(iPoster) Self-Referential Racism and the Disposability of Exterior Objects

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory III & Comparative Political Economy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory III

Abstract

Race and racism today is generally understood as a permutation of morphological or biological conceptions of racial hierarchy originating in the 18th and 19th centuries. In some instances, racism is meant to refer to self-improvement and perfection, such as in the case of eugenics. In other historical episodes such as in the colonies of North America, racism is used in law and culture more broadly as a discriminatory means of maintaining categorical distinctions necessary for hierarchical and typological division of status and roles in economic production and social and political hierarchy. And yet in the 20th century, race is recovered by civil rights and other social movements as a concept of resistance for self-determination and the assertion of inclusion in politics and society. The afterlives of race and racism today is often a confused amalgam of these distinct discursive and historical forms that tends to often obfuscate what operations of power are actually in play and the different political stakes that are involved.

I propose a disaggregation of these different conceptions of race through a revisitation of the genealogy of discourses on race first initiated by Michel Foucault. As many such as Ann Stoler, Étienne Balibar, and Ladelle McWhorter have noted, race was of central importance to Foucault’s unfinished volumes on The History of Sexuality. One might say that race was the culmination of Foucault’s various forms of power, from sovereign power to disciplinary and biopolitical power. Above all else, my interpretation seeks to revisit Foucault’s nuanced distinction between race discourse as a binary and adversarial discourse as opposed to a monolithic and biological discourse. The former is a relational discourse that assumes relative parity between the revolutionary and the sovereign, thus resembling more a discourse of war amongst subjects from different social lineages but more or less equal standing in which the objective is the vanquishing of the other. This kind of discourse better represents discussions of race that relate today to national borders and immigration as well as racist attempts to prevent the loss of political dominance in economic and political affairs. In contrast, a monolithic discourse of race better corresponds to power relations of dominance in which the objective is homogenization and control, much like the relation between the modern nation-state and its subjects in Foucault’s better-known works. Here, racism is better understood as a productive and pacifying discourse whose objective is either centered upon self-aggrandizement or the elimination or silent neglect of unassimilable “residue.” My contention is that the self-referential nature of the monolithic form of racism generates a harder distinction between political subjects and racialized “objects.” Accordingly, I propose to explore how this distinction between adversarial and monolithic forms of racism highlight almost unrecognizably different forms of power at play, such as in the differentiations between various kinds of subjects as opposed to the disposability or extractivist “use” of racial objects. And last but not least, I ponder the question of how racism should be conceptualized today. As race began as a concept denoting more social lineage than morphology or biology, it is not necessary that the concept of race should remain so today. Thus, I consider the case of the American “race” today, its significations and its political ramifications for non-American “racial objects.”

Author

• Mingiu Lee, University of California, Irvine