Sumayyah Nabiyeva, Temple Rome Culture & Identity Envoy, Fall 2024
What is inscribed on our bodies and takes shape in social, political, and economic constructs within society? Its race—and Philomena Essed would agree. Race is something that is not fixed, it changes and morphs with each place we go as the concept of hegemonic groups and the racialized minority changes along with it. Philomena Essed is a Surinamese-Dutch professor who believed in gendered racism and everyday racism activated by underlying power relations. She, along with great thinkers in race relations, Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci, studied cultural hegemony and how people come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people themselves vested in its hierarchical orders.
At Temple Rome, I have had the privilege to study race relations through the lens of the Sardinian scholar, Gramsci, and visit his homeland where most of his race theories were cultivated from. Gramsci’s discoveries laid the foundations for critical race theory on a global scale and influenced the scholarship of Philomena Essed.
In Essed’s documentary, Everyday Dignity, she is one of the first scholars to put a label on what most people could not identify as racism in everyday life. The documentary takes place in the Netherlands, but the concept and the scholarship on race relations applies to every society under the blue sky. We can see how race is manifested through a hegemonic system of exploitation and exclusion, sometimes taking form as racism, where one group of people define another through a false sense of dominance. Essed describes how everyday mannerisms, and treatment can be a clear indication of social, economic, and political oppression and power dominance over a group of people through the same ideas of power, dominance, skin tone privilege, and financial standing. To depict this complex, yet simple, concept of race and how that is manifested in Rome, I created this spread as a collage visualization of the nuanced concept of race in Rome and how I see Everyday Dignity.
Learn more about the Culture & Identity Envoy Program at Temple Rome.