Tag: Racism

Written by camilabassi

Philip Cohen’s Perversions of Inheritance

To make the issue of in/visibility depend on physical appearance is to bracket out the historical realities of racist representation “And that is the point. Visibility is socially constructed and can change over time. For example, Irish immigrants were singled out by the authorities as a specially ‘dangerous’ class in the 1850s, whereas in the […]

Written by camilabassi

Why antisemitism on the Left is inevitably racist

In Daniel Randall’s review of my book for our shared organisation Workers’ Liberty, he raises the following critique: “One cannot hold water in one’s hands; a too fluid conception of the construction and reconstruction of “race” risk depriving it of any explanatory value whatsoever. In my own book, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists, […]

Written by camilabassi

Imperial boomerang: what Hannah Arendt actually said

“Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that racialisation and territorial expansion – two practices inherent to imperialism – laid the foundations for European fascism. Totalitarianism in Europe was an outcome of what Arendt termed the ‘imperial boomerang’. Similarly, poet and theorist Aimé Césaire argued in Discourse on Colonialism that Hitler ‘applied to Europe colonialist procedures […]

Written by camilabassi

Entanglements of antisemitism and transphobia on the Left

I. ANTI-JEWISH RACISM AND TRANSPHOBIA IN LIBERATORY IMAGINATIONS “Racism and patriarchal discourses/practices are similar, in that both forms of signification serve to naturalise certain ascriptive differences: racism constructs human variation as codifying inherent and immutable difference, represents it as ‘racial’ and maps this imputed difference on to social collectivities; patriarchal moves invoke sex as a […]