FORUM: Stripping Away the Body: Prospects for Reimagining Race in IR
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International Studies Review (2021) 0, 1–29
THE FORUM
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FORUM: Stripping Away the Body: Prospects
for Reimagining Race in IR
T. D . H A R P E R - S H I P M A N
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, USA
K. MELCHOR QUICK HALL
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
G AV R I E L C U T I PA - Z O R N
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
AND
MAMYRAH A. DOUGÉ-PROSPER
University of California, Irvine, USA
It is impossible to talk about race in international relations (IR) with-
out acknowledging the early and groundbreaking intervention of a cou-
ple of special issues, followed by conversation-changing book anthologies.
Despite these contributions, mainstream IR continues to marginalize the
valuable work of non-white institutions and people, while minimizing the
role of race and racism in the discipline. In the wake of a historic racial
uprising in the United States (and globally) during the summer of 2020,
IR scholars returned to critical discussions of race and racism in the con-
temporary moment.
Although the current conversations on race in IR are crucial for di-
recting the field toward a more generative path, there is still work to be
done. Many of the existing formulations of race orient the concept around
the somatic. The overreliance on the body as an indication of race can
obscure how race as a set of dispossessing structures supported and re-
produced through a variety of agents and mechanisms can be discerned
through other means. Body-centric conceptualizations of race are also typ-
ically divorced from their origins at the root of capitalism, in favor of
more US-centric renderings of race as identity. The contributors to this
forum think through race as the concomitant othering and rank-ordering
of groups that translates into material conditions. We illustrate how race
as a material–spatial–temporal relation of power exposes the limits of race
as merely phenotype or culture. Through our examination of race in this
light, issues of gender effortlessly emerge alongside the study of race. As
such, we demonstrate how a re-reading of IR with this formulation of race
as its central tenet offers a more generative avenue for explorations of
class, gender, security, and power, writ large.
Es imposible hablar de la cuestión racial en las relaciones internacionales
(RI) sin reconocer la temprana e innovadora intervención de un par de
publicaciones especiales, a las que les siguieron antologías de libros que
Harper-Shipman, T.D. et al. (2021) FORUM: Stripping Away the Body: Prospects for Reimagining Race in IR. International
Studies Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab034
© The Author(s) (2021). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This is an
Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the
work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited.
For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com2 Stripping Away the Body
marcaron el rumbo de la conversación. A pesar de estas contribuciones, la
tendencia dominante en el campo de las relaciones internacionales sigue
marginando el valioso trabajo de las instituciones y personas no blancas, al
tiempo que minimiza el papel de la raza y el racismo en la disciplina. A raíz
de un histórico levantamiento racial en Estados Unidos (y a nivel mundial)
durante el verano de 2020, los académicos especialistas en RI volvieron a
plantear debates cruciales sobre la raza y el racismo en el presente.
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Aunque los debates actuales sobre la raza en las RI son cruciales para
dirigir el campo hacia un camino más generativo, aún queda trabajo por
hacer. Muchas de las definiciones existentes sobre la raza orientan el con-
cepto en torno a lo somático. La excesiva confianza en el cuerpo como
indicador de la raza puede ocultar la forma en que la raza, como conjunto
de estructuras desposeedoras apoyadas y reproducidas a través de una var-
iedad de agentes y mecanismos, puede ser percibida a través de otros
medios. Las conceptualizaciones raciales centradas en el cuerpo también
se han separado de sus orígenes en la raíz del capitalismo, a favor de inter-
pretaciones de la raza como identidad más centradas en Estados Unidos.
Las personas que contribuyen a esta discusión entienden la raza como
la alteración y la jerarquización de los grupos que se traduce en condi-
ciones materiales. Demostramos de qué manera la raza como relación
material-espacial-temporal de poder expone los límites de la raza como
mero fenotipo o cultura. Al examinar la raza desde este punto de vista, las
cuestiones de género surgen de forma natural junto con el estudio de la
raza. Así, demostramos cómo una relectura de las RI con esta definición de
raza como principio central ofrece una vía más generadora para explorar
la clase, el género, la seguridad y el poder en general.
Il est impossible de parler d’origine ethnique en relations interna-
tionales (RI) sans reconnaître l’intervention précoce et révolutionnaire
de quelques publications spécifiques, suivies par des anthologies de livres
qui ont fait évoluer le débat. Malgré ces contributions, les RI courantes
continuent à marginaliser le précieux travail d’institutions et de person-
nes « non blanches » tout en minimisant le rôle de l’origine ethnique et
du racisme dans la discipline. Suite aux révoltes ethniques historiques qui
ont eu lieu aux États-Unis (et dans le monde entier) durant l’été 2020, les
chercheurs en RI sont revenus à des discussions essentielles sur l’origine
ethnique et le racisme à l’ère moderne.
