Dorian Bell
University of California, Santa Cruz, Literature, Faculty Member
- Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, Department Memberadd
- Critical Race Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Whiteness Studies, Antisemitism (Prejudice), Antisemitism/Racisms, and 12 moreantisemitism and Islamophobia, Racial capitalism, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Theory, French Studies, Islamophobia, Islamophobia In Europe, Race and Racism, Imperialism, French colonialism, French Colonial History, and Nineteenth-Century French Literatureedit
- I'm an Associate Professor of Literature and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I work broadly in the history and theory of race, imperialism, and antisemitism.edit
Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels... more
Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.
Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.
As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.
Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.
As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.
Research Interests: Social Theory, European Studies, Political Philosophy, Jewish Studies, French Studies, and 71 morePolitical Theory, Marxism, Nineteenth Century Studies, Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Race and Racism, Imperial History, Critical Social Theory, Critical Race Theory, Anthropology of space, Race and Ethnicity, Antisemitism (Prejudice), Nationalism, Mediterranean Studies, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, 19th century France, Marxist theory, French colonialism, Critical Geography, Postcolonial Theory, Anti-Semitism, Politics of Secularism, Antisemitism/Racisms, Fin de Siecle Literature & Culture, Islamophobia, Tunisian History, History of Imperialism, Frankfurt School, Anthropology of Time, Postcolonial theory (Cultural Theory), Critical Race Geography, Hannah Arendt, Postcolonialism in French society, Frantz Fanon, Mediterranean and North Africa, Fin de siècle Paris, antisemitism and Islamophobia, Theories of Race and Racism, Postcolonial Theory/Subaltern Studies, Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Neo-Marxism, Islam and Secularism, Emile Zola, Antisemitism in modern Europe, Comparative Genocide Studies, French colonial Algeria, Twentieth and Twenty-first Century (French) Literature, Islam in France, Anthropology of Space and Place, Political Scandals, BALZAC - GUY DE MAUPASSANT- FLAUBERT, Algerian history, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Nineteenth Century French History, Critical Theory and Postcolonial Cultural and Political Practices, Michael Rothberg, French Jewish History, History of Antisemitism, Empire Studies, Maurice Barrès, Racial capitalism, Literary Anti-Semitism, racism and anti-Semitism, Colonialism and Imperialism, Postcolonialism, Adorno/Horkheimer, Anthropology of Space and Time, French antisemitism, Algerian Jewish History, and Émile Zola
Are Muslims the "new Jews" of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such... more
Are Muslims the "new Jews" of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such a historical comparison between Islamophobia and antisemitism, however, risks missing their ongoing interrelation. This article examines that interrelation, arguing that Islamophobia and antisemitism now most resemble each other as complementary mechanisms for diverting the anxieties bred by the global economic order. Antisemitism has long scapegoated the Jews for capitalism's tendency to produce outsized winners. But there has been no comparably global shorthand for the anxiety prompted by capitalism's losers—until now. Muslim refugees help give a name, Islam, to the masses seemingly encroaching from the margins of the world system. The result, I argue, is the hardening of Islamophobia and antisemitism into the inextricable poles of a reactionary worldview. Taking France as a case study, the article reads the burkini bans prompted by the July 2016 terror attack in Nice as an expression of middle-class fear about downward mobility. Targeted at both internal Muslim leisure and external Muslim encroachment, the bans evoke how European unease about globalization increasingly takes Islamophobic form. Such intolerance threatens not only to lodge Islamophobia at the heart of a reconstituted Europe but also to erode the vigilance against antisemitism once characteristic of the postwar European project.