Naming Race, Naming Racisms

Jonathan Judaken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Eschewing social scientific approaches, which tend to examine race and racism in terms of quasi-static ideal types, this book surveys differing historical contexts from the era of scientific racism in the nineteenth-century to the post-racial racism of the post 9/11 period, and from Europe to the United States, in order to understand how racism has been articulated in differing situations. It is distinguished by the attention it pays to the on-going power of racial discourse in the contemporary period as a legitimating factor in oppression. It exemplifies methodological openness, combining the work of historians, philosophers, religious scholars, and literary critics, and includes differing theoretical models in pursuing a critical approach to race: cultural studies; trauma theory and psychoanalysis; critical theory and consideration of the "new racism"; and postcolonialism and the literature on globalization. It brings together the work of leading academics with younger practitioners and is capped off by an interview with world-renowned intellectual Cornel West on black intellectuals in America.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.

Naming race, naming racisms: an introduction

 

To better understand the protean concept of race, we might consider it in light of what Friedrich Nietzsche said about truth: ‘It is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished … and which, after long use seem fixed, canonical, and binding to a people.’ Races are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. They are metaphors which have become worn out and no longer have the power to carry meaning.' The historians, literary theorists, political scientists and philosophers included in this volume seek to analyse some of the key debates since the eighteenth century that have helped shape how concepts of race have served as metaphors, as carriers of meaning, in the shifting contexts of modernity.

Eschewing social scientific approaches and their reliance on quasi-static ideal types, this volume provides an overview that ranges from the consolidation of ‘scientific’ conceptions of race in the late eighteenth century to today. Its essays range transnationally in order to understand how racism has been articulated in differing situations. With four essays focused on the post-9/11 period, and all of them engaged with contemporary discussions about race, the volume is distinguished by the attention it pays to the ongoing power of racial discourse and the institutionalization of racism. It exemplifies methodological openness, employing differing theoretical models for a critical approach to race: the history of philosophy and systems of thought; trauma theory and psychoanalysis; critical theory; cultural studies and intellectual history; and postcolonial and globalization literature.

Mark Larrimore's essay on Immanuel Kant offers a novel perspective on modern racism's origins. He maintains that the renowned philosopher was not only an originator of the scientific concept of race and a key figure in the central role of anthropology in the development of scientific racism, but also a founder of the category of ‘Whiteness’. Kant had invented not only race but ‘Whiteness” as an escape from it,’ writes Larrimore. ‘Whites were at once a race and beyond race, the summation and circumvention of race, an uncertainty’ that Kant would ‘sharpen into an antinomy with his critical philosophy’. The challenge of Larrimore's piece is his location of Kant's marginal writings on race and whiteness firmly within the development of his overall system of thought, drawing attention to the formative role these played throughout Kant's philosophical project and, in turn, in the history of the theorization of race. Larrimore also positions Kant's writings on race within the wider discourse of race theorizing in the eighteenth century. He correlates Kant's position with those of Buffon and Blumenbach, situates his writing in relation to Lavater's physiognomy, and counterposes Kant's interventions to the polygenetic theories of Lord Kames and Voltaire, just as systems of racial classification were beginning to coalesce.

Robert Bernasconi picks up this thread by contextualizing Anténor Firmin's De l'égalité des races humaines (1885), a remarkable 650-page tract written by a young Haitian to oppose the doctrine of racial inequality. He situates Firmin's intervention at the centre of circulating nineteenth-century discussions of racial science. Bernasconi takes up where Larrimore leaves off, with the debate between polygenesis and monogenesis as it was played out under the auspices of the the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, ‘the most important anthropological society anywhere in the world’, founded in 1859, the same year that Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. Firmin's De l'égalité des races humaines was, as its title suggests, a counterpoint to Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853–5), which argued that race was destiny and race-mixing led to the decline of civilizations. Firmin was also responding to the leading racist anthropologists of the nineteenth century, like Paul Broca, who founded the Sociéte. His main target, however, was the importation of evolutionist theories as applied to the human races, especially those of Clémence Royer, ‘Darwin's bulldog in France’. Firmin would mobilize his own version of Auguste Comte's positivism in order to dismantle these racist viewpoints. But he also imbibed aspects of the racialist presuppositions of French Republican ideology, which was busy legitimating colonial empire under the auspices of the mission civilisatrice. Bernasconi thus reveals the limits—but more importantly the possibilities—of an anti-racist perspective, as scientific racism was becoming a fixture of European's self-understanding.

