transnationalism. Yet, most of this endeavour has been concerned with the very first part of the conceptual corpus constituted by Chinese cinemas; namely, what constitutes 'Chinese' in the contemporary panorama of cinematic production, regardless of the lenses employed to investigate such a relation: those of the national, trans-, supra-and sub-national, localizational, situational or de-territorializational. A cursory review even of the most recent literature will confirm such a trend À from studies dealing with the notion of national cinemas (e.g. Zhang 2004) to those preoccupied with the construction of the nation in cinemas (e.g. Berry and Farquhar 2006). A review of these studies will, moreover, reveal how China has been consistently depicted as a monolithic and homogenous nation-state with fixed territorial boundaries and disturbing Sinocentric tendencies. However, this trend has not gone unchallenged. Transnational Chinese cinemas (Lu 1997) and Chinese-language cinemas (Lu and Yeh 2005) represent the two major conceptual frameworks (Lim 2006, 4) or critical paradigms (Lu 2014, 13) that have significantly reshaped the field of Chinese cinemas studies by bringing together the historically separated political and cultural cinematic traditions of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in one filmic discourse À albeit with differing results. The framework of transnational Chinese cinemas has situated the signifier 'China' within the highly dynamic transnational reality of the contemporary world, acknowledging the multifarious border-crossing practices in film production, distribution and consumption, while calling for a thorough examination of the tensions existing between centripetal (Greater China) and centrifugal (Chinese diasporic) forces as engendered by transnationalism (Lu 2014,17). However, as Song Hwee Lim (2006, 5) has suggested, the subsumption of Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinemas within the umbrella of transnational Chinese cinemas presents the risk of reinforcing the Chinese nation-state as the its main theoretical framework of analysis for this group of cinemas. The oscillating translation of Lu's term in Chinese scholarship between 'transnational zhongguo cinemas' and 'transnational huayu cinemas'
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2017
The term transnational cinema first appeared in 1997 to describe the emergence of a mode of produ... more The term transnational cinema first appeared in 1997 to describe the emergence of a mode of production and consumption of " Chinese " movies exceeding the borders of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (Lu1997). Since then, most studies have focused on films epitomising the logic of either profit maximisation or ethnic affinity to explain transnational phenomena such as the remaking of East-Asian box office winners and the mainstreaming of Kung Fu movies. Yet, these two kinds of logic do not account for all of the transnational projects which have populated the contemporary panorama of cinema production, hence the call for more studies on " trans-border patterns " that operate beyond market interests and ethnic affinity (Berry 2010, 123). In this article, we take up this call by approaching the Chinese and Italian co-productions as exhibiting a " trans-border pattern " which satisfies the interests ranging from political solidarity to the desire of participating in the prestigious circle of international film festivals. We begin with tracing the history of such a trend back to the arrival of an Italian called Amerigo Lauro, a pioneer of Chinese cinema, in Shanghai in the early 1900s. We continue by contextualising the productions of Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo/China (1973), Giuliano Montaldo's Marco Polo (1982) and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) to provide the most important examples of a non-market oriented affinity between two culturally distinct nations: China and Italy. We conclude by suggesting that China has pursued transnational co-productions with the European countries such as Italy to exercise a more productive control than censorship over the ways China is to be represented internationally by means of cinema.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Australian government initiated the Overseas Studen... more In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Australian government initiated the Overseas Student Plan as part of the humanitarian program known as the Colombo Plan. By allowing “Asian” students to enter the well-patrolled borders of 'white Australia to acquire skills and knowledge useful to the ‘development’ of their own countries, Australia symbolically positioned itself as benevolent educator to its multiple Asian neighbouring others. At the same time, the Overseas Student Plan was understood as crucial to endear the goodwill of recently independent Asian nations, promoting political and trade relations ultimately favourable to Australia in spite of its racially exclusionary migration and population policies. In light of this historical contextualisation, this article demonstrates the discursive complexities underpinning the successive positioning
of Asian countries as equal partners of Australia in the process of
internationalisation of higher education. Further, it shows the pernicious persistence of the Australian colonial imaginary in shaping the understanding of Asian students as subjects essentially lacking the characteristics marking the epistemological superiority of the West. In so doing, it argues that the
