Social Analysis

After outlining the aims of this thematic section, I introduce the articles that follow. Although they reflect different geographical interests and theoretical orientations, the articles raise some interesting issues, of which I take up two. One is the role of Islam. It appears that both Islam's historical role and its contemporary effect are critical, yet indeterminate and contestable. The other issue is comparative. There is much in common between the way sexuality is configured in Europe, on the one hand, and in the Middle East and North Africa, on the other. But there are also significant differences. I discuss some of these differences in the way sex and sexuality are culturally mobilized to construct genderedness.

Arab scholarship of sexuality is currently emerging against many obstacles. This article provides a suggestive introduction to the current state of knowledge in the area. After briefly sketching an archetype of Arab sexuality, especially its peculiar form of phallocracy, new sexual trends are reviewed, some of which adapt current practices to Shari'a law (e.g., visitation marriages), while others break with it altogether (e.g., prostitution). The article then discusses three distinctive areas of public and policy concerns in the region, namely, honor killings, impotence and Viagra use, and sex-education programs that are precipitated by concerns over HIV/AIDS. The essay concludes with an assessment of some of the main challenges still facing research into the topic in the Arab Islamic world.

From Belgrade to Baghdad, from Algiers to Aleppo, sexual discourse in the pre-modern Ottoman world was rich and variegated. Its manifestations were to be found in literature and poetry, in medicine and physiognomy, in religious writings and popular culture. During the nineteenth century, much of this panoply of discussions about sex disappeared or was attenuated to such an extent that it became virtually non-existent. A similar phenomenon can be perceived in Western European attitudes toward sex several decades earlier. Yet while in Europe the old sexual discursive world was replaced with a new one in short order, the Ottoman Middle East did not produce a new sexual discourse to replace the one that vanished. This article presents some of the premises of the old Ottoman sexual discourse, describes the process of their demise, and suggests an explanation for the failure to produce a new (textual) discourse of sex.

This article aims to provide a broad overview of the enormous transformations of gender and sexual relations and sensibilities that occurred in Iran from the early nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century. In particular, it seeks to investigate how these changes—while not directly linked with a project of production of modern governmentable bodies in the sense that Foucault had proposed for a similar period of European history—were deeply connected with what it meant to 'achieve modernity' for the Iranian cultural elite of this period. The article ends by bringing this historical background to bear on some very recent developments that have come to public attention through the discussions of sex-change surgeries in Iran.

Desire focuses on a particular object, while horniness stems from a generalized feeling of sexual arousal. In Tajikistan, people are discouraged from the former and are expected to experience their sexuality as the latter. The story of Rustam and the clashes with his father Malik over the choice of his bride serve to demonstrate the tensions between the two types of sexuality. Women have more difficulties experiencing desire than men, owing to the reification of the hymen and their expected subordination to their husbands. The conceptual differences between Rustam and his father are to some extent due to differences between collectivism and individualism. The concluding discussion suggests that Western culture may be less individualistic in this regard than is often believed.

The demand for rights to recognition among the indigenous activists in Taiwan was part of a larger movement for democratization before the lifting of martial law and was supported by international concurrence. The transfer of power from the Nationalist Party (KMT) regime to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) marks a rising consciousness of Taiwanese nationalism. By examining public discourses/rituals and the debates about the organizational reforms, I show how the changing perceptions and status of the indigenous population within the state are used to legitimize the new national identity. By examining the political processes involved in the politics of recognition, on the other hand, I also explore how the indigenous activists exploit to their advantage opportunities that have arisen during the national restructuring.

What do secular, left-wing Israelis living inside the Green Line have in common with religious, right-wing 'settlers'? Despite their conflicting positions, I argue that there is a depth of commonality that fuels the hatred and intolerance between these groups. This article aims to reveal a positional unity that appears as conflict, difference, and disunity. Resituating the apparently incommensurable discourses, I contend that this discord is best understood within the context of a society that is continually struggling with the outcomes of its settler origins and ongoing settlement activity. The focus is on the arguments between the two groups concerning uses of the past, which serves as a reference from which to demonstrate that the desire, particularly among the secular, to differentiate rather than identify is located in a fear of what today's settler activity reveals about the Zionist project in a broader sense and what it therefore stands to potentially undermine.