Bien que les débats actuels sur l’origine ethnique en RI soient cruciaux
pour orienter le domaine vers une voie plus productive, il reste encore du
travail à faire. Nombre des formulations existantes de l’origine ethnique
orientent le concept autour du somatique. Le recours excessif au corps
comme indication de l’origine ethnique peut masquer la manière dont
l’origine ethnique, en tant qu’ensemble de structures de dépossession
soutenues et reproduites par une variété d’agents et de mécanismes, peut
être discernée par d’autres moyens. Les conceptualisations de l’origine
ethnique qui sont centrées sur le corps sont aussi généralement dissociées
de leurs origines à la racine du capitalisme, en faveur d’interprétations
plus américaines de l’origine ethnique comme identité. Les contribu-
teurs à cette tribune se livrent à une réflexion sur l’origine ethnique en
tant qu’ostracisation et que hiérarchisation concomitantes de groupes
qui se traduisent en conditions matérielles. Nous illustrons la manière
dont l’origine ethnique, en tant que relation de pouvoir matérialo-spatio-
temporelle, expose ses limites si nous la considérons simplement comme
un phénotype ou une culture. En examinant l’origine ethnique sous ce
jour, des questions relatives au genre émergent sans effort parallèlement à
l’étude de l’origine ethnique. Ainsi, nous démontrons comment une nou-
velle lecture des RI avec cette formulation de l’origine ethnique comme
principe central offre une piste plus productive pour les explorations des
classes, du genre, de la sécurité et du pouvoir, dans leur ensemble.T.D. HARPER-SHIPMAN ET AL. 3
Keywords: international relations, race, gender
Palabras clave: relaciones internacionales, raza, género
Mots clés: relations internationales, origine ethnique, genre
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Introduction
T. D . H A R P E R - S H I P M A N
Davidson College, USA
AND
K. MELCHOR QUICK HALL
Brandeis University, USA
It is impossible to talk about race in international relations (IR) without acknowl-
edging the early and groundbreaking intervention of a couple of special issues
(Persaud and Walker 2001, 2015), followed by conversation-changing book antholo-
gies (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2015; Persaud and Sajed 2018). Despite
these contributions, mainstream IR continues to marginalize the valuable work of
non-white institutions and people (Beier 2005; Davenport 2008; Vitalis 2017; Hall
2020), while minimizing the role of race and racism in the discipline (Vitalis 2000;
Chin 2009; Mittelman 2009; Thompson 2013; Henderson 2017; Harper-Shipman
and Gordon 2020; Sabaratnam 2020). In the wake of a historic racial uprising in
the United States (and globally) during the summer of 2020, IR scholars returned
to critical discussions of race and racism in the contemporary moment (Adkins and
Devermont 2020; Bhambra et al. 2020; Murrey 2020; Shilliam 2020a, 2020b; Zvobgo
and Loken 2020).
Although the current conversations on race in IR are crucial for directing the
field toward a more generative path, there is still work to be done. Many of the
existing formulations of race orient the concept around the somatic. The overre-
liance on the body as an indication of race can obscure how race as a set of dis-
possessing structures supported and reproduced through a variety of agents and
mechanisms can be discerned through other means. Body-centric conceptualiza-
tions of race are also typically divorced from their origins at the root of capitalism,
in favor of more US-centric renderings of race as identity. The contributors to this
forum think through race as the concomitant othering and rank-ordering of groups
that translates into material conditions. We illustrate how race as a material–spatial–
temporal relation of power exposes the limits of race as merely phenotype or cul-
ture. Through our examination of race in this light, issues of gender effortlessly
emerge alongside the study of race. As such, we demonstrate how a re-reading of IR
with this formulation of race as its central tenet offers a more generative avenue for
explorations of class, gender, security, and power, writ large.
The following questions motivate and inform this forum: How were communi-
ties narrating and understanding their own existence in relation to others while IR
was viewing “the other” in ways that marked the discipline’s own myopia (Harper-
Shipman)? How might we understand the challenges to the histories (and futures)
that undergird our understanding of “the international” (Cutipa-Zorn)? In what
ways is the international system not as much anarchic as it is controlled by the in-
terests of the global elite (Dougé-Prosper)? Hall concludes with an epistemological
and methodological offering for future IR scholarship that seeks to contend with
the meditations that we advance in this forum. Each paper explores race in regions
that are generally elided in IR discussions of race because they are presumed to be
racially homogeneous.4 Stripping Away the Body
We acknowledge the particularity of the cases highlighted in Africa, the Middle
East, the Americas, and the Caribbean. At the same time, we end with a theoreti-
cal provocation that we hope scholars will engage beyond these particular regions.
Evidence of race as the structuring of access to life, death, and pleasure as well as
the quality of these experiences at various levels brings together ostensibly disparate
regions in this forum. Conceptualizing race as material–spatial–temporal expands
our ability to understand international and national power relations that exist
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alongside the remnants and new articulations of colonial systems. It will allow
IR scholars to better discern the texture of international and regional hostilities
and cooperation. We entreat IR scholars to use race as a lens for reimagining the
form and content of gender, sex, borders, power, and privilege in the international
realm.1
(E)racing Africa in IR
T. D . H A R P E R - S H I P M A N
Davidson College, USA
Exploring race formation in Africa both reinforces and complicates the study of
race in IR. The extant body of scholarship that touches on race in Africa provides a
necessary alternative grammar for explaining the global forces that have shaped the
continent since the age of European exploration. This grammar runs contrary to
endogenous explanations such as war, ethnic tension, autocratic governments, and
corruption that mainstream IR scholars offer. IR scholarship on race in Africa helps
us articulate the distaste that arises when scholars studying Africa speak of failed
states (Jones 2015) and failed development (Rodney 1974; Wilson 2012; Rutazibwa
2018). The palpable hermeneutics of race that inform the study of Africa can no
longer be unfelt (Grovogui 2001). This lens provided by critical IR scholars, how-
ever, keeps our gaze lifted toward international and epistemic structures that repro-
duce race in Africa. But what happens when we decide to peer down into the con-
tinent? Howard Winant reminds us that “Each nation-state, each political system,
each cultural complex necessarily constructs a unique racialized social structure,
a particular complex of racial meanings and identities ... Increasing internation-
alization of race can only be understood in terms of prevalent patterns, general
tendencies, but in no sense can such generalizations substitute for detailed analyses
of local formations” (Winant 2002, 123). Shifting our gaze to substate formulations
of race in Africa unsettles the discipline’s intellectual equilibrium as we begin to see
that we have been standing on shaky ground. Africans are also engaged in unique
forms of race-craft that have broader implications for the study of race in IR.
Scholars writing on race in IR entreat the field to consider its origins in colonial
matrices of knowledge production and engage the ways in which the current world
order is constituted through race. This indispensable academic project tends to re-
produce a measurement of race that relies on evidence of what I call white/other bi-
naries where phenotypical whiteness dominates other groups. Such a measurement
renders non-settler colonial states in Africa difficult to discuss beyond the context
of the formal colonial period and donor–government relations. Because whiteness
in this context is primarily understood in somatic terms, the assumption is that
Africans in non-settler colonial states are not, themselves, engaged in race-crafting.