representation of Asian students as irreducibly different to their domestic counterparts relies on the historical construction of the knowledges of Aboriginal people and non-English speaking migrants as cultural impediments to their full inclusion in Australian educational institutions
Outskirts: Feminism Along the Edge, 2010
Book Chapters by Maria Elena Indelicato
Book Reviews by Maria Elena Indelicato
European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2023
Social History of Medicine, 2023
In 1985, the Philadelphia city government bombed the headquarters of the Black liberation group M... more In 1985, the Philadelphia city government bombed the headquarters of the Black liberation group MOVE, killing six adults and five of their children. In 2021, activist Abdul-Aliy Muhammad denounced that for over 35 years, the remains of two victims were transferred back and forth between the Penn Museum and the University of Princeton. The remains had also been displayed in an online instruction video for a Princeton course series. When Muhammad made the incidents public, Penn & Slavery Project member VanJessica Gladney commented that her community had to witness, ‘once again’ ‘the remains of Black Philadelphians used as a teaching tool’. Just a few months earlier, the University of Pennsylvania had apologised for the ‘unethical possession of human remains’ with reference to the most known skull collections in the history of the racial science, the Morton Cranial Collection. As in the past, the collection had been till then used for research and part of it was showcased in a classroom.
Modern Italy , 2022
Migration and the Media constitutes a methodologically well-crafted study of four major media deb... more Migration and the Media constitutes a methodologically well-crafted study of four major media debates concerning Chinese migrants in Italy at the onset of globalisation. In this regard, it is less about Chinese migrants themselves than about Italy's socio-cultural and economic repositioning vis-à-vis increased migration to the country and loss of competitiveness in the dynamic international economic order of 1992-2012. Tensions between local and global identities and economic interests are indeed duly factored in by Zhang's study and employed to explain why Chinese migrants, and not any other migrant group, were those who captured the imagination of Italian politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs and ordinary (white) citizens at a time of great changes. As the author explains, in contrast to the other migrant communities in Italy, Chinese migrants were the only ones who could concomitantly stand for the global economic ascendancy of China, the crisis of the world-renowned small-and medium-sized enterprises (SME) industrial model of Italy and, finally, migrant integration in the national economy. As Zhang convincingly argues throughout the book, the tensions between local and global identities and economic interests also constituted the two major frameworks that were used to write about Chinese migrants from 1992 to 2012. Naming these frameworks Italian-migrant and local-global dynamics, respectively, the author applies them to examine three main phases of the representation of Chinese migrants in the Italian media. According to Zhang, the first phase started around 1992, when, amid daily reports of widespread political corruption and the Italian mafia, the Italian media started to accuse Chinese migrants, without foundation, of having brought the Chinese mafia into Italy. The second phase started around 2006-7, when the Italian media started focusing on Chinese migration as an economic phenomenon. The third phase started in 2012, when the Italian media began characterising Chinese migrants as fellow Italian residents. After contextualising Chinse migration in Italy and the socio-political exclusion of migrants in general in the first chapter, Zhang devotes the second one to the examination of the 'Chinese mafia' metaphor. As the author explains, Italian journalists had adopted it to report about Chinese illegal migration practices (i.e., people smuggling) because of their propensity to report on migration through a 'criminological lens', and their exposure to the genres of crime reporting and fiction. Despite its popularity, the use of the Chinese mafia metaphor came to a halt in the early 2000s, when both police investigations and sociological studies ascertained that no form of international criminal organisation was behind Chinese migration. Nonetheless, as Zhang observes, since all parties involved in the debate, including the Italian journalists and elite Chinese migrants who defended Chinese migrants, had likened Chinese illegal migration practices to 'a specific set of bounded (cultural) traits' (p. 47), the debate introduced 'ethnocultural essentialism' as Modern Italy 283
Postcolonial Studies, 2020
Border as method is an ambitious book animated by the desire to undo the representation of the bo... more Border as method is an ambitious book animated by the desire to undo the representation of the border as a wall. It shows how borders rarely just exclude but productively discriminate amongst flow of money, goods, and people in ways that constantly reshape the composition of markets and labour forces around the world. Due to the broad scope of the book, a description chapter by chapter is impossible. Consequently, this review reflects what I found most interesting from the viewpoint of having been myself a temporary migrant in Australia while engaging with its border politics from the disciplinary perspective of race and whiteness studies.
