U.S. Empire and the “Adaptive Education” Model: The Global Production of Race

Bates, Julia

doi:10.1177/2332649218783451

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Many sociologists have long been critical of and oppositional to colonial states, revealing the colonial underpinnings of social thought, and the eurocentricism of what constitutes ‘modernity’ (Bacon and Norton 2019; Bates 2018; Bhambra 2007, 2011; Go 2016; Hammer 2020; Quisumbing King 2019; Steinmetz 2013; White 2022). Anticolonial sociology challenges empire-states’ monopoly on the social order and traces how the human was tied to the rights bearing citizen of colonial states (Hammer 2020).…”

Section: Finding An Exit: Humanisms Beyond the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen, Subject, Human: For A Humanist Sociology at The End of The Eurocene

Nicholls

2023

Humanity & Society

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The history of humanism is intertwined with empire and racism. Many in sociology are aware of the significant contributions of Sylvia Wynter in our understanding of how modernity has shaped what it means to be human. ‘Man,’ Wynter argues, was never more that the European bourgeois man of the colonial world. Colonial conceptions of humanity have largely excluded ways of being and living that resist and refuse global empires. I argue that the differences between those who lived under state rule and those whose politics were illegible to European colonists became part of what we now think of as race. Colonists conflated the human with a certain kind of colonial subject, and later, the favored White citizen-subject and fellow colonist of an empire-state. In contemplating this journal’s title and mission for a humanist sociology, I argue that ‘society’ its 20th and 21st century articulations have often stood in for Man in the Wynterian sense. U.S. Sociology promoted ‘society’ as both an object of inquiry and a cognate for the colonial state. As such, sociology as the study of ‘society’ contained a specifically statist bent. Finally, this essay ends by offering examples of anticolonial humanist sociology that nurtures a more egalitarian genres of the human for the future.

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Section: Finding An Exit: Humanisms Beyond the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen, Subject, Human: For A Humanist Sociology at The End of The Eurocene

Nicholls

2023

Humanity & Society

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“…2 This has the effect of effacing U.S. settler colonialism on the continent and naturalizing those lands as part of the United States while relegating settler colonialism and/or occupation to the extra continental territories. Furthermore, it fails to trace the relationship between these forms of political rule and racial politics that emerge relationally across these contexts (Bates, 2018;Go, 2016Go, , 2018. U.S.…”

Section: P 2)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Antiracism amidst empire? Understanding the United States' relationship to whiteness

Nicholls

2022

Sociology Compass

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Dominant conceptualizations of the United States as a nation-state have recently given way to greater understandings of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. However, notions of U.S. empire may still work to naturalize settler colonialism if viewed in isolation from the expansiveness of what has been considered U.S. territory. In this review article, I outline three dominant understandings of U.S. empire and describe how each reifies the myth of the U.S. as a "nation-state." The U.S. does not simply have an empire. It is an empire. I then review helpful insights concerning processes of rule within empire-states including from postcolonial sociology, comparative-historical sociology, and gender and sexuality. Insights from critical Indigenous studies offer a way forward for research that analyzes the rule of settler colonial and empire-states alongside the politics of race and racism. As theorized by Indigenous feminisms in Oceania, racism also operates through possessive processes that integrate peoples and ways of living into state logics and mechanisms of rule. Finally, I argue that sociology committed to addressing racism must further grapple with the reality that the United States is an empire-state. As such, we must more closely analyze the state and statist politics as key producers of White supremacy today.

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“…24 Taking up the educational model used with black Americans since the mid-nineteenth century, Jones's proposed policy could be summed up into four categories which he called "The Four Essentials of Education": health, home life training, industry (including agriculture), and recreation. 25 Education was meant to serve primarily the needs of the community, particularly agricultural and industrial ones, rather than provide literary knowledge that had supposedly little relevance or utility in African economic life. These utilitarian principles were embraced, directly or indirectly, by many colonial administrations (once again, for different reasons, with distinct aims).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%