Publications

2020
Light C, Thomas J. Ahmaud Arbery was killed, allegedly by vigilantes. Racism allowed them to claim self-defense. Washington Post. 2020. Publisher's Version
Light C. On Civil Rights, Armed Citizens, and Historical Overdose. Lateral - Journal of Cultural Studies. 2020;9 (1). Publisher's VersionAbstract
Today’s radically sovereign Armed Citizen®—a commodity fetish trademarked by the NRA—derives his representational and ethical power from fantasies of self-defensive heroism rooted in historical distortions that obscure the traces of armed settler colonialist violence and racial capitalism. Such historical “overdose” flattens anti-racist civil rights activism, making us “complaisant hostages” of a selective memory that serves self-destructive, necropolitical structures today.
Light C. "The Worst that Humanity Has to Offer": On Looters and Law-Abiding Citizens in a State of Emergency. In: Guns: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice. New York: Routledge ; 2020.Abstract
This essay represents an effort to uncover the dynamics of reverse victimhood on which law-abiding citizenship rests, a dialectic of white masculine vulnerability and disenfranchisement, while “Black people [signify] terror’s embodiment.” I explore the ways in which implicitly racialized and gendered perceptions of terror mobilize state action in the service of expanding the right to carry lethal weaponry for those perceived as law-abiding citizens. The state’s invocation of natural disasters as “states of exception” necessitates the expansion of DIY Security Citizenship, the spread of neoliberalized self-care in the absence of state protection, and the deputization of the “law-abiding citizens” to protect property from racialized and gendered figures of perceived “stranger danger.” This project examines the dismal underside of American exceptionalism, the facilitating apparatuses of our nation’s exclusionary nationalism, and the pernicious historical amnesias on which they’re based.
2018
Light C. Precarious Pasts and Collective Jewish Memory: "Trapped in History" in 2017 America. Journal of Jewish Identities. 2018;11 (1) :191-204.
Light C. Guns Were for White Men. Public Books. 2018. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Based on my review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's recent publication LoadedA Disarming History of the Second Amendment, this essay interrogates the historical silences implicated in contemporary appeals to gendered and raced "Armed Citizenship."
Light C, Livingston L. Gun Studies Syllabus. Public Books. 2018. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control activists. In response, Public Books reached out to scholars Caroline Light and Lindsay Livingston to develop a Gun Studies Syllabus.

 

There are an estimated 310 million firearms in the United States today—more than one gun per person—and while the US comprises about 5 percent of the world’s population, its inhabitants possess over 40 percent of the world’s guns. The US also experiences more gun deaths than any economically comparable nation: more than 38,600 in 2016, with nearly two-thirds of them suicides. How did the nation get here, and what is it doing to prevent gun violence? To answer these questions, this syllabus provides an interdisciplinary introduction to America’s unique “gun culture.”

2017
Jews and Gender in the Jim Crow South. Lilith. 2017;42 (2) :38-39. Publisher's Version
A ‘Stand Your Ground’ Expansion That Expands Inequality. New York Times. 2017. Publisher's Version
The False Promise That ‘Armed Citizenship’ Will Keep Women Safe. The Trace. 2017. Publisher's Version
Why the NRA Has Been a Disaster for Black Americans. Mother Jones. 2017. Publisher's Version
Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. Boston: Beacon Press; 2017.Abstract

Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original “castle laws” of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our country’s most powerful lobbying forces.

syg.jpg
2014
That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South. New York: New York University Press; 2014.Abstract

 

“It has ever been the boast of the Jewish people, that they support their own poor,” declared Kentucky attorney Benjamin Franklin Jonas in 1856. “Their reasons are partly founded in religious necessity, and partly in that pride of race and character which has supported them through so many ages of trial and vicissitude.” In That Pride of Race and Character, Caroline E. Light examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots.

Light provides a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideals of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. In an effort to combat the voices of anti-Semitism and nativism, established Jewish leaders developed a sophisticated and cutting-edge network of charities in the South to ensure that Jews took care of those considered “their own” while also proving themselves to be exemplary white citizens. Drawing from confidential case files and institutional records from various southern Jewish charities, the book relates how southern Jewish leaders and their immigrant clients negotiated the complexities of “fitting in” in a place and time of significant socio-political turbulence. Ultimately, the southern Jewish call to benevolence bore the particular imprint of the region’s racial mores and left behind a rich legacy.

 

thatpride.jpg
2011
Alterity Chic: Saving Africa, Losing (Sight of) the Legacy of AIDS. Interdisciplinary Humanities. 2011;28 (2) :20-34.

Pages