However, assuming that there is agency in the way that Africans in non-settler colo-
nial states navigate and understand race disrupts the white/other binary and the
somatic notions of race that dominate the conversation IR.
1
T.D. Harper-Shipman and K. Melchor Quick Hall are the co-editors of this special forum.T.D. HARPER-SHIPMAN ET AL. 5
Measuring Race in IR
When Errol Henderson (2015a) signals that race in IR is hidden in plain site, he
points to a persistent problem facing race scholars: measurement. What is race
(conceptually) and how do we know it when we see it (operationally)? How do we
know that what we are looking at is race, not nationality, ethnicity, regionalism, or
something else? As Lewis Gordon and I point out “the illusiveness of race as an
exact science pointed to an important insight into human science, and perhaps all
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science, which is that the human being always exceeds science’s capacity to capture
it” (Harper-Shipman and Gordon 2020, 71). In other words, race as a concept has
proven difficult for many scholars to define and defend its existence. Ultimately,
how we conceptualize race is tied to our methodological and epistemological
orientations.
Race in IR draws heavily on Du Bois’ prescient prediction that the color line
would be the problem of the twentieth century as a methodological focus for the
study of race (Marable and Agard-Jones 2008; Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie
Shilliam 2015; Persuad and Sajed 2018). For example, in the well-cited and seminal
edited volume on race in IR, Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam (2015) foreground
Du Bois’s statement as the basis upon which we should understand race and how it
constitutes the existing world order. They aptly argue that political constructs, eco-
nomic systems, and an array of international actors that come to comprise the global
sphere are products of a racial logic (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2015). The
authors and contributors to the volume deftly illustrate the persistent relevance of
the color line as both a problem and analytical construct for IR scholarship. How-
ever, contrary to Du Bois’s intended aims, the color line, as it is widely wielded in
IR scholarship today, reproduces measurements of race that rely on evidence of
white domination. This type of scholarship anchors whiteness as both a geographi-
cal and epistemological location that has shaped and continues shaping the world
through race relations. This is not to say that identifying vestiges and technologies
of European and US Empires is not a pressing academic endeavor—it undoubtedly
is. However, race is not an ontological category. Race has always been an episte-
mological enterprise detached from its provincial roots in Europe. A decolonial
approach to understanding race, then, requires a shift in our geography of reason.
How do we engage the tools that enabled Du Bois to make such a resounding pre-
diction? Monteiro (2000, 2008) illustrates how Du Bois’s epistemological position
was rooted in Africa. Being rooted in Africa had far reaching consequences as, “Du
Bois rethought the language, methods, historical references, and civilizational as-
sumptions of the social sciences” that allowed him to see the color line (Monteiro
2000, 221). From this epistemological location, Du Bois was able to critique the
dearth of scientific rigor that informed the study of race and Black people uniquely
(Gordon 2006; Monteiro 2008). In effect, he could see the color line as a material
project with academia as its handmaiden. Unfortunately, in bringing the color line
into the twenty-first century, IR scholars have left Africa as a dynamic site of agency
and race-making in the twentieth century.
Disengaging the reimaged color line from its purely physical orientations and
re-engaging Africa as a discursive site of racial formation brings into contrast the
dynamic race relations that do not begin and end with a white/other binary. For
example, today, China has moved into a comparable position with the West with
respect to its global reach and economic power. Sylvia Tamale, for example, in-
cludes countries that export finance capital to the Global South as Western, which
would include China (Tamale 2020, 13). Despite having once been a part of the
Non-Aligned Movement that established the Third World, H.L.T. Quan (2012) illus-
trates how China draws on the language of South–South solidarity that grew out of
the Non-Aligned Movement to leverage exploitative contracts for natural resources
from African countries. Race certainly informed the Third World discourse and the
ordering of factions within the Non-Aligned Movement (Darby 2004; Prashad 2008;6 Stripping Away the Body
Cooper 2014). And despite this history, China has been complicit in anti-African
racism.2 Would the reimagined color line bring the China–Africa relationship into
view?
Understanding race as an articulation of material and social relations expands
our capacity to study race in Africa, outside of South Africa, and the formal colonial
period. Being attuned to a racial logic that accentuates othering and hierarchy is
one generative way to capture the deployment of racial technologies. Take for ex-
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ample the origins and implementation of autochthony in francophone West Africa.
Autochthony is a category of belonging that means “born of the soil” or the orig-
inal people of the land. The French created the term as a socially divisive tool for
upholding colonial power structures by designating certain groups within the ter-
ritory as the indigenous and others as outsiders (Geschiere 2009). Various West
African states and social groups within those states have used the term to reinscribe
a set of hierarchal social relations that sustain unequal material and political access
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Mbembe 2001; Boone 2003; Geschiere 2015). These
relations are especially salient during moments of political upheaval and land dis-
putes where the language of autochthony has been harnessed to dispossess targeted
groups of citizens from their land or expel them from the country. This was the
case in Cameroon (Nyamnjoh and Rowlands 1998; Geschiere 2009), Cote D’Ivoire
(Dozon 2000; Chauveau 2000), and Burkina Faso (Lentz 2003). Sometimes the dif-
ference between the groups claiming autochthony and those being disenfranchised
appear to map on to ethnic divisions. But more often than not, the schisms and
groupings happen along regional lines where various ethnicities comprise either
the autochthonous group or the “outsider” group. The preservation and deploy-
ment of autochthony in West Africa might easily register as a racial technology if
the autochthonous group were white. The usage of autochthony is evidence of race
within nonsettler colonial African countries if we detach confirmation of race from
phenotype and instead privilege material and social relations. However, because IR
scholars have misread autochthony as a primordial ethnic violence, IR will continue
to only partially explain some instances of forced migration, land dispossession, po-
litical violence, and divisions of labor in West Africa.
