Barnor Hesse

Racialized modernity: An analytics of white mythologies

Abstract This article is located in parentheses between two quotations from Derridas reflections on white mythologies, defined here as the ‘rhetoric of modernity’. It re-conceptualizes race by interrogating its elision in contemporary social and political thought where discussions of modernity routinely ignore colonial and racial formations. It discusses a commentary by Jurgen Habermas on Hegels discourse of modernity, which is used heuristically to illustrate the systematic elisions of race in contemporary theoretical discussions of modernity. Reading various juxtapositions between the two, it argues Habermass erasure of distinctly colonial/racial themes in Hegels concept of modernity, can be used to develop an analytics of racialized modernity, against white mythologies, which understands race beyond corporeality as signifying colonial distinctions between assemblages of ‘Europeanness’ and ‘non-Europeanness’. Building on developments in race/modernity studies it argues for the importance of conceptualizing race without any residual reliance on a biological referent to guarantee the object of critique.

Im/plausible deniability: racism's conceptual double bind

Since the ending of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, the international concept of racism, first initialised in the 1930s, has been inscribed in an unacknowledged conceptual double bind. Western political culture has inherited a hegemonic concept of racism that foregrounds those meanings associated with the anti‐fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern anti‐colonial critiques centred on Western Imperialism. This can be taken to suggest a divergence within a western tradition of critical thought that in one of its guises occurs between the view that ‘‘race’ thinking’ resembles ideological exceptionality and the contrary view that ‘race relations’ approximates colonial conventions. The present essay explores the extent to which these views are constituted conceptually and dialogically in opposition and divergence. This is defined as racisms conceptual double bind. In other words, the international concept of racism is doubly bound into revealing its imprints in nationalism and concealing its anchorage in liberalism; or recognising extremist ideology while denying routine governmentality. The essay, therefore, asks the following: is it im/plausible to deny that there is an inescapable conceptual double bind between these differing conceptualisations of racism that has been ignored by the dominant social science traditions in the West? The idea of a double bind in the concept of racism, reiterated throughout this essay, is not to be confused with the proposition that there are two concepts of racism. On the contrary, during the twentieth‐century conceptualisation of racism, there have rather been two distinct orientations, the hegemonic Eurocentric and the subaltern De/colonial, based on conflicting yet dialogical paradigmatic experiences of the referent of racism.

The Creolization of Theory

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities. Contributors . Etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black Fugitivity

This essay places Isaiah Berlin’s famous “Two Concepts of Liberty” in conversation with perspectives defined as black fugitive thought. The latter is used to refer principally to Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois and David Walker. It argues that the trope of liberty in Western liberal political theory, exemplified in a lineage that connects Berlin, John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant, has maintained its universal meaning and coherence by excluding and silencing any representations of its modernity gestations, affiliations and entanglements with Atlantic slavery and European empires. This particular incarnation of theory is characterized as the Western discursive and hegemonic effects of colonial-racial foreclosure. Foreclosure describes the discursive contexts in which particular terms or references become impossible to formulate because the means by which they could be formulated have been excluded from the discursive context. Through an examination of the action of foreclosure, based largely on unraveling the liberal-colonial convergences of Two Concepts the essay reflects on the political and theoretical problems posed for black political thought by the hegemony of Western formulations of liberty that deny their indebtedness to Western colonialism. Drawing upon juxtapositions between white liberal/republican thinkers and black fugitivity thinkers, it argues a particular lineage of black political thought is compelled to conceive of itself as an escape from the colonial and racial hegemony of Western liberty.

Introduction: On Black Political Thought inside Global Black Protest

Recent global trends in the policing deaths and antipolicing protests of black people urge a reconsideration of the orientations and scope of black political thought. One of its central considerations must be black politics and its anticolonial/antiracial conditions of possibility. This is because the solidarity logics of blackness implicated in the signifier “black politics” continue to be insurgent in and repressed by Western capitalist, liberal democratic polities. Our understanding of the social, cultural, and existential oppositional activities among dispersed populations of African descent has been largely derived from black antislavery/ anticolonial/antiracial mobilizations spanning the sixteenth to twentyfirst centuries. Nevertheless, it remains the case that black politics appears to be one of the least elucidated and most contested concepts in contemporary political discourse. This is partly because whatever has been represented and configured as black politics has also been routinely marginalized, pathologized, repudiated, or attacked in Western political theory and Western polities. Delineating and contributing to a distinctive field of black political thought has always required that we recuperate conceptually the Western-attributed outlaw status of black politics. Here the task also

Solidarities Black: Richard Iton's blues archive

This article is a homage and memorial to the intellectual work of African-American studies scholar Richard Iton, who passed away in April 2013. It elaborates the motif of a blues archive to evoke the documentary affects and passionate attachments inscribed in Itons unique diaspora analyses of black politics and black popular culture.