Abigail B. Bakan, Enakshi Dua (Eds.) - Theorizing Anti-Racism - Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories-University of Toronto Press (2014)

THEORIZING ANTI-RACISM
Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories
Edited by Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua
Over the last few decades, critical theory examining issues of race and
racism has flourished. However, most of this work falls on one side or
the other of a divide between theory inspired by Marxist approaches
to race and racism and theory inspired by postcolonial and critical race
theory. Driven by the need to move beyond the divide, the contributors
to Theorizing Anti-Racism present insightful essays that engage these
two intellectual traditions with a focus on clarification and points of
convergence.
The essays in Theorizing Anti-Racism examine topics that range from
reconsiderations of anti-racism in the work of Marx and Foucault to
examinations of the relationships among race, class, and the state that
integrate both Marxist and critical race theory. Drawing on the most
constructive elements of Marxism and postcolonial and critical race
theory, this collection constitutes an important contribution to the
advancement of anti-racist theory.
abigail b. bakan is a professor and Chair in the Department of Social

Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
University of Toronto.
enakshi dua is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality

and Womens Studies at York University, Toronto.
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Theorizing Anti-Racism
Linkages in Marxism and
Critical Race Theories
EDITED BY ABIGAIL B. BAKAN

AND ENAKSHI DUA
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

TorontoBuffaloLondon
University of Toronto Press 2014
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4935-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4426-2670-6 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled

paper with vegetable-based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Theorizing anti-racism : linkages in Marxism and critical race theories /

edited by Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4426-4935-4 (bound). ISBN 978-1-4426-2670-6 (pbk.)
1.Critical theory. 2.Anti-racism. 3.Racism. 4.Race. 5.Social

classes. 6. State, The. I. Bakan, Abigail B. (Abigail Bess), 1954, author,
editor. II. Dua, Enakshi, 1958, author, editor.
HM480.T54 2014305.8C2014-903668-X
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support

of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund
for its publishing activities.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
1 Introducing the Questions, Reframing the Dialogue 5

abigail b. bakan and enakshi dua
Part I: Rethinking Foucault
Introduction to Part I: Foucault and Anti-Racism 17

2 Revisiting Genealogies: Theorizing Anti-Racism beyond

the Impasse 19
enakshi dua
Introduction to Chapter 3 39
3 Foucault in Tunisia 41
robert j.c. young
4 Not Quite a Case of the Disappearing Marx: Tracing the Place

of Material Relations in Postcolonial Theory 63
enakshi dua
viContents
Part II: Revisiting Marx
Introduction to Part II: Marx and Anti-Racism 95

5 Marxism and Anti-Racism: Rethinking

the Politics of Difference 97
abigail b. bakan

6 Marxism and Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice:

Reflections and Interpretations 127
himani bannerji
Part III: Legacies and Relationships
Introduction to Part III: Legacies of, and Relationships

among, Key Anti-Racist Thinkers 145
7 C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Jacobins

and Black Reconstruction, Writing Heresy
and Revisionist Histories 148
anthony bogues
8 Colonizing, Colonized: Sartre and Fanon 184

audrey kobayashi and mark boyle
9 Intellectuals, Oppression, and Anti-Racist Movements

in South Africa 205
eunice n. sahle
Part IV: Interventions in Race, Class, and State
Introduction to Part IV: New Interventions in Intersections

of Race, Class, and State 249
Contents vii
10Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering

the Jewish Question 252
abigail b. bakan
11Race, Sovereignty, and Empire: Theorizing the Camp,

Theorizing Postmodernity 280
sunera thobani
12Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism, and the Bourgeoisie

in the Age of Neoliberalism 311
sedef arat-ko
13Race and the Management of Labour

in United States History 340
elizabeth esch and david roediger
Afterword 377
Contributors 383
Index 389
Acknowledgments
This book represents a truly collaborative effort, as it reflects both of

our long-standing commitments to social justice research and praxis.
We began working together when Ena approached Abbie some years
ago about the need for a collection that would advance our shared com-
mitment to creative critical scholarship, traversing sedimented ortho-
doxies, regarding race and racism. At the time, such an idea seemed
not only eminently reasonable, but one that would attract consider-
able support. This part has proven to be accurate. But what we did not
anticipate were the challenges. Overcoming the divide has proven to
be complex, involving the questioning of layers of historic certainties,
revisiting assumptions, and the development of new collegial networks.
Through this, we have appreciated each others curiosity, support,
perseverance, patience, profound knowledge, humour, and creativity,
which have helped to develop a better volume, but also to advance
in each of us a more profound passion to extend, expand, and deepen
the dialogue.
The volume itself is the product of a significant collective effort,
involving many people and many conversations over years of labour.
Thanks are owed to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Coun-
cil of Canada, the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, York
University, Queens University, and the University of Toronto. Each of
these provided resources and support without which the volume could
not have made its way to publication. The transition from an idea about
theorizing anti-racism to the completion of this volume would not have
been possible without the encouragement, professionalism, and con-
tinuing guidance of Douglas Hildebrand, Acquisitions Editor at the
University of Toronto Press. No one could imagine a more helpful and
xAcknowledgments
supportive editor. We would also like to thank Carolyn Zapf, our copy
editor, for her careful eye in editing our chapters before publication.
We are grateful to the University of Toronto Press and to the anony-
mous reviewers whose comments on earlier versions of the collection
contributed to a stronger volume.
We have also been aided by outstanding support. In the first stage
of the project, Vivian Lee was instrumental in organizing the initial
workshop that inspired the volume. Meghan Millss assistance in fol-
lowing up with contributors helped to keep the collection on track.
Paul Kellogg provided technical support for the workshop. A special
thanks goes to Angela Pietrobon, our editorial and production assistant
throughout the development of the project. We are grateful to Angela
for her meticulous work in the preparation of the collection.
Many colleagues from many spaces have participated in contrib-
uting to extending the dialogue regarding theorizing anti-racism, in
numerous ways, through the volumes long maturation: Yasmeen
Abu-Laban, Janet Conway, George Dei, Margot Francis, Grace-Edward
Galabuzi, Audrey Kobayashi, Paul Kellogg, Ania Loomba, Minelle
Mahtani, Katherine McKittrick, Charles Mills, Radhika Mongia, Sher-
ene Razack, John Sanbonmatsu, Sarita Srivastava, Asha Varadharajan,
and Rinaldo Walcott.
Each of us, as co-editors, also relied on a team of gracious supporters
to navigate the challenges of life and work, all the while keeping an eye
on the central importance of this collection.
Ena would like to thank Savitri Dua, Sara Abraham, Sedef Arat-Ko,
Himani Bannerji, Feyzi Baban, Arti Dhand, Mary Gellatly, Ashwin
Joshi, Mustafa Ko, Michael Kuttner, Deena Ladd, Bonita Lawrence,
Wayne Motayne, Kiran Mirchandani, Kim Rygiel, Ashwini Tambe, and
Alissa Trotz, whose friendship has provided for a rich and warm com-
munity that redefines family and political and intellectual communi-
ties. Colleagues at York University Jessica Balmer, Bettina Bradbury,
Tania Das Gupta, Honor Ford-Smith, Lindsay Gonder, Andil Gosine,
Celeta Irwin, Carl James, Ali Kazami, Kamala Kempadoo, Sonia Law-
rence, Radhika Mongia, David Murray, Narda Razack, and Sue Sbrizzi
have provided an engaged community of critical race and feminist
scholars whose conversations and insights have shaped me, perhaps
more than they know. Colleagues at several other universities, particu-
larly Davina Bhandar, Roland Sintos Coloma, Shahrzad Mojab, Roxana
Ng, Gordon Pon, and Malinda Smith, have provided a committed
Acknowledgmentsxi
community of critical race scholars. Ena would also like to acknowl-

edge her son, Jashan Dua, and her collection of nephews and nieces,
Akshay Goodrich Dua, Hannah Goodrich Dua, Alican Arat-Ko, Kan-
ishka Christoffson, Rahul Christoffson, Kira Gellatly-Ladd, Savita
Gellatly-Ladd, Asha Motayne-Trotz, Kai Motayne-Trotz, Suvan Joshi,
Syona Joshi, and Jamie Rygiel-Baban. When Jashan was five and Ena
was beginning to write her chapters for this collection, he looked up
at her one day while playing with a Spiderman car. Mom, he said
quietly, Spiderman is not going after the bad guy. Why? she asked.
He is too busy writing an article, he responded. While their humor-
ous exchange was governed by the desire of a child to have unfettered
access to his parent, it also raised a discussion of how to fight for social
justice. Enas contributions in this collection are inspired by the need
for us to develop the tools to ensure that the next generation does not
encounter racism, or at least encounters less racism (if racism can be
quantified) than their grandparents and parents generation did. She
hopes the collection will also inspire the next generation to continue to
look to theoretical insights and the importance of the written word in
informing their praxis in the struggle for social justice.
Abbie wishes to thank Roland Sintos Coloma, Martin Cannon, Adam
Hanieh, Janice Hill, Catherine Krull, Margaret Little, Eleanor Mac-
Donald, Mazen Masri, Scott Morgensen, Mary-Jo Nadeau, Alan Sears,
Cindy Sinclair, Alissa Trotz, Terrie Easter Sheen, Frances Shepherd,
Cynthia Wright, and Rafeef Ziadah for being there over the years of
production of this work and helping in ways they may not know. Abbie
wishes to acknowledge Paul Kellogg for sharing hours of joyous and
productive conversation, and for his unending encouragement. She also
wants to thank her children, Adam McNally and Rachel Kellogg, now
young adults, who have supported her scholarly and activist labours in
various ways all their lives, while patiently enduring her distractions.
And, posthumously, Abbie thanks her parents, from whom she learned
about the complexities of race, class, and power in ways they did not
articulate, but navigated boldly. Mildred Bakan (19222010) was an
intellectual pioneer, inspiring an example of scholar-activism that was
nearly impossible for Jewish women of her generation. David Bakan
(19212004) wrestled with Jewish identity and meaning, in theory and
practice, with a devotion to discovery of truth, and its spectacular char-
acter, that is beyond measure. The commitment to extend dialogues
across difference, a commitment that has animated this project, was the
xiiAcknowledgments
stuff of their being. Abbie is still learning to comprehend and appreci-

ate the impact they have had on her own intellectual development. Her
work is indebted to their teachings.
This book represents a genuine collaboration, greater than the sum of
its parts. It is both a finished project, of which we are genuinely proud,
and part of an ongoing work in progress, one part of a conversation,
that demands all due modesty.
THEORIZING ANTI-RACISM
Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories

Introduction
1Introducing the Questions, Reframing
the Dialogue
abi g ai l b . b akan an d e nak s h i dua
The aim of this collection is to advance critical scholarship in theorizing

race, racism, and anti-racism by recognizing the pivotal importance of
both Marxist and critical race theoretical contributions. In past decades,
a considerable body of scholarship focused on theorizing race and rac-
ism has emerged. While rich in contributions, this scholarship can be
characterized by a theoretical divide between Marxist approaches to
race and racism and those located in what we suggest is a continuum
of critical race and postcolonial frameworks. Important critiques have
emerged of both Marxist and critical race writings in this regard. Com-
monly, Marxists insist that a focus on material conditions of life and
production are essential to explaining relations between race and class,
and claim that critical race scholarship fails to centre this epistemologi-
cal starting point. Alternatively, critical race scholars challenge what
they see as a reductionist economism, which fails to centre ideological
divergences not only between but also within class formations. How-
ever, for many scholars on both sides of this divide, the compelling
importance of developing an anti-racist theory that is informed by, and
in turn informs, social praxis has pointed to the need to think through
the relationship of Marxism to anti-racism, and anti-racism to Marxism.
The co-editors of this collection have presented papers and organized
panels at a number of conferences on this subject, where animated con-
versations have taken place on how to re-theorize race and racism in
order to go beyond a palpable, though sometimes unnamed, theoretical
impasse. This collection is thus the result of numerous conversations
and is intended to both reflect contributions to date and encourage the
continuation of constructive conversations in wider circles. As similar
tensions exist in regard to other areas of critical scholarship such as
6 Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua
cultural, transnational, feminist, and queer studies we anticipate that

this collection will encourage related discussions across paradigms.
This collection is the product of a continuing conversation. The text
was preceded in September 2008 by a scholarly workshop held in
Toronto, Ontario, organized with the support of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Queens University,
and York University. Re-theorizing race and racism, the theme of this
volume, was the workshops focus, and a number of the contributions
in this collection were developed from early drafts first presented there.
Other contributions have been added to address particular issues not
discussed at the foundational workshop. The present collection there-
fore builds on this initial conversation and shares further contributions
made to date. Rather than revisiting the historic polarization in these
bodies of work, we have attempted to shift the discussion towards an
integrated analysis regarding various entry points, case studies, and
theoretical challenges specifically concerning theorizing race and anti-
racism. We consider these and related issues to be grounded in the ways
in which culture, modernity, and whiteness were constituted by, and in
turn continue to constitute, a dynamic capitalist mode of production
and global processes of imperialist war and conquest.
We understand race to be a constructed category of difference,
where phenotypical, cultural, linguistic, and/or other specific charac-
teristics are ascribed to designated groups; these groups are accordingly
rendered the subjects of systemic and sustained discriminatory ideas
and practices. Racism is the body of ideas and practices that establishes,
maintains, and perpetuates such categories of difference, sustained
through multiple, varied, and contextually specific social, political, and
economic constructions. Pivotal in advancing anti-racism, defined as
a theoretically informed political praxis that can effectively challenge
and overcome racism, is the capacity to explain the complex processes
that generate race and racism. This is, of course, a challenging task. It
involves developing a theoretical framework that addresses the ways
in which racism is socially constructed. We suggest that both Marxism
with its insights into capitalism, the state, ideology, and oppression and
critical race theory and postcolonialism with insights into Oriental-
ism, racialized legacies of colonialisms, nationalisms, and whiteness
are central to contributing to such a project. Our aim is to mitigate
the tensions between these approaches, which have been more com-
monly exaggerated and the points of commonality underplayed. Such
Introducing the Questions, Reframing the Dialogue 7
tensions, we suggest, can be productively addressed and transcended