Building on African Women and Gender
How African feminists have grappled with the concept of gender provides valu-
able insight for IR scholars studying race in Africa. Many Western feminists de-
scribed gender oppression as the preeminent struggle facing women around the
world. They, uncritically, projected their analyses on to Africa—depicting African
women as a monolithic group lying dormant under the weight of African men. Ella
Shohat called this the “homogenous feminist master narrative”—the fixed read-
ing of Third World women as lacking agency and perpetual victims (Shohat 2001,
1270). In response to the homogeneous feminist master narrative, African femi-
nists offered counter narratives that illustrated the complexities of gender rela-
tions across the continent, which were bound up in legacies of colonialism, reli-
gion, nation-building, and global capitalism inter alia (e.g., Mama 2015). These re-
alities led African feminists to engage critically with gender as an imported concept
that had limited explanatory power when not considered alongside other struc-
tures of power. Achola Pala notes that “the position of African women in con-
temporary Africa is to be considered at every level of analysis as an outcome of
structural and conceptual mechanisms by which African societies have continued to
respond to and resist the global processes of economic exploitation and cultural
domination” (Pala 2005, 299). Grappling with these realities meant that African
feminists could not rely solely on historical analyses. It required that they offer clear
2
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/chinas-racism-is-wrecking-its-success-in-africa/.T.D. HARPER-SHIPMAN ET AL. 7
articulations for improving, navigating, or dismantling gender relations in Africa
through a rigorous engagement with the limitations and possibilities of gender
as a concept (Oyewumi 2005; Mama 2015; WoMin Collective 2017; Tamale 2020).
Oyeronke Oyewumi (1994, 2003) even challenged the colonial foundation upon
which gender as a methodological tool rested. Scholars who were epistemologically
located in the West writing on gender in Africa were ill-equipped with inadequate
measures of gender, or as Olufemi Taiwo states, “When a theory that apprehends
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reality with only two categories—‘men’ and ‘women’ confronts Africa, the result is a
litany of confusion and nonexplanations” (Taiwo 2003, 48). The African feminists’
approach to gender entreats us to examine agency in race-making in Africa, while
being sensitive to the possibility that there are discontinuities with global renderings
of race.
How African feminists have had to critically interrogate not just the epistemic en-
terprise of gender in Africa, but the concept itself, and at times even the conceptual
significance of “Africa” (Ebunoluwa 2009), is instructive for IR scholars studying
race in Africa. African feminists’ treatment of gender suggests that the same might
be true for race. Africans are not simply being oppressed under immutable colo-
nial structures of race. To think otherwise privileges state and global analyses of
race that elided the ways in which actors at the sub-state level in different African
countries have been reproducing/negotiating, and/or subverting race (Brown and
Harman 2013; Munyi, Mwambari, and Ylönen 2020). African actors exercise con-
siderable agency within their given national and regional contexts to create their
own racial maps for locating themselves and the rest of the world. While there are
some overlaps in these different racial maps that resonate with the global notions of
race, other aspects cannot be reconciled with the extant reliance on race as pheno-
type. If concepts such as gender and the Weberian state (Henderson 2015b)—both
products of a colonial matrix of power—have been exposed as clumsy in their ex-
planation of African realities, why would not race follow suit?
Negotiating Race in West Africa
“Toubab, toubab, toubab! White person. People passing by shout, smiling and wav-
ing at me. I am black. I am African. I am Rwandan.”3 In a personal narrative about
her experience in Banjul, Gambia, Aurore Iradukunda expressed confusion and
frustration that Gambians labeled her toubab and called her white although she
is a phenotypically Black woman, raised in Canada with Rwandan roots.4 “Back in
Canada,” she says, “my blackness goes unquestioned. I am dark. My hair defies grav-
ity.”5 Still, Gambians persisted in referring to her as white because race is not solely
a matter of phenotype in West Africa. It is a register of how one moves through
the world. Nassara in Burkina Faso and Cameroon, Obruni in Ghana, and Toubab in
Mali, Gambia, Cote D’Ivoire, Mauritania, Guineé, and Senegal simultaneously and
independently mean white/foreigner/stranger (Doquet 2005; Pierre 2013; Quashie
2015). Whiteness is not fixed but a constantly changing dynamic with multiple com-
ponents. A nassara in Burkina Faso may refer to a white person, a person from the
African diaspora, or any other non-sub-Saharan African country. In an ethnographic
account of race in Ghana, Jemima Pierre recounts, “Over time, the word obruni has
been used to refer to foreign Whites, Asians, and lighter-skinned and often brown-
skinned diaspora Blacks” (Pierre 2013, 77). The same metric applies to nassara and
toubab. One key distinction between the concepts is the degree to which Blackness
and Africanness are synonymous. Toubab and nassara signal non-African and non-
Black. Thus, nassara and toubab are used interchangeably with the word “white” in
3
Aurore Iradunkunda (2016).
4
Aurore Iradunkunda (2016).
5
Aurore Iradunkunda (2016).8 Stripping Away the Body
French or English and apply to diasporic Africans under certain contexts. While
obruni means white/foreigner/stranger, when applied to African Americans, it does
not signal non-Black, but instead means not African (Ralph 2008; Pierre 2013). In
this way, whiteness is peeled away from the body and mapped on to a façon de se
comporter, or a manner of behaving and existing in the world.
To behave like a white person or “Dafa toubabé” in Wolof is not entirely pejora-
tive or celebratory, as some suggest. In instances where it is applied to Africans who
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have either traveled abroad or who take up mannerisms associated with whiteness,
there is a pejorative tinge to the word. Obruni, for example, “has been applied to
Ghanaians returning from abroad who are perceived to be affluent and are often
derided as dressing, walking, talking, and acting White” (Pierre 2013, 77). Being
called white in this context does not afford one any special privileges for abdicat-
ing Blackness. What it means to behave like a white person, however, is contextual.
