Bibliography 2: #BIB39911

Key	BIB39911
Reference type	Journal Article
Title	Confronting Culture and Caste in the American Bahá’í Magazine World Order, 1935–1949
Journal	Du Bois Review : Social Science Research on Race
Author	Hughey, Matthew
Year	2026
Epub date2	2026/04/13
ISSN	1742-058X
Abstract	The Bahá’í Faith was founded in 1863 in Persia and first publicly mentioned in the United States at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. Growing throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, the germinal American Bahá’í communities established different periodicals with varied foci. The first American Bahá’í periodical to fall under the full aegis of American Bahá’í administrative control was the magazine, World Order (1935-1949). Bahá’ís and non-Bahá’ís published within it and, while not the explicit focus, made many attempts to merge, reconcile, debate, and apply Bahá’í scriptural imperatives and Bahá’í-informed perspectives to the social and spiritual problems of racial prejudice, inequality, segregation, and disunity. But their vast heterogeneity, and sometimes strange, divergent, and contradictory stances on the very definition of “race” together gesture toward the need to understand how, why, and which strategies and logics functioned to mutually constrain and enable the American Bahá’í discursive articulation of the “race” concept. Toward that end, I map the landscape of such discourse with attention to how race was simultaneously understood as both a “cultural” marker and a category like “caste”. I thus explore these discursive uses as they developed against the backdrop of the Great Depression, eugenic race science and its backlash, Aryanism in World War II, and the continued debate over Jim Crow, racial equality, and the scientific and religious connotations of the category of “race” itself.
Language	English
Keywords	WORLD ORDER (JOURNAL); RACE; RACE UNITY; PREJUDICE; INEQUALITY; SEGREGATION
URL	https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/14275C3DCB24674ED13F311766849562
DOI	10.1017/S1742058X26100113
Pages	1–18
File attachments	internal-pdf://1156600343/Hughey - Confronting-culture - DuBoisRev 2026.pdf
Database provider	Cambridge University Press
Name of database	Cambridge Core

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