Topic: Together Confronting Racism (2017) — The Flavors of Racism

Colonial Subjects is the first book to use a combination of world-system and postcolonial approaches to compare Puerto Rican migration with Caribbean migration to both the United States and Western Europe. Grosfoguel provides an alternative reading of the world-system approach to Puerto Rico's history, political economy, and urbanization processes. He offers a comprehensive and well-reasoned framework for understanding the position of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the position of Puerto Ricans in the United States, and the position of colonial migrants compared to noncolonial migrants in the world system.

This book is an extended argument on the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative scholars of Latin American studies. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of "colonial difference" into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis," or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding.

At the close of the twentieth century the stereotyping and demonization of 'others', whether on religious, nationalist, racist, or political grounds, has become a burning issue. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to how and why we fabricate images of the 'other' as an enemy or 'demon' to be destroyed. This innovative book fills that gap through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach that brings together a distinguished array of historians, anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics, and feminists. The historical sweep covers Greco-Roman Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Era. Antisemitism receives special attention because of its longevity and centrality to the Holocaust, but it is analyzed here within the much broader framework of racism and xenophobia. The plurality of viewpoints expressed in this volume provide fascinating insights into what is common and what is unique to the many varieties of prejudice, stereotyping, demonization, and hatred.

Fry seeks to interpret historical and contemporary expressions of American nativism with reference to Blumer's group position framework. Fry interprets these initiatives as collective attempts by self-identified natives to secure or retain prior or exclusive rights to valued resources against the challenges reputedly posed by resident or prospective populations on the basis of their perceived foreignness. Fry uses the perspectives of symbolic interactionism and rational choice theory to examine the history of American immigration and immigrant policies and the politics of immigration reform. His research underscores the importance of institutionalized boundaries, the perception of threat, and power relations in negotiating questions of immigrant admittance and membership.