Cutting race down to analytical size: UK edition

Presented by Luke de Noronha

Please read the paper in preparation for the seminar.

Abstract :  This paper is an experiment in cutting race down to analytical size. It is the result of several years working and teaching within the broad field of race, ethnicity and postcolonial studies and reflecting on where race-centric approaches lose their explanatory purchase on our confounding present. It asks whether we would recognise if race became, in Raymond Williams’ terms, a residual cultural force, and how we might distinguish the remainder from the new. Analyses of race are being stretched by changes to global order (multipolarity as the end of west-rest, core-periphery binaries) and digital technologies which unfasten the epistemology of body-mass on which racial thinking has relied. The paper interrogates race maximalist approaches, most pointedly in an appraisal of racial capitalism and mobilities paradigms. It suggests that the proliferation of nationalism and attendant anti-immigrant politics North and South, East and West, raises challenging questions for the study of racism and racialisation.