In an ethnographic study of whiteness in Dakar, Helen Quashie finds that Dark-
aroise conceive of whiteness as behaving like you are superior, lacking spontaneity,
being sentimental, acting in a way that is asocial, or not having self-worth (pride,
self-esteem) (Quashie 2015, 764). Blackness, by contrast, is the opposite of these
attributes (Quashie 2015, 764). Whether true or not, the Black gaze illustrates how
it is these behaviors, not nationality or degrees of melanin by themselves that de-
marcate whiteness.
The actual ability to move throughout the world is another indication of white-
ness. Kalra, Kaur, and Hutnyk (2005) refer to this as the “passport of privilege” that
facilitates white people’s ability to travel the world unencumbered. Inter-continental
travel for many people in West Africa is economic, political, and racial. During my
time in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, and Mali, people would express how they
dreamed of one day being able to travel to the United States, Europe, or Canada.
However, travel to Europe and North America meant having what my Burkinabe
friends called le moyen (the means). The means were certainly pecuniary given the
cost of flights, visas, and relative purchasing power parity (ppp) of the CFA and the
Cedis to the Euro and the dollar. But even if one could muster up the financial
support, the political obstacles were far more difficult to surmount. Access to Amer-
ican, Canadian, and European Union visas are difficult for many in West Africa to
obtain (Konadu-Agyemang, Takyi, and Arthur 2006; Schapendonk and Steel 2014).
In 2018, only 5.5 percent of all non-immigrant visas to the United States were issued
to Africans across the entire continent (US Embassy). Visa systems often reflect
racialized and epistemic privileges at the international scale that make it difficult
to uncouple global mobility and whiteness (El-Khawas 2004; Andrucki 2010). The
fluidity with which foreigners from these same countries are able to acquire Sene-
galese, Ghanaian, and Burkinabè visas is mediated through a racialized matrix of
privilege that locates Blackness as local and whiteness as global. The aspect of travel
is crucial for understanding how whiteness is not about wealth or class ipso facto.
Stuart Hall’s poignant statement that “race is the modality through which class
is lived, the medium in which class relations are expressed” aptly captures the
material element of whiteness (Hall et al. 1978, 394). The perceived wealth status
that shrouds toubabs, obrunis, and nassaras has led to a “white price.” The white price
reflects an informal dual price system predicated on ostensible wealth differences
between whiteness and Blackness. Whiteness indicates a global income status. In his
book In My Father’s House, Kwame Appiah (1992) offers an anecdote that elucidates
the white price. While traveling with a white friend in Ghana, the pair was in a
vehicle accident where a Ghanaian truck driver backed into Appiah’s friend’s car.
Despite there being numerous Ghanaian witnesses, the witnesses stated that Ap-
piah’s white friend was culpable for the accident. The rationale for siding with the
truck driver was that the truck driver, being Ghanaian, more than likely could not
afford the cost associated with the accident, but Appiah’s white friend could. The
“white price” evidences how, although whiteness in these contexts is a discourse of
privilege and power (Pierre 2013), it does not run roughshod over all that itT.D. HARPER-SHIPMAN ET AL. 9
touches. In understanding the material components of whiteness, the white price
presents an opportunity to begin accessing the unevenly distributed wealth that
accumulates in the West. Although the informal dual price system does not system-
atically generate and redistribute wealth from whiteness, it does illustrate a level of
economic agency predicated on a non-somatic notion of whiteness that is absent
from the literature.
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Concluding Thoughts
Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam (2015, 7) make salient the point that the world
order is carved along racial lines. There are, consequently, a variety of actors that
shift, straddle, and/or reinscribe those lines. Our ability to ascertain the spaces and
actors that have reinterpreted global racial lines through their own encounters is
tied to our ability to perceive race beyond the somatic. Whiteness in West Africa
illustrates how a preoccupation with the color line may narrow our view of race to
look only for the cases that support pre-established notions of race, not different
realities on the ground.
In some respects, the West African formulations of whiteness better capture the
ways in which race is socio-spatially and politically constituted. West African for-
mulations of race both transcend and reinscribe melanin as a way of existing and
knowing about the world. They reinforce the readings of whiteness as global and
blackness as provincial that are already foundational practices in international re-
lations (Grovogui 2001; Persuad and Sajed 2018). From this perspective, whiteness
and its attendant constructs are transportable, malleable, and global; whiteness is
dynamic. Blackness, by contrast, is insular, atavistic, and static. In the same way that
to be African is to be constrained by a set of political and economic structures that
render your experience local.
There are practical and far-reaching consequences for rethinking race in Africa.
Understanding whiteness as an articulation of wealth and privilege means that calls
to replace development with reparations and restitution in Africa must contend with
local formations of race.6 Attempts to foment Pan-African solidarity that traverses
the Atlantic would have to grapple with global and local class distinctions and geo-
racial identities in order to avoid taking on an elitist orientation. Similarly, transna-
tional solidarity movements may not be able to rely on phenotypical racial identities
as the crux of solidarity. I end with this final thought from Du Bois in his study of
the Philadelphia Negro. Under “credibility of results,” Du Bois acknowledges the
human inability to restrain personal bias from entering the research process, but
concludes that despite the possibility of creeping bias, “here are social problems
before us demanding careful study, questions awaiting satisfactory answers. ... The
utmost that the world can demand is, not lack of human interest and moral con-
viction, but rather the heart-quality of fairness, and an earnest desire for the truth
despite its possible unpleasantness” (Du Bois 1899, 3). Critical scholars in IR must
be careful not to reproduce the uncritical measurements of race that grow out of
the colonial matrix of knowledge production. Race in IR cannot be relegated to the
domain of simply locating static white/other binaries.