to advance Marxist and anti-racist scholarship.
Clearly, a focus on Marxist and anti-racist scholarship encompasses
a breadth of literature that would be impossible to address in a single
volume. Certainly scholars working under the rubric of Marxism have
varied profoundly, according to their regional or historical focus, or
depending on whether they support or oppose particular geopoliti-
cal states that are identified as Marxist or socialist. Other Marx-
isms have developed in regard to theoretical and strategic approaches
related to political party projects (see, for example, the intense debates
associated with the Algerian independence war discussed in Birchall
2012). Similarly, there is a burgeoning body of work that concentrates
on theorizing race and racism, also varied in focus. This work has been
variously grounded in analysing particular periods associated with
slavery, colonialism, or empire, or with particular patterns of racializa-
tion associated with whiteness, intersections, or privilege. In order to
address the challenges posed by such vast bodies of scholarship, we
employ a method that, we suggest, simultaneously adds breadth and
narrows the scope. This collection addresses a broad range of Marx-
ist writings, from Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci, from C.L.R. James to
Dorothy Smith. But we also limit the focus to Marxist writings that spe-
cifically suggest theoretical contributions to understanding anti-racism,
with a view to considering racialization in relationship to class broadly
understood as social relationships related to processes of production
and reproduction as a central and defining element. Similarly, we are
aware that framing race and racism is an endeavour located in different
theoretical and strategic approaches, and we attempt to include some
of the most significant among these diverse perspectives. However,
we deliberately include both the postcolonial and critical race theo-
retical traditions in a single continuum, collapsing other distinguish-
ing elements in order to focus on racialization as a process linked to
colonialism and settler societies as a central element.
A number of critical race and postcolonial scholars have suggested
that the historical and contemporary articulations of race and racism
cannot be explained by a limited reliance on the core categories of
Marxism, such as capitalism, class differentiation, or false conscious-
ness; instead, the plane of analysis is broadened to include cultural,
political, and social realms. In a pivotal article, Stuart Hall (1980) argued
that Marxist writers such as Raymond Williams had naturalized the
idea of race, and thereby contributed to the articulation of racism. Such
theorizations of power, identity, and discourse, while shedding light

on some aspects of the production and reproduction of race and rac-
ism, have tended to obscure others. A number of Marxist theorists
have argued that postcolonial approaches to race and racism have
underemphasized materiality and capitalism, and that the turn to Fou-
cault may in fact obscure our understandings of how race and racism
are related to capitalism (see, for example, Dirlik 1997; Parry 2004).
At the same time, the particular contribution of Marxist theory, his-
tory, and organization to postcolonial studies, conceptualizations of
racialization, and anti-racist emancipatory movements and ideas has
inspired an expanding literature (see, for example, Brennan 2002; Jani
2002; Austin 2008; Anderson 2010; Blackburn 2011). Within this total-
ity, where c apitalism is understood as not only an economic but also a
social and political system, issues such as the role of centralized state
authorities, uneven development, and hegemony can be understood
in the context of racialization. Orientalism, European culture, moder-
nity, and whiteness are constituted significantly through a dynamic
global capitalist mode of production, and, institutionally and ideo-
logically, within and among capitalist states within a global system
of power.
To address these issues, the first two sections of this volume are orga-
nized to consider the place of Foucault and Marx in theorizing race
and racism. Following this introduction to the volume, we, as editors,
offer specific introductions to various sections. These begin with a sec-
tion on Rethinking Foucault, consisting of three chapters: Revisiting
Genealogies: Theorizing Anti-Racism beyond the Impasse by Enakshi
Dua; Foucault in Tunisia by Robert Young; and Not Quite a Case
of the Disappearing Marx: Tracing the Place of Material Relations in
Postcolonial Theory, also by Enakshi Dua. A section on Revisiting
Marx follows, again introduced by a brief note from the editors, and
is composed of two chapters: Marxism and Anti-Racism: Rethink-
ing the Politics of Difference by Abigail B. Bakan; and Marxism and
Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice: Reflections and Interpretations
by Himani Bannerji.
To this point, our focus is to address concepts and tensions with a
view to reframe historic debates with the aim of engaging construc-
tively with issues that specifically address race and racism from a criti-
cal theoretical perspective. Despite a significant body of literature that
points to the limitations of both Marxist and critical race theorizing of
race and racism, few scholars have addressed questions that would
allow us to move forward and reach greater clarity. As Stuart Hall
noted in the mid-1990s, the two halves of the current debate about late
modernity the postcolonial and the analysis of new developments in
global capitalism have indeed largely proceeded in relative isolation
from one another (1996, 2578). An important element caught in the
abyss of this wider debate is the place of race and racism. This has impli-
cations beyond abstract theory not least in the context of increased
post-9/11 racial profiling and border regulations, rising global migra-
tion, emerging policy debates regarding multiculturalism and diver-
sity, and the ongoing implications of the Arab Spring. We suggest there
is growing recognition among critical scholars that these debates have
come to an impasse.1 Certainly, some scholars have attempted to offer
such an exploration. They include Marxist writers such as Bannerji
(2007), Bolaria and Li (1985), Galabuzi (2006), Satzewich (1992), and
Stasiulis and Bakan (2005), who have integrated analyses of capitalism
and ideology with questions of racialized social exclusion, whiteness,
culture, and nation. Similarly, postcolonial and/or critical race theo-
rists such as Balibar (1991), Dei, Karumanchery, and Karumanchery-
Luik (2004), Dei et al. (2006), Dua (1999), Dua and Lawrence (2005),
Hall (1996), Loomba (2005), Mills and Pateman (2007), Razack (2004),
Said (1978), and Thobani (2007) refer to capitalism, globalization, and
imperialism in theorizing racialized discourses and whiteness, culture,
and nation. In bringing together these approaches in an identified and
engaged relationship, theoretical and methodological advances are
suggested that demand elaboration and amplification, pointing to an
original and important synergy, if not quite a synthesis.
In an attempt to overcome this impasse, four key questions have
shaped the collection. We begin by reconsidering the characterization
of critical race/postcolonial theory as being in opposition to Marxist
theorizing. We ask if there are alternate readings of critical race writ-
ings on race, including the writings of Foucault, with an eye to points of
convergence with a Marxist epistemology. We consider whether there
are insights suggested by critical race theory that can serve to advance
or complement the epistemological frameworks inspired by Marxism.
Second, we ask if there are alternate readings of Marxs writings and
Marxism that would allow for more nuanced conceptualizations of race
and racism. Are there aspects of Marxs theorizing and concepts that
would offer particularly relevant insights into theorizing race and rac-
ism? Third, we ask if there are insights in the writings of Black and
Third World Marxism that might allow us to rethink the contempo-
rary divide. We recognize that ours is not the first generation to experi-
ence tensions between Marxism and theorizing race and racism nor
are these tensions isolated from global events. Thus, we revisit various
writers to explore their insights and consider how these can contribute
to current debates. Fourth, as an emerging number of contemporary
theorists have been putting forward frameworks that integrate race,
class, and state, we ask if this work can offer models with which we can
integrate the insights of critical race theory and Marxism.
These analyses inspire the next two sections of the volume. Following
a brief introduction from the editors consistent with the presentation of
earlier sections, Legacies and Relationships revisits and highlights
some classic thinkers, including their contributions and interactions,
through readings rooted in understandings of both Marxism and criti-
cal race approaches. This section comprises three chapters: C.L.R.
James and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction, Writ-
ing Heresy and Revisionist Histories by Anthony Bogues; Coloniz-
ing, Colonized: Sartre and Fanon by Audrey Kobayashi and Mark
Boyle; and Intellectuals, Oppression, and Anti-Racist Movements in
South Africa by Eunice N. Sahle. The next and final section of the vol-
ume, Interventions in Race, Class, and State, is briefly introduced to
highlight the value of an intersectional approach to these issues. The
section includes four chapters that address new, or unpack earlier,
theoretical and historical challenges in theorizing anti-racism. These
chapters are as follows: Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering
the Jewish Question by Abigail B. Bakan; Race, Sovereignty, and
Empire: Theorizing the Camp, Theorizing Postmodernity by Sunera
Thobani; Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism, and the Bourgeoisie in
the Age of Neoliberalism by Sedef Arat-Ko; and Race and the Man-
agement of Labour in United States History by Elizabeth Esch and
David Roediger. The volume is concluded with an afterword by the
editors, which both traces the various threads of the arguments in the
collection and raises some questions about continuing the conversation.
This is an ambitious project, and we do not want to suggest that it is
a comprehensive review or an inclusive approach that will lead to the
advancement of a new synthesis. In fact, we are aware of two particu-
larly notable absences. The first concerns the complex matrix of issues
associated with indigeneity. The relationship of indigeneity to land, and
to ongoing colonization and occupation in settler societies, offers par-
ticularly rich and challenging theoretical questions centrally relevant to
the intersection of Marxism and critical race theory. We, as co-editors
of this collection, have both engaged in issues related to indigeneity
in the context of anti-racist theoretical challenges from distinct entry
points (Dua and Lawrence 2005; Abu-Laban and Bakan 2012). Rather
than forcing this extensive area of inquiry within the limited context of
this collection and inevitably failing to do it justice, we have elected to
acknowledge the serious limitation. The second notable absence is the
politics of social reproduction, gender, and sexuality. The intersections
of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and the varying forms of family
that shape and inscribe anti-racist theorization, regarding both daily
and generational social reproduction, are similarly pivotal to the ques-
tions addressed in this volume. Significantly, both of us have arrived
at the current project through intellectual journeys largely inspired by
debates emerging from the contributions, as well as the limitations, of
feminist and queer studies (see Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Dua 1999,
2007; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005). Rather than presume that these major
areas of enquiry could be adequately addressed in single chapters on
indigeneity and gender, we have opted to affirm their absence. We
note that these questions are addressed in some of the chapters, but
we recognize the limitations of the collection in providing a compre-
hensive consideration of these important dimensions. We invite further
contributions for future publications.
As the volume proceeds, supported by editorial introductions and an
afterword, we suggest that reconsidering the divide between Marxism
and critical race/postcolonial theorizing and reframing the dialogue
can invite constructive advances in theorizing race and anti-racism.
Moreover, we hope that this volume will inspire wider networks of
communication that raise critical anti-racist theory beyond such polar-
izations, and that a wider community of scholars and activists can
advance and learn from ongoing and effective anti-racist praxis.
NOTE
1Others, of course, have fuelled the divisions. See Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial
Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013).
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. 2007. Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian Migration in the Mak-
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Justice 32 (4): 12043.
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In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO.
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in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
PART I
Rethinking Foucault
Introduction to Part I: Foucault
and Anti-Racism
We begin this collection with three chapters that examine the influence
of Foucault on critical race theory. Indeed, as many have noted, Fou-
caults work has resonated with critical race theorists, leading to the
characterization that critical race theory and postcolonial theory are
antagonistic to Marxism, a view supported by the critiques that Fou-
cault made of Marx and Marxism. In this section, we ask if there are
alternate readings of Foucaults writings that would allow for conver-
gence with a Marxist epistemology. As authors in this section note, the
critiques made by Foucault and Foucauldian theorists are often con-
flated with the critiques made by critical race theorists. These chap-
ters therefore examine the specific critiques that notable critical race
theorists have made of Marx and Marxism, and just as importantly,
their significant and often overlooked points of divergence with
Foucaults epistemology.
Enakshi Dua, in a chapter titled Revisiting Genealogies: Theoriz-
ing Anti-Racism beyond the Impasse, documents the movement to
Foucauldian approaches by many scholars theorizing race and racism.
Focusing on the interventions of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Edward
Said, Dua traces the emergence of a set of intellectual questions around
race and racism that led to the turn towards Foucaults concepts of
power, identity, and discourse. However, as she notes, despite the adop-
tion of elements of Foucaults concepts, these authors also signalled the
importance of the concepts of class, ideology, and capitalism concepts
associated with Marxist approaches for theorizing race and racism.
The chapters that follow explore the points of convergence between
critical race/postcolonial theory and Marxism. Robert Youngs Fou-
cault in Tunisia is reprinted here because it continues to serve as a
formative, original, and nuanced reconsideration of Foucault. The

article points to aspects of materiality in the writings of this founda-
tional post-structuralist theorist, suggesting that the characterization
of Foucaults work as devoid of considerations concerning materiality
needs to be re-examined. Young thus draws important attention to the
salience of common misreadings of Foucault that have been inscribed
in the more ossified features of the debate between Marxism and criti-
cal race/postcolonial theories. Finally, Enakshi Duas chapter, Not
Quite a Case of the Disappearing Marx: Tracing the Place of Material
Relations in Postcolonial Theory, takes the dialogue in new direc-
tions, illustrating that Marxs ideas have resonated in important ways
in the core epistemology of critical race theory. This has significant
implications for theorizing race and racism.
2 Revisiting Genealogies: Theorizing
Anti-Racism beyond the Impasse
enak sh i dua
My chapter comes out of my intellectual and political history. As a

graduate student, I was drawn to Marxism both politically and intellec-
tually. Politically, it seemed to me that central to challenging any form
of oppression was the necessity of a praxis that addressed the power of
capital, capitalists, and the state. While I identified as a socialist fem-
inist, I was quite aware of the contradictions within such a political
and intellectual positionality. Intellectually, I was profoundly engaged
with challenging Eurocentric aspects of Marxist development theory.
As did many of us who attempted to carry out feminist, anti-racist, and
anti-imperialist work in the 1980s, I found myself curtailed by political
groups that focused on singular issues of sexism, racism, or imperialism.
Raising the issue of racism in feminist and left-wing political groups,
we discovered, was met with profound hostility, with the dismissal that
anti-racist projects were located in liberal notions of equality, and with
accusations that we were distracting the focus away from the central
projects of the day. Over and over, I and others were told that once
capitalism was transformed, racism would be eradicated. Despite these
contradictions inside socialist feminism during that period, I, like many
other anti-racist feminists (for example, Lorde, early hooks, and Davis),
did believe that in its basic tenets Marxism could provide a framework
within which I would be able to formulate an integrated analysis to
address the politics of oppression and society.
In the 1990s, when I began to be interested in the intellectual study
of race and racism, I started to shift away from Marxist approaches.
Notably, this was a period in which a number of writers such as Stuart
Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Edward Said embarked on a study of these ques-
tions. Many of these scholars began to employ Foucaults concepts of
20 Enakshi Dua
discourse, power, and identity to explore the complexities of race and

racism.1 Deploying Foucaults concepts, these writers suggested that
race and racism have been constructed through projects of modernity,
colonialism, and slavery that were premised on knowing the colo-
nized. Drawing on Foucaults emphasis on the social construction of
identities, critical race theorists illustrated the ways in which identi-
ties are located in discourses of race. These writers pointed out that
it was through knowing the Oriental or colonized subject that Euro-
peans came to have an understanding and articulation of European-
ness, whiteness, culture, democracy, and citizenship (see Said 1978;
Goldberg 1993). Notably, much of this work also implicitly drew on
Foucaults notion of power as diffuse and unlocalized thus impli-
cating white working class and white feminist identities in projects
of colonialism and postcolonialism (see McClintock 1995; Stoler 1995;
Ware 1992). I found these approaches to be powerful, in particular the
theoretical tools such as discourse, identity, and regulation. In my own
writing, such epistemological tools allowed me to explore the politics
of race, gender, and sexuality within the context of a Canadian white
settler project (see Dua 2000). Many of us who worked on race and rac-
ism shared such an intellectual trajectory. However, nagging questions
persisted in my journey. What was missing in Foucauldian-inspired
approaches? In my own work and in that of others, references to capi-
talism, capital, and the state remained. Notably, given that many of us
who studied race and racism came from the same intellectual roots of
Third World Marxism, I suspected that my uneasiness with the journey
to Foucauldian-inspired epistemologies and ontologies was also shared
by many others undertaking critical race studies (see, for example,
Quayson 1999). How were we integrating an analysis of capitalism and
globalization with Foucauldian-inspired approaches to race and rac-
ism? As the two theorists employ very different epistemological frame-
works, was it possible to integrate Marxs analysis of centralized power
with Foucaults concepts of discourse and power?
As I reflected on these matters, I began to question the perceived
tensions and polarization between Marxism and writings on race and
racism in academic genealogies (see Solomos and Back 1999). In this
chapter, I begin this collection by outlining the tensions a number of
critical race scholars experienced with Marx and Marxism, and their
subsequent journeys to Foucaults methodology. I then turn to relook
at the work of Hall, Gilroy, and Said, with a view to rethinking tensions
between postcolonial and critical race theories regarding Marxism in
addressing theorizations of race and racism.
Revisiting Genealogies: Theorizing Anti-Racism beyond the Impasse 21
Revisiting Genealogies
While Marxists and postcolonial theorists have offered important