If Larrimore and Bernasconi reveal just how wide ranging discussions of race were during the long nineteenth century, then Richard Francis Crane's focus on France's most important twentieth-century Catholic intellectual, Jacques Maritain, makes evident that this was also the case for discussions of the Jewish Question in the period between the Dreyfus Affair and the rise of National Socialism. Crane chronicles the shift in Maritain's perspective from his close association with the radical-right Action Française, then the foremost antisemitic group in France, to his emergence in the 1920s as a leading voice opposed to antisemitism. Even as Crane sensitively treats the polysemic discussions of Jews and Judaism in interwar France, he shows nonetheless that

Maritain strove to advance a metahistorical understanding of what might be called the Sacred Jew in an era when the racially hygienic construct of the Dirty Jew threatened to prevail … But Maritain's recasting of the timely Jewish Question as the timeless Mystery of Israel amounted to just as clear an expression of the political-cultural anxieties of the interwar period as its racist and ever more eliminationist counterpart.

Larrimore, Bernasconi and Crane therefore demonstrate the paradoxes at work in discourses on the racial question: ostensibly cosmopolitan and universalist rationalists who were at the origins of race-thinking (Kant); anti-racism that articulated a vision of equality within a progressive teleology but that reiterated some of the suppositions of racial hierarchy (Firmin); and anti-antisemites whose commitments to an eschatological theology continued to fix Jews and Judaism within a pre-scripted role in the drama of Christian salvation (Maritain).

These tensions did not end with the civil rights era. Damon Freeman focuses on the conflict between Kenneth Clark and Adam Clayton Powell, two prominent African American leaders of the 1960s. Their intra-racial struggle, Freeman argues, does not fit neatly into narratives about either the civil rights or black power movements, and poses difficult questions about the politics of race and the transformations of racial thought. ‘The Clark -Powell split symbolized both the promises and the perils of the black freedom struggle’, Freeman notes. He explores how the conflict helped Clark to rethink the nature of power, the civil rights movement and the prospects for African American leadership' and how Powell came to argue that the dilemmas of race were, in fact, subsumed within power relations in ways that anticipated the critical race theorists of the 1980s.

In turn, Leigh Anne Duck reads Alice Walker's post-civil rights novel Meridian (1976) as an exploration of the political significance of suffering. She interrogates Walker's text to explain how the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning and melancholia help render more intricate the relationship between racial/gender oppression and psychic trauma. She also examines how the eponymous protagonist of Meridian can sensitize critical race theorists to a more complex understanding of the damaged racial pasts they examine, offering ‘insight into problems that are simultaneously social and psychological’.

The remaining contributions all focus in different ways on race and racism today. George Michael and D. J. Mulloy's ‘Riots, Disasters and Racism’ surveys how some key journals and figures on the extreme right in the United States represented Hurricane Katrina, the November 2005 riots in Paris, and the interethnic mêlée on Cronulla Beach in Sydney between native Whites and Middle Eastern immigrants in December 2005. We learn about the ways in which these groups oppose a multicultural society, racialize the politics of immigration and feed on current events for an affirmation of their racist perspective. Michael and Mulloy ultimately reveal that the very media mechanisms that disseminate the diatribes of this white supremacist community are a function of how essentialist and exclusionary nationalism has become transnational. White supremacy is today defined more in terms of a crisis of European and western civilization (read as white) rather than in narrower nationalist terms. Since the very events Michael and Mulloy survey are the result of global forces, it indicates how globalization is transforming the discourse of extreme nationalism and racism.

This conjuncture of racism, nationalism and globalization is explored in more detail in the final three pieces. Brigitte Weltman-Aron shows how the postcolonial resides at the intersection of the global and the local. She considers Assia Djebar, the first Algerian woman writer ever elected to join the Académie Française, an institution founded in 1635 to define the French language by writing its dictionary. Djebar is one of several francophone, and specifically Mahghrebian, writers who have analysed the relationship between the French language and racialization, a relationship Frantz Fanon made clear in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter’, he wrote, ‘that is, he will come closer to being a real human being —in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language’. Weltman-Aron examines how Assia Djebar's inclusion of idiomatic terms in her writing is an index of a dual poetics of resistance. On the one hand, Djebar dismantles the cultural racism at work in the discourse on assimilation that underpinned the French model of colonialism, since the mission civilisatrice was founded on the notion that mastery of the language was the sign of whiteness. On the other hand, she opposes Algerian claims to any unproblematic and ‘authentic’ self-recovery after colonialism.

A similar nexus of globalization, racialization and resistance is considered in Alfred López's work, as his subtitle, ‘9/11, Race and the New Postglobal Literature’, makes evident. López explores how the forces of globalization affect those at the bottom, the subalterns of the new global economy: migrants and workers in the postcolonial metropole. He develops the concept of the postglobal' through a close reading of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, which exemplifies a ‘new postglobal literature’ that depicts the experience of aliens and minority labourers as symptomatic of the confines of a neo-liberal order defined by the global expansion of capitalism.

