A01=Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colon
Author_Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colon
Category=JBFA
Category=JBSL1
Category=JHMC
coalitional politics
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
government
politics
social activism
social science
Product details
- ISBN 9780231215299
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 05 Nov 2024
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Racial experiences vary widely in everyday life and in different social contexts. They range from damaging to fulfilling, spanning discrimination, unquestioned assumptions, and political solidarity. Drawing on years of cross-cultural ethnographic research, Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón develops an innovative theory to grasp racial experiences in their full sociocultural complexity, with vital implications for both social science and antiracist politics.
This book demonstrates how people draw from their experiences to fashion “styles for flourishing”—embodied strategies for survival in racialized societies that can both reproduce and contest racial orders. In performing their styles, individuals embrace their racialized selves and communities, helping them flourish in broader social worlds. They are able to creatively reconfigure racialized existence into desires for recognition, expressions of resistance, and aspirations for alternative political orders. Torres Colón explores how styles develop within “racial niches” through nuanced considerations of a boxing gym in the U.S. Rust Belt, Afro–Puerto Rican community organizing in an ancestral mangrove forest, and Muslim political activism in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa. Each case highlights nuanced dimensions of racial experience to question how local efforts are seen in political ideologies and governance. Bringing together humanistic, social scientific, and biological approaches with compelling ethnographic detail, this interdisciplinary book provides generative theoretical insights regarding race and critical new perspective on racial inequality in liberal democracies.
This book demonstrates how people draw from their experiences to fashion “styles for flourishing”—embodied strategies for survival in racialized societies that can both reproduce and contest racial orders. In performing their styles, individuals embrace their racialized selves and communities, helping them flourish in broader social worlds. They are able to creatively reconfigure racialized existence into desires for recognition, expressions of resistance, and aspirations for alternative political orders. Torres Colón explores how styles develop within “racial niches” through nuanced considerations of a boxing gym in the U.S. Rust Belt, Afro–Puerto Rican community organizing in an ancestral mangrove forest, and Muslim political activism in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa. Each case highlights nuanced dimensions of racial experience to question how local efforts are seen in political ideologies and governance. Bringing together humanistic, social scientific, and biological approaches with compelling ethnographic detail, this interdisciplinary book provides generative theoretical insights regarding race and critical new perspective on racial inequality in liberal democracies.
Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón is assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He is a coauthor of Genetic Ancestry: Our Stories, Our Pasts (2021).