Fear the Child: Racial and Sexual Regulation
along the US–Mexico Border
G AV R I E L C U T I PA - Z O R N
Yale University, USA
6
Rutazibwa (2020)10 Stripping Away the Body
In 2010, conservative calls to revoke birthright citizenship came to a head when
Texas Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert warned about an insidious plot by
terror organizations to infiltrate the United States with pregnant women. Gohmert
falsely claimed that Hezbollah and Hamas were sending young women to have chil-
dren in the United States, who would then “be raised and coddled as future terror-
ists” (Tacopino 2010). Not to be outdone, Texas Republican State Representative
Debbie Riddle declared that former FBI employees had informed her office about
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a plot involving pregnant women from Middle Eastern countries traveling to the
United States through the US–Mexico border (Cooper 2010). Far-right politicians’
references to terror anchor babies captured the cruelty of fights to rescind the Four-
teenth Amendment, which stated that any person born in the United States could
become a citizen, regardless of their parents’ legal status. These accusations indexed
xenophobic and racist policies that united the Middle East and Latin America in
the minds of white settler nationalists as sites of sexual excess, civilizational decline,
and threats to national security. At their core, such statements sought to control the
bodies of women who had been subjected to forced displacement.
While Gohmert and Riddle are both part of a radical right wing, US immigra-
tion enforcement and border rule has been a bipartisan activity for the past two
centuries. The US–Mexico border was formed as a direct result of US settler, slave-
holding, and imperial policies. The first IR of the United States involved destroying
sovereign indigenous nations. As IR scholarship has turned attention to the study of
border securitization worldwide, calls have increased to explain how national secu-
rity and border control are expressed through racial and sexual regulation (Howell
and Richter-Montpetit 2019). Mainstream IR scholarship views contemporary immi-
gration into the United States as a crisis for domestic policy or solely a Latinx issue.
IR discussions of race, immigration, and terrorism often rely on what Randolph Per-
saud (2001) called an overwhelming stress on security and strategy. As a result, IR
scholarship prioritizes state action and grand strategy, despite the fact that history
is not made on a giant chess board of nation-states.
In this article, I argue that the panic that Gohmert and Riddle express regard-
ing Middle Eastern men sending women to the US–Mexico border relies on longer
histories that intertwine the Middle East and Latin America. Focusing on race in
IR reveals the US–Mexico border to be a site that links indigenous dispossession
and the Global War on Terror. It unites two regions that are usually understood as
separate by mainstream media and Area Studies. The focus of Gohmert and Riddle
on controlling women’s bodies displaces the contradictions that emerge from capi-
talism’s economic race to the bottom and nationalism’s promises of exclusive white
citizenship onto migrant gender and sexual relations.
In IR scholarship, the figures of the immigrant and the terrorist represent chal-
lenges to Western civilization (Huntington 1996; Bigo 2002). The idea of West-
ern civilization is a concept analogous to a Potemkin village; it purports to be the
bedrock for the United States, yet is seemingly so fragile that one migrant seems
to threaten its entire existence. The policing of the US–Mexico border is, as Ran-
dolph Persaud argues, a tactic of “civilizational sovereignty” (Persaud 2018, 59).
By constructing twin figures of the unwanted immigrant and the terrorist, state-
craft gives rise to what Cynthia Weber describes as “sexualized orders of inter-
national relations that securitize the ‘unwanted immigrant’ and the ‘terrorist’ so
that white, Christian, bourgeois, heterosexual, cisgendered, ableized, ‘developed’
Westerners/Northerners can feel at home in their homelands” (Weber 2016, 79).
Seen as such, race is neither biological essentialism nor social construction. Race
is a way to analyze the political economy of these sexualized orders. As Chan-
dan Reddy suggests, “racist practice articulates itself generally as gender and sex-
ual regulation” (Reddy 1988, 3). Some outstanding examples in IR have forced
deeper considerations of the relationship between race and IR (Doty 1993; Doty
2001; Persaud and Walker 2001; Shilliam 2011; Persaud and Sajed 2018; Hall 2020;T.D. HARPER-SHIPMAN ET AL. 11
Chowdhry and Ling 2018). Alongside such works, it is imperative to ground these
points in the historical legacies that connect the Middle East and Latin America.
Scholars have analyzed the impact of the discourse of reproduction and national
security. Carmen Lugo-Lugo and Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo argue that the terms an-
chor baby and terror baby are both part of what they call the 9/11 project, a tactic to
“construct immigrant women, and specifically Latinas, their bodies, and their babies
as immediate threats to the security and stability of the country ... [with] the threat
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of terrorism-typically gendered as masculine—becoming feminized through Latina
bodies/babies” (Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo 2014, 1). For Lugo-Lugo and
Bloodsworth-Lugo, the conjoining of Latinx immigrants as sexually promiscuous
criminals and potential terrorists is a relatively new articulation that can be traced
to the rise of the post-9/11 discourse of terrorism and efforts to repeal birthright
citizenship in the United States. These corresponding campaigns constitute part
of what Natalie Cisneros calls a process of “backwards un-citizening” of Mexican
women; the “production of a racialized, sexually deviant, and threatening ‘alien’
subject functions in a normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen in
opposition to a sexually perverse anti-citizen, who is feminized, marginalized, and
thus securitized” (Cisneros 2013, 292). To be successful, these right-wing campaigns
reinscribe a heteronormative family and efface the domestic labor that these women
do for the white nuclear family.
Meanwhile, the global rise of the figure of the terrorist is not only about ma-
terial realities of the Global War on Terror nor accurate descriptions of political
violence. Instead, it has functioned as an ideological determination intended to
insulate settler colonies from critiques of violence while condemning anti-colonial
action taken against colonizers as morally evil. Lisa Stampnitzky (2013) has care-
fully documented the transformation whereby terrorism has become a self-evident
identity—an immoral act that can only be committed by an immoral person. The
roots of this view are evident in two historic conferences on terrorism organized
by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the behest of the Jonathan Insti-
tute, a think tank named after his brother who died in a raid in Entebbe, Uganda.
Bringing together Israeli and US political and military leaders, Netanyahu’s father
described the archetypal terrorist as “a new breed of man which takes humanity
back to prehistoric times, to the times when morality was not yet born. Divested of
any moral principle, he ... is also a cunning, consummate liar, and therefore much
more dangerous than the Nazis, who used to proclaim their aims openly. In fact,
he is the perfect nihilist.” C. Heike Schotten describes this positioning of the ter-
rorist as “premoral and precivilization, thus in effect prehuman, calling to mind
the prehistoric members of [Thomas] Hobbes’ timeless state of nature” (Schotten
2018, 136). The social category of terrorist evolved to be what Jasbir Puar and Amit
Rai called “both a monster to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected ...
