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ID:
187071
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Summary/Abstract |
It is widely accepted that race is socially constructed. Despite this, deference to race witnesses scholarship and activism becoming complicit in the reification of race and the reproduction of its effects. Gilroy describes ‘‘the pious ritual in which we always agree that ‘‘race’’’ is invented but then are required to defer to its embeddedness in the world and to accept that the demand for justice requires us nevertheless innocently to enter the political arenas it helps to mark out’. This article engages this contention through reflection on the political deployment of race in Southhall Black Sisters. Empirical data and postracial theory extend the analysis to examine an applied postracialism and to consider whether we have arrived at a new antiracist conjuncture. Ultimately, this theoretically informed and empirically engaged article examines the role of race in antiracist politics and reflects on its future as a tool for performing such principled labor.
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ID:
101283
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Publication |
2010.
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Summary/Abstract |
Following Barack Obama's election as United States president, the illusion that the worst excesses of the Bush administration are now simply finished must be tempered by a sober assessment of the deeply consequential institutionalization of antiterrorism as the intransigent idiom of a new species of security state formation. Obama's assumption of responsibility for the conduct of the so-called War on Terror has committed him to the dominant ethos of antiterrorism and a multifaceted program of securitization, "domestically" and internationally. Furthermore, the task of reinvigorating United States nationalism by exalting American exceptionalism is one that deeply conjoins Obama with his predecessor. This is, perhaps, nowhere so evident as in Obama's dissimulations of the racial singularity and salience of his accession to the presidency. Indeed, he compulsively deracialized his election in favor of an American exceptionalist gesture of patriotic postracialism. This essay interrogates the relation between this "postracial" Americanism and a distinctly imperial multiculturalism. Through this "postracial" and assimilationist vision of empire, and by means of the crucial (racially ambiguous) figure of the Muslim, the United States has fashioned itself as the decisive police power of an incipient Global Security State, charged with putting in order the wild new frontiers of an unruly planet.
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