Styles for flourishing : histories of survival in the racial niche / Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón.
| Author/creator | Torres Colón, Gabriel A. author. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication | New York : Columbia University Press, [2024] |
| Description | xii, 288 pages ; 22 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | The racial niche: origin stories of race and theoretical resolutions -- Styles for flourishing: reconfigurating selves through the racial niche -- Going to the body as Mexican boxers do: fashioning styles from racial experiences -- Bomba styles: surviving anti-Blackness in the racial niche of empires -- The origins of racialized citizens in the illiberal state: life stories in the Spanish-Moroccan borderland -- Liberal antiracism and the ends of flourishing. |
| Abstract | "Racial experience is rich, complex, and varies socioculturally. In everyday life and multiple social contexts, racial experiences range from discrimination to a sense of solidarity to a reflection of one's identity. Sentiments, thoughts, and behaviors-deemed good, bad, or mundane-are all dimensions of experiences that individuals and social groups encounter through their racialized lives. Although experiences of prejudice cannot exclusively define racial experience, racism persists as a social problem. Discrimination and inequity have been intertwined with racialized populations for hundreds of years. In response to this condition, W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1903, questioned: "How does it feel to be a social problem?" In 2008, Mustafa Bayoumi asked the same question for Muslims living in the United States. In the spirit of anti-racism, both argued that racial groups were not inherently deficient and problematic. As they disavowed racism, they also validated the worth of their racial existence. Racial experiences simultaneously informed their positive sense of social being and antiracist political thoughts. Styles for Flourishing: Histories of Survival in the Racial Niche argues that to imagine and implement anti-racist politics, it is first vital to appreciate racial experiences in their full sociocultural complexities. Such complexities are most holistically appreciated if we approach racial experience as aesthetic and biocultural. Aesthetics allows us to look beyond how people experience racial prejudice and onto the myriad instances when race is a meaningful source of social existence. A biocultural approach holds us accountable to the very real ways that experiences of racism negatively affect health and the geographical, political, and economic marginalization of communities, but also the very real ways in which racialized peoples' mental and physical well-being is tied to how they embrace, celebrate, and struggle for their racialized selves and communities. From these aesthetic and biocultural forms of racial experiences, people fashion racialized styles that can both reproduce and contest racial orders. Using "racial niches" of a Midwest boxing gym, an Afro-Puerto Rican community embedded in their historical mangrove forest, and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, Torres Colón allows us to engage in a cross-cultural comparison of histories of communal survival without defining people through their oppression and acknowledging their efforts to resist inequality and flourish, querying the gap between the complex realities of racial experience and how racism is politically remedied as a social problem"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-266) and index. |
| LCCN | 2024013470 |
| ISBN | 9780231215305 |
| ISBN | 9780231215299 (hardback) |
| ISBN | 0231215290 |
| ISBN | 0231215304 |
| ISBN | (ebook) |