Abstract
The contemporary relevance of historical patterns of hierarchy and subordination formed by classification (sorting), othering, imposition of the purity condition, and violence—tools of repression universally used by dominant groups—comes into full focus in this edition of Global Humanities: Stereotypes and Violence. As an American reader, I found the eight essays assembled by Editor Frank Jacob compelling. Collectively, they unravel the weft of patriarchal white supremacy viewed from an international frame, making more visible threads in a global structure that bind acts of racialized aggression like those in Charlottesville, VA, to a culturally sanctioned system of patriarchy that largely uses women’s bodies as currency, highlighted by the Me Too Movement emerging from the Harvey Weinstein scandal in late 2017. These threads of hierarchy and exploitation are only too related to the bald expressions of essentialist white supremacy of U.S. President Donald Trump who, in January 2018, announced that certain nonwhite “s***hole countries” were not worthy of the now-tarnished prize of American citizenship.
At the outset, Frank Jacob’s editorial furnishes key terms, which puts the reader on notice that definition and meaning-making are integral to the social process of hierarchy and exclusion. Quoting Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion (1922), Jacob observes that “symbolic pictures” determine human interrelations, particularly in times of crisis or when overcome by fear (p. 7). Jacob further notes that “stereotypes often serve as a tool that helps people to explain particular group-related phenomena” by dividing groups into “so-called in- and out-groups” (p. 8). This distinction is the touchstone for the reader’s journey.
The volume’s works examine the process and impact of constructing and deploying rigid stereotypes in an array of contexts ranging from 19th-century industrial England to Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia during periods that span from the 1980s to the present. In “The Wandering Worker: Violence and Casual Labor in the Modern Anglophone World,” Oliver Betts explores the social anxieties surrounding England’s white, working-class transient laborers, “the wandering navies” who built England’s railways from 1840 to 1940, linking similar anxieties associated with migrant laboring groups in other countries, including the Zulu in South Africa and the “Chinese coolie,” all of whom—despite their extraordinary hard work—were burdened with exclusionary narratives of criminality, vagrancy, violence, and immoderation.
Barbara Manthe’s genealogy of right-wing violence in Germany, “Racism and Violence in Germany Since 1980,” highlights the very real political and policy manifestations of a deep-rooted and evolving neo-Nazism that shifted its local subject from a 1980s fixation on ethnic nationalism, reunification of the Reich, and anti-Semitism to present-day anti-immigrant/Muslim xenophobia. The essay highlights the right wing’s strategy of forming connections with the U.S. Ku Klux Klan and United Kingdom’s Skinhead groups starting in the 1980s and fixes upon the fomenting right-wing cultural climate that led to August 1992’s infamous Rostock incident, when racist rioters attacked hostels holding asylum seekers for several days. With chilling similarity to recent events and comments made by the 45th President of the United States that “there are two sides to a story” following the murder of Heather Heyer, an antiracist demonstrator killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, VA, in August 2017, Lother Kupfer, then Minister of the Interior of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, stated (in 1992) that he possessed a “‘certain understanding’ for the rioters and the applauding bystanders in Rostock” who did nothing to stop the violence (p. 42). Manthe notes that subsequent media accounts rarely explicitly condemned violence against immigrants but actually “expressed sympathy toward the offenders” (p. 42). The Rostock incident was subsequently lionized in Skinhead music, like the neo-Nazi band No Remorse’s “Barbecue in Rostock” (p. 46). Such nationalist seeds, coupled with a long-germinating outsider narrative of the Muslim in Germany dating from the 1960s, are shown to be bearing fruit in today’s anti-immigrant backlash.