At the time of this writing, the world is watching incredulously as terror and deprivation ravage the poorest citizens of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The region’s middle class and elite fled the disaster, while federal authorities’ inaction resulted in starvation for those too poor to leave. Such callousness embodied in US civil society and state institutions has been made transparent to the world, illuminating the increasing class inequality that has evolved since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In light of this conflation of racism and class inequality, this forum focuses on the ways that multi-cultural politics mystify such power relations with romantic recollections of popular resistance to racism in the post–World War II era: decolonization, the US civil rights movement, and the fall of apartheid in South Africa.

Is nationalism more noble than racism? Anderson argues that it is: “Nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations” (1991: 149). For Anderson, racism springs from ideologies of class, which are rooted in notions of blood purity. In contrast, he holds that patriotic dreams and nationalist fellowship rest on a fundamentally different criterion—the language encountered on the mother’s knee. This distinction that Anderson draws is crucial. It leads him to view nations as open and inclusive, since one can be invited into the nation (as is implicit in the term ‘naturalization’), whereas the impulse of racism is to exclude.

In these remarks on race in Malaysia, I wish to engage the popularly held belief that racism in Malaysia is a legacy of colonialism. I will instead address the way racializing beliefs and practices in the Malaysian context are better understood in the context of processes of modern state- and nation-building during the period of so-called organized modernity, processes that were at work in both colonial and non-colonial settings. This explanation at the same time provides for a more effective resolution of what might otherwise appear to be a genuine paradox, namely, the fact that racism and anti-racism appear always to co-exist in the Malaysian context. I will deal with this sense of paradox historically by problematizing the most widely accepted explanation for the racialization of contemporary Malaysian society—that it is the legacy of Malaysia’s colonial past. Subjecting the argument for colonial exceptionalism to critical scrutiny clears the way for better explanations of the apparent persistence of racializing discourses and practices in post-colonial conditions, at the same time casting doubt on the effectiveness of the kinds of universalizing anti-racist practices and movements that characterize our times.

As long as there was race, there was the savage. Tribes would come later as those who invented their descending lines and segmentable surfaces projected them into the classical past of gens and phatries. And as long as there were savages, there were infidels. Christianity, defeated in the old Jerusalem, established a New Jerusalem through conquest and settlement, conversion and genocide, enslavement and rectitude in the Americas and Pacific. Some savages would be bestowed with cultures and some religions with the power of enlightenment. And yet, in the shadow of the enlightenment project, all of these social figures and social histories seem to collapse into a unilinear process of historical descent—the Crusades begat voyages of discovery, which begat the problem of the twentieth century, namely, the color line and the international division of colonizer and colonizer, the North and the South, the East and the West, the politics of recognition and the refusals of secularism— and a univocal problem of race, racialization, and racism. Race seems to have begat race: what makes discourse of tribalism, racism, and the savage slot seem ‘the same’ and seem different than the national citizen/subject is that they are all the effect of the same razza (lineage). Their actual social divergences and specificities are bled out. “But he who listens to history finds that things have no pre-existing essence, or an essence fabricated piecemeal from alien forms” (Foucualt 1984: 78).