observations about the limitations of both perspectives, it is certainly
not an understatement to suggest that there is a theoretical divide
between many Marxists and postcolonial theorists who work on race
and racism. It is useful, therefore, to consider some specific issues
that have emerged in the genealogy of this divide. First, I suggest this
divide is purported by genealogies that conflate all postcolonial writ-
ers with those who focus on theorizing race and racism. Postcolonial
theory has been a difficult field to define. While the term evokes the
image of the period after colonialism, the field has come to refer to the
sustained study of colonialism and its past and present effects in both
former colonies and metropolitan settings. Thus, a strength of post-
colonial theory has been that it provides a transnational analytic for
exploring colonialism, former colonies, and metropolitan sites. Such
a transnational methodology has led scholars to connect the study of
the social construction of difference of race, gender, and place to the
context of imperial European and colonial knowledges such as his-
tory, philosophy, anthropology, literature, and art. However, this broad
field includes a much wider range of analyses in terms of both subject
matter and methodology. Notably, it encompasses a focus on the his-
tories of colonies and postcolonial societies, resistance to colonialism,
national liberation, and postcolonial nationalism (see, for example, the
Subaltern Studies Group). As a result, the rubric of postcolonial schol-
arship includes a diverse body of scholarship that addresses a breadth
of topics.
Importantly, located in this vast body of scholarship are very differ-
ent engagements with and critiques of Marx and Marxism. In particu-
lar, debates on how to study the histories of formally colonized societies
have generated a specific set of critiques of Marxist theory, methodol-
ogy, historiography, and praxis (see, for example, the writings of the
Subaltern Studies Group). In many genealogies, such critiques are often
conflated with critiques made by those who theorize race and racism.
Many of these critiques have been made by writers categorized as
postcolonial theorists; in the cases of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, their
most notable engagements with and critiques of Marxism were made
in relation to the interventions by the Race and Politics Group (RPG)
of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birming-
ham, England. As a result of such omissions, many genealogies obscure
an important moment in the genesis for thinking about questions of
22 Enakshi Dua
race and racism. Thus, in this chapter, I delineate the bodies of work
that specifically address race and racism, which I refer to as critical
race theory. I use the terminology of both postcolonial and critical race
theory to address a continuum of critical scholarship on theorizing race
and racism. My narrowing of the scholarship is heuristic: it allows a
focus on those writings that have been central to defining the study of
race and racism. Complicating my use of the term critical race theory
is that this term has emerged with multiple meanings in a number of
national contexts, such as in the United States and at times in Canada,
where it is deployed in reference to a specific theorization of race that
refers to anti-racist legal theory, as well as to feminist approaches to
intersectionality, African American studies, and ethnic studies. Thus
it is important to note the specificity of my use of the term critical
race theory.
Second, the divide between Marxist and postcolonial theorists is tied
to the important, and at times ferocious, critiques Marxist and postco-
lonial theorists have made of each other. A number of theorists, includ-
ing Timothy Brenan, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, E. San Juan Jr, and
Crystal Bartolovich, have put forward critiques of the emerging body
of thought that has come to be labelled as postcolonial theory and/or
critical race theory. A number of themes can be considered here. Some
writers have questioned Saids and Spivaks suggestions that Marx
and Marxist theory are Eurocentric. Writers such as Neil Lazarus and
August Nimtz have argued that such a characterization both misinter-
prets and distorts Marxs writings (Nimtz 2002; Lazarus 2002). Further,
Benita Parry has questioned the dismissal of liberation discourses and
practices, arguing that such dismissal not only overlooks the revolu-
tionary potential of these practices, but also, importantly, promotes the
civil evasion of contemporary left movements (Parry 2002). A number
of critics have further argued that the focus on texts that often inform
postcolonial theory associated in particular with the work of Said,
Spivak, and Bhabha dematerializes social contexts and leads to an
ahistorical methodology. Moreover, various theorists have challenged
the postcolonialist theorization, or lack thereof, of capitalism as a mode
of production (San Juan 2002). And finally, as Timothy Brennan has
argued, there is the claim that postcolonial theorists have overlooked
their own legacy in Marxism, particularly the writings on imperialism
and the work of Third World Marxists (Brennan 2002).
For many scholars of race and racism, it is difficult to engage with
these arguments seriously. As Bartolovich has suggested, [A] good
deal of oversimplification, caricature, and trivialisation has crept into

the discourse on both sides (2002, 1). The emotionally laden accusa-
tion that postcolonial theory is complicit with imperialism obscures the
attraction that many have had to Foucauldian-based concepts, includ-
ing discourse, identity, and regulation, as well as the contributions
these concepts have made to understanding race and racism. Thus, by
characterizing postcolonial theory as being devoid of considerations of
material relations, these critics not only polarize theorizing about race
and racism, but obscure the tensions that actually inscribe this body of
thought.
Moreover, under the rubric of postcolonial theory, many theorists
focus on the work of Spivak and Bhabha as their starting point for map-
ping a genealogy. As influential as these two theorists have certainly
been, such genealogies overlook the works of a number of writers
who have set the stage for the emergence of new perspectives on race
and racism, or what I refer to as critical race theory. The exclusive
emphasis on Spivak and Bhabha obscures an important moment in
the genesis of critical race and postcolonial theory, notably the inter-
ventions by the CCCSs RPG in Birmingham, England. Authors asso-
ciated with this school include Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby,
and Pratibha Parmar, among others. Significantly, these theorists set
out many of the intellectual questions that led to the turn towards Fou-
caults concepts of power, identity, and discourse, which have allowed
us to understand the location of race and racism in culture, modernity,
and whiteness.
Revisiting Early Writings: Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy,

and Edward Said
Since Marx and Engels wrote their classic texts, many theorists from
the Third World including Naoroji, M.N. Roy, Amilcar Cabral,
and Frantz Fanon have been in critical dialogue with Marxs writ-
ings. These dialogues have raised important questions regarding the
approach of Marx and Engels to non-European societies and processes
of colonialism, and have also pointed to the scarcity of attention given
to race and racism. In the 1970s and 1980s, another wave of critical
evaluation concerning the possibilities and limitations of Marx and
Marxism began to take place. The work of CCCSs RPG in Birmingham,
England, combined with the publication of Edward Saids classic work,
Orientalism, clearly established a new scholarly agenda for theorizing
race and racism.
24 Enakshi Dua
The re-evaluation of the possibilities for Marxist approaches to race

and racism in the 1970s and 1980s was informed by a number of the
intellectual and political currents during this period. First, in the wake
of 1968, a broader re-evaluation of Marxism took place within the Left
in the West. A number of theorists, including Raymond Williams, E.P.
Thompson, Louis Althusser, tienne Balibar, and Ernesto Laclau, began
to question the economism that was widely perceived to characterize
post-war Western Marxism.2 These critics raised the thorny question
of the relationship between culture and society.3 Moreover, the emer-
gence of neoliberal agendas, associated with Thatcherism in Britain
and Reaganism in the United States, redeployed discourses of race and
nation with the aim of constructing hegemony for neoliberalism that
influenced a section of the working class, and notably sections of the
white working class. While a number of key Marxist scholars pointed
to the roles of capitalist classes and states in constructing hegemony
for a neoliberal agenda (see, for example, Leys 1985), Stuart Hall (1980,
1988) and Paul Gilroy (1987) pointed out that neoliberal agendas were
embedded in discourses of whiteness and nationalism.4 By the 1980s,
scholars of race and racism were suggesting that the Marxist study of
political economy required specific attention to these questions.
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a resurgence of anti-racist action and
organizing. In a number of national contexts during this period, several
anti-racist initiatives targeted racist policing and educational and hous-
ing practices, as well as discriminatory immigration policies. Further
initiatives looked to organizing workers of colour, who tended to be
employed in non-unionized sectors, and to challenging racism within
the womens movement. The writings of the Birmingham Group
emerged in relation to the anti-racist organizing activities that were
taking place in England in the early 1980s. As Solomos and Back have
noted, In a sense the political struggles that were occurring in England
around racism were being echoed in the context of the production of
knowledge about racism (1999, 70).
A particular focus of those located in the academy was to point to
the failure of the universities in challenging racism in Britain; in par-
ticular, the specific ways in which academic knowledge construction
was embedded in discourses of race and racism were challenged. As
Solomos and Back have noted, The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982)
acted as a catalyst to the politicization of debates about the role of
research in relation to race relations (Solomos and Back 1999, 70). As a
group of academics and activists began to confront the ways in which
institutional practices of racism operated, the Left responded not only

with little sympathy, but with hostility (for more detail on this history,
see Stuart Hall 2010). Anti-racist activism was accused of being nar-
rowly based in identity politics, a term considered derogatory, and
of undermining the overall project of socialist transformation (see, for
example, Miles 1988).5 As a result, the emergence of critical race theory
in this period needs to be placed in the context of the ways in which
post-war Marxism was (and continues to be) stubbornly lodged in a
politics of class-based social transformation, a commitment to class
that often led to a silence on the specific processes of racism, as well as
to a hostile relationship towards explicitly anti-racist organizing and
politics. As Paul Gilroy declared, [T]he use of the concept of class
in the politics of Britains black settlers has often been economistic
and reductive, seeking to subordinate the self-organisation of blacks
to the mythical discipline of a unified working class and its repressive
political institutions (1987, 18).
Within this economic, political, and intellectual context, theorists
who were part of the CCCSs RPG began to rethink questions of race
and racism. Given the currents of the time, it is not surprising that
such rethinking began with a critical assessment of the limitations of
Marxism to provide a framework for analysing race and racism. Stuart
Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Edward Said were particularly influential in this
re-evaluation.
A number of significant critiques were put forward. First, it was
argued that both historical and contemporary articulations of race and
racism could not be explained only through references to capitalism,
class differentiation, or false ideology, but also needed to be located
in cultural, political, and social realms. Second, Marxist theorists were
understood to often conflate race with class. And third, race and rac-
ism were seen to be not only about those racialized as minorities, but,
as importantly, about those racialized as white. It is important to note
that in making these critiques, Hall, Gilroy, and Said generalized a vast
body of writings, and as several of the chapters in this collection sug-
gest, oversimplified a diverse field of thought. Similar to postcolonial
theory, post-war Marxism included a number of distinct traditions,
ranging from the more doctrinal Leninist and Maoist communist par-
ties, Trotskyist organizations, Structuralist Marxism, Political Marxism,
and Cultural Marxism to the Frankfurt school. Influential theorists
ranged from Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukcs, and Jean-Paul Sartre to
Jrgen Habermas, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Max
26 Enakshi Dua
Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, and Robert Brenner.

While most of these theorists overlooked questions of race and rac-
ism specifically, this body of work generated a number of writings on
how to theorize modes of production, capitalism, the state, and class.
In addition, as Abigail Bakan suggests in Marxism and Anti-Racism:
Rethinking the Politics of Difference, Chapter 5 of this collection, post-
war Marxism was also based on those writings of Marx that had been
translated in the pre-war period. The translation of the Grundisse and
other texts shaped the emergence of the New Left in the 1970s.
In an early and influential article, Race Articulation and Societies
Structured in Dominance, Stuart Hall (1980) reviewed existing Marxist
and sociological approaches to racism. In his discussion of influential
Marxist writers including V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemberg, Nikolai Bukha-
rin, Andre Gunder Frank, Harold Wolpe, John Rex, Maurice Dobb,
and Louis Althusser, Hall pointed to the tendency within Marxism to
explain racism through reference to economic relations, particularly
slavery (see, for example, Blackburn 1997). In contrast, Hall suggested
that it may not be possible to explain away race by reference to the
economic relations exclusively (1980, 308). Pointing out that pre-
capitalist forms of slavery were not associated with racism, Hall argued
that there can be no assumed, necessary coincidence between racism
and slavery as such (ibid.). It is important to note that Hall did not
argue that economic relations were irrelevant to explaining racism, but
rather that they were insufficient. As he stated:
[I]t may not be possible to explain away race by reference to the eco-
nomic relations exclusively. But the first tendency is surely correct when it
insists that racial structures cannot be understood adequately outside the
framework of quite specific sets of economic relations [T]he problem is
not whether economic structures are relevant to racial divisions but how
the two are theoretically connected. Can the economic level provide an
adequate and sufficient level of explanation of the racial features of these
social formations? (ibid.)
In particular, Hall suggested that other factors also constructed race and
racism. As he noted, The problem here is to account for the appear-
ance of this something else these extra-economic factors and their
place in the dynamic reproduction of such social formations (ibid.).
Hall emphasized the importance of placing the study of racism in the
context of rigourous historical study.
One needs to know how different racial and ethnic groups were inserted
historically, and the relations which have tended to erode and transform,
or to preserve these distinctions through time not simply as residues
and traces of previous modes, but as active structuring principles of the
present organization of society. Racial categories alone will not provide
or explain these. What are the different forms and relations in which
these racial fractions were combined under capital? Do they stand in
significantly different relations to capital? (339)
Finally, Hall pointed out that if we concede that racism is the product
of multiple historical forces, this requires a reassessment of a Marxist
epistemology that does not allow for racism, in turn, to affect economic
relations.6 In contrast, Hall argued that race has an autonomous effect
on history and society, and thus should be seen as relatively autono-
mous. As he succinctly stated, [A]t the economic level, it is clear that
race must be given its distinctive and relatively autonomous effectiv-
ity, as a distinctive feature (342).
The insistence of these Marxist theorists that racial differentiations
are always created in the context of class differentiation raised concerns
about both class reductionism, and, as importantly, about the reliance
on the concept of class to explain racism. Members of CCCGs RPG
contested whether the Marxist concept of working class, defined as
a group that is created through relations of appropriation and exploita-
tion, could be deployed to explain race and racism. Indeed, predomi-
nant in these Marxist arguments about racism was the assumption that
certain structural conditions, such as the existence of unfree labour and
of migrants as an underclass, could be understood through the concept
of class (see Bolaria and Li 1988; Miles 1988). In contrast, Paul Gilroy
cogently suggested that [t]he processes of race and class formation
are not identical. The former is not reducible to the latter even where
they become mutually entangled. The evolution of racism from vul-
gar to cultural forms described by Fanon has introduced a new vari-
ety which stresses complex difference (1987, 40). Gilroy went on to
suggest that race and class belong to separate spheres of experience
with different epistemological and ontological valences (15). Echoing
Hall, Gilroy warned that in suggesting that race and class should not
be conflated, he was not implying that class is irrelevant for the study
of race and racism. [T]hough it makes life difficult for the theorist,
he cautioned, the concept of class cannot be entirely banished from
inquiries into racial politics (17). As Hall suggested, Race is, thus,
28 Enakshi Dua
also, the modality in which class is lived, the medium through which
class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and
fought through (1980, 341).
Complicating the study of the role of economic forces and class was
the question of the social construction of white identities. Indeed, a
focus of the CCCGs RPG was the lack of analytical attention given to
the study of whiteness by Marxist and sociological theorists. As Hall
pointed out, suggesting that race is a modality through which class
is lived has consequences for the whole class, not specifically for its
racially defined segments. It has consequences in terms of the internal
fractioning and division within the working class which, among other
ways, are articulated in part through race (1980, 41). Identifying white-
ness as a site of study raised a number of thorny issues. As Hall noted:
It is not simply sufficient to see racism as operating as a false ideology,

