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CERS Book launch

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Date: Tuesday 6th October, 2015, 13:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 12.25 Social Sciences Building

Celebrating recent publications by Centre members Shirley Anne Tate, Ian Law and Shona Hunter

Black Women's Bodies and the Nation (cover)Black Women's Bodies and the Nation

by Shirley Anne Tate

Black Women's Bodies and the Nation develops a decolonial approach to representations of Black women's bodies within popular culture in the US, UK and the Caribbean and the racialization and affective load of muscle, bone, fat and skin through the trope of the subaltern figure of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an 'alter/native' (Truillot, 2003). Enslavement, colonialism and settlement in the metropole created the Black woman's body as both other/same and deeply affective whether read as fear, disgust, contempt or fascination. Her body draws attention to the negotiations through which the semblance of consensus on the citizen body is created at the same time as Black women's bodies as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives rupture the collective body formed through the (re)iteration, (re)interpretation and (re)presentation of the meanings of muscle, bone, fat and skin. This dismantling of body norms reveals other modes of being through disalienation's (Césaire, 2000) refusal of the racial epidermal schema (Fanon, 1967).

Caribbean Racisms (cover)Caribbean Racisms: Connections and Complexities in the Racialization of the Caribbean Region

by Shirley Anne Tate and Ian Law

This book identifies and engages with an analysis of racism in the Caribbean region, providing an empirically based theoretical reframing of both the racialization of the globe and the evaluation of the prospects for anti-racism and the post-racial. The 30 contemporary territories of the Caribbean and their differing colonial and postcolonial contexts provide a highly dynamic setting that urges a reassessment of the ways in which contemporary processes of racialization are working. This book seeks to develop a new account of racialization in this region, challenging established arguments, propositions and narratives of racial Caribbeanization.

With new insights into contemporary forms of racialization in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, this will be essential reading for scholars of race and ethnicity.

Power, Politics and the Emotions (cover)Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance?

by Shona Hunter

How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters?

Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss.

Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.

Creolizing Europe (cover)Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations

edited by Shirley Anne Tate and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

Creolizing Europe critically interrogates creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the cultural and social transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. Exploring the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking post/coloniality, raciality and othering not only as historical legacies but as immanent to and constitutive of European societies, this volume develops an interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities. It juxtaposes US-UK debates on ‘hybridity’, ‘mixed-race’ and the ‘Black Atlantic’ with Caribbean and Latin American theorizations of cultural mixing in order to engage with Europe as a permanent scene of Édouard Glissant’s creolization. Further, through a comparative methodological angle, the focus on Europe is broadened in order to understand the role of Europe’s colonial past in the shaping of its post/migrant and diasporic present. ‘Europe’ thus becomes an expanded and contested term, unthinkable without reference to its historical legacies and possible futures. While not all the contributions in this volume explicitly address Edouard Glissant’s approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking. All of the chapters explore the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization to the European context. As such, this edited collection offers a significant contribution and intervention in the fields of European Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies on two levels. First, by emphasizing that race and “cultural mixing” are central to any thinking about and theorization on/of Europe, and second, by applying Glissant’s perspective to a variety of empirical work on diasporic spaces, conviviality, citizenship, aesthetics, race, racism, sexuality, gender, cultural representation and memory.