Abstract
This collective handbook provides an incredibly interesting collation of research and perspectives on race and gender by deploying a largely decolonial perspective. As the editors explain, ‘The decolonial heuristic and methodological angle looks at the endurance of multiple historical processes in the configuration of the present, including race and gender’ (p. 2). The book maintains its relation to studies of European communication and media by exploring the decentralisation of Europe as ‘a cradle of modern thought, aesthetics, ethics, jurisprudence, and democracy’ (p. 2). It employs the view that injustice is the link that binds disparate groupings and the relationality between race and gender. In Part I, ‘Bodies’ the violence on the body is explored through the following focal points: ‘body shaming (Craig); the terror of lynching (Mowatt); the white European gaze's erasures (Attia); the exclusions of homogeneity and its denial of difference (Al Rasheed); the intersection gender/ethnicity/class in beauty work hierarchies (Liebelt); and the coming to consciousness of misogynoir for young Black women in the context of #BLM and #SayHerName (Desir and Seraphin)’ (p. 21). Then, in Part II, ‘Feminisms’, researchers draw their focus on the Global North and South West and engage with black, women of colour and indigenous feminist activism and their resistance to colonial power and gender state violence. The chapters trace through past and present history of feminisms, reinventions, and struggles of women. Race, gender, class and age between Europe, Jamaica, and Hawai’i is analysed in Part III, ‘Nation’ through the exploration of indigenous resurgence, social mobility, dissection of white settler colonialism's legacy of racialisation and patriarchy, acknowledgement of nations as potential death worlds for ‘other’ bodies, or thinking what anti-racism could look like today (p. 285) as survival mechanisms within the contemporary world. The history and continual colonialism of Europe, South Africa and Brazil and the establishment of the white self are the main focus in Part IV, ‘Whiteness’. In part V, ‘Masculinity’, violence and gender are covered by drawing attention to the marginalisation of black men and boys and white patriarchal hegemony and violence. Finally, in Part VI, ‘Beyond Gender’, the possibility of self-liberation for those considered outside the hegemonic norms of white, cis, neoliberal, capitalist-extractivist and national body is explored.