where white workers are duped into identifying with the interests of
capital/ists. This is no mere racist conspiracy from above. For racism is
also one of the dominant means of ideological representation through
which the white fractions of class come to live their relations to other
fractions, and through them to capital This is not to treat racism as, in
any simple sense, the product of an ideological trick. (341)
Paul Gilroy (1987) expanded on this by illustrating the way in which

whiteness was tied to discourses of patriotism, nationalism, xeno-
phobia, Englishness, Britainness, militarism, and gender differences.
Drawing attention to whiteness indeed complicated the kinds of epis-
temological and ontological tools required to study race and racism.
A number of valuable studies have helped illustrate the depth of the
impact that colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism have had on
the social construction of race and practices of racism throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the perceived lack of confi-
dence in Marxism to provide the epistemological and methodological
tools to analyse race and racism, the central agenda for many scholars
working on race and racism was to develop new analytical tools. These
new approaches took seriously Halls suggestion that [o]ne must start,
then, from the concrete historical work which racism accomplishes
under specific historical conditions as a set of economic, political and
ideological practices, of a distinctive kind, concretely articulating with
other practices in a social formation (1980, 340).
In this context, Edward Saids text Orientalism, published in 1978,

provided an opportunity to re-examine the history of ideas regarding
race. It also opened new conversations regarding the ways in which
Foucaults writings could provide conceptual and methodological tools
specifically to address the construction of race and racism. In Oriental-
ism, Said pointed out that the study of the stereotype required not only
an attentiveness to colonialism as history, but also to the discursive
operations of colonialism, thus connecting language with the forms of
knowledge that emerged in the history of imperialism. Said argued that
Orientalism is a knowledge system that operates in the service of the
Wests hegemony over the East by producing the East discursively as
the Wests inferior Other, a manoeuvre that in turn constructs the
Wests self image as a superior civilization. It does this by first dis-
tinguishing, and then essentializing, the identities of East and West
through a dichotomizing system of representations embodied in the
stereotype, with the aim of making difference rigid. As a consequence,the
East is produced as voiceless, sensual, despotic, irrational, female,
and backward. By contrast, the West is produced as moral, dynamic,
democratic, rational, male, and progressive. Notably, in undertaking
the study of Orientalism, Said also articulated the need for a set of
theoretical and methodological tools that extends beyond the study of
material or historical relations to the study of culture and knowledge.
As he stated, Orientalism is something more historically and mate-
rially defined Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the
corporate institution for dealing with the Orient dealing with it by
making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by
teaching it, settling it (3).
In order to study the ways in which knowledge about the Orient was
constructed, Said explicitly turned to Foucaults concept of discourse.
As Said stated:
I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucaults notion of a dis-

course, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Disci-
pline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without
examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand
the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was
able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-
Enlightenment period. (3)
30 Enakshi Dua
Importantly, Saids turn to Foucault was as much tied to understand-

ing the operations of power as it was to understanding knowledge.
Like Foucault, Saids employment of the methodology of discourse
was to illustrate the complexities of configurations and operations of
power as impersonal, operating through a multiplicity of sites, particu-
larly through the will to knowledge (7). Like Foucault, Said argued
that the configurations of power could not be reduced to material
interests.
Saids turn to Foucaults concepts of discourse and power had a pro-
found impact on scholars studying race and racism (see Hall 1992; Young
1995). As Nichols has pointed out, Orientalism not only secured Fou-
caults place as a central figure in postcolonial theory, but it also linked
Foucault to the notion of discourse. Further, it provided an authorita-
tive reading of Foucauldian discourse as a textual attitude, or a sys-
tem of textual representations (2010, 120) (see also Moore-Gilbert 1997;
Young 1995). Said reminded theorists of the necessity of going back to
the history of colonialism not simply as a history of economic, mili-
tary, or political expansion, but as a history of knowing and a history of
the way in which these knowledges constituted material and political
relations. Saids focus on discourse and knowledge opened up avenues
for studying the discourses of race within historical and transnational
frames. It allowed for the study of connections between constructions
of race in colonial regimes and constructions of race in projects of
nationalism in colonial, former colonial, and metropolitan sites. Echo-
ing the work of the Birmingham School, Said focused on the cultural
as a productive site for illuminating histories and practice. Indeed, in
the next three decades an increasing number of scholars would employ
the theoretical and methodological tools offered in Orientalism.
Despite the influence that Orientalism had on a wide range of disci-
plines, it was also met with reservations. Theorists pointed to limita-
tions in the methodological and theoretical tools that it employed (see
Clifford 1988; Ahmad 1994; Porter 1994; Moore-Gilbert 1997; Young
2004). Porter (1994), for example, pointed to the methodological limi-
tations in Saids analysis of Orientalism itself, particularly the exclu-
sion of certain German texts and other works, including the strong
tradition within Arabic writing that draws ontological distinctions
between East and West. Porter also drew attention to Saids insistence
that Orientalist discourse cannot overcome the differences within itself
and completely subsumes the anomalous or the individual. Ahmad
(1994) pointed to the significance of such a methodology, arguing that
while Said attempts to illustrate how Europe constructed the Orient

as an imaginary and united whole, Said in turn constructs a West that
is unified, self-identified, transhistorical (183). Moore-Gilbert (1997)
suggested that Said failed to differentiate whether Orientalism is the
ideology of colonialism, a discursive operation, or rooted in the very
psyche of European thought.
As a result of such limitations, a number of critics such as Abdul
Janmohamed ([1983] 1988) and Aijaz Ahmad (1994; 2000) questioned
Saids turn to Foucault, suggesting that this reflected the influence of
post-structuralism on diasporic Third World intellectuals (Ahmad and
Wood 1996), and called for a return to Marxist-informed methodology
for the study of culture. As Ahmad stated:
Every social practice and all material production involves signification, but
neither communication nor fashion nor any other of those things that Cul-
tural Studies takes as its specific object of study is merely or even mainly a
signifying practice. Nor can the relation between cultural production and
its basis in economic and political processes be read off anecdotally or epi-
phenomenally; it has to be studied rigorously and structurally. You cant
just throw in a bit of economics here, a bit of technology there; you have to
be able to locate individual facts in a complex historical process. (ibid., 10)
While in subsequent writings Said addressed these criticisms of Ori-

entalism, perhaps the most influential defence of employing Foucaults
concept of discourse was offered by Stuart Hall. In an introductory
essay titled The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power, Hall asked
the critical question: Why then use discourse rather than ideology?
(1992, 202).7 Hall argued that underlying the concept of ideology is the
premise of rationality and truth; hence ideologies function as untruths.
Such a methodology does not allow theorists to uncover the complexi-
ties through which knowledge of race came into being. In contrast, Hall
argued that Foucaults concept of discourse requires attention to the
very language used to describe truths and facts the regimes of
truth (205). In addition, Hall contested the suggestion that the concept
of discourse limits the ability of a researcher to illuminate the work-
ings of power. He argued that while Foucault is reluctant to reduce
discourse to statements that simply mirror the interests of a particular
class this does not mean that discourse is ideologically neutral or
innocent (203). Thus, citing Foucault, Hall argued that not only is
discourse always implicated in power; discourse is one of the systems
32 Enakshi Dua
through which power circulates (204). And echoing Said, Hall argued
that the concept of discourse allows theorists to examine the ways in
which projects of modernity, colonialism, and capitalism intersect in
the history of race and racism.
Notably, in The West and the Rest, Hall expanded on Saids use of
Foucault, pointing to the importance of the concept of subjectivity as
an avenue through which scholars could explore the ways in which the
structural conditions of colonization and decolonization come to shape
subjectivity, and, under such circumstances, limit how the colonial sub-
ject is able (and unable) to resist. I would suggest the move to subjec-
tivity allowed those theorizing race and racism to overcome some of
the methodological limitations of Orientalism by centring an analysis
of subject formation within textual analysis. Importantly, in order to
study subjectivity, Hall deviated from Foucault and evoked Fanon to
suggest that to understand the history of race and racism it is impor-
tant to explore how knowledge is constructed through irrational and/
or unconscious desires. Hall suggested that the desires which drove the
Europeans to colonize the world were powerful; but their power was
not always subject to rational calculations (ibid.).8
In pointing to the importance of the unconscious, the irrational, and
desire, Hall, as did many other scholars of race and racism, turned to
Fanon. In particular, Fanons (1986) emphasis on theorizing how race
gets written on to bodies through the gaze of white subjects allowed a
number of theorists to further delve into questions of whiteness. Rich-
ard Dyer (1997) pointed out the ways in which whiteness becomes
equated with normality, and as such, being normal is colonized as
being white. Echoing Fanon, bell hooks (1992), pointed to the terroriz-
ing effect of whiteness on black imagination. Fanons emphasis on the
implications of the white gaze for subject formation was profoundly
influential: it offered an analytical framework for understanding the
complexities of the idea of race on subject formation. As Hall stated in
Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities:
[A]s Fanon constantly reminds us, the epistemic violence is both outside
and inside, and operates by a process of splitting on both sides of the
division in here as well as out there. That is why it is a question, not only
of black-skin but of Black Skin, White Masks the internalisation of
the self-as-other [A]nd in the doubling, fear and desire double for one
another and play across the structures of otherness, complicating politics.
(1997, 49)
Indeed, integrating Fanon allowed those theorizing race and racism to

examine the ways in which the doubleness of identities, the other as
inside, was also tied to discursive operations of nation, representation,
and narration.
Contexts and Questions
As we have seen, the shift to Foucauldian methods was facilitated by

particular political and intellectual contexts. The hostility of many on
the Left to anti-racist politics, combined with the prevalence of econo-
mistic readings of Marx in the post-war period, certainly contributed
to the perspective that Marxs work, and Marxism, was unable to pro-
vide tools that could contribute to the study of race and racism. Fur-
thermore, theorists such as Hall, Gilroy, and Said became interested in
Foucauldian concepts in order to place the study of race and racism in
a non-economistic framework. As David Scott noted:
It is also, and perhaps more importantly, because I think of Foucaults

work less as a series of ethnographies, stories of a particular past of mad-
ness, of medicine, of knowledge, of punishment, than as a congeries of
theoretical attitudes, an attitude to thinking. I think of his work the same
way I think of Marxs or Wittgensteins or Nietzsches or yours. It is the
ethos of inquiry, the voice, most of all that I find so instructive, so compel-
ling. (Scott 2005, n.p.)
I suggest that a number, if not the majority, of those who work in race
and racism would argue that the shift to Foucauldian-based epistemol-
ogies has allowed for a more sophisticated understanding of the ways
in which knowledge of race is tied to modernity, Orientalism, European
culture, racialized subjectivities, and whiteness.
However, often such an emphasis has obscured the relationship of
race and racism to an ever-changing capitalist mode of production,
and postcolonial/critical race theorists have often failed to elaborate
such relationships. Indeed, as Atu Quayson suggested, what is called
for is a more rigourous engagement of post-colonialism with the leg-
acy of Marxism in ways that are highly illuminating and fruitful for
future work (1999, 13). Thus, efforts to synthesize the approaches are
necessary in order to advance our understanding of race and racism.
However, given that Marx and Foucault employ very different epis-
temologies and methodologies, particularly in conceptualizing power,
34 Enakshi Dua
subjectivity, knowledge, politics, and resistance, is it possible to com-

bine the insights of two such different approaches? While a number
of theorists have suggested that synthesis is not possible (see, for
example, Spivak 1990; Bhabha 1984; Bhabha and Comaroff 2002), such
a conclusion is not obvious. As Quayson has suggested, it would be
very stimulating to be able to attend to both the discourse and materi-
ality (1999, 8) of the history and practices of race and racism. Given the
seeming polarization of the two approaches, the task remains to think
through these tensions in a creative and constructive manner.
NOTES
1 Notably, a number of scholars continued to work with Marxs epistemology.

