Ongoing Research

Poor White to White Victim: South Africa and the US in a dialogue of White Supremacy

For more than a century, the United States and South Africa have traded ideas, strategies, and talking points on the construction and maintenance of a state engineered to produce white dominance. A 1929 study on the status of “poor whites” in South Africa was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which made recommendations on how to institute a welfare state to raise the standard of living for Afrikaners. The recommendations laid out boosted the National Party to prominence under the slogan “The White Man Must Remain the Master,” and later laid the groundwork for the implementation of apartheid-era social welfare and development projects, aimed at benefitting exclusively the white poor. These recommendations, for segregation, job reservations, and racialized welfare policies, drew directly from the architecture of Jim Crow laws in the US South, and the comparisons between the two societies were based on their shared racial divisions of labor and capital. Eugenics texts, like Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius written after travels in Southern Africa, became fodder for US-based white supremacist groups since the early part of the 20th century. More recently, white nationalists in the United States (and Western Europe) have made the supposed violent targeting of white South African landowners a cause celeb of their movement, producing documentaries, conducting advocacy tours, and meeting with members of the Trump administration to pursue diplomatic avenues to address the alleged problem. This article explores the historical and contemporary interlinkages of the white nationalist/supremacist project in the United States and South Africa, in an effort to demonstrate how transnational white activism has opened up opportunities for the movement. In so doing, they have maintained their influence, even as unqualified governmental support for white supremacy has waned.

Vernacular-Language Media Framing of Violence in Gujarat and Consequences for Indian Secularism

In 2002, riots in Gujarat claimed the lives of more than 1000 people and an additional 2500 were injured. The riots, sparked by a confrontation between Hindu pilgrims and Muslim vendors resulting in the burning of train cars at a station. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government in Gujarat was accused of complicity in the violence against Muslims by instigating rioters, withholding police, and distributing weapons. When the Modi-led BJP subsequently won an outright majority of national legislative seats in 2014—a feat that no single party had achieved since 1984—there was a flood of opinion pieces questioning whether the Indian state, or indeed the Indian electorate, had abandoned their commitment to secularism. But this interpretation of the 2014 election is contingent on the assumption that the Indian electorate primarily understood the 2002 riots through a religious lens, and chose to ignore the (alleged) toleration of violence against Muslims by Modi and his allies. Our research problematizes this assumption, based on the reality of India’s regionally and linguistically fragmented news media market. India is the world’s single largest daily newspaper market, with more than 70,000 dailies printed in multiple state languages. This vibrant and multi-lingual press covered the events surrounding both the violence and the elections of 2014. The central question of our research is whether voters in 2014 chose to disregard the connections between Modi and the violence of 2002, or did they simply understand these events in a fundamentally different way? Specifically, were different communities presented with distinct mass media frames about the violence and the role of the Modi government in it, and did those change over time? Furthermore, if and how did these differences map on to the voting patterns in the 2014 national elections?

Purity as Protection

For centuries, societies have valued female virginity because of its connections to the purity of souls and bloodlines, both communal and familial. Virginity is connected to notions of religious purity and carries cultural and communal significance. The nexus of security and purity, however, supersedes the confines of the family and individual bloodlines. Women have long served as symbols of nations and groups, as symbolic and actual mothers whose sexual purity was made equivalent to the purity of the group. The protection of women from the ravages of enemy populations is a key element of wartime propaganda. Sexual violence against women in the context of an ongoing war is understood not just as an individual assault, but as a contamination and an offensive against not only symbolically resonant victims, but the purity of future generations. But what about other, more quotidian threats to the purity of nations, and of their members? Virginity is invoked as a central tenet of community identity and security in peace as well as wartime. In the mid-1990’s, however, two new public and cultural displays were pioneered to promote virginity for young women in two very different contexts; the United States and South Africa.