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This special issue emerged out of the continuing concern with how best to deal with institutional racism in higher education institutions (HEIs) that we have long shared as colleagues in the Center...

This paper speaks against tolerance as an instrument of institutionalized anti-racism within academia where collegiality is a minimal expectation in interpersonal interactions. Through auto-ethnographic readings, the discussion focuses on the racial affective economies produced in universities as tolerance ‘makes race ordinary’. Within this reading, ‘making race ordinary’ is shown to produce unliveable lives because of its racial affective economies animated by contemptuous tolerance, disgust and disattendability. These negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others placed outside of organizational networks. The paper argues that to destabilize the white power in networks that decide on access, tenure and promotion and to enable liveable lives within universities, the transformative potential of the transracial intimacy of friendship must be engaged. This entails ‘race made ordinary’ through disa...

The debate on Michelle Obama’s ‘right to bare arms’ illustrates that American cultural politics is far from ‘post-racial’. Through reading ‘Michelle O’ as a body out of place, at once exoticized, fetishized, and affective, this article shows the continuing location of the First Lady as white as well as exploring how stylization revisions the raced, gendered, and classed space of the First Lady’s body. It argues that, as a corporeal negation of the norms of both white upper/middle-class respectability and ‘the Black Venus’, Obama creates a space of resistance that enables a black First Lady to emerge through performativity.

Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia. By Patricia de Santana Pinho. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010. Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform and Tradition in Bahia. By Anadelia A. Romo....

The down-low stabilized in the early 2000s as a discursive practice that links black sexuality with duplicity. Although the term includes Latino men, it continues as a black sexual phenomenon withi...

Dark skin shade and natural afro-hair are central in the politics of visibility, inclusion and exclusion within black anti-racist aesthetics. This article focuses on black beauty as performative through looking at how the discourse of dark skin equals black beauty is destabilized in the talk of ‘mixed race’ black women. A dark skin shade and natural afro hair become ambiguous signifiers as the women's talk leads to a mobility of black beauty. Their talk is thus an interception in which there can never be a definitive reading of black beauty while also pointing to the binaries of the black anti-racist aesthetics on which they draw. Thus, while women are rooted in racialized and racializing notions of beauty they expand the boundaries of the beautiful black woman's body. Black beauty as an undecidable resists binaries without ever constituting a third term and arises through the disidentification and shame of cultural melancholia.

Adilifu Nama, SUPER BLACK: AMERICAN POP CULTURE AND BLACK SUPERHEROES, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011, 180 pp., $24.95 (paper) In this book Adilifu Nama sets as his task the exploration of...