Singing about the dark times in the US and India: notes on situated understandings in our age of essentialisms

Abstract

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Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom

“…On a wider theoretical plane, building upon the insights offered in recent scholarship on Jewish-Muslim interactions (Everett and Gidley, 2022;Klug, 2014;Sheldon, 2022a;2022b;Kasstan, 2022) and research highlighting the flexibility and plurality in human actants' analytical thinking (Glick Schiller, Darieva, Gruner Domic, 2011;Heywood, 2020;Mathur, 2020;Stasch, 2009), I proposed a framework that underscores the agentive power of minoritised groups. This framework invites us to pay closer attention to the way racialised communities develop and express their ethnic, racial and religious selfunderstandings, as well as define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and other minorities in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations and emphasise the simultaneity of similarity and difference.…”

“…I would therefore hesitate to describe the way in which my interlocutors theorise commonality and difference among Jewish and Muslim populations as contradictory and, instead, argue that their thinking about these topics does not lend itself easily to dominant European discourses about Jewish-Muslim relations or, on a broader plane, politically constructed binaries of difference that nation-state building projects can deploy as instruments in organising and governing difference. To give an example of recent research that casts congruent theoretical light on communal self-understandings, Chandana Mathur's (2020) discussion of Muslim women's protests in India suggests that while the protesters’ discourses were oftentimes based on ideas that essentialise Muslim women in gendered terms, they also incorporated and engendered a nation-wide proliferation of much more inclusive narratives asserting that Muslim protesters were as Indian as anybody else in the country. Another useful theoretical departure point to illustrate my interlocutors’ conceptualisation of the commonality and difference between Jewish and Muslim traditions may be found in Paolo Heywood's suggestion that different actors espouse different styles of thinking about difference (Heywood, 2020).…”

Sleights of Hand: Free Ports, Bordering, and the Racial Capitalist Roots of Economic Nationalist Strategies in the US and the UK

“…Ethnographers have looked beyond simple binary or exceptionalist understandings 5 of the votes for Trump's Make America Great Again agenda and for Brexit, noting the heterogeneity of their often-essentialised supporters (Balthazar 2017;Mathur 2020;Rapport 2020), the conjuncture of multiple political strategies (Clarke 2019;Evans 2017), and the political work (Maskovsky 2019) done by seeming to amplify White working-class grievances and racist versus progressive divisions, thereby disguising the overall racial capitalist White benefit from that trope (Ilc 2017;Walley 2017) 6 and the very quiet, very powerful projects of a small capitalist (and fracturing) elite (Gusterson 2017: 210). In the UK case, Hickman and Ryan (2020) call that elite group the 'chumocracy', schooled together and later scuffling over which tack to take (Shore in Green et al 2016: 490 to maximise and securitise their capital.…”