Apartheid Raciald̈iscrimination Discrimination Racer̈elations Politics SouthÄfrica.

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability—notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality. Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice. Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

From Simon & Schuster, Power, Racism, and Privilege is William J. Wilson's exploration of race relations in theoretical and sociohistorical perspectives. As described by Contemporary Sociology, Power, Racism, and Privilege is "a useful work in which history, theory and comparative analysis are uniquely brought together to provide a provocative application of theory to empirical materials in the are of race relations."

The unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela in February of 1990 cleared the way for negotiations toward a new, post-apartheid political order in South Africa. But three years later, the main parties have made little progress toward a compromise, while violence escalates in the townships. In this revealing study, Marina Ottaway examines the new conflicts emerging in South Africa, the factors influencing them, and the probable outcome. She shows that the black-on-white conflict that has made the country a pariah in the past has evolved into a much more complex state of affairs and explains that the transition is likely to take an unprecedented form. Beginning with a brief history of the events since Mandela's release, Ottaway provides a vivid account of the evolving conflict over apartheid. She discuses the complexity of conflict resolution in a country where internal and external currents work against each other, and where the struggle for power transcends any strides toward peace. Ottaway thoroughly addresses the issues involved in South Africa's transition from apartheid. She explains that the abolition of the pervasive system has more far-reaching implications than originally thought. South Africa explores the effects that the international climate of the 1990s has had on the county’s transition. Ottaway contends that the international community rejects apartheid but is unsympathetic to black demands for redistribution, and has condemned the white government’s vision of separate development but accepts ethnic nationalism as inevitable. She describes the dramatic effects the new world order has had on South Africa and assesses what those changes will mean to the country’s difficult transition.

First published in 1980. Toward the end of 1975 the author decided to edit a collection of essays on political developments in Southern Africa. Regional events since the Portuguese coup in April 1974 had already made an enormous impact, first suggesting the possibilities of peaceful accommodation between South Africa and its neighbors, but then demonstrating the destructive impact in Angola of widespread international intervention (in the latter half of 1975). From 1975 to the present, events in Southern Africa have neared center stage in international attention, but, as these essays will show, outstanding regional differences are no closer to peaceful resolution in late 1979 than they were in early 1976.