Contenu du sommaire : Mobilisations ethno-raciales dans l'Amérique d'Obama

Melina Abdullah is a scholar-activist. She holds a Ph
D in Political Science from the University of Southern California and chairs the Department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, in Los Angeles. A womanist1, she has written numerous articles about black feminism, race relations, and political coalition building.
She is also an original member and one of the main organizers of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, the famous network created in 2013 to organize black people and non-black allies in the fight against state-sanctioned violence overwhelmingly targeting black individuals.
We reached out to her in order to know more about her perspective on the Obama administration's record in terms of racial equality and racial justice, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement both nationally and more specifically in Los Angeles, and the future of black mobilizations in the Trump era.

Native Americans have played a key role in the anti-pipeline movements that have recently increased in the United States. This article aims at understanding the mobilization strategies of Native Americans through the example of the anti-Keystone XL and the anti-DAPL movements. The different alliances, whether with environmental groups or local ranchers and farmers, as well as the choice of Washington D.C. as the focal point of the struggle, thus taking advantage of the executive-legislative tensions, have contributed to the Keystone victory. With the anti-DAPL movement, all eyes were watching the Standing Rock reservation. The struggle was rooted in the land, thus giving substance back to treaty territory. Through the use of social media, non-violent direct action and by performing culture, the actors of the movement insisted on the continued presence of Native Americans in today's United States.

In the first part of his professional and political career, Barack Obama was not particularly close to the US Armenian community. It is only after being elected Senator of Illinois and even more during the 2007-2008 presidential campaign that Obama and Armenian-Americans undertook a spectacular rapprochement and that Obama started to be viewed as a major supporter of the Armenians and their quest for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States. This rapprochement was symbolized by the fact that some Armenian organizations went as far as supporting Obama during the Democratic Party Primaries. However, once elected, he did not respect his promises to the Armenians and disappointed them for not using the term “genocide” to characterize the 1915 Massacres and for remaining ambivalent concerning the other causes important to the Armenian community. On the contrary, he opted for a line rather similar to that of his predecessors and favored Turkey and its allies, the Armenian lobby's opponents. The main goal of this article is to understand why and how the relations between the Armenian-Americans and Obama evolved in such a drastic way.

 

For the presidential election of 2008 and 2012, mobilization was low in Williamsburg. Latinos' and Hasidic Jews' main need—affordable housing—is not anymore addressed by the federal government, which has slowly cut its programs and financing in that field since the 1980's. However, the Latinos have strongly fought against a housing project lead by the local government. It raises questions about the long-term effects of the civil rights movement and federal programs since the 1960s.

This article presents an author and reformer whose name was famous in the nineteenth century but who has almost fallen into oblivion. Eliza W. Farnham (1815-1864) was a pioneer in many respects : as matron of the female division of Sing Sing prison in the 1840s, she introduced bold reforms based on phrenology, she was the first woman to publish a book on California in 1856 and, more than any other writer, she gave shape to the metaphor of the Angel in the House, arguing in her 1864 work, Woman and Her Era, that woman was a divine creature placed above the male sex. Her conception of the role and nature of the female sex, deeply anchored in the theory of separate spheres that prevailed in the nineteenth century, was at once traditional and revolutionary. While adhering to the belief that woman belonged in the home, she ultimately depicted man as the mere material provider of a semi-goddess whose mission was not only to domesticate and purify the male dominated political arena but also to transfigure society and the whole world thanks to her inner spiritual powers. This article, which focuses on the multifaceted notion of public sphere and on its treatment in Farnham's actions and works, seeks to highlight the complex and porous boundaries between public and private / internal and external that undermine, reassert and revisit the theory of separate spheres in order to promote a form of “apocalyptic feminism” (Helsinger).

Since the mid-1970s, Willa Cather has been claimed as one of their own by critics keen to defend various liberal causes; but this interpretation of her novels is challenged by the ambiguous posture she adopts towards the very idea of progress, which she treats with suspicion. This article defends the opposite hypothesis—that Cather is in fact what Antoine Compagnon terms an anti-modern writer, one who is fascinated by modernity yet in whom it arouses feelings of uneasiness, anxiety, and even fear. In Cather's world, the rising sense of loneliness—defined by Hannah Arendt as the loss of the proper distance between the self and others, between the subject and itself, between the self and the world—is what characterizes modern experience at its most disturbing. In My Ántonia, Cather seeks to counter this threat by offering a reassuring and, at times, almost utopian vision, but this is still a way of pointing out, albeit indirectly, what is most problematic about a time of deep ethical crisis.