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7Subject to Difference: Heterogeneity, Antagonism, and CoercionphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 13 (1): 16-24. 2023.In this article, I explore Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter. Goswami has laid out an extensive excavation of the variety, depth, and breadth of antagonistic encounters between the Western world and subaltern subjects. I am interested in Goswami’s take on the production of the unknowable women of color who are constructed either as good wives, animate objects without wills of their own, or transgressors of the genre of producing women of color as oppressed. I argue that the question of heter…Read more
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97Toward a Political Philosophy of RaceState University of New York Press. 2009.Examines how liberal society enables racism and other forms of discrimination
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37The Veil, Transparency, and the Deceptive Conceit of LiberalismphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 9 (1): 53-72. 2019.The veil has remained controversial in the US since 9/11, yet it has not been subject to explicit regulation. Beginning with a court case in which a Muslim woman is banned from the courtroom for refusing a judge’s order to remove her niqab, I explore the ways in which the judge’s order resembles a demand for transparency. Transparency as a norm, a mode of discourse, and a kind of comportment betrays the explicit ethos of secular-liberal political norms and practices as being purely procedural. D…Read more
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21The Production of Acceptable Muslim Women in the United StatesJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (4): 411-422. 2019.This essay explores some of the elements by which Muslim women who wear the hijab in the United States are managed so as to produce and distinguish "unruly" from "good" Muslim female citizens within the context of American liberation. Unlike the French state, which has regulated both the hijab and niqab through national legislation, the American liberal framework utilizes a laissez-faire approach, which relies on a range of public and private institutions to determine acceptable public presentat…Read more
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93Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial ComplexityHypatia 29 (1): 75-93. 2014.In this essay, I consider how to conceptualize “diasporic” subjects, namely those whose identities and homes cannot be easily attributed, with regard to the political and racial dynamics of intra-group tensions, alliances, and divergences of interest. These concerns are important relatives to topics that Critical Race Theorists and Critical Race Feminists have readily addressed, such as the war on terror, the not-so-gradual erosion of dignity and rights protections accorded to non-citizens, and …Read more
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34Framing Rape: Patriarchy, Wartime, and the Spectacle of Genocidal RapePhilosophy Today 59 (2): 337-343. 2015.Debra Bergoffen’s Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape shows us beautifully what is gained by considering rape as a consequence of genocide. What gets lost here, in relation to considering cases of rape that are not the result of such, such as gang rape, “mass rape,” or other instances of rape? Is rape qua rape a human rights violation of a sort that is articulated within the context of the “right to sexual integrity”? Can a case be made, even in “non-wartime” societies where rape occurs sy…Read more
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70Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman, eds., A Companion to African-American Philosophy (review)Philosophical Review 115 (2): 263-267. 2006.
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44The War on Terror and Ontopolitics: Concerns with Foucault’s Account of Race, Power SovereigntyFoucault Studies 12 51-76. 2011.In this article, I explore several of Foucault’s claims in relation to race, biopolitics, and power in order to illuminate some concerns in the wake of the post-9.11.01 political regime of population management. First, what is the relationship between sovereignty and power? Foucault’s writings on the relation between sovereignty and power seem to differ across his writings, such that it is not clear whether he had definitively circumscribed the role of sovereignty in relation to “power.” Second,…Read more
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214The Technology of RaceRadical Philosophy Review 7 (1): 77-98. 2004.Drawing on Heidegger and Foucault, I argue that we need to understand race as a technology. Race has three technological dimensions: instrumental, naturalizing, and concealment. Through this understanding, I hope to bridge two discourses that appear disconnected: Race as Color, Blood, and Genealogy (RC), which sees race as phenotypical or biological, and eclipses a discussion of political power, and Political Othering (PO), which eclipses race in its accounts of political ostracization. Finally,…Read more
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14Violence, Democracy, and Selective RecognitionPhilosophy Today 67 (1): 21-33. 2023.The January 2021 attacks on the US Capitol prompt a renewed look at the relationship between violence and Western liberal democracies. The attacks were viewed in a race-neutral frame of staging an insurrection against a procedurally elected government of a liberal democracy. Without considering the racial-political context, we are susceptible to recognizing only certain iterations of political violence while missing others altogether. In what follows, I argue that political violence against nonw…Read more