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Books by Maria Elena Indelicato
Peer Reviewed Publications by Maria Elena Indelicato
of Asian countries as equal partners of Australia in the process of
internationalisation of higher education. Further, it shows the pernicious persistence of the Australian colonial imaginary in shaping the understanding of Asian students as subjects essentially lacking the characteristics marking the epistemological superiority of the West. In so doing, it argues that the
representation of Asian students as irreducibly different to their domestic counterparts relies on the historical construction of the knowledges of Aboriginal people and non-English speaking migrants as cultural impediments to their full inclusion in Australian educational institutions
Book Chapters by Maria Elena Indelicato
Book Reviews by Maria Elena Indelicato
of Asian countries as equal partners of Australia in the process of
internationalisation of higher education. Further, it shows the pernicious persistence of the Australian colonial imaginary in shaping the understanding of Asian students as subjects essentially lacking the characteristics marking the epistemological superiority of the West. In so doing, it argues that the
representation of Asian students as irreducibly different to their domestic counterparts relies on the historical construction of the knowledges of Aboriginal people and non-English speaking migrants as cultural impediments to their full inclusion in Australian educational institutions
Conversely, cases of ‘moral panics’ from these same geopolitical realities will be studied to show how alleged transgressions of the norms yielded by the gendered patriarchal imperative to be ‘straight’ uphold forms of social division and domination along the line of race, ethnicity and national identity. As this course will demonstrate, public debates on minority groups’ sexuality bespeak of dominant groups’ investment into the hetero-patriarchal paradigm (i.e. the monogamous couple and nuclear family) not just because this stands as a measure of normality but also, and more importantly, because it works as the mark itself of civilisation.
If you can, please also suggest potential readings that can either help me think through the questions I want to address in this course or be assigned for the perusal of undergraduate students. Of the same importance, please provide examples/ case studies illustrating in a quasi-intuitive fashion the intersection of sexuality, race, and gender across media and over time.
To explain such anomaly, the paper traces the history of Chinese-Italian collaboration back to the arrival in Shanghai of Italian Amerigo Lauro, pioneer of Chinese cinema, in the early 1900s. It continues by contextualizing the reception of Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo/China (1973), and the production of Giuliano Montaldo’s Marco Polo (1982) and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) to show how current co-productions might be motivated by interests ranging from political solidarity to soft diplomacy, from the desire to expand in new markets to the one to become a habitué in the prestigious circuit of international film festivals.
The paper concludes by suggesting that China has pursued transnational co-production with Italy and other European countries as way to exercise a more productive control than censorship over the ways China is to be represented internationally by means of cinema.
This paper addresses these questions by illustrating the historical and discursive circumstances which have led international students to be perceived as a potential harm to the economic and social wellbeing of Australia. It will do so, firstly, by providing a short genealogy of the metaphors of “back door entry” and “jumping the queue”. This genealogy reveals the relevance of the self-representation of Australia as an open, generous and tolerant nation in shaping what constitutes harm. Secondly, it examines the exclusionary effects of the measures employed to avoid this harm by taking successive students visa assessment criteria and restrictions into consideration. In so doing, it concludes by revealing the continued salience of race in determining who and how might cause harm to the Australian nation.
