Rancor: Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment

In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.

Toward a Comparative History of Racial Thought in Africa: Historicism, Barbarism, Autochthony

Using material from the history of African thought, this essay proposes a strategy for writing a comparative history of race that ranges beyond a consideration of white supremacy and its anti-racist inflections. Studies of race outside the global north have often been hobbled by rigid modernist assumptions that over-privilege the determining influence of Western discourses at the expense of local intellectual inheritances. This essay, in contrast, proposes a focus on locally inherited discourses of difference that have shown signs of becoming racialized, at times through entanglement with Western ideas. It pays particular attention to discourses that arranged “human kinds” along a progression from barbarian to civilized, suggesting the presence of African historicisms that in modern times have converged with the stadial ideas that played a major role in Western racial thought.

Language ideology and policy in a colonial and postcolonial context

This chapter discusses the animosity against Arabic elements in Persian in present-day Iran. I argue that this phenomenon can be seen as a continuation of the modern anti-Arabism that appeared in Iran in the nineteenth century as a direct result of the domination of European culture, rooted in European racial thought and linguistic beliefs and ideologies. The chapter first outlines the historical background of anti-Arabism in Iran. This is followed by a discussion on the controversy around the rise of the Persian language, while also highlighting the significance of this language as an aspect of Iranian national identity. The chapter finally addresses language-related anti-Arabism and focuses on the hostility that can be observed in scientific scholarship.

Human Difference

Chapter 5 explains how debates about human origins and distinctiveness inform ideas about Europe. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography books often argue that the natural environment shapes human characteristics, and that Europeans are distinctive because they have been exposed to certain conditions. However, the books also propose that Europeans possess intrinsic, unchanging qualities. This tension highlights the complexities of contemporary racial thought, which combines ideas about inherent nature, inheritance, environmental influence, and aesthetics. Some geographical texts argue for a single European race, but others identify a range of European races, often premised on categorization of languages.

Whiteness

Whiteness as a conceptual framework—and whiteness studies, the interdisciplinary field it precipitated—largely developed from two overlapping scholarly strands that sought to “reverse the view” of how we think, and talk, about race. Though both activists and scholars had long described the insidious effects of racism and discrimination on people of color, and the pervasive disadvantages they faced in US society, in 1989 women’s studies scholar Peggy McIntosh flipped the script to interrogate the generally unseen, and unearned, advantages white people carry with them in every aspect of life. Her now classic article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” articulated the concept of “white privilege” for a broad audience, and it was quickly adopted for classroom use by many secondary and university instructors. What made the article particularly useful in the classroom was her inclusion of a list of privileges demonstrating the range of ways in which whiteness is constructed as a normative and neutral category, such as “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin.” Her article continues to be in heavy use in classrooms and anti-racist workshops, while McIntosh herself has revisited the concept of white privilege, as well as male privilege, in numerous publications. A similar trend of reversing the view emerged from historians and literary scholars beginning in the 1990s. Previously, scholarship on race was dominated by studies examining how Europeans and European Americans viewed black people in particular, and to a lesser extent groups from indigenous, Asian, or Latin American descent. This focus was exemplified by numerous foundational texts on racial thought, many of which emphasized the rise of scientific racism in the 19th century, including William Stanton’s The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–1959 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); John Haller Jr.’s Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971); and George Frederickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). In response, historians began to interrogate the changing meanings of whiteness over time, both politically and culturally. Within that new historiographic turn, some historians focused on the ways in which the parameters of whiteness were tied to patterns of immigration and assimilation, while others looked to the role of social class in the development of the nascent and often amorphous racial category, while still others even more literally reversed the view to examine how African Americans have viewed white people historically.

Latina/os and Race

This chapter argues that the subject of racism and race is crucial to Latino studies in that the historical conditions responsible for birthing gospels of phenotype and fundamentalisms of ancestry began in sites of Hispanic colonial domination in our hemisphere. Only later did racial literacies and pedagogies travel to other colonial domains within the hemisphere and across the globe. The chapter stresses the crisis of Christian piety that caused colonizing nations to produce discourses of disparagement meant to reduce or stigmatize the humanity of their subjects, the eminently historical nature of racial thought, and the role of cultivated intellects in defining, demeaning, and debasing conquered populations that differed from them in heritage, origin, and appearance. It posits that racist violence, including of the genocidal kind, is not an aberration but a vital factor of the civilization that European colonial ventures forged in the Americas. It offers an outline for a pan-hemispheric history of discourse from the Anglo and Iberian Americas to illustrate how feasibly one can claim that in the hemisphere one is racist by default. The exclusion of black, Indian, or Asian-descended people not only recurs as an ideal for the region’s foremost thinkers, political theorists, and founding fathers, but it also creeps into the pages of schoolbooks and the media in general. This scenario leaves it up to the maligned groups in the citizenry to devise ways of surviving the animosity hurled at them from various levels of public discourse in their own country. Nothing, then, would seem more urgent to fuel visions of humane solidarity and peaceful coexistence across difference of phenotype and ancestry in the Americas than to rehabilitate social relations by disabling the App of racial acrimony installed in the social fabric of our nations by the founding discourses that created our civilization.