Browsing by Subject "Race"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
Adaptation and nostalgia
(Oxford University Press, 2020) Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen
This essay highlights the shared critical terrain of adaptation and nostalgia: how they critically juxtapose the past with the present, and how they underscore the impossibility of return while also relying on prior experience. It also explores nostalgia’s effect on personal responses to adaptations and its interaction with textual form. Drawing from various areas of literary, media, and performance studies, including film adaptations of children’s literature, Watchmen and its screen adaptations, and Disney’s live-action remakes, this essay underscores how both nostalgia and adaptation are inherently multivalent concepts, and how they each rely on perspective to generate critical meaning.
Open Access
Color-blindness in rawls’s theory of justice
(2019-05) Oktay, Emine Naz
I argue that Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be a guide to rectify or even to address racial injustice. While critics of Rawls’s theory do not particularly focus on colorblind discourse, my critique builds on this problematic feature of Rawls's account. In particular, the original position, a central element of the motivation for Rawls's account, is constructed from a color-blind perspective. For the case of racial injustices, any ideal drawn from a color-blind perspective cannot be of any help, since it emphasizes equality and sameness of all human beings. This serves to cover up the deep causes of racial inequalities and contributes to maintenance of racial structure in society. In order to illustrate my point, I use Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s conceptualization of color-blindness as “color-blind racism”, which makes clear the negative impact of a focus on egalitarian considerations. Surely, Rawls’s conception of a perfectly just society is taken by him as a part of ideal theory. Yet, even though questions of racial injustices are part of nonideal theory, the fact that his ideal theory is the foundation of his normative theory renders this defense questionable, as Charles Mills also emphasizes. This is because it suggests that our actual society would become more just, if it approximates to his ideal society. And since ideal society is a color-blind one, my worry is that Rawls’s normative account is also color-blind and would give us a society where racial structures remain intact and keep producing racial inequalities.
Open Access
Hybrid Osmanlees”: racialism, caucasian slave trade and the race of Ottoman Turks
(2022-09) Önder, Ayşe Sıla
This thesis analyzes the Western perception of the racial identity of Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century and how Caucasian slave trade complexified the perception in question. It relies on a vast array of primary sources to demonstrate how the racialist perspective towards Ottoman Turks and Caucasian slave trade became widespread in the nineteenth century. Following the emergence of race science as a respected field, the West sought to find a definite answer to the puzzling issue of the racial identity of Ottoman Turks. Raciologists agreed that Ottoman Turks came to possess a Caucasianized physical appearance as a result of white slavery while at the same time condemning the institution of white slavery in the Ottoman Empire as proof of the cultural and racial backwardness of Ottoman Turks. The racially mixed identity of Ottoman Turks also held interest in the West and discussions around it revealed the anxieties about racial intermingling and miscegenation which arose after the rise of the abolitionist movement.
Open Access
Multi-player race
(Elsevier B.V., 2018) Doğan, S.; Karagözoğlu, Emin; Keskin, K.; Sağlam, Ç.
We present a model of race with multiple players and study players’ effort choices and expected prizes in equilibrium. We show that, in equilibrium, once any two players win one battle each, the remaining players do not exert any effort anymore. This turns the continuation game into a two-player race. This is different than the results in previous two-player models of race, which report that all states of the game are reached with positive probabilities. We also provide a set of comparative static results on the effects of the number of players and the victory threshold.
Open Access
‘Profane language, horrid oaths and imprecations’: order and the colonial soundscape in the American mid-Atlantic, 1650–1750
(Routledge, 2021-08-04) Johnson, Daniel
One of the most important developments in the historical discipline in recent years has been the growth of histories of the senses, and studies of sound and soundscapes have made important contributions to this growing field. The relationship between a perennial early modern concern for social order and ‘noise’ has received relatively little attention, however. This article examines the formation of novel soundscapes between the 1650s and 1740s in the North American middle colonies, the most ethnically and culturally diverse region of the English Atlantic world. Placing special emphasis on the region’s two largest cities, New York and Philadelphia, it argues that the mid-Atlantic’s distinctive soundscapes posed significant problems of order for urban and provincial authorities during a period of elite Anglicization. Sound was more than a way to encourage new norms of politeness; it was a source of contestation between different cultural systems. Speech, music and other sounds were also instrumental in processes of class, ethnic and racial formation.
Open Access
Race, ethnicity, and political behavior
(Oxford University Press, 2017) Just, Aida; Thompson, W. R.
Whether as a consequence of colonialism or more recent international migration, ethnic diversity has become a prominent feature of many contemporary democracies. Given the importance of ethnicity in structuring people’s identities, scholars have sought to incorporate ethnicity in their models of people’s political behavior. Studies focusing on individual support for group interests among ethnic minority members find that higher socioeconomic status generally leads to a reduced emphasis on ethnicity in forming individual political opinions. However, this relationship is often considerably weaker among ethnic minorities with frequent experiences of discrimination, pessimistic assessments of equal opportunities in a country, and social pressures from group members to comply with group norms. Research also shows that, in comparison to majority populations, members of ethnic minorities are generally less active in politics, more likely to use contentious forms of political action, and support left-wing political parties that promote minority interests. Key explanations of differences between ethnic minorities and majorities in Western democracies focus on the importance of individual and group resources as well as political empowerment via representation in policymaking institutions, usually enabled by higher shares of minority populations within electoral districts.