For example, see the interview with Himani Bannerji in Chapter 6 of this
volume. I will return to this work in Chapter 4.
2 Notably, a critique of economism and a re-evaluation of the relationship
between culture and society were part of the general questioning of Marx-
ism that was taking place during this period, particularly at the Birming-
ham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Prior to the entry of Stuart
Hall into the Centre, the founding fathers Williams, Hoggart, and
Thompson had begun a project of rethinking Marxist approaches to cul-
ture. Williams (1963), in Culture and Society, 17801950, had pointed to the
problems of employing a structure and superstructure approach, argu-
ing that it resulted in little more than reducing culture to economic struc-
tures. Williams also suggested that Marx vacillated between a mechanical
materialism and an active and transformatory understanding of culture. As
a result, drawing on Althusser and Gramsci, members of the School began
to challenge reductionist accounts of class determination of culture with
anideological reading of signification.
3 As Sparks (1996) has noted, [I]t is true that in its adoption of the Althus-
serian version of Marxism the Birmingham Centre was part of the dominant
mood of left intellectual culture during this period, which was overwhelm-
ingly attracted to such a position in the wake of 1968 (82).
4 Notably, Halls engagement with Marxism and thus theorizing race and
racism was rooted in the larger project of the Birmingham Centre for Con-
temporary Cultural Studies. As a longstanding member of the Centre, Hall
was active in the Centres debates on culture and ideology, putting forward
a number of critiques of economic reductionism and the concept of articula-
tion (see Hall 1983; 1996).
5 For example, Miles (1988) argued that as black and minority politics are
really distillations of class conflict, any movements that are based on a
notion of a black community are ultimately doomed to failure.
6 Notably, Hall does not generalize these critiques to all Marxists. He points
to Althusser and Poulantzas for offering an interpretation of ideology that
overly determines the economic. In contrast, similar to Said, Hall points
toGramscis concept of hegemony at a site that can offer particular insights
that allow theorists to overcome such limitations. Hall states, Gramsci
may help to counteract the overwhelming weight of economism (Marxist
and non-Marxist) that has characterized the analysis of post-Conquest and
colonial societies. Perhaps because the weight of imperialist economic
relations has been so powerfully visible, these formations have virtually
been held to be explainable by an application of imperialism as essentially
a purely economic process (1980, 333). The centrality of Gramsci to Halls
and Saids theorization of race and racism is explored in more detail in
Dua, Not Quite a Case of the Disappearing Marx: Tracing the Place of
Material Relations in Postcolonial Theory, Chapter 4 of this volume.
7 Notably, for much of his intellectual career, Hall had been raising crucial
questions of Marxist approaches to economy and ideology (see, for exam-
ple, Hall 1983; 1996).
8 Pointing to the role of the unconscious was a crucial move, as it allowed
theorists to go beyond Foucaults methodology. The legacy of Fanon for
redefining a Foucauldian methodology will be expanded later, in Chapter
8 of this volume. The re-introduction of the concept of a self not only
deviates from Foucault ontologically, in which he argues for the death of the
subject, but also, as importantly, broadens the ability of scholars of race and
racism to use Foucaults concepts of discourse, power, and subjectivity.
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Blackburn, Robin. 1997. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to
the Modern, 14921800. New York: Verso.
Bolaria, B. Singh, and Peter S. Li, eds. 1988. Racial Oppression in Canada,
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Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnogra-
phy, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dua, Enakshi. 2000. The Hindu Womans Question: Canadian Nation-
Building and the Social Construction of Gender for South Asian-Canadian
Women. In Anti-Racist Feminism, edited by George Dei and Agnes Calliste,
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Dyer, Richard. 1997. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge.
Fanon, Franz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto.
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Introduction to Chapter 3:
Foucault in Tunisia
Robert J.C. Youngs chapter Foucault in Tunisia is a particularly sig-

nificant contribution to this volume, as it draws attention to the salience
of common misreadings of Foucault. These have been inscribed in the
rather more entrenched elements of the debate between Marxism and
critical race/postcolonial theories regarding racism and anti-racism.
This chapter is reprinted from Youngs Postcolonialism: An Historical
Introduction (2001), marking an early contribution to efforts to over-
come a polarized debate. Young notes in his book the central premise
that postcolonial theory operates within the historical legacy of Marx-
ist critique, suggesting this historical role remains paramount as the
fundamental framework of postcolonial thinking (6). Much of the
book is an attempt to resituate a rereading of Marx and Gramsci within
the contributions of anticolonial thought. As Young argues, the con-
tribution of tri-continental theorists was to mediate the translatability
of Marxist revolutionary theory with the untranslatable features of the
specific non-European historical and cultural contexts (ibid.).
In Foucault in Tunisia, Young advances his premise regarding the
legacies and connections between Marxism and tri-continental theo-
rists by offering what remains a pivotal and original rereading of Fou-
cault. He argues that there is an unresolved tension in postcolonial
theory a tension in disconnections between two different types of
materialism: namely Marxist and Foucauldian. In so doing, Young
shifts our attention from the often addressed tensions between Marxist
and Foucauldian theorizations regarding issues of subjectivity, power,
and discourse to methods for understanding materiality.
Young argues that Foucault, contrary to common conceptions,
actually does address issues of materiality in his writings. Foucault, he
s uggests, illuminates the way in which knowledge works in the realm

of materiality and the body, in the domain of objects and specific histor-
ical practices (399). Thus, for Young, Foucaults framework is not only
textual and theoretical, but also material. Young further connects Fou-
caults materialist understanding to Marxist anticolonialism, arguing
that a focus on the materiality of the body has been a central concept
within the work of anticolonial Marxist thinkers.
Young suggests that such an acknowledgment allows us to inter-
pret the writings of postcolonial theorists, such as Homi Bhabha and
Gayatri Spivak, as offering an intermediary space where the differing
materialisms of Marx and Foucault meet. As a result, he concludes that
postcolonial thought is a theoretical creole space, which both joins
Marxism to, and separates it from, other modes of thought.
We would suggest that this chapter offers a more nuanced and effec-
tive reading of Foucault, one not commonly understood or engaged by
Marxist scholars, but one that offers insights into rethinking tensions
and connections.
REFERENCE
Young, Robert J.C. 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers.
3 Foucault in Tunisia
rober t j. c. youn g
Foucaults Silence: Sidi-Bou-Sad and the Context of Archaeology
It is not only with respect to discourse that Foucault has been a central
theoretical reference point for postcolonial analysis.1 Whether early or
late, so much of Foucault seems to be applicable to the colonial arena
his emphasis on forms of authority and exclusion, for example, his
analysis of the operations of the technologies of power, of the appara-
tuses of surveillance or of governmentality (Bhabha 1994; Scott 1995).
Foucaults own concepts are themselves productive, enabling forms
of intellectual power. Even his images are extraordinarily suggestive:
take, for example, the description of the ship of fools with which Mad-
ness and Civilization begins, the boat that carried from port to port its
cargo of insane people who had been expelled from their native town.
Later this ship of fools would become the form of the enforced migra-
tion of surplus populations to North America, to Australia, or the wan-
dering ships of Jewish refugees that travelled the Mediterranean. These
diasporic images correspond to Foucaults own argument, made in a
lecture given in 1967, that the twentieth century was dominated by
concepts of space and spatial organization (Foucault and Miskowiec
1986). As a result, many of Foucaults own concepts involve sugges-
tive spatial and geographical metaphors: position, displacement, inter-
stice, site, field, territory, geopolitics spatialized concepts that have
been further developed by postcolonial critics (where would they be
without interstices?), as well as by postcolonial anthropologists such as
Johannes Fabian or historians such as John Noyes in his Colonial Space
(Fabian 1986, 78; 1991, 198; Noyes 1992, 52).
By contrast, Foucaults work displays a virtual absence of explicit
discussions of colonialism or race (Young 1995).2 Foucault remained
42 Robert J.C. Young
curiously circumspect about the ways in which power operated in

these arenas. Challenging this absence, Ann Laura Stoler has teased out
the implications of his concept of biopower for the history of colonial
racialized practices (Stoler 1995). Foucaults own silence on these issues
is striking. In fact his work appears to be so scrupulously Eurocentric
that you begin to wonder whether there is not a deliberate strategy
involved. Consider, after all, the context of the Paris of Sartre, Fanon,
and Althusser, the traumatic defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in
1954, the Algerian War of Independence, the national liberation move-
ments of the 1950s and 1960s, to say nothing of his own trips to Brazil,
his contemplated move to Zaire, and, most of all, his two-year resi-
dence in Tunisia.
It was in fact The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) that Foucault wrote
while he was living in Tunisia, developing the ideas of the book in lec-
tures at the University of Tunis, where he taught from 1966 to 1968.
He lived in the small village of Sidi-Bou-Sad and wrote the book dur-
ing long hours of intense, isolated reflection in the early mornings. He
also witnessed the violent pro-Palestinian demonstrations during the
ArabIsraeli war of 1967 that, by March 1968, developed into explo-
sive student protests against the government of Habib Bourguiba and
anticipated the events of May in Paris. Foucault became involved with
the student activists, and by extension with their impressively fierce
version of a Trotskyist-Maoist Marxism. As a result of his involvement,
he began to reread Marx, Luxemburg, and Trotskys History of the Rus-
sian Revolution (Miller 1994, 171). Foucault later remarked that for me
Tunisia in a sense represented an opportunity to reinsert myself into the
political debate; as his biographer translates, it was precisely his Tuni-
sian experience that allowed a much more vocally militant Foucault to
emerge (Macey 1993, 204, 206). Events in Tunis and subsequently in
Paris were to enforce Foucaults belief that if one is interested in doing
historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness,
then this is possible only if one has some kind of involvement with the
struggles taking place in the area in question (Foucault 1980, 64).
At the same time, he used his distance from France while working in
a postcolonial state the better to develop an ethnological perspective on
French culture. Ethnology, for Foucault, was only useful as a study of
ones own culture: he regarded its use for the study of other cultures,
as in anthropology, as fundamentally misconceived. At the end of The
Order of Things (1966) he had written that ethnology consists of a struc-
tural science predicated on a hypothesis of sameness, and it is this that
Foucault in Tunisia 43
enables it to link itself to other cultures in a mode of pure theory. Eth-

nology, therefore, allows the exercise of a kind of comparative homol-
ogy between cultures, one based on their all being made to conform to
a fundamental Western model.
There is a certain position of the Western ratio that was constituted in its
history and provides a foundation for the relation it can have with all other
societies Obviously, this does not mean that the colonizing situation
is indispensable to ethnology but ethnology can assume its proper
dimensions only within the historical sovereignty always restrained, but
always present of European thought and the relation that can bring it
face to face with all cultures as well as with itself. ([1966] 1970, 377)
Ethnology, Foucault here suggests, does not always have to rely on the
power relation of colonialism, but it does require the historical sover-
eignty of European thought. As a disciplinary practice of knowl-
edge, it depends for its very existence on a power relation of European
hegemony. In producing a general model of how cultures organize and
define themselves, ethnology for Foucault is therefore not about the
particular differences of other cultures, but about how such differences
conform to an underlying theoretical pattern formulated according to
the protocols of European thought. This means that
ethnology avoids the representation that men in any civilization may

give of themselves, of their life, of their needs, of the significations laid
down in the language; it sees emerging behind those representations
the norms by which men perform the functions of life the rules through
which they experience and maintain their needs, the systems against the
background of which all signification is given to them. (378)
Foucault ends The Order of Things, his Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
by naming ethnology and psychoanalysis as the foundations of the
human sciences in general. He argues that ethnology should describe
itself in his terms not as the study of societies without history, but
as the study of the unconscious processes that characterize the sys-
tem of a given culture (379). The proper use of ethnology comes not
in studying other cultures but in developing what Bhabha defines as
one of the key tasks for the postcolonial critic: the development of a
critical ethnography of the West (Bhabha 1991, 54). The Order of Things
itself represents an ethnology of what Foucault always describes very
specifically as the Western episteme ([1966] 1970, 378; cf. Honneth

and Jonas 1988, 131). The Archaeology of Knowledge, though entirely
methodological, remains one of the greatest examples of an ethnology
of European institutional practices of power.
Tunis, therefore, had the effect of sharpening Foucaults critical gaze
on French culture. In terms of his politics, it increased Foucaults own
involvement with political movements in the three continents, which
continued until the very end of his life. In his academic work, by con-
trast, for the most part he preserved a scrupulous silence on such issues
and has, as a result, been widely criticized for alleged Eurocentrism
(Said 1986, 14955; Spivak 1987, 210). Clearly, Foucaults distrust of
the Eurocentrism of any ethnology of other cultures was one factor
prompting this contradiction. At a personal level, while he himself
was more active politically than any other philosopher since Sartre, his
public dispute with Sartre, who had become the major spokesperson
for tri-continental issues in contemporary France, no doubt also made
Foucault more reluctant to make competing public interventions in this
area (Sartre 1971, 110; Caruso 1969, 109; El Kabbach 1968). He had in
fact moved to Tunis partly to get away from the public interest in Paris
in their quarrel. The effect of his residence in Tunisia worked in a dif-
ferent way: first to provide the critical distance for a more effective eth-
nology of the West and its mechanisms of power; and second, to make
him radically reconceptualize the role of the Other and alterity in his
work. The result was that Foucault, against the earlier current devel-
oped in Madness and Civilization, came rather to deny the possibility of
the Others separated existence and reduction to silence. In its critique
of the central thesis of Madness and Civilization, The Archaeology signals
a major revision in his thinking.
Foucaults early work had provided the theoretical model for an
archaeology of silence designed to retrieve what Saids Orientalism
had excluded: the Other. In terms of the social production of the sub-
ject, Foucaults Madness and Civilization (1961) functioned as a founding
study of the way in which society has produced its forms of exclusion.
Foucault himself described The Order of Things as a history of resem-
blance and sameness, of the incorporation of the Other into the same,
whereas, he said, Madness and Civilization comprised a history of dif-
ference, of the expulsion of alterity: The history of madness would be
the history of the Other of that which, for a given culture, is at once
interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcise the inte-
rior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness)
([1966] 1970, xxiv). In a similar way Saids Orientalism describes a system

of apparent knowledge about the Orient but one in which the Other
from that Orient is never allowed, or invited to speak: the Oriental
Other is rather an object of fantasy and construction. Among postcolo-
nial critics, this account of the discursive representation of Orientalism
has subsequently been balanced by attention to the reality which that
representation missed or excluded and has inspired a whole movement
dedicated to retrieving the history of the silenced subaltern: both in
terms of the objective history of subaltern or dominated, marginalized
groups, counter-histories, and in terms of the subjective experience
of the effects of colonialism and domination. This demonstrates that
they are not in any way Other, only that this is how Orientalist dis-
course presents them according to its own binaristic logic. Foucaults
concept of discourse, which revises his earlier account of alterity, does
not operate according to this exclusive mechanism.
Discourse in Foucault
The theory of discourse that Foucault elaborates in The Archaeology is

altogether different from any of its manifestations in linguistics. Fou-
cault by contrast emphasizes the role of discourse in the structuring
of the knowledge of objects as a part of the formation of scientific dis-
ciplines, or indeed in the construction of knowledge as such and the
creation of the categories, such as deviance, mental illness, or sexuality,
through which society is organized. This is the argument for which he
is best known, and indeed it is this aspect that Said invokes in Oriental-
ism. Foucaults theory of discourse and discursive practices, however,
goes much further than this. He does not make it easy, it has to be said.
His theory of discourse, as he points out, is not properly a theory but
rather a coherent domain of description ([1969] 1972, 114; further ref-
erences to The Archaeology are cited by page number only). In refusing
every normative category, concept, and form of analysis, inevitably it
remains somewhat enigmatic, not least because he refines, qualifies,
and revises his argument as he proceeds. Foucaults very radical notion
of discourse is primarily directed away from any form of textualism,
textual idealism, texts as disembodied artefacts, or intertextuality,
towards a concept of the materiality of language in every dimension.
Foucault wants to consider each act of language written or spoken
as a historical event, a unique point of singularity, and to trace the ways
in which it interacts and interrelates with material circumstance. His
notion of discourse is therefore refined through a number of concepts

that make it clear that in most respects the concept of discourse is very
different from any conventional notion of text. It does not refer to sen-
tences, propositions, or representations, and is not organized or uni-
fied according to any psychological, logical, or grammatical categories.
Foucaults discourse does not set up a body of texts for interpretation
of their common themes or ideas, language or ideology, meanings
(conscious or unconscious), or representations. Its analysis, he argues,
avoids all interpretation.
A discourse, Foucault suggests, is primarily the way in which a
knowledge is constituted as part of a specific practice whose knowl-
edge is formed at the interface of language and the material world.
Therefore, medicine or psychiatry attempts to establish knowledge that
will operate at the site of interaction between language and the body.
In general, knowledge is not contained discursively, but exists at the
edge between language and the rest of material reality. Discourse is
a border concept, a transcultural practice that crosses intellectual and
physical boundaries. This is both because in practical terms, knowledge
in discourse will be part of everyday practices, and because material
conditions will also operate on the conceptual formation of knowledge.
Foucault, therefore, analyses forms of knowledge, but such knowl-
edge is never considered in an abstract, disembodied mode: it never
becomes part of the general field of discursivity as for Laclau and
Mouffe (1985). Knowledge operates in the interstices of the contact zone
between concept and materiality. The difficulty but also the value of
his analysis is bound up with this desire to characterize discourse as a
material, historical entity. Whereas language can be considered solely
in the aesthetic realm of the text, and knowledge can be considered in
the abstract, transcendental field of philosophy, discourse works in the
realm of materiality and the body, in the domain of objects and specific
historical practices.
A sequel to The Archaeology, conceived as an analysis of the forms of
historical discourse, was unfortunately never completed. In The Archae-
ology itself, Foucault is not interested in ideas or their history in the
abstract, but in how ideas of medicine, psychiatry, and penality cash
out as a part of material practices. He looks at the discursive formation
as a way of analysing a discipline and a disciplinary practice. This is
rather different from Orientalism and from colonial discourse as gener-
ally conceived. Orientalism at first sight might seem closer to the kind
of disciplinary and institutional analysis that Foucault goes in for. It
involves a body of knowledge and has a common conceptual terrain.