Counterterrorism is a form of racial, civilizational knowledge, but now also an aca-
demic discipline that is quite explicitly tied to the exercise of state power” (Puar
and Rai 2002, 122). Thus, the terrorist is inescapably tied to contemporary IR defi-
nitions of security, nation, and civilization. Taken together, the term terror anchor
baby is a racist, sexualized dog whistle. It cannot approximate the fullness of the
lives of women who risk their lives to cross militarized borders for material, famil-
ial, and political reasons. The reality of these women’s lives is much more than the
pathologies that Riddle and Gohmert would believe.
The 2010 right-wing accusations united specters of the Middle East and Latin
America that were epitomized through the purported collaboration between
Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels. In 2011, US federal prosecutors charged
Lebanese businessman Ayman Joumaa under the Patriot Act for financing Hezbol-
lah through a drug-smuggling network that linked US-bound cocaine, a prominent
Lebanese bank, and the Zetas, the largest Mexican drug cartel. A federal jury quickly
indicted Joumaa for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars to the Zetas, whose12 Stripping Away the Body
core members were originally a disaffected part of Mexican special forces trained
by Israeli Defense Forces (Correa-Cabrera 2017). Terrorism experts warned that
Hezbollah would begin making inroads throughout Latin America, effectively pro-
viding yet another justification for Israeli–Latin American militarized coordination.
Four months after the federal prosecution, the Committee on Homeland Security,
headed by notorious New York Republican Congressman Peter King, presented
hearings to the House and Senate on the case of “Hezbollah in Latin America.”
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There, the subcommittee on Counterterrorism argued that Hezbollah “is immersed
in trafficking in weapons, drugs, and women ... [and] engaged in a strategy of asym-
metric warfare on our doorstep,” pointing to Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil as “ar-
eas of potential terrorist influence” (US Congress, House, Committee on Homeland
Security 2011).
While the threat of Hezbollah finding receptive collaborators through Latin
America, and sneaking into the United States was found later to be false, it draws
upon older cultural, political, and military relationships between the Middle East
and Latin America. One of those relationships shaped European notions of civi-
lization, as far back as the earliest Spanish encounters with indigenous peoples in
the Americas. Scott Morgensen (2010) identifies the relationship between the cat-
egories of terrorist and savage through the rise of the term berdache used by early
Spanish colonizers to justify indigenous tribes’ inability to rule. Morgensen traces
how this term was used to condemn Muslim men as racial enemies of Christian civi-
lization during the Crusades by linking them to the creation of berdache, or a group
of “kept boys whose sex was said to be altered by immoral desire ... [whose] effem-
inized male leadership invited and justified conquest” (Morgensen 2010, 65). This
term was also used in Peter Martyr’s account of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s 1513 expe-
dition in Central America, when Balboa’s first act was reportedly to find forty men
dressed in women’s apparel and throw them to be eaten alive by his dogs. Colo-
nial discourses of race and transgressive sexuality travelled to mark entire commu-
nities as sexual heathens who needed European governance and regulation. This
language justified the implementation of the gender binary through genocide and
sexual violence across the Americas, while reinforcing the sexual practices of what
Samir Amin (1989) called “the Eternal West” as appropriate and desirable.
In the early twentieth century, Syrian migration along the US Mexico border also
linked the Middle East and Latin America. As Randa Tawil (2019) details, between
1880 and 1950, 35,000 Syrians immigrated to Mexico, forming part of a diaspora
known as the mahjar. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt assigned immigration
inspector Marcus Braun to investigate Syrian migrants in Mexico and report on
their “devious” migration and racial passing as Mexican laborers to gain entry into
the United States. The racist fearmongering culminated in Congress passing the
Asiatic Barred Zone Act in 1917, the harshest immigration policy to that point that
made it almost impossible for people from the Middle East and Asia to enter the
United States. US fear of Syrians’ racial passing as Mexicans was part of a campaign
of sexual regulation that sought to police interracial relationships between Mexican
and Syrian people. Not to be outdone, the emergent Mexican national ideology of
mestizaje excluded Syrians from the Mexican state’s idealized “cosmic race” of mes-
tizos. By the turn of the twentieth century, the US–Mexico border was what Grace
Peña Delgado describes as “a site of gender and sexual exclusions” (Delgado 2012,
157). This was an opening salvo to the war on immigration that enabled the milita-
rization of the US–Mexico border.
In the twenty-first century, the terror anchor baby union of the unwanted mi-
grant and terrorist served as an alibi to justify further investment in militariza-
tion of the US–Mexico border wall. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the De-
partment of Homeland Security contracted an Israeli security company that had
built the Israel/Palestine wall to supply technology to “identify threats, deter and
prevent crossings, and apprehend intruders along the US borders with Mexico”T.D. HARPER-SHIPMAN ET AL. 13
(Goldman 2006). Elbit Systems won a $2.4 billion contract in 2006. Jimmy John-
son (2012) expressed the Israeli–US border relationship as the “Palestine–Mexico
Border” that is marked by the same white supremacist polities that seek to exclude
others. The CEO of Elbit Systems of America, Tim Taylor, touted Elbit’s border
control expertise, stating that “detecting threats along 6,000 miles of border in the
US is not the place for experimentation” (Goldman 2006). Taylor sees the intimate
relationship between the two settler colonial states as part of what journalist Todd
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Miller (2019) called “the expansion of the US border around the world.”
Since Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential candidacy with a call to
militarize the US–Mexico border in order to stop “Mexican rapists” from entering
the United States, it has become more urgent to understand the roots of contempo-
rary fascism throughout the Americas. While it may be easy to ignore the use of the
term terror anchor baby as right-wing conspiracy, which is at our own peril. These
discourses draw their power from historical imaginaries of Latin America and the
Middle East that intertwine to justify further militarization and international fas-
cism. Taken from this perspective, race and racist practices are articulated through
sexual and gendered regulation. They are not additive to IR but shape the very
categories of civilization upon which the discipline relies.
