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University of California Press

About the Book

Relational Formations of Race brings African American, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Native American studies together in a single volume, enabling readers to consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another. These essays conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups. The chapters offer explicit guides to understanding race as relational across all disciplines, time periods, regions, and social groups. By studying race relationally, and through a shared context of meaning and power, students will draw connections among subordinated groups and will better comprehend the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession such groups face. As the United States shifts toward a minority-majority nation, Relational Formations of Race offers crucial tools for understanding today’s shifting race dynamics.
 

About the Author

Natalia Molina is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of two award winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940.

Daniel Martinez HoSang is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.
 
Ramón A. Gutiérrez is Professor of American History at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race
Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina

PART ONE THEORIZING RACE RELATIONALLY

1 • Race as a Relational Theory: A Roundtable Discussion
George Lipsitz, George J. Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández, with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina
2 • Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens
Natalia Molina
3 • Entangled Dispossessions: Race and Colonialism in the Historical Present
Alyosha Goldstein

PART TWO RELATIONAL RESEARCH AS POLITICAL PRACTICE

4 • The Relational Revolutions of Antiracist Formations
Roderick Ferguson
5 • How Palestine Became Important to American Indian Studies
Steven Salaita
6 • Uncle Tom Was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery
Tiya Miles
7 • “The Whatever That Survived”: Thinking Racialized Immigration through Blackness and the Afterlife of Slavery
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

PART THREE
HISTORICAL FRAMEWORKS

8 • Indians and Negroes in Spite of Themselves: Puerto Rican Students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Catherine S. Ramírez
9 • Becoming “Hawaiian”: A Relational Racialization of Japanese American Soldiers from Hawai‘i during World War II in the U.S. South
Jeffrey T. Yamashita
10 • Vietnamese Refugees and Mexican Immigrants: Southern Regional Racialization in the Late Twentieth Century
Perla M. Guerrero
11 • Green, Blue, Yellow, and Red: The Relational Racialization of Space in the Stockton Metropolitan Area
Raoul S. Liévanos

PART FOUR
RELATIONAL FRAMEWORKS IN CONTEMPORARY POLICY

12 • Border-Hopping Mexicans, Law-Abiding Asians, and Racialized Illegality: Analyzing Undocumented College Students’ Experiences through a Relational Lens
Laura E. Enriquez
13 • Racial Arithmetic: Ethnoracial Politics in a Relational Key
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz
14 • The Relational Positioning of Arab and Muslim Americans in Post-9/11 Racial Politics
Julie Lee Merseth

Further Reading
Contributors
Index

Reviews

“These fine scholars argue persuasively that the next new direction in the field of Ethnic Studies should be to study race relationally: an old idea made new again by building on the robust scholarship produced in comparative and transnational ethnic studies during the past three decades or so.”—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

“Studying race as a relational formation is more than powerful—it is necessary. This important gathering of essays challenges even the most radical thinkers on race to repattern the ways we understand social justice, human rights, and struggles that form in mutual action toward a common good. Together, these essays refuse the dominance of whiteness in studies and enactments of racial relations, generating new theories and conversations that reveal historic and powerful connections among freedom seekers across the globe.”—Gaye Theresa Johnson, author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity and coeditor of Futures of Black Radicalism

Studying Race Relationally demonstrates beautifully the insights produced by examining systems of race alongside each other. This generative, exciting volume offers essential contributions to critical Ethnic Studies and American Studies.”—Emily K. Hobson, author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left

“What if we could think about race and racism differently? Go beyond thinking about race mainly in terms of whiteness and its ‘others’? Dispense with fatuous denunciatoions of ‘groupism’ and recognize the centrality of racialization in the construction of our world? In Relational Formations of Race, some of our most profound race theorists do just that. They explore how racial identities and racialized groups interact and overlap. They show how racial formation involves permanent conflict with the U.S. empire-state and simultaneously constitutes that state. Exclusion and inclusion; conquest and social control; struggles over racialized labor, gender, migration, and, indeed, U.S. imperialism and ‘nation-building’—all are reconceptualized here. Our understanding of race and racism is both deepened and broadened by this exceptional book, which will certainly become a central text across the disciplines. A tour de force and a must for course adoption!”—Howard Winant, coauthor of Racial Formation in the United States

“This is a must-read for everyone in American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Africana Studies, and, indeed, for anyone who wants to understand how and why difference and disadvantage are created and perpetuated, and how we are all, in some way, complicit in this creation and perpetuation. It is destined to become a big-hearted model of scholarly praxis on race, a core text for the next generation of young scholars who recognize that activism and deeper understanding are joined at the hip.”—Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

Awards

  • MacArthur Fellow 2020 2020, MacArthur Foundation

Media

Natalia Molina, American Historian | 2020 MacArthur Fellow