The point about Orientalism however, in Saids account, is that it devel-
ops initially as an imaginative and academic practice, involving a form
of representation that misrepresents what is really there. This implies
an ideology-versus-reality distinction, or signifier-signified distinc-
tion, which Foucaults analyses explicitly reject. Indeed Saids stress on
the question of representation gets away from the whole emphasis on
discourse as a material force. Foucault is concerned with the way that
knowledge is used as part of, and a function in, a material practice.
The whole point of Saids argument is that Orientalism does involve a
disembodied knowledge, representations that could develop prior to
any material experience of the East. Said suggests that the academic
knowledge of Orientalism both enabled and was put into practice in
the subsequent development of colonialism. He certainly emphasizes
and refers widely to Orientalist discourses institutional framework,
but never analyses it as a material practice. This is problematic, not
only because it implies that the misrepresentation nevertheless worked
effectively when it encountered the reality which it distorted, but also
because it constitutes a fundamental difference from Foucaults analy-
ses, in which a discourse is never a disembodied imaginative represen-
tation prior to any interaction with the real, but always forms at the
cusp of knowledge acting in and on the material world. Discourse is
language that has already made history.
The Discursive Formation
In The Archaeology Foucault develops his model of discourse through

a conceptual apparatus defined according to a complex succession of
terms: discursive formations, statements (noncs), enunciations (non-
ciations), discursive practices, the archive, and archaeology. The func-
tion of these neologisms or redefined terms is to specify the singularity
of his description, to make it as clear what discourse is not as what it
is. As he recognizes, discourse itself is a highly ambiguous and mobile
term Foucault himself writes The Archaeology to specify its meaning,
but admits that he ends up using it in a variety of different ways, treat-
ing it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as
an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated
practice that accounts for a certain number of statements (80).
While the first two conform to common usage, and the second
describes the way in which colonial discourse is usually thought of,
following Said, it is the last that corresponds to Foucaults analytic

description: a discourse amounts to a regulated practice that accounts
for a group of statements. It is not an all-encompassing, amorphous
category, neither homogeneous nor unified. A discourse is rather made
up of what Foucault characterizes as a dispersion of statements that
are diffused and scattered in locational terms, but which make up a
regularity. Much of The Archaeology is taken up with defining how the
dispersed elements articulate as a discursive formation, an immense
density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple relations (76).
Foucault rejects the straightforward idea that a discourse could be
made up of diverse statements that describe a common object, or a
common style and manner, or a system of concepts, or that develop a
thematic continuity (that is, exactly what most people mean by colo-
nial discourse). Even when considering the familiar discourses of
medicine, economics, or grammar, their objects, the statements made
about them, their concepts and thematic concerns, appear far too het-
erogeneous, working at different levels, and without any overall uni-
fied logical architecture. Foucault therefore seeks to characterize these
discourses at a more functional level according to the strategic possi-
bilities that allow the activation of such incompatible elements across
different groups of statements. Rather than using what he considers to
be overdetermined contemporary terms such as science, ideology,
or theory to describe these systems of dispersion, Foucault invents
the phrase discursive formations. Said uses this term in a different
way to describe what he calls the collective body of texts constituting
a discursive formation like Orientalism ([1978] 1985, 23).
Foucault defines a discursive formation as the principle of disper-
sion and redistribution of a group of statements that belong to a sin-
gle system of discourse. Discursive formations are not homogeneous
or predicated on the uniformity of historical or geographical continu-
ities. What makes them a discursive formation is that they have certain
regularities that make the elements within them subject to discernible
conditions of existence and modification. Foucault elaborates the func-
tioning of what he calls rules of formation at length across four chap-
ters. They are particularly significant because these regularities make
up the conditions of existence according to which the elements of a
specific discourse are constituted. A discourse therefore is formed (and
can be defined in retrospect), not by invoking a common object or set
of concepts or representations, but by something more abstract, namely
by certain rules, conditions, operating on, and therefore forming, the
object or concepts that it constructs. The regularity of a discourse will

operate at the level of the formation of objects, the enunciative function,
the formation of concepts and strategies. Discourse analysis consists of
the identification of these conditions.
The Statement
For Foucault, the material of discourse is made up of individual state-

ments. What does he mean by the term statement (nonc)? This
is the most difficult concept, on which the whole theory of discourse
hinges. Only Homi Bhabha (1994) has fully engaged with the Foucauld-
ian account of enunciation and developed it into a unique instrument of
theoretical and historical insight. For the English-speaking reader, the
problem begins with the distinction in French between the terms nonc
and nonciation, which have no equivalent in English. The translation in
The Archaeology uses the terms statement and enunciation, which
we could gloss as the act of making the statement and what is stated,
the saying and the said. However, it is hard to keep these entirely sepa-
rate, particularly as Foucault at one point alternates the significance of
or perhaps he himself muddles the two terms. Together, they make
up the two aspects of the discursive event, operating simultaneously
as a function of the individual subject and as a historical act, the study
of which, in a lecture given while he was writing The Archaeology, Fou-
cault described as deixologie, a neologism derived from the theory of
deixis, of enunciation, in linguistics (Macey 1993, 507).
What Foucault is trying to make clear is that a statement, in this con-
text, is above all not simply a text or a piece of language. The statement
itself constitutes a specific material event, a performative act or a func-
tion, a historical eruption that impinges on and makes an incision into
circumstance. Its effect, therefore, in the first instance, is primarily one
of discontinuity, of deictic intervention, of effecting change, but it also
exists in a productive tension with regularity. It involves language, but
it is not reducible to it, because that language will also be part of the
situated materiality of circumstance. A statement, such as a lecture title
announced as to be announced, for example, offers a promise that an
announcement will be made, which will be both an event in itself as
well as giving information or commentary exactly the properties of
Foucaults statement. A discourse is made up of statements that are
both events and things, as well as pieces of language. Statements are of
the kind made to a parliament or to the press: an announcement, itself
an event that constitutes news, which will invariably relate to a set of

larger circumstances and will itself impinge on them; the statement is
both conditioned by them, but may well subsequently shape them. A
press statement represents an incision into a discursive field, while it is
itself also an event that constitutes news.
Or consider the use of the term statement as it is employed by the
police: when one makes a statement to the police, it is first of all because
one has been positioned as the speaker of a statement by both a set of
circumstances and the subsequent invitation from the law. The state-
ment then becomes a material piece of evidence that operates in the
court as more than merely a set of words: a statement is determined by
the circumstances in which it was given, for which it was given, and
how it is then used. It then functions as part of an institutional appa-
ratus, the law, and cannot be separated from that function. Though the
specific enunciation that gave rise to or enabled the statement remains
unique and a singular event, the statement can nevertheless be cited,
repeated, and put in connection with other statements. The statement
and other forms of evidence with which it can be linked are themselves
constructed from a disparate range of possible evidence drawn from a
range of sites, from a dispersion of statements, and from documents of
all kinds. They have no intrinsic unity, they do not have a single author,
and they are not the expression of a meaning. A discourse, therefore, is
made up of diverse and heterogeneous statements which, though lin-
guistic in form, are themselves the product of an interaction between
language and the world.
The analogy with the statement in court suggests that there is a core
of legal documents, police statements, witnesses evidence, and so
forth, all of which will have been formed according to the constraints
of the institutional apparatus and are appropriated within a legal dis-
course that forms part of the law, itself made up of acts of parliament
and the precedent of earlier cases. Other documents will be brought in
as evidence and will relate to the central core, but will themselves have
been constructed according to other circumstances and constraints (for
example, a letter, a fax, an e-mail, a phone conversation, a credit card
bill, a novel). Some of them will be accepted as evidence, others not.
Some of them have been constructed as a part of the legal apparatus,
but others were formed in very different circumstances and have only
a tangential status in relation to legal discourse. In this way a discourse
will draw on elements that, while not determined by the demands of
that discourse, will nevertheless make up part of its material practices,
brought into its domain according to its rules. The boundaries of a

discourse will therefore be permeable, but this does not undermine
the consistency of its own rules of formation. Rather, it reinforces the
degree to which any discourse will be in a permanent state of inter-
action with languages, events, circumstances, other discourses, as all
intrinsic parts of its own operation. Foucault employs the term posi-
tivity to describe the modality, the mode of being, the conditions of
existence of a statement, the tangled mass of language caught up
with the functioning of the material world a conception which antici-
pates Foucaults later conception of power as dispositif in The History of
Sexuality. This is the term that Said himself also invokes, but Said uses it
not for such material-linguistic interaction but rather to describe what
he calls latent Orientalism, which he characterizes as something spe-
cifically immaterial: an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouch-
able) positivity ([1978] 1985, 206).
The Regularities, the Enunciative Modalities,

and Formation of Objects
Discourse is a complex, differentiated practice, governed by analyz-

able rules and transformations, Foucault argues, and he spends much
of The Archaeology conceptualizing the form of these rules and how they
operate as a structure of discursive formation with regard to the for-
mation of objects (the best known part of the argument of the book and
the one which Said invokes), the means through which individuals are
authorized and positioned in relation to the statement so as to invoke a
discourse in a particular institutional site (enunciative modalities, the
enunciative function), the means through which concepts emerge, and
the ways in which theoretical and practical choices become available
within a discursive formation (the formation of strategies). In the
course of this elaboration, Foucault emphasizes that discourses operate
in an unstable environment of change and transformation. The objects
of a discourse are quite capable of being contradictory.
Of the various rules that operate for a discursive formation, those of
the enunciative modality and formation of concepts have been par-
ticularly influential. To take the first of these: the nature of the group of
relations that constitutes a discourse can be approached from the point
of view of its subject. From the point of view of discourse analysis, the
question of the subject amounts to the question Who is speaking?
Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right
to use this sort of language (langage)? Who, in other words, has the
institutional, legal, and professional status that allows the speaker to
occupy this discursive site? Foucault uses as his example the complex
status of the doctor: his qualifications, the authority of the institutions
to which he is affiliated, the legal sanctions and conditions that autho-
rize his work. This would include what might be called the library
or documentary field, which includes not only the books and treatises
traditionally recognized as valid, but also all the observations and case-
histories published and transmitted, and the mass of statistical infor-
mation that can be supplied by public bodies, by other doctors,
by sociologists, by geographers (512). In addition, the doctor will be
positioned differently in relation to his various professional activities:
he will be questioner, observer, interpreter, prescriber, and counsellor.
So a new scientific discourse, such as clinical medicine, is not simply
the establishment of a new technique of observation but rather is the
product of the establishment of new relations between a whole array of
distinct, different elements, some of which are internal to the ideas of
the discipline, but others of which relate to issues of professional status,
institutional sites, and the subject positions of those participating. In
its practice, clinical discourse makes constant use of a heterogeneous
system of relations in which the modality of enunciation is constantly
shifting. The types of enunciation will be disparate, enforcing a disper-
sion on the individual subject who will be required to adopt a series of
subject positions: the various enunciative modalities manifest his dis-
persion. What links them all together is not individual consciousness,
but the specificity of a discursive practice.
Analysis of a discourse, therefore, will not be concerned to trace it back
to the particular truth of individual subjective experience. Rather than
seeing discourse as a field of expression for individual consciousness,
Foucault declares that he will
look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity. Thus

conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of
a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in
which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may
be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct
sites is deployed. (54)
Discourse thus constitutes the unifying force of an anonymous

field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking
subjects (122). Foucault does not, as McNay observes, provide an

account of the means whereby certain subjects are enabled to take up
these positions, and certain others not (1994, 779). Nevertheless, his
model does not preclude analysis or foregrounding of the forms and
procedures of social authorization, whether determined by gender,
class, or political status.
The Heterogeneity of Discourse
Among all its various activities, relations, subject positions, sites, forms
of authorization, discourse alone operates as a systematic network
linking them together, and in doing so constitutes the very objects that
occupy its field. A discourse rarely possesses a set of concepts that form
a logical totality or coherent whole; its concepts, moreover, are not
static but always changing, in a state of transformation. There is noth-
ing inherently monological or monolithic about a discursive forma-
tion. A discourse rarely possesses a set of concepts that form a logical
totality or coherent whole. Discourses remain fragmented, dispersed,
and incomplete. Discourses are heterogeneous and uneven; concepts,
moreover, are not static but always changing, in a state of transforma-
tion. Foucault argues that it was possible for men, within the same
discursive practice, to have contrary opinions, to make contradictory
choices (221). A discursive formation is the product of a set of rela-
tions between disparate entities or activities. It is not made up of the
smooth surface of texts, but a product of a conjunction of institutional
sites, functions, activities, subjects, and so on, which in themselves are
highly dispersed. The group of rules that operate within the field of a
particular discourse do so at a preconceptual level.
This preconceptual level consists of the group of rules that oper-
ate within the field of a particular discourse not only in the minds of
individuals, but in discourse itself: they operate, therefore, according
to a sort of uniform anonymity, on all individuals who undertake to
speak in this discursive field (69). These discursive regularities and
constraints do not (pace Said) produce uniformity, but make possible
the heterogeneous multiplicity of concepts, and, beyond these, the
profusion of the themes, beliefs, and representations with which one
usually deals when one is writing the history of ideas (63). Discur-
sive analysis thus defines regularities that specify a particular field
of appearance, and establishes the basis of a practice in operation.
Foucault emphasizes again that not only is a discourse made up of a
dispersion of statements, but also that even when framed as a particu-