Whereas Goldie Osuri argues for to consider the recommendations made by Victoria Police’s recommendations as a governmental pedagogy that attempts to disavow race and racism as motivating factors of the violence afflicted on Indian nationals (2010) in this paper, I will show how such recommendations rely on a consolidated tradition of representation of international students as vulnerable subjects that is as much gendered as it is racialised. By conducting a detailed analysis of the Think Before You Travel campaign, I will show how the construction of international students as subjects at high risk of street crime and violence not only evacuates issues regarding race and racism from the debate engendered by the students’ protests but also constitutes an iterative discursive practice that reproduces the space of the Australian nation as white and male.
References:
Osuri, Goldie (2010) Once More to the Breach: Race, Neoliberal Governmentality and Violence Against International Students, in Suvendrini Perera, Graham Seales, and Sue Summers (eds.), Enter At Your Own Risk? Australia's Population Questions for the 21st Century. Black Swan Press: Perth, p. 91-116.
As Rony (ibid., p. 27) explains, since modernity could not but be thought of as a reflection of ‘civilised’ Western societies, ‘territorial state, monogamous family and private property’ became the standard against which to assess others’ morality. Conversely, primitive societies could not but be ‘nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist’ (ibid.) As I taught about anthropologists’ stadial ordering of cultural forms into polygamy and monogamy, two insights struck me at once with the strength of a revelation. Firstly, the scientific and aesthetic knowledge that was systematically amassed through colonialism had to be approached as the archive that still informs how non-white and Indigenous subjects are represented via tropes as insidious as the wrapping of an island in mist. Secondly, whereas the aforesaid knowledge formations have subordinated non-white and Indigenous subjects by means of association with women (McClintock, 1995, p. 56), it is through sexuality that they have dispossessed them of humanity and/or sovereignty. Put more simply, non-white and Indigenous subjects have not been just feminised, rather they have been rendered queer.
To achieve this objective, it introduces prospective participants to the following theoretical paradigms and debates concerning: anti-colonialism (first day); racial capitalism (second day); abolitionism (third day); intersectionality (fourth day); and queer settler colonial studies (fifth day). For more information about the second edition, please check the website of CES Summer Schools: https://ces.uc.pt/summerwinterschools/?lang=2&id=41032. If you are of African Descent, please also consider to apply for the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) Scholarship - People of African Descent to cover you registration and travel expenses (application deadline November 20, 2022): https://www.enar-eu.org/enar-scholarships-people-of-african-descent/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=enar-scholarships-people-of-african-descent.
The second occurrence took place in Europe, where, both the Black Lives Matter movement and racial inequities that the Covid-19 global pandemic brought in sharp relief led to the launch of the Action Plan Against Racism (APAR) in the spring of 2020. As the chair of The European Network Against Racism (ENAR), Karen Taylor, stated in the wake of its launch, APAR constitutes the very first European normative document that ‘explicitly acknowledges the existence of structural, institutional and historical dimensions of racism in Europe’ as well as the necessity of addressing them by adopting a critical race and intersectional approach. Not incidentally, the attacks against CRT began at the same time as anti-racist organisations put renewed pressure on the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to enforce the recommendations of APAR, including involving racial and ethnic minorities in European policymaking, and redressing European national histories of colonialism, enslavement and genocides.
The third occurrence unfolded in Portugal. Following a string of racially motivated crimes that culminated in the murder of Bruno Candé in July 2020, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Dunja Mijatović, issued the Memorandum on combating racism and violence against women in Portugal. In this document, Mijatović urged the Portuguese government to ‘acknowledge the legacy of the repressive structures put in place by past colonial policies’ and to identify and correct ‘ingrained racist biases and their present-day ramifications’. Heeding this request, the National Plan Against Racism and Discrimination (NPARD) was launched in 2021 presenting ‘intersectionality’ and deconstruction of ‘stereotypes’ as its guiding principles. Albeit nowhere in the NPARD is clarified how exactly CRT will inform the anti-racist interventions of the state, well-known rightwing pundits have systematically attacked CRTinspired scholarship and activism.
