Alain Locke: Imperialism, Race and the International Order

• In Event: The Howard School of International Affairs: Theory and Practice

Abstract

In 1915 Alain Locke gave a series of lectures titled “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations” in which he presented a novel conceptualisation of imperialism as “race practice,” thereby pointing towards the intimate connection between race and imperial order. Although Locke’s understanding of race was ground-breaking for showing what is constructed as race and for its emphasis on practice, and even though he provided original insights into how race operates and to what effect, they remained unpublished for almost 80 years and it is only recently that they have been recovered and started to receive some attention by scholars of international relations and political science. Locke’s recovery and reintegration into the body of thinkers of international politics offers not only the possibility of demonstrating the ways in which race practice constitutes and shapes international order, but also, and more broadly, illustrates the importance of a re-examination of some of the earlier theorists of international relations, particularly those whose work has been excluded from the canon or whose perspectives have been marginalised. As such, this paper presents a recovery and re-examination of Locke’s conception of imperialism as race practice, and highlights its continuing relevance by connecting it to practice theory and to a conceptualisation of international order as an ongoing project in order to argue that the continuing deployment of shifting race practices helps constitute and reproduce a hierarchical international order that bears the marks of the colonial and of racialisation in the absence of formal empire.

Author

• Owen Rhys Brown, Northwestern University