Similarly, in Benjamin Nickl’s “Modern German Anxieties” and Sylvia Sadzinski’s “‘All Men [of Color] Are Rapists’ or the Grammar of Violence,” the reader is presented with examples of how essentialized depictions of Muslims and Arabs draw upon long-standing orientalist stereotypes of the perpetual outsider and act as a conduit for the projection of German sexual anxieties onto criminalized representations of Muslims. This familiar scenario mirrors the widespread demonization of black males as the serial rapists of white women at the turn of the 20th century in the United States, which served as a justification for mass lynchings, the razing of black towns, and antiblack violence in the South. By way of example, Nickl observes that the first immigrant wave of Muslims arriving in the 1960s was portrayed as “uneducated,” then, in the 1980s, as abusive husbands/fathers who beat their wives and daughters, purportedly in accord with Islam, then post–9/11 as a dangerous, unassimilable Muslim collective. Sadzinski’s examination of the operation of intersecting narratives culminates in the social response to a report that several hundred German women were sexually assaulted and mugged by large groups of men described as “Arabic” or “North-African-looking” (p. 67) in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve 2015. Underscoring the persistent resonance of patterns over time, an anti-Muslim tweet by a German far-right-wing politician appeared as recently as January 1, 2018, and hearkened back to this event by suggesting that a tweet issued by the Cologne police posted in Arabic on New Year’s Eve 2018, pandered to Muslim “gang-raping hordes of men.” The roots of narrative run long and deep (see https://www.timesofisrael.com/german-far-right-mp-accused-of-incitement-for-anti-muslim-tweet/).
But by far the most fertile area of exploration is undertaken by two complementary pieces that interrogate the construction of Roma stereotypes and the destructive practices deployed against Roma living in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989, Biba Hadziavdic and Hilde Hoffmann’s “Violent Fantasies: The Persisting Stereotypes of European Roma” and Victoria Shmidt’s “The Violence of Knowledge in Practices Toward Roma in the Czech Republic: The Historical Echo of Surveillance During Socialism.” The essays provide historical detail and analytical clarity about the impulses and methods behind the state-enforced practices directed against the Roma people. Hadziavdic and Hoffmann describe the origins of the ideology of “antiziganism,” society’s dominant, stigmatizing mind-set respecting the “gypsy” (p. 140). The narrative projections of antiziganism, which describe gypsies as wild, impulsive, and musical, are qualities that could easily describe early American Irish stock dramatic figures or black Minstrel characters. These ascriptions have the very real effect of preventing such out-group members from participating in society and, in policy terms, supported the creation of special Roma schools and ghettoes to contend with a population that was thought to possess intractable essential differences.
Representational expressions of hierarchy and their patterns of exclusion are only too relevant to the American experience. In the turn of the 20th-century United States, white supremacist ideology was thinly undergirded by the nascent science of anthropology and justified the dehumanization and abuse of persons like Ota Benga, a Congolese native installed in ape exhibits at various American institutions, including the Bronx Zoo, and Sarah Baartman, “The Hottentot Venus,” an African woman whose hypersexualized anatomy was displayed at carnivals.
Much in the way that exercise of the franchise in the United States was linked to rationality—selectively enforced by literacy rates—barring blacks, women, and others on that basis, Shmidt illustrates how the Czech population’s evaluation and labeling of the Roma resulted in their containment in segregated schools and ghettoes and their disproportionate placement in institutions (like the mass incarceration of African Americans in the late 20th century). While many today would recognize such treatment, as crimes against humanity, these out-groups were victims of societies whose dominant group self-concepts demanded confirmation of their superiority enforced through the purity condition.
This edition of Global Humanities is rounded out by Bojan Perovic’s “Gender-Based Violence in Serbia: Media, Stereotypes, and Celebrities,” and Andrew Fuyarchuk’s “Gendered Epistemology and Harrassment: The Case of Dr. Olivieri,” which collectively address gender violence from two ends of the spectrum. Perovic examines aggression against the female body as justified and amplified by media projections of male narratives suggesting women’s overall blameworthiness for violent acts against them, citing such reasons as women wanting to leave their abusers, allegations of sexual infidelity, or some other “crime” against the masculine sex. On the other end of the spectrum, Fuyarchuk explores how institutional male violence is deployed against a professional woman who “steps out of line” by becoming a whistleblower that reports the unethical acts of a powerful pharmaceutical company. Both writers describe issues that women face every day while navigating the male power structure and their relationships with men—again underscoring the relevance of this illuminating collection of essays.