lar discourse it is by no means homogeneous.
One is dealing with events of different types and levels, caught up in dis-
tinct historical webs; the establishment of an enunciative homogeneity in
no way implies that, for decades or centuries to come, men will say and
think the same thing; nor does it imply the definition, explicit or not, of a
number of principles from which everything else would flow, as inevitable
consequences. (146)
Foucaults remark here indicates that his idea of discourse is almost the
very opposite to Saids as elaborated in Orientalism. Within an enun-
ciative regularity Foucault suggests there are interior hierarchies,
developing in a tree-like structure, with governing statements at the
root, but burgeoning differential activities at the branches (147). Within
a single discourse, although the general field, the definition of observ-
able structures and the field of possible objects, will operate as the
governing statements, all sorts of strategic options, many of them dis-
tinct from or even incompatible with each other, will be developed at
the peripheries.
Nothing would be more false than to see in the analysis of discursive for-
mations an attempt at totalitarian periodization, whereby from a certain
moment and for a certain time, everyone would think in the same way, in
spite of surface differences, say the same thing, through a polymorphous
vocabulary, and produce a sort of great discourse that could travel over in
any direction. (165)
Moreover, discourses are themselves made up of relations with other

discourses. There is no vast, smooth surface of a unitary generalized
discourse; rather, there are varied, distinct systems of statements. Fou-
cault calls these the archive.
The unity of a discourse therefore lies not in its concepts, its represen-
tations, its themes, but in its underlying system of rules. A discursive
practice establishes an interactive relation between otherwise hetero-
geneous material elements (institutions, techniques, social groups,
perceptual organizations, relations between various discourses) (72).
This relation, though determining, is not inflexible. In particular Fou-
cault emphasizes that its flexibility makes it a part of transformative
historical processes.
These systems of formation must not be taken as blocks of immobility,

static forms that are imposed on discourse from the outside, and that
define once and for all its characteristics and possibilities A discursive
formation does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes
it for decades or centuries; it determines a regularity proper to temporal
processes; it presents the principle of articulation between a series of dis-
cursive events and other series of events, transformations, mutations, and
processes. It is not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondence
between several temporal series. (734)
Just because a discourse is determining does not mean that its deter-
minations are themselves fixed, and that a discourse is not open to his-
tory and temporal transformation. At the same time, it does not require
that everyone adopt the same position: [M]y aim, writes Foucault,
was to show what the differences consisted of, how it was possible for
men, within the same discursive practice, to speak of different objects,
to have contrary opinions, to make contradictory choices (200).
Discourse and Power in The History of Sexuality
The qualities of discourse elaborated in The Archaeology were subse-

quently reaffirmed in The History of Sexuality (1976), where Foucault
writes:
We must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose

tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must
not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and
excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the domi-
nated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into
play in various strategies. ([1976] 1978, 100)
According to this argument, the whole attempt to represent other

voices that have been silenced and excluded by Orientalist discourse
represents a conceptual error. Foucaults discourse removes all consid-
erations relating to the subject who utters. Discourse, for Foucault, was
a way of getting away from the then conventional ways of thinking in
terms of books, authors, disciplinary unities, a philosophy of history
based on the human subject, or anthropological categories, whether
of authors or speaking subjects. Discourse effectively desubjectifies,
removes the whole realm of psychology. To this degree, discourse
analysis operates as the exact opposite of all attempts to recover forms

of the subaltern voice, articulating subjective experience, what he
calls the living plenitude of experience. Discourse is not about the
direct representation, or misrepresentation, of experience. Foucaults
discourse therefore represents a directly antithetical strain to the
assumptions and endeavours of postcolonial writing that posits a sub-
jective voice of the colonized against the objectified discourse of the
colonizer.
Just as power and resistance are necessarily imbricated within each
other, so discourse also enacts its own effects of destabilization.
We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby
discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a
hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for
an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it rein-
forces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes
it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for
power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and pro-
vide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance. ([1976] 1978, 101)
This more flexible, heterogeneous account of discourse suggests that

Foucault himself had become wary of the inclusion/exclusion dialectic
in Madness and Civilization already challenged by Derrida ([1967] 1978,
3163; Foucault 1979). Its result is that Foucault denies the very e xistence
of a dominance/subversion paradigm.
There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another
discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks
operating in a field of force relations; there can exist different and even
contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the con-
trary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another,
opposing strategy. ([1976] 1978, 212)
Power works through a dominance without hegemony, in Ranajit

Guhas phrase, and it is this characteristic of the production of power
that has been exploited so successfully by the Subaltern Studies histo-
rians (Guha 1997). For Foucault, power is neither intentional nor fully
realized; it is rather a multiple and mobile field of force relations,
wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domina-
tion are produced ([1976] 1978, 1012). The argument in The History
of Sexuality goes further to suggest that repression, rather than being

restrictive, has the very opposite effect and breeds a proliferation of
discourses. The implication of this would be that colonial domination
and repression, far from silencing anyone, produced a proliferation
of subaltern discourse as indeed it did. The sites of enunciation and
forms of discourse would in many cases be different from those of the
colonial masters (Bolton and Hutton 1995). In other cases, such as anti-
colonialism, it would operate as a counter-discourse. For Foucault, the
subaltern cannot but speak. The example of sati shows that there can
be counter-discourses, but within the terms of a particular discursive
apparatus, only certain subalterns will be authorized to speak. This
does not mean that subalterns cannot speak within other discourses
that operate elsewhere for different constituencies and institutions.
A Foucauldian Model of Colonial Discourse
If we take the problems that have been articulated with respect to colo-
nial discourse outlined earlier, it can be argued that a colonial discourse
developed according to Foucaults model would not be vulnerable to
most of the objections posed. The problem of historicity, the objection
that colonial discourse dehistoricizes, or that it produces a textualized
version of history; the labyrinthine questions of representation and its
relation to the real; the complaint that the uniform homogeneity of colo-
nial discourse overrides the particularity of historical and geographi-
cal difference; and the problem of the determining, univocal force of a
monolithic discourse none of these would apply to Foucaults original
model.
At the same time, a description of a colonial discourse according
to Foucaults principles would look very different from anything that
could be recognized from most work that has gone under that name.
Colonial discourse analysis would no longer involve the analysis of
colonialism as predominantly a structure of knowledge and represen-
tations, nor the interpretation of any text that has any old tangential
relation to colonialism. Indeed, from a Foucauldian point of view, what
is odd about so-called colonial discourse analysis is that it takes
discourse itself as its primary object of analysis, rather than invok-
ing discourse as a means of analysing a particular practice in this
case colonialism. Certainly, it would be possible to analyse colonial-
ism according to its discursive formations, but it would have to be the
discursive field of colonialism as a historical practice, a colonialism that
involved a political activity and organization that developed its own

forms of knowledge as part of its activities of domination and exploita-
tion. One would have to look at discursive statements in terms of the
historical emergence of colonialism as a specific practice that operated
according to successive administrative regimes. Colonial discourse
would necessarily be different from the kind of discourses, such as that
of psychiatry or medicine, analysed by Foucault. First, it is not that of
a profession, nor of a discipline, nor a self-constituted body of knowl-
edge. However, colonialism did amount to a particular set of practices,
and this makes it all the more challenging to bring its diversity under
one field. What holds it together? What are its surfaces of emergence?
What is the group of rules proper to its discursive practice? How does it
order its objects? Do the colonial practices of the different nations work
with different colonial discourses?
Such a colonial discourse would not involve analysis of texts as such;
rather, it would comprise the discursive practice of colonialism as a
material form of appropriation and administration. Colonialism as a
practice operated at the interface of knowledge and material culture;
its operations were highly dispersed, contradictory, and heterogeneous
in historical and geographical terms. Its discursive formations are
likely to have been similarly heterogeneous and subject to successive
transformations in response to specific events (for example, 1857). One
would not be seeking to interpret these discourses in order to reveal
their hidden psychological meaning, an imperial unconscious, but
rather attempting to formulate the rules which governed their condi-
tion of possibility and formed and enabled specific enunciations.
In the British case this would involve a whole group of relations in a
system of metropolitan institutional sites: the Colonial Office, the India
Office, parliament, the press, the variety of chartered companies and
firms with colonial interests, educational establishments such as Hailey-
bury and Oxford, religious organizations, imperial conferences, and so
on; and in the colonies, Government House and the whole administra-
tive, military, legal, penal, commercial, medical, religious, and educa-
tional apparatus. Vast numbers of statements were enunciated from
these sites in parliamentary speeches, notices, legislation, acts, statutes,
orders in council, treaties, documents, directives, dispatches, instruc-
tions, resolutions, trade agreements, correspondence, papers, memo-
randa, minutes, memorials, resolutions, petitions, addresses, accounts,
reports and official diaries from governors, district officers, and magis-
trates, diplomatic interventions, writings on colonial g overnance, emi-
gration, and so forth.
As a practice, British colonialism was heterogeneous and contested,

but its discursive regularity has yet to be investigated. A Foucauldian
account would mean focusing on these kinds of statements, consider-
ing them in the relations that they developed between dispersed insti-
tutions, techniques, social groups, perceptual organizations, and other
discourses (of government, commerce, economics, war, law, medicine,
psychiatry, anthropology, and linguistics). If colonial discourse there-
fore is to have a relation to history, it must be related to the historical
practice of colonialism, but in this case such statements would them-
selves not need to be articulated to the historical because they would
already form a part of the historical processes, events, and strategic
practices in which they participated. Making manifest the conditions
and rules from which the statements of a colonial discursive forma-
tion emanated would not suggest that the latter existed outside history,
but rather demonstrate that, as Foucault puts it: Discourse is, from
beginning to end, historical a fragment of history, a unity and discon-
tinuity in history itself (117). Meanwhile, the cultural and literary texts
of colonialism, the ever more carefully honed interpretations of Pas-
sage to India, King Solomons Mines, and Kim, the nostalgic cultivation of
travel writings, autobiographies, and letters, all of which have to date
formed the major focus of colonial discourse analysis, would move to
the margins, as elements of the general positivity. A literary text, or a
travel book, though it may have had an influence on those who became
administrators, would be no more part of colonial discourse proper
than the private letter that is used as evidence in a law court forms part
of legal discourse: it interacts with it only for the duration of a specific
event. It would not have been subject to the rules of formation of a
colonial discourse (its formation would rather have been the effect of
the discursive conditions of literary practice), nor would it have been
authorized by the institutional sites from which such a discourse would
derive its legitimation its legitimate source and point of application
(its specific objects and instruments of verification). Such cultural and
literary texts, in so far as they have a relation to the discursive forma-
tions of colonialism, would be affiliated to its statements but would
have to be positioned and analysed as an unofficial, secondary body of
texts produced as part of the material, historical, and discursive effect
of colonial practice. If this seems discouraging to those whose major
interests lie in the realm of the literary, its emphasis is not altogether
unsurprising given that Foucault was, after all, a historian-philosopher.
However, there is a positive possibility: those secondary texts could
potentially carry disruptive force given that they would be constituted
according to different rules and would therefore not work directly

within colonial discourse proper. Such analysis, however, would have
to be concerned with demonstrating the dialectical deconstructive
activity operating between the two forms of discourse, not simply the
interpretive richness or ambiguity of the literary text in glorious lin-
guistic abstraction and material and historical isolation. Colonial dis-
course never just consisted of a set of ideological (mis)representations:
its enunciations always operated as historical acts, generating specific
material effects within the coercive machinery of colonial rule, its enun-
ciative sites and formations of power simultaneously inciting material
and psychological effects upon colonized subjects.
The theoretical issue that remains involves the differences between
Foucaults historical materialist and institutional account of discursive
events the conceptual difficulty of which, like the work of Deleuze,
results from its refusal of dialectics and other available materialist
positions, particularly Marxism. Paradoxically, the most challenging
postcolonial theory, for example the work of Bhabha and Spivak, often
functions productively through an unresolved tension between colo-
nialism as an institutional performative discourse of power-knowledge
and colonialism understood according to the dialectical formations
elaborated in tri-continental Marxism. Indeed, as a result of their work,
such a disjunctive articulation could be said to operate as the t heoretical
kernel of postcolonial theory itself.
NOTES
1 This chapter was originally published in Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism:

An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 395410.
2 This essay was written before the publication of Foucaults Lectures at the
Collge de France.
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. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bolton, Kingsley, and Christopher Hutton. 1995. Bad and Banned Language:
Triad Secret Societies, the Censorship of the Cantonese Vernacular, and
Colonial Language Policy in Hong Kong. Language in Society 24 (2): 15986.

doi:10.1017/S0047404500018571.
Caruso, Paolo. 1969. Conversazione con Michel Foucault. In Conversazioni
con Claude Lvi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, 91131. Milan:
Mursia.
Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass.
London: Routledge.
El Kabbach, Jean-Pierre. 1968. Foucault rpond Sartre, La Quinzaine litt-
raire, no. 46: 202.
Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swa-
hili in the Former Belgian Congo, 18801938. Berkeley: University of California
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. 1991. Time and Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays, 19711991. Chur, Swit-
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Foucault, Michel. (1961) 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in
an Age of Reason. Translator Anonymous. New York: Pantheon.
. (1966) 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans-
lator Anonymous. London: Tavistock Publications.
. (1969) 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan
Smith. London: Tavistock Publications.
. (1976) 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by
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. 1979. My Body, This Paper, This Fire. Oxford Literary Review 4 (1): 928.
doi:10.3366/olr.1979.003.
. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 197277, edited
by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Translated by
Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 227. doi:10.2307/464648.
Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial
India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Honneth, Axel, and Hans Jonas. 1988. Social Action and Human Nature. Trans-
lated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Democratic Politics. Translated by Winston Moore and Paul Cam-
mack. London: Verso.
Macey, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson.
McNay, Lois. 1994. Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Miller, James. 1994. The Passion of Michel Foucault. London: Flamingo.
Noyes, John. 1992. Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South
West Africa, 18841915. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood.
Said, Edward W. (1978) 1985. Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
. 1986. Foucault and the Imagination of Power. In Foucault: A Critical
Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy, 14955. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1971. Iron in the Soul. London: Hamish Hamilton.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics.
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Young, Robert J.C. 1995. Foucault on Race and Colonialism, New Formations,
no. 25: 5765.
4Not Quite a Case of the Disappearing
Marx: Tracing the Place of Material
Relations in Postcolonial Theory
enak sh i dua
A pervasive assumption in the many genealogies written about the rela-