Finally, my own effort to rethink antisemitism in a global age explores the postglobal from the vantage of the debate on what has been named the ‘new antisemitism’. I argue that it is not new in at least two senses. First, none of the elements that characterize the new antisemitism are actually new: Holocaust denial, Islamic Judaeophobia, antisemitism on the left, anti-racism as antisemitism, and anti-Zionism each have a long history. Second, the extensive historiography on the ‘new antisemitism’ mitigates the claim that something novel is afoot. But the forces of globalization have transformed discussions of antisemitism into a battleground with the rhetorical warfare played out on the Internet both a symptom and cause of the ways representations of Jews and Judaism are being altered in the age of the new media. Here, I draw on works by Léon Poliakov, Judith Butler, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt School, among others, to critically re-evaluate the phenomenon of the new Judaeophobia in our era of globalization.

So what does the genealogy of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ presented in this volume reveal? It shows how race has functioned as a metaphor in different historical contexts: a means to point to a fixed origin and stable cause of meaning for historical phenomena that are constantly in flux. Race seeks to stabilize discourse, to provide its knowable ground, but is not itself stable and so cannot be easily defined or named. It is, rather, a symbolic and imaginary way of attempting to anchor meaning given the changes engendered by modernity. Most importantly, this collection of essays shows that this slippage of meaning can be historicized. To do so involves situating forms of racial categorization in relation to other discursive constructs that are posited as transcendental signifieds, including the technologies of power at work in gender formation, class structures, regimes of normativity and respectability, religious conceptions and configurations of epistemic truth. ‘Race’ and ‘racism’ are therefore useful as vectors of historical change that help to trace the effects of racial discourses and how these are projected on to racialized bodies within the dynamic of power relations played out in the body politic. This forensic exercise is ultimately undertaken in order to demythologize, destabilize and deconstruct the mutations of racism in modernity.

The book ends with an interview with Cornel West about “Black Intellectuals in America.” In his inimitable fashion, West's ruminations knit together the concerns of the work as a whole. For West locates himself as a black intellectual within both a Socratic and Jewish tradition of prophetic critique whose sights are sharply honed in on both anti-Jewish demonization and anti-black racism. The discussion with West ranges from how the itinerary of black intellectuals overlaps, but also differs from those of the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish. Their agenda was defined after Auschwitz and with the onset of the Cold War and was attentive to the issues of mass murder, Marxism, and modernism. ‘Whereas the black intellectuals,’ West avers ‘are actually dealing with the night side of American democracy. ‘They're dealing with the problematic of the forms of death—social death and civic death, spiritual death and psychic death in America—and so it's a very different context in which they're working.’ Parsing his own demarche from Race Matters to Democracy Matters, West reconsiders the possibilities of resistance to the antiintellectualism in American life, including the role of the academy, as well as the interconnections of imperialism, racism, and democracy in a post-global age: ‘Every democracy we know has been predicated on some kind of imperial project,’ he stipulates, ‘So the question becomes how does one engage in a critique of democracy with democratic ideals that are suspicious of the imperialism which often are the preconditions for your democracy. It's a real paradox.’ This paradox is at the heart of the project of Naming Race, Naming Racisms.

Jonathan Judaken
University of Memphis

Antinomies of race: diversity and destiny in Kant

MARK LARRIMORE

Immanuel Kant, the inventor of autonomy, was also the inventor of race.¹ Understanding the invention of a concept is a challenging business, however, especially when the concept has played so fateful a part in subsequent history. Even histories of race as a construction risk reifying what they seek to dismantle by treating it from the start as explanandum rather than explanans. When first invented, race was an answer to questions we no longer ask, and conceived in terms of schemes of human diversity we barely remember. Kant lectured on human diversity against the backdrop of geography and history throughout his career out of an eighteenth-century sense of diversity as real and inevitable as well as potentially meaningful. The critical turn and his mature ethics did not displace these concerns. They reframed them and, as they did, ‘race’ became a term claiming at once scientific, providential and pragmatic significance. In this essay I will explicate Kant's writings on race of the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, not in terms of the disingenuous ‘science’ his work helped make possible, but rather in relation to the concerns of Kant's practical thought in their true home.

Scholarship on Kant's contributions to race theory tends either to focus on his appalling views of non-Europeans, especially Africans, or to see him as engaged in a classificatory exercise, albeit one connected to understanding man's place in nature and history. But Kant didn't need the concept of race to maintain noxious views of non-Europeans, and classification of human varieties is never innocent. Scholars also often fail to distinguish between writings from different stages of Kant's career, allowing others to draw false comfort from the possibility that Kant dropped his hateful views with the critical turn of the 1780s or his theory of race with the cosmopolitan turn of the 1790s.² Kant's views did change in important ways. Once invented, however, the race concept only became more complex and ambitious, moving from geography to anthropology and from discussions of ‘what nature makes of man’ to those concerning ‘what man can and should make of himself’.

Kant's theory of race shows the importance of reading together elements of his oeuvre that tend to be studied in isolation: practical philosophy, philosophy of history, anthropology, physical geography. But rac...