Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Abstract

Abstract:Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call 'victorious whiteness', 'infinite whiteness' and 'static blackness' assembled by the CTCA, and an 'advancing blackness' pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20 th -century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…As Brown et al (2012Brown et al ( : 1607 have convincingly argued, neoliberal regimes deploy this notion 'to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change, and the individual lifecourse'. This observation is important for my purposes, because later on in the paper I will discuss in some detail the underappreciated relationship between global, collective futures and personal futures (see also Krupar and Ehlers, 2017;Olund, 2017;Oswin, 2014;Schurr, 2017;Smith and Vasudevan, 2017;Wang, 2017). I shall argue that more detailed research on the constitutive role of surprise in people's personal futures is sorely needed if socio-spatial theorists are to capture 'the messiness of becoming, seeing transition through the scale of a life and important life events' (Worth, 2009(Worth, : 1050.…”

Schooling in the University Town: The Racial Capitalist Foundations of Education

“…Emphasising and placing such value on the students who are categorised as “academically or intellectually gifted”, who are majority white students, the school district is reproducing “static blackness”—keeping Blackness “in a purely supplementary relation to white futures” (Olund 2017:290). Centring the role of anti‐Blackness in US public schools allows us to see how practices and policies have “concentrated whites in the most heavily resourced schools, and relegated Black children to underfunded schools with less experienced teachers and crumbling physical infrastructures” (Dumas 2016:16).…”

“…Black residents were left to create their own privately funded school, to eventually become known as the Orange County Training School, in the shadows of a burgeoning institution of higher learning (Waugh 2012). Since its inception, public education in Chapel Hill has been a mechanism for "victorious whiteness"-or whiteness that takes precedence over other races (Olund 2017). The futures of white and well-resourced families were ensured as they cemented their power through the educational system.…”

“…Racial inequity in university towns requires us to pay attention to the relationship between schools and the broader social forces shaping the community. In examining the university–school district relationship, I build on scholarship theorising how education encloses Black social, political and cultural life (Shange 2019; Sojoyner 2016) in response to white anxieties, desires and futurity (Baldwin 2012; Olund 2017; Smith and Vasudevan 2017).…”

Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section

“…Biopolitical sexuality is reprosexuality, sexuality marshaled to reproductive futurity (Edelman, 2004;Friedman, 2000;Halberstam, 2005;Olund, 2017;Warner, 1991). In service to racialized goals and bound to national imaginaries, reprosexuality ''pits the 'straight time' of progress, development, and reproduction against a 'queer time' that is out of step, out of place, and, at best, productive rather than reproductive'' (Oswin, 2012(Oswin, : 1625.…”