ISKO

This article offers a collectively developed analysis of the Covid-19 crisis as it relates to contemporary cultures of rejection, i.e. the socio-cultural conditions in which authoritarian and right-wing populist politics thrive, in Europe. We explore how the pandemic and its management reinforces, transforms and/oroverrides existing antagonisms and institutes new ones in Serbia, Croatia,Austria, Germany and Sweden. We discuss how the Covid-19 crisis affects the rise of new statisms; gendered patterns of social reproduction; mobility and migration; digital infrastructures; and new political mobilizations

Harder’s article investigates how changes in working and living conditions are experienced by workers and how these changes create the conditions of acceptabilityfor right-wing politics. Drawing on qualitative interviews, mappings, questionnaires and fieldwork with workers in two retail workplaces in southern and eastern Germany, it outlines processes of logistificationthat impact workers’routines of labour and social reproduction: that is, their everyday lives. Respondents testify to an intensification and isolation of labour as well as a general scarcity of resources for social reproduction and powerlessness to influence the changes. Their work environments demand continuous adaptation to new technologies and management strategies. These experiences are shaped by a metanarrative of societal decline that appears to lie beyond the workers’control. Nostalgia—a romanticized imagination of the past—and reclusivity—apreference for privacy and suspicion of the public—emerge as responses to the perceived decline of their surroundings. They can constitute elements that far-right parties articulate against migration and towards authoritarian politics.

Aus der Einleitung:
"Der Soziologe Felix Lösing analysiert in Nachrichten aus dem Herz der
Finsternis die Kongoberichterstattung im Wochenmagazin Der Spiegel für den
Zeitraum von 1947 bis 2012. Sein Textkorpus umfasst 502 Artikel, die er mit dem
Ansatz der Kritischen Diskursanalyse interpretiert und kontextualisiert
und auf rassistische Inhalte und Strategien hin befragt."

Robert E. Park’s lasting influence on the establishment of American Sociology as a scientific discipline is uncontested. Yet his pioneering sociological approaches towards the study of ›race relations‹ have been rightly criticized as defending an ontological approach towards ›race‹ and racial hierarchies. This essay examines how the pre-scientific career of Park, first in colonial policy as a press-agent of the Congo Reform Association, and subsequently as an associate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, has influenced the foundation of his conceptualization of ›race‹ and ›race relations‹. It is argued that Park established specific (pseudo-)romantic conceptions of superior whiteness and inferior blackness to counterbalance problematic features of modernity, and eventually entered a portentous romance with the racist social relations of the Jim Crow segregation system

The pioneering scope of the Congo Reform Movement as first international humanitarian campaign of the 20th century has been rightfully acknowledged by now, yet its commitment to racism and colonialism tends to be trivialized. This paper examines how the American and British reform movement opposed the Congo Free State largely due to the negative implications of the rubber atrocities for the white imperial community, which had invested immense symbolic expectations into the colonization of the Congo as so-called ›Darkest Africa‹. First, the open force of the rubber regime endangered an anticipated white hegemony in Central Africa and beyond, through inciting anti-colonial and anti-white resistance. Secondly, the cruelty of Congo colonialists shattered the philanthropic narrative of the ›civilizing-mission‹ as legitimation for imperial subjugation, as much as the implied claims of a superior white culture. Thirdly, the destruction of the Congolese workforce and the corrosion of the image of the ›white man‹ as heroic civilizing agent jeopardisedd both economic and symbolic wages of whiteness in the imperial societies. In illustrating how the Reform Movement understood Léopold's Congo colony as a menace to white supremacy as such, the racist and colonialist underpinnings of this influential and significant humanitarian discourse are exposed.

In Bezug auf den Organisationsgrad, den Mobilisierungserfolg und die diskursive Reichweite gilt die Kongo-Reformbewegung (1890-1913) gegen Gewalt und Willkür im Kongo-Freistaat zu Recht als erste große internationale Menschenrechtsbewegung des 20.Jahrhunderts, und wird für ihre zukunftsweisenden Protestmethoden besonders gewürdigt.  Im hier vorliegen-den Vortrag wird hingegen zunächst vertreten, dass die Gefährdung rassistischer Vergesell-schaftung und Vormachtstellung durch die koloniale Gewalt im Kongo zentraler Beweggrund der britischen und amerikanischen Reformbewegung war. Diese rassistische und imperialis-tische Dimension der Kampagne bleibt jedoch bisher unzureichend erforscht und häufig bagatellisiert. Diese Unschärfe wird anschließend auch als Ausdruck der dominierenden methodischen und theoretischen Perspektiven bisheriger Analysen verstanden. Dabei wird sowohl der mangelnde postkoloniale Blickwinkel der historiographischen Untersuchungen der Reformbewegung, als auch die mangelnde historische Fundierung postkolonialer Kritik an Reformliteratur thematisiert. Durch die hier vertretene Perspektive einer historisch-soziologischen Rassismusanalyse hingegen wird es möglich, Gehalt, Struktur Äußerungs-formen und Zentralität von Rassismus in dieser einflussreichen Menschenrechtsbewegung zu erfassen.

The British and American Congo Reform Movement (ca. 1890-1913) has been praised extensively for its ›heroic‹ confrontation of colonial atrocities in the Congo Free State. Its commitment to white supremacy and colonial domination, however, continues to be overlooked, denied, or trivialised. This historical-sociological study argues that racism was the ideological cornerstone and formed the main agenda of this first major human rights campaign of the 20th century. Through a thorough analysis of contemporary sources, Felix Lösing unmasks the colonial and racist formation of the modern human rights discourse and investigates the ›historical work‹ of racism at a crossroads between imperial power and ›white crisis‹.