Because of these three occurrences, CRT has been in the public eye both as a dangerous political ideology and a suitable tool to redress racism. In the first instance, CRT has operated as an empty 1
signifier, by which far right and rightwingers have conflated affirmative actions with multiculturalism, wokeism, identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture. In the second instance, CRT has worked as an anti-racism tool, by which activists have advanced their demands for social justice. Either way, no comprehensive explanation has been offered about what CRT is, how it distinguishes itself from and/ or relates with other theoretical paradigms concerned with race and racism and, more importantly, if and how it accounts for the various ways in which racialized minorities have been oppressed from country to country in Europe and elsewhere.
The summer school ‘Endangered Theories’ addressed these questions through a programme that mixed introductory lectures on relevant theoretical paradigms concerned with the intersections of power relations and social divisions that are structured by race, gender, class, and nationality with lectures that illustrated their application in a variety of national contexts (i.e., the UK, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, USA, and South Africa), roundtables with experts, workshops with participants, and social events. Each day was dedicated to one of the five selected models: CRT; Critical Whiteness Studies; Postcolonial Europe; Afro-Pessimism; and Settler Colonial Studies. Besides reflecting the expertise of the organizers, these paradigms afford prospective participants the opportunity to approach standing debates with new theoretical lenses.Afro-Pessimism and Settler Colonial Studies, for instance, have been rarely deployed to examine the various phases of the Portuguese empire, let alone the formation of its national myths and identities.
The first edition of the summer school ‘Endangered Theories: Standing by Critical Race Theory in the Age of Ultraviolence’ stemmed from the organisers’ desire to intervene in the post-Black Lives Matter backlash against critical race theory while, at the same time, providing invited guest lecturers and selected participants with a safe space where to learn about each other work and anti-racism strategies. To achieve this double objective, the first edition of ‘Endengered Theories’ was designed to equip participants with the epistemic tools of the following anti-racist theoretical paradigms: critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, postcolonial Europe, Afro-pessimism, and settler colonial studies.
As the concerted ideological campaign against Critical Race Theory continues to gain momentum, the second edition of the summer school too strives to provide participants with the space and tools necessary to reflect upon the current proliferation of anti-anti racism stances across dramatically different national contexts in conjunction with state failure to halt police violence, migrant criminalisation, imprisonment of racialized minorities and Indigenous people, and the assault against LGBTQI+ rights. The second edition, thus, proposes to introduce participants to five further anti-racist theoretical paradigms: anti-colonialism, racial capitalism, abolitionism, intersectionality, and queer settler colonial studies. Besides reflecting the expertise of invited guest speakers, these paradigms will afford prospective participants the opportunity to approach standing debates with new theoretical lenses. Neither abolitionism and queer settler colonial studies, for instance, have yet been employed to examine Fortress Europe and the rapid diffusion of anti-gender sentiments in the aftermath of homonationalism. Nor racial capitalism has been applied to explain intersectional extraction of value in the age of humanitarian and environmental catastrophes. Finally, the school will provide participants with a wide array of case-studies (e.g. Portugal, Italy, US, Brasil, UK, Dominican Republic, and Palestine), enriching their understanding of colonial, settler colonial and postcolonial intersectional matrices of power.
Organisers:
Gaia Giuliani (CES-UC), Maria Elena Indelicato (CES-US), Carla Panico (CES PhD student), Susi Anny Veloso Resende (CES-UC/ Phd student ASEP-UNIMIB), and Daniela Ayoub (CES-UC).
Teaching Team:
Maria Paula Meneses, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Medhin Paolos, Professor of the Practice, Film and Media Studies, Tufts University;
João H. Costa Vargas, Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin;
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Research Professor, Sociology, Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging, Easter London University;
Lester Spence,Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies John Hopkins University;
Shahd Wad, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Sofia José Santos,Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Júlia Garraio, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Cristiano Gianolla, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Rita Santos, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Luciane Lucas dos Santos, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra;
Lorgia García Peña, Professor, Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Chair, Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora,Tufts University;
Vanessa Fernandes, filmmaker, performer and visual artist.