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Racial Boundaries (racial + boundary)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Drifters and the Dancing Mad: The Public School Music Curriculum and the Fabrication of Boundaries for Participation

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2008
RUTH GUSTAFSON
ABSTRACT Recent reforms in the general music curriculum have, for the most part, failed to lessen the attrition rates of African Americans from public school music programs. In this article I assert that an embodied ideal of cultural nobility, exemplified by Auguste Rodin's famous statue, The Thinker, has unconsciously operated as a template for participation. As a model comportment in the Western musical tradition, The Thinker has a broader relevance insofar as other school subjects emerged from similar cultural ideals. Beginning with the early period of public music instruction up to the present, I examine the construction of racial boundaries by linking a specific body comportment hailed as worthy by the music curriculum to historically constructed notions of Whiteness. This issue has been underexplored in research in both music and general education. For that reason, this article examines overlapping systems of reasoning about music, comportment, class, religion, language, nationality, and race in professional and popular texts from the early 1800s to the present. This positions public music instruction as authored, not by pedagogical insight alone, but through changes in musical taste, social practices, strategies of governing populations, and definitions of worthy citizenship. There are three levels of analysis. The first is a personal account of the early manifestations of attrition of African Americans from school music programs. The second level of analysis brings the problem of equity into proximity with the tradition of genteel comportment that permeated the training of the good ear or listener and the fabrication of the bona fide citizen. These, I argue are congruent with the historical construction of Whiteness as a standard mark of worthiness. At the third level of analysis, I take up present-day curriculum designs. This section discusses how the language of the music curriculum continues to draw boundaries for participation through protocols that regulate musical response. Here, I argue that the exclusion of popular genres such as hip-hop should be rethought in light of the evidence that shifting historical definitions for music fabricated an overly restrictive template for comportment, recognizing the prototype of Whiteness as the sole embodiment of merit. [source]

Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically,marked dialect

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 4 2002
Julie Sweetland
Recent work on language crossing in the U.S. has examined the temporary appropriation of African American Vernacular English by white youth in an effort to participate in the current popularity and prestige of hip,hop culture, or in order to highlight racial boundaries. While such verbal behavior probably encompasses most white use of AAVE, it is not the only way in which whites (or other non,blacks) can use the variety. This paper presents a case study of the language of a 23 year old white female who makes consistent use of many distinctive linguistic features associated with AAVE. I argue that the interaction of ideologies of race, class, localness and language allow her to be considered an ingroup member despite her biographical race. This suggests that there is a tension between academic linguistic theory and actual speaker practice in assigning authenticity to individuals, and I conclude that language ideologies and other forms of qualitative evidence should be taken into account by sociolinguists looking at the link between language and race. [source]

Converging on the Poles: Contemporary Punishment and Democracy in Hemispheric Perspective

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2005
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
In this article I place U.S. punishment trends in comparative context, seeking to show that the contemporary penal regime in the United States resembles patterns of governance prevalent throughout Latin America, the world's most economically unequal region. In both the U.S. and Latin America, I argue, neoliberal reforms have produced societies characterized by ever greater divides between the haves and have-nots, and state criminal justice institutions increasingly position themselves to police this boundary rather than mitigate its effects. In this article, I examine these trends through the lens of wars on crime and terrorism, arguing that in societies polarized between a dwindling set of haves and an ever more numerous (and potentially unruly) group of have-nots, an inexorable pull makes criminal justice institutions more aggressive in their enforcement of class and racial boundaries. Hallmarks include a widening of the criminal justice net (by broadening definitions of criminal activity, for example) and a deepening of the deprivations visited on those ensnared within it. The article concludes with reflections on the need for reconfiguring conceptions of human rights and their relation to security. [source]

Discourse Resistance And Negotiation By Indigenous Australians

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 2 2003
John Synott
In the context of intercultural relations, the boundaries between dominant and subordinated communities are constructed in a variety of ways. Language frames, or discourses, understood from a sociological rather than a linguistic perspective can be considered to constitute one of the main processes for determining the character of intercultural boundaries. Using this theoretical perspective, this article examines a number of discourses that have contributed to the construction of social relations between Australian Aborigines and the dominant nonindigenous cultural groups in Australia. Examples from the colonial period show the way in which indigenous people were oppressed along racial boundaries, even as they resisted, while more recent instances chart the process of indigenous people in renegotiating social relations and in asserting the process of self-determination and cultural celebration. [source]