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Metaphors and dehumanization 1 METAPHORS AND THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MARGINALIZED GROUPS 1 Why is one person, or animal, abused and not another? If this is understood, everything is understood. In the face of greatly mounting criticism, one Canadian official commented on the slaughter of 50,000 harp-seal pups each year in the Maritime Provinces: ‘If we could find a way to make pup seals look like alligators, our problems would be over.’ It was the job of Joseph Goebbels to make pup seals look like alligators and Jews and Poles look like subhumans.2 Metaphors
This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.
in a scarf in a tent with a crying baby … I thought it was so dehumanizing … It just reeks of white saviourism and the white man’s burden.’ 27 According to the same informants, it has become ‘almost an expectation’ that these simulations should include a kidnapping, despite what one trainer characterised as a lack of evidence that such re-creations are useful for such an eventuality; another trainer questioned the ‘layers of stress’ such simulations provoke
that poverty makes to the spirit’ (2019: 228). Given the nature of humanitarian work, it is unsurprising that a similar sentiment emerged in this special issue. Louise Beaumais dedicates an entire section to ‘the refusal to dehumanize the profession’ in her paper. Here she points to the complaints of humanitarian workers that individual stories and narratives have been displaced by statistics and datasets. In doing so, the unquantifiable elements of crises – best represented
. Since 2018 I have interviewed over a dozen former detainees who recently fled across the border from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan and elsewhere. These former detainees, as well as dozens of former inhabitants of the region, told me that Turkic Muslim teachers and contractors often become the voice and face of the re-education process. They occupy a primary site of human encounter with other Turkic Muslims who have been dehumanized by party-state power, ethno-racialization, and the ordinary functioning of the camp system. In the end, the surveillance work these Turkic Muslim
We live in an age in which advertising is part of the fabric of our lives. Advertising in its modern form largely has its origins in the later nineteenth century. This book is the first to provide a historical survey of images of black people in advertising during the colonial period. It highlights the way in which racist representations continually developed and shifted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depending on the particular political and economic interests of the producers of these images. The book analyses the various conflicting, and changing ideologies of colonialism and racism in British advertising, revealing reveal the purposes to which these images of dehumanisation and exploitation were employed. The first part deals with images of Africa, the second deals with images of black people in the West, and the third considers questions relating to issues about images and social representations in general. The Eurocentric image of the 'savage' and 'heathen', the period of slavery, European exploration and missionary activity, as well as the colonisation of Africa in the nineteenth century are explored. Representations of the servant, the entertainer, and the exotic man or woman with a rampant sexuality are also presented. The key strategy with which images of black people from the colonial period have been considered is that of stereotyping. The material interests of soap manufacturers, cocoa manufacturers, tea advertising, and tobacco advertising are discussed. The book explains the four particular types of imagery dominate corporate advertising during the 1950s and early 1960s.
of discrediting Uyghur resistance and even dehumanizing the Uyghur people as a whole. When the book refers to its own working definition of this term in order to objectively determine whether, in my opinion, an act should be universally condemned as ‘terrorism,’ it explicitly notes this. Likewise, the book uses scare quotes when 14 ROBERTS 9781526147684 PRINT (MUP).indd 14 11/06/2020 14:12 Introduction it refers to the related terms of ‘extremism’ and ‘separatism,’ which the Chinese state frequently employs interchangeably with ‘terrorism’ as interrelated
entwined, and hence one's treatment and admission as fully human in the so-called human family. In short, International Relations theory and recognition theory need to explore more systematically processes whereby recognition is inter-personally accorded. 1 This is imperative given the long history of dehumanizing
leadership of Chen Quanguo. Finally, it argues that Uyghurs have long been dehumanized via applied collective labels such as ‘backwards’, a ‘terrorist collective’, and, more recently, ‘weeds’. MacGregor and Bowles ( 2012 : 437) have warned: ‘[t]o prevent genocide, we have to understand its root causes. Genocide and mass killing do not simply erupt spontaneously. They are incremental processes, building blocks, which aggregate and develop into their final form.’ This chapter identifies the KDHRP as a building block within a pattern of social engineering across the XUAR that
it is doing in the region. The PRC has repeatedly suggested that its acts against the Uyghur people and other non-Hans of this region are not motivated by settler colonial ambitions, but are an attempt to mitigate the spread of Islamic ‘extremism’ and violent ‘terrorism’ among the Muslims of the XUAR (CGTN 2019, 2021 ). In a post-9/11 world, this is a convenient justification for state violence deployed against Muslim citizens. Since 9/11, the label of ‘terrorist’ has served to dehumanize entire groups of people and allow