Volume 11, numéro 1, 2024 Summer 2024: Resistances to Aesthetic and Social Violence, Past and Present

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The present study investigates the experiences of second generation South Asian-Canadian women with shadeism. Two narrative interviews were conducted and analyzed thematically. Results indicate that collaborators had a desire to be fair that was shaped by their generational and intra-familial relationships as well as the media they were exposed to. This desire led to their use of make-up and skin-lightening creams to achieve fairness. Insecurity about their skin tone had a negative affect on their relationship with themselves and their social networks, including their dating life and friendships.

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Ayad Akhtar claimed in an interview after a performance of his Pulitzer-winning play Disgraced that the play was about the ways Muslims “are still beholden on an ontological level to the ways in which the West is seeing us.” The point is for Muslims to free themselves from those networks of symbolic identification by reclaiming their voices and telling their own stories. The claim, then, is that the performance of Muslimness that Akhtar is initiating on the American stage with his critically acclaimed plays allows Muslims to escape the rules and demands of the hegemonic play of identities. How, then, does one redefine Muslimness while performing it? Situated in this context, this paper examines the narrative possibilities and possible narratives that are available to Muslim characters on the American stage. This article will read two of Akhtar’s plays, Disgraced (2013) and The Who & The What (2014), through the lens of this purported claim of ontological reconstruction. Following Akhtar’s admission that the latter was inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, I will extend the same principle of adaptability to read the former as a contemporary retelling of Othello. As a critique pivoted on the triple axes of class, gender, and form, this article will argue that by deploying the same ideological positions and stereotypical narratemes that legitimize anti-Muslim racism in America in the larger project of the US Empire, Akhtar leaves his self-endowed task of ontological reconstruction both politically and ethically wanting.

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Joseph Anténor Firmin was a Haitian diplomat and scholar, Pan-Africanist, and an early participant in the birth of French anthropology. After long being neglected, Firmin’s articulations of Pan-Africanism in the Caribbean environment are finally receiving their due. In active correspondence with other thinkers of the African diaspora, Firmin was an early proponent of developing a Caribbean confederacy. Although his seminal anthropological study, The Equality of Human Races: Positivist Anthropology (1885), has received the most scholarly attention to date, his contextualization of Haiti on the world stage, developed in Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States, and the Republic of Haiti (Mr. Roosevelt, président des États-Unis et la République d’Haïti, 1905) remains understudied to this day. Firmin situates his nation in the larger North American landscape of U.S. imperialism and Haiti’s longstanding ties to the French Republic to examine how to most rationally promote Haitian prosperity. His notions of political determination for African diasporic nations appear early in the timeline of the fields of anthropology and sociology. This article will explore Firmin’s contributions to history, anthropology, and self-determination of nations.