[Antiracism] Fwd: Annoucement

[cjbSS at hampshire.edu]

----- Forwarded message from Cinamon Blair <cinamonblair at hotmail.com> -----
    Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 12:22:13 -0400
    From: Cinamon Blair <cinamonblair at hotmail.com>
Reply-To: Cinamon Blair <cinamonblair at hotmail.com>
 Subject: Annoucement
      To: cjbSS at hampshire.edu

>*Anthropology’s Evolving Relationship to Genocide:*
>
>*Does the Term Apply to Darfur and the United States?*
>
>Enoch Page
>
>Anthropology was slow to adopt the study of racism and was slower to take
>up the stury of genocide. Yet both areas of knowledge production have
>become a salient feature of human rights, peace and conflict studies on our
>field. Consequently, most of the work done so far narrowly confines the
>definition of what constitutes genocide. As a result, academic struggles
>emerge over what some scholars resist as the overgeneralization of an
>exceedingly narrow accepted definition of the term. At the same time, there
>is a strong resistance to casting a wider net so as to include any
>systematic attempt, over time, of committing mass murder against a
>particular group, on a population scale. There is an even stronger
>resistance to recognizing when genocide is racialized. Finally, there is a
>still stronger resistance to recognizing that genocide against non-whites,
>and particularly, anti-black (including black on black) genocide, has
>growing global dimensions.
>
>Two forms of unrecognized genocide occur against Blacks in Darfur and in
>the United States. While these forms of genocide are enacted in very
>different ways for quite different reasons by radically different states,
>the specific manner of causing dispersal or death may be differ in each
>case, but the outcome is amazingly similar: that is, large numbers of black
>resource competitors either are removed from the market place, or else,
>they are completely eliminated from the state.
>
>Historically, there has been widespread denial when genocide is taking
>place, and the rationalization of genocide, a method of its denial, has
>always been the most intense when the victims are seen as not white, as in
>the case of Jews, and especially when they are of African descent. I argue
>that racialized cultural imperialism is a precursor to cultural genocide.
>This concept was created by anthropologists to explain one method of
>achieving genocidal removal or annihilation. Accomplishing genocide
>requires the intentional destruction of a social group; the project may not
>necessarily require overt violence nor does it necessarily require any
>violence outside the law, as is commonly assumed in most analyses of
>genocide. So, it’s important for us to recognize that including cultural
>genocide as a concept in our theories paves the way for more broadly
>rethinking what violent genocide is, so as to make analytical space for the
>parallels I draw. Hence, I argue that media representation of the Darfur
>genocide is informed by the narrow academic model that does not take into
>account the larger phenomenon of anti-black genocide. Non-whites are not
>killed or culturally eradicated simply because they are black; rather they
>are assaulted this way because it commonly is known around the world that
>very little cultural value placed on black lives, even when people are not
>being killed. This fosters the pretext for all forms of genocide against
>blacks, including the black on black version we witness in Darfur and the
>United States.
>
>/Enoch Page is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
>Massachusetts in Amherst. His primary area of specialization is the
>scholarship of African enslavement, colonization, and global struggles for
>anti-racist liberation. He has studied and taught about the organization of
>racism in the Caribbean, Africa and the United States. He currently teaches
>courses like The Anthropology of Whiteness, Activist Antiracism Through
>Film, and The Anthropology of Genocide./
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/

----- End forwarded message -----


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DARFURJuly6th.LG.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 732827 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.hampshire.edu/pipermail/antiracism/attachments/20060705/ba33bf17/attachment.pdf>