Perhaps what is required is to challenge the categorical confines of sex and gen-
der offered under racialized hierarchy and authoritarianism. In her brilliant appli-
cation of Frantz Fanon’s insights on gender roles in Algeria, cultural worker Toni
Cade Bambara makes a call to “fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives,
revolutionary relationships.” Eschewing white supremacist “madness of masculinity
and femininity” required us, in Bambara’s words, “to submerge all breezy definitions
of manhood/womanhood until realistic definitions emerge” (Bambara 1970, 109–
10). Bambara’s insightful recognition offers an opportunity for social movements
struggling against recent authoritarianism to interrogate rather than assimilate into
these sexual and racial formations.
“Multicultural” Recolonization of the First
Black Republic
MAMYRAH A. DOUGÉ-PROSPER
University of California, Irvine, USA
In January 2019, the Kolektif Peyizan Viktim Tè Chabè (Collective of Peasant Vic-
tims from Chabert Land) celebrated the signing of an agreement with the Inter-
American Development Bank (IDB) and the Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances
(Ministry of the Economy and Finances of the Republic of Haiti) that afforded ac-
cess to land, jobs, modern agricultural equipment, small business grants, loans, and
training opportunities for the 422 families, or about 3,500 residents and farmers
of the Chabert Habitation in the Department of Nord-Est, displaced in 2011 from
ancestral lands to make way for the largest industrial park in the Caribbean and
Central America, the Caracol Industrial Park (PIC). The Kolektif was founded in
2015, three years after the inauguration of the PIC, after dispossessed Chabert fam-
ilies were denied the original compensation pledged by the Haitian government
and its international partners and were forced to labor in sweatshops managed by
US American, South Korean, and Haitian multinational companies.
Race as a colonial tool extracts life, labor, and pleasure from differentiated
flesh. Nevertheless, scholars vacillate between constructivist and essentialist no-
tions of race and Blackness. This article builds on the provocations of Caribbeanist
Hilbourne Watson to empiricize and theorize on race, its corporealities, and uses,14 Stripping Away the Body
in a Black nation-state. I show how the Black misleadership class in Haiti organizes
and sanctions the abandonment (i.e., militarized land dispossession, enclosures in
industrial and agricultural labor camps, sprawling slums, and food dependency) of
the so-called masses to facilitate the plunder of resources by “multicultural” transna-
tional capitalist (or aspiring capitalist) actors and corporations. I argue that this
entangled process of accumulation, what Caribbean scholars term “recolonization”
(Alexander 1994), necessitates the biopolitical codification of difference to produce
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zones of extraction/exception of labor, pleasure, and life. The raciality of power
that is this entangled praxis of the “more capable” (land-owning state and capitalist
persons) to drive development in the not-yet-productive rural lands stewarded by
idle already poor denizens is precisely what the Kolektif protests. I point not only to
the coloniality of power, but emphasize the raciality of power and its gendered idea
of order.
From Race as Phenotype to Race as Power Relations
Scholars generally locate the birth of the eugenicist concept of biological race in
French demographer Arthur de Gobineau’s and English geologist and biologist
Charles Darwin’s mid-nineteenth-century classification of humanity into so-called
genetically and evolutionarily distinct groups ( Watson 2001; Wynter 2003; Quijano
2007; Mignolo 2011). Race as biological and physiognomic scientific fact was coined
as enslaved, maroon and freed indigenous and African people, rebellious Indians,
incensed European peasants, factory, domestic and sex workers, jobless people,
feminists, abolitionists, anarchists, and genderqueer people struggled against their
imperial master(s). Race was invented to justify (and project onto the future) the
national and international order of things. Cameroonian historian and philosopher
Achille Mbembe explains that race “aims to mark population groups, to fix as pre-
cisely as possible the limits within which they can circulate, and to determine as ex-
actly as possible which sites they can occupy” (Mbembe 2013, 35). Planetary space,
as a social product, was/is racialized.
At every iteration, this production of life-extinguishing difference has rested not
only on science to explain and manipulate the natural world, but also laws to regu-
late family, kinship ties, inheritance (land), and commerce (trade) (Robinson 1983;
Wynter 1995; Patil 2018). Race as a device that divides and orders human popula-
tions into biopolitical hierarchies with corresponding geographical coordinates to
extract pleasure, labor, and life from differentiated flesh motivated the European
exploration of the Americas, anchored the colonial project, and shapes our mod-
ern capitalist world. Race, then, conditions sexuality and compels specific gendered
arrangements of power relations.
Over the last thirty years, scholarship on race in Latin America and the Caribbean
has contended with the tension between constructivist and essentialist notions of
race and Blackness. In Latin America, there are human populations who consti-
tute a differentiated (racial) group marked as Black/Afrodescendant (Alberto and
Hoffnung-Garskof 2018; de la Fuente and Andrews 2018). Researchers expose racial
inequalities and celebrate African-based cultural systems (Wade 2010; Rahier 2012).
In doing so, some note Black women’s erasure and contribution to racial uplift
and development (Adams 2004; Perry 2013; Lloréns 2020; Pozo Gato 2020). In
the Caribbean, where entire territories are marked as Black or African-descended,
human populations are distinguished by color/shade (Bonilla 2015). Researchers
scoff at mulatto/mestizo/brown elites’ desires to characterize themselves as racially dis-
tinct from the masses (Trouillot 1990; Thomas 2004; Meeks 2008). Instead, some
invoke the metaphors of ajiaco (Torres 1998) to signify the nation as family. As such,
they insist that class is the primary contradiction that organizes human relations in
the Caribbean. Seemingly, race, tethered to Blackness (in opposition to whiteness),
is only relevant when populations are physiognomically distinct, like in TrinidadYou can also read
