A real pleasure to catch up with Melissa Harris-Perry and talk about Cruelty as Citizenship for her WNYC show The Takeaway. She and Dorian Warren then used the conversation as a jumping-off point for a broader discussion of political cruelty. It's a great listen. Check it out!
Events
Cruelty as Citizenship
Order Cruelty as Citizenship from your local indie bookshop or directly from the University of Minnesota Press!
More than a decade before the election of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the national conversation. Situating the contemporary debate on immigration within America’s history of indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cristina Beltrán reveals white supremacy to be white democracy—a participatory practice of racial violence, domination, and exclusion that gave white citizens the right to both wield and exceed the law. Still, Beltrán sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial justice.
The Trouble with Unity
- Order The Trouble with Unity from your local indie bookshop or directly from Oxford University Press! Over the past dozen years, much attention has been given to examining the growing political influence of Latinos in the United States in order to define the so-called "Latino vote." The existence of a coherent, pan-ethnic Latino political agenda is, as The Trouble with Unity shows, not only highly debatable but democratically unviable. Situated at the intersection of political theory and Latino studies, the book is a nuanced critique of civic Latinidad and the Latino electoral and protest politics that work to erase diversity and debate in favor of images of commonality. Cristina Beltrán looks at key moments in U.S. Latino political history through the lens of political, feminist, and cultural thought to provide a theoretically driven account of the many ways in which Latinos lay claim to the public realm. In its innovative approach to the realities of Latino protest politics, The Trouble with Unity advances both social-movement and democratic political theory.
10/14/2021
08/16/2021
08/03/2021
05/13/2021
05/06/2021
03/29/2021
03/18/2021
01/26/2021
Multiracial whiteness
In the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and seeing FBI wanted posters featuring the occasional nonwhite rioter, I wrote an op-ed-length essay on multiracial whiteness, an idea I've been mulling over for some time, and sent it to the Washington Post, which not only accepted it but ran it in print, on the front page of the Sunday opinion section! (Here's a link to the article; click on the picture below to read just the text as published.) A week later, Lulu Garcia-Navarro reached out to do a quick interview on the subject, and that aired shortly afterward—my first NPR appearance. (Here's a link to the audio.)
In between the two, I was reminded of what happens when one talks in the public sphere about the concept of "whiteness" (which is NOT the same as white people, BTW) or tries to discuss how the legacy of white supremacy has distorted our collective understanding of democracy: A bunch of right-wing pundits and their followers freak out! First, they post a bunch of outraged tweets. Then they write faux-news articles about the outraged tweets they've just written. It's a big dumb circle of silly, but it was far more negative attention than I've ever gotten from an MSNBC appearance—even the one time when Bill O'Reilly put a clip of me on his Fox News show. Fortunately, the insults and ugliness quickly peter out as the online mob moves on to a new outrage. The good news: A whole lot of people read real newspapers like the Washington Post. And that strikes me as a very good sign!
11/16/2020
11/12/2020
Politically, there is no “Latino community”
In the aftermath of the election, the Guardian asked me and several colleagues for a few thoughts on Latino voters. Check out the article here.
About Cristina
- Cristina Beltrán, Ph.D., works at the intersection of Latinx politics and political theory. She is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. From 2001 until 2011, she taught in the Political Science Department at Haverford College; in 2013–14, she was a resident member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and an advanced seminar member at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.
Her work has appeared in Political Theory, the Du Bois Review, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and various edited volumes. She is currently the co-editor of Theory & Event, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes work by scholars working at the intersections of political theory, cultural theory, political economy, aesthetics, philosophy, and the arts. She is also an occasional guest on MSNBC.
Her new book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press), explores the American right’s deep antipathy toward nonwhite migrants from Mexico and Latin America and examines why many in the Republican Party experience acts of cruelty against migrants as a form of democratic pleasure. Other book projects include The Right Kind of Difference: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Ideological Uncertainty of Race, a collection of essays that explores a variety of topics including Latino conservatism, and what it means to work ethically at the intersection of race and political theory.
Cristina and her husband, editor and writer Matthew Budman, live in New York City.