Franz Fanon and Elva Cook point out that race is more than simply a cognitive system of classification. Race is also inscribed on bodies and realized in geographies of space (Williams 1989). David Harvey (2001) has developed the latter theme in his account of the ‘moral geographies’ that symbolize relations between nation-states. His discussion calls attention to the ways in which a state gives value to place across various types of terrain. Spatializing race and class in the towns and cities of a state involves creating stigmatized zones that are naturalized. These zones are described as ‘slum’, ‘ghetto’, ‘fringe camp’, and the like. They suggest detritus and morass, islands of disturbed moral order residing within the state. ‘Reserve’, ‘homeland’, ‘quarter’, and ‘hinterland’ may seem more benign but can be turned to similar effect in any national discourse. Both in cities and interstate, these are spaces to ‘go around’. It becomes appropriate to know such places only through received knowledge and without the contaminating risk of actual engagement.

The tragedy of the age of integration (1954 onward) in the United States is that it overlapped with the demise of the social-wage state and with the rise of the neo-liberal social order. Whereas the civil rights movement fought for the widest provision of dignity, the guardians of the American state have reduced this vision to one concession: that all people will have certain rights vested in the state. When the US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, it ended legal segregation in the US. That, combined with the judicial decisions that culminated in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, was immense, and its victory should not be underestimated or misunderstood. Within a generation, people’s struggles had destroyed the statutory acceptance of Jim Crow and put in its place high-minded ideas of equal rights. By the logic of bourgeois democracy, the state is the guardian of those rights—the right to vote, along with all the other rights assembled in the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution. The problem is that the state, by the late 1960s, was not the same institution. The guardians of the state had dismantled the social-wage state, leaving citizens with high-minded norms as it gutted the institutions that could respond to them. The first-class visions of the civil rights movement would collapse into the second-class nightmare of our times.

Since the 1990s, many countries have jettisoned a focus on economic development in favor of promoting markets and market efficiency. Much has been written on the influence of these neo-liberal economic policies and the linked idea of globalization. Less noticed is that this shift from a developmentalist ideology to neo-liberal reform has often been paired with an ideology that casts the state as neutral with respect to race, ethnicity, and even nationality. Indeed, while the heyday of wholesale adoption of neo-liberal economic policies may be receding, the neo-liberal state appears to be a more enduring feature. There is a need to examine more closely the neo-liberal ideology that pairs economic reforms with a neutral state, and a need to understand how this ideology is involved in the creation of racialized identities and racist practices.

These are challenging times for people who think critically about race. The intellectual edifice upon which many scholarly interventions against racist thought and practice have developed over the last few decades is in the process of crumbling. The simple but profound assertion that race is socially constructed is being assailed in a variety of intellectual forums and may soon become untenable as a basis for effectively countering widespread racial perceptions and beliefs.1 Actually, the efficacy of the social constructionist stance, as with most ‘social’ explanations for politically charged and complex problems, has at best maintained only a tenuous hold in the public imagination.2 The challenge, then, is to find a better and more effective means of both objectifying and analyzing racial dynamics. This task begins by assessing why social construction is vulnerable in the first place, by delineating its weak points as an analytical framework, and by questioning the ways it either succeeds or fails in adequately representing and interpreting the nuance and complexity of racial relations.

When Rwandan ethnicities are discussed, one seldom hears of the country’s least numerous group, the Twa, who constitute less than 1 percent of the present- day population. Despite this, long before ethnic division arose between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, a great social divide separated Twa from non-Twa. Twa were the first group to have suffered discrimination at the hands of others. Local practices of social exclusion based upon notions of esteem and disgust focused upon the Twa body, which was both feared as dangerous and reviled as polluting. Well in advance of European intervention in Rwanda, interactions between Twa and others were governed by practices of avoidance in marriage, residence, and commensality, practices that were termed kuneena batwa. Twa could neither cultivate the land nor raise cattle. Instead, they were relegated to the least esteemed productive activities: foraging, pottery-making, entertainment, and serving as torturers and executioners for the Rwandan king. Twa were reputed to be gluttonous, and both Hutu and Tutsi spurned the aliments that Twa would consume, mutton in particular. Later, during Rwanda’s precolonial history, similar mechanisms of differentiation began to characterize interaction between Tutsi and Hutu. These practices were exacerbated during the colonial period due to European notions of biological determinism.