tionship of Marxism to postcolonial theory is that the two paradigms
are polarized and oppositional. For those who work within postcolo-
nial paradigms, postcolonial theory is often seen as contributing to the
decline of Marxism. For example, Robert Young, editor of Interventions:
The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies notes, The rise of postco-
lonial studies coincides with the end of Marxism as the defining political,
cultural and economic objective of much of the third world (1998, 8).
Writers working within a Marxist framework have responded that
claims of the demise of Marxism are premature, as the central tenets of
Marxism remain relevant, and have further suggested that these tenets
are missing in postcolonial formulations. E. San Juan, for example,
argues that post-colonial theory seems to require a post-Marxism as
a supplement, a prophylactic clearing of the ground (2002, 221; see
also Brennan 2002; Lazarus 2002; Parry 2004; Bartolovich 2002). As a
result of such a polarized characterization, the perception has emerged
that Marxists explain class and capitalism, while postcolonial, and by
association critical race, theorists, explain race and racism.
Furthermore, one of the central critiques of postcolonial theory, and
theorists, is that an exclusive focus on race and racism has been at the
cost of an understanding of class, capitalism, and globalization. For
example, Bartolovich states that we might all agree, perhaps, that a
leaden-footed pursuit of the path of political economy is best to be
avoided But surely this ought not to lead to a wholesale flight from
political economy so characteristic of post-colonial studies in general
today (2002, 5). Similarly, E. San Juan points out that the most blatant
flaw of postcolonial theory lies in its refusal to grasp the category of
64 Enakshi Dua
capitalist modernity in all its global ramifications (2002, 222). The con-
sequences of these missing components have led some, in an extreme
formulation, to suggest that postcolonial and critical race theorists are
in fact complicit with imperialism (ibid.).
In this chapter, I contest the characterization that those theorizing
race and racism have presented a wholesale flight from the tenets of
Marxism or from considerations of a capitalist modernity. In part, my
efforts are an attempt to challenge the way in which the two approaches
are perceived as contrasting and polarized. As we have seen, a
re-examination of Marxs work suggests there are important possibili-
ties for theorizing race and racism. In the same vein, a closer examina-
tion of the writings of key postcolonial theorists also contests such a
polarization. Indeed, a number of postcolonial theorists have consis-
tently pointed to the importance of Marxism for theorizing race and
racism (see, for example, Loomba 2005; Quayson 1999; Balibar and
Wallerstein 1991; Said 1978b, 1983, 1993; Hall 1980, 1997, 2001; Gilroy
1987). Ato Quayson resonates with a number of postcolonial schol-
ars when he claims that from the point of view of post-colonialism,
there is no need to perceive Marxist and post-structuralist discourses as
mutually incompatible (1999, 14).
Indeed, as suggested in Chapter 2 of this volume, when Stuart Hall
(1980, 1992), Paul Gilroy (1987), and Edward Said (1978a) made sub-
stantial critiques of Marxism, they also systematically signalled the
importance of retaining an analysis of material relations as well as
class in the study of race and racism. Moreover, all these theorists were
unequivocal in challenging culturally deterministic approaches. As
Hall stated, [T]he problem is not whether economic structures are rel-
evant to racial divisions but how the two are theoretically connected
(1980, 308). Thus, in contrast to the characterization that the turn to
Foucault has been a dismissal of the importance of material relations,
I suggest that this turn was tied to a more complex project of analys-
ing culture and material relations as interrelated but autonomous sites
through which race has been constructed and racisms have emerged.
Often overlooked in genealogies of postcolonial theory, beginning
with Saids initial turn to Foucault, is that a number of postcolonial
theorists have had an ongoing struggle with several aspects of Fou-
caults epistemology. A close reading of this body of work suggests that
a prevalent theme in postcolonial theorizing has been a concern with
the limitations in deploying Foucaults method for explaining race and
Not Quite a Case of the Disappearing Marx 65
racism (see, for example, Balibar 1992; Loomba 2005; Scott 2005; Quay-
son 1999; Young 1995b, 2001).1 Much of the concern focuses on Fou-
caults conceptualization of discourse as a phenomenon that produces
reality, one that produces domains of objects and rituals of truth
(1977, 194).2 A number of theorists agree with Ato Quaysons argument
that there is a need to attend to the material, social and economic fac-
tors within which any discourse is framed (1999, 7). The concern that
Foucaults conceptualization of discourse marginalizes material rela-
tions has given rise to concomitant concerns about Foucaults concep-
tualizations of power, resistance, subjectivity, identity, and history. It
has led a number of postcolonial theorists to note, with David Scott,
that Foucault requires some supplementation (2005, n.p.).
While a number of key theorists have registered concerns with Fou-
caults epistemology and methodology, of these, the two theorists who
have undertaken the most consistent and elaborate discussion of the
limits of Foucaults writings are Edward Said and Stuart Hall. In this
chapter, I trace the reflections of Said and Hall on Foucault through-
out their writings, illustrating the profound ambiguity both theorists
expressed about Foucaults epistemology and methodology. It is per-
haps ironic that the two theorists who were crucial in establishing
the importance of Foucaults concepts of discourse, power, and iden-
tity in postcolonial and critical race theoretical approaches are also
at the centre of offering substantial reservations regarding the limits
of his epistemology and methodology. Moreover, as I will demon-
strate, Saids and Halls critiques of Foucault have consistently been
informed by Marxist concerns with capital, the state, and resistance.
Both of these theorists have pointed to the absence of material rela-
tions in Foucaults understanding of discourse and raised concerns
about this absence for theorizing power, resistance, subjectivity, and
identity. Both theorists have consistently stressed the importance of
bringing in elements of Marx and Marxism to overcome what they
have argued is a flawed epistemology. I suggest that Edward Saids and
Stuart Halls writings offer a very different epistemological framework
than that which is often characterized as classically postcolonial.
What is often overlooked is that implicit in the writings of these two
theorists is a syncretism of two seemingly incompatible epistemologi-
cal frameworks: Marx and Foucault.3 Indeed if we trace their writings,
what emerges is an attempt to offer a common ground, overcoming
the perceived divide between an economistic Marx and an idealistic
Foucault.4
66 Enakshi Dua
Edward Said: Power, Resistance, Subjectivity,

and the Limits of Foucault
As we have seen, Edward Said, in Orientalism, was pivotal in intro-

ducing Foucaults concept of discourse as a theoretically rich concept
for the analysis of race and racism. While the role that Said played in
establishing Foucault as a central figure in postcolonial studies has
been widely acknowledged (see Young 1990; Moore-Gilbert 1997; Nich-
ols 2010), what is often overlooked is that Said also offered substantial
critiques of Foucaults epistemology and methodology. Beginning in
Orientalism and continuing throughout the course of his writings, Said
devoted considerable attention to identifying the limits of a Foucaul-
dian epistemology and methodology. Moreover Saids concerns with
Foucault led him to repeatedly point to the importance of Marxism
for theory.5
However, despite raising substantial objections on Foucaults epis-
temology, Said, throughout his writings, also asserted the compelling
utility of the concept of discourse. For Said, Foucault is a paradox
(1983, 243). I will illustrate that Saids paradoxical relationship to Fou-
cault results in an attempt to overcome the limits of Foucault by draw-
ing on Marxs epistemology. Indeed, if we explore Saids attempts to
synthesize Foucault and Marx, we can reinterpret the methodology
that Said puts forward in Orientalism as not simply Foucauldian, but
rather as a methodology that is a synthesis of elements of Marxism and
Foucault.
I begin this section by outlining Saids criticisms of Foucault. Next,
I examine the suggestions that Said offers for synthesizing Foucault
with Marx. I end by reinterpreting Saids methodology in Orientalism,
before turning, in the next section, to a consideration of the writings of
Stuart Hall.
In Orientalism, Said begins to signal his departure from Foucault, par-
ticularly concerning the question of methods for studying discourse.
As he writes, Yet, unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly
indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers
upon the anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive
formulation like Orientalism (1978a, 23).6 While a seemingly minor
point, the relationship of an author to discourse, this methodological
question leads to a number of concomitant critiques: of power, class,
subjectivity, resistance, and of methods for studying history. Said
elaborates on this comment in several subsequent articles.
Notably, the same year as Orientalism was published, Said published

an often overlooked article, The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary
Positions (1978b), in which he expands on his reservations with Fou-
cault.7 Unlike Orientalism that focuses on a historical analysis, in this
article Said, reviewing both Derridas and Foucaults method for tex-
tual analysis, addresses a number of methodological challenges in the
undertaking of textual analysis. Said expands on the passing comments
he made about Foucaults work in Orientalism, elaborating his reserva-
tions with Foucaults writings. In particular, Said raises concerns with
Foucaults conceptualization of power, pointing to the limitations in a
decentralized conceptualization of power.
Yet despite the extraordinary worldliness of this work, Foucault takes a

curiously passive and sterile view not so much of the uses of power
but of how and why power is gained, used and held onto. This is the
most dangerous consequence of his disagreement with Marxism, and its
result is the least convincing aspect of his work. Even if one fully agrees
with his view that what he calls the micro-physics of power is exercised
rather than possessed, it is not the privilege, acquired or preserved, of
the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions. (710)
Said goes on to point out the profound implications of ignoring how

and why power is gained. First, pointing to the dangers of such a dif-
fuse conceptualization of power, he argues that Foucaults concept of
power raises concomitant concerns regarding the state, the power of
capital to control the economy, and imperialism.
The notions of class struggle and of class itself cannot therefore be

reduced along with the forcible taking of state power, economic domina-
tion, imperialist war, dependency relationships to the status of super-
annuated nineteenth-century conceptions of political economy. However
much power may be a kind of indirect bureaucratic discipline and control,
there are ascertainable changes stemming from who holds power, who
dominates whom, and so forth. (ibid.)
Further, Said suggests that overlooking class, state, and ideology

raises questions about Foucaults method of historical analysis. He
argues that [w]hile he [Foucault] is right in believing that history can-
not be studied exclusively as a series of violent discontinuities (pro-
duced by wars, revolutions, great men), he surely underestimates
68 Enakshi Dua
motive forces in history such as profits, ambition, ideas, the sheer love
of power (ibid.). In addition, Said points out (what would later be
noted by Young 1995b; Stoler 1995; Scott 2005) that Foucaults historical
analysis is itself characterized by an Orientalist ontology.
He does not seem interested in the fact that history is not a homogenous
French-speaking territory but a complex interaction between uneven
economies, societies, ideologies. Much of what he has studied in his work
makes greatest sense not as an ethnocentric model of how power is exer-
cised in modern society but as part of a much larger picture involving, for
example, the relationship of Europe and the rest of the world. He seems
unaware of the extent to which the ideas of discourse and discipline are
assertively European and how, along with the use of discipline to employ
masses of detail (and of human beings), discipline was used to admin-
ister, study, reconstruct and then subsequently to occupy, rule, and
exploit almost the whole of the European world. (Said 1978b, 711)
Despite noting his reservations regarding Foucault, Said does argue

that an analysis of Orientalism is compatible with Foucaults concerns
about regulation and governmentality. This dimension is wholly
absent from Foucaults work even though his work helps one to under-
stand it [T]he parallel between Foucaults carceral system and Orien-
talism is striking (ibid.). Notably, Said ends the article by going back to
the aspects of Foucaults work that most attract him: Foucaults ability
to theorize power that is located in authority through textuality. I am
referring of course to the hegemony of imperialist culture [M]uch of
contemporary criticism seems utterly blind to the impressive consti-
tutive authority in textuality of such power as that of a broadly based
cultural discipline, in Foucaults sense of the world (713). Simultane-
ously, Said also signals the importance of going beyond these limita-
tions. For a discourse of Orientalism, like all discourses, is composed
of signs; but what they (discourses) do is more than use these signs
to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to
the language and to speech. It is the more that we must reveal and
describe (712).
In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), published after a number
of scathing reviews of Orientalism, Said continues to discuss his reser-
vations about Foucault. Here Said takes up thinking through method-
ological questions regarding the place of the critic in literary criticism.
In doing so, Said refers to a range of theorists, including Raymond
Williams, Jacques Derrida, E.P. Thompson, Roland Barthes, Noam

Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Georg Lukacs, and Louis Althusser. While
the collection of articles contains several comments on Foucault, in two
chapters Said turns his attention specifically to Foucaults work.
In the chapter Criticism between Culture and System, Said dis-
cusses the epistemological status of the text, the writer, and the critic,
returning to the epistemological implications of dissolving the writer
into the text, a point briefly touched on in Orientalism. He points out
that a failure to give autonomy to the author gives rise to profound
limitations in Foucaults methodology, in that it leads him to an
overdeterministic conceptualization of subjectivity.8 As Said argues:
[T]he archeological is supposed to reveal how discourse impersonal, sys-

tematic, highly regulated by enunciative formations overrides society
and governs the production of culture. Foucaults thesis is that individual
statements, or the chances that individual authors can make individual
statements, are not likely Foucault dissolves individual responsibil-
ity in the interests not so much of collective responsibility as of institu-
tional will In a variety of ways therefore Foucault is concerned with the
assujetissement, the subjugation of individuals in society to some supra
personal disciplines of authority. Though obviously anxious to avoid vul-
gar determinism in explaining the workings of the social order, he pretty
much ignores the whole category of intention. (1983, 188)
As Said contends, overlooking intentionality shapes Foucaults con-

ceptualization of power as everywhere but nowhere. Said elaborates,
Thus by virtue of Foucaults criticism we were able to understand cul-
ture as a body of disciplines having the effective force of knowledge
linked systematically, but by no means immediately or even intention-
ally, to power (220). Said points out that overlooking intentionality not
only has implications for theorizing subjectivity, but also suggests that
it allows for a form of cultural determinism. Going back to the argu-
ments he made earlier in The Problem of Textuality, Said reiterates,
almost verbatim, that what is missing in Foucault is an understanding
of how power works through class and state. Yet despite the extraor-
dinary worldliness of this work, Foucault takes a curiously passive and
sterile view not so much on the uses of power, but of how power is
gained, used, and held onto. This is the most dangerous consequence
of his disagreement with Marxism, and its result is the least convincing
aspect of his work (221).
70 Enakshi Dua
In a subsequent chapter, Travelling Theory, Said elaborates on con-

cerns with Foucaults framework. He begins by noting that he has a
paradoxical relationship with Foucault. On one hand, Said recognizes
the significance and utility of Foucaults conceptualization of power.
He unequivocally states that in his opinion, Foucault has no peer, and
what he has done is remarkably interesting by any standard. As he says
for power to work it must be able to manage, control, and even cre-
ate detail; the more detail, the more real power, management breeding
manageable units, which in turn breed a more detailed, a more finely
controlling knowledge (244). Said suggests that Foucaults concep-
tualization of power allows him to effectively challenge a historical,
asocial formalism (ibid.).
On the other hand, Said continues on to note the contradictions
embedded in such contributions. He reiterates his concern with Fou-
caults claim that power is everywhere and nowhere. As he states,
[E]ven if we accept that view that power is essentially rational, that
it is not held by anyone but is strategic, dispositional, effective, that
it invests all areas of society, is it correct to conclude, as Foucault
does, that power is exhausted in its use? (254). Said argues that this
conjecture has enormous epistemological consequences. The prob-
lem is that Foucaults use of pouvoir moves around too much, swal-
lowing up every obstacle in its path (resistances to it, the class and
economic bases that refresh and fuel it, the reserves it builds up),
obliterating changes and mystifying its microphysical sovereignty
(245). Said points out the profound implications that such a concep-
tualization of power offers for thinking about questions of agency, as
well as for hope and resistance. If power oppresses and controls and
manipulates, then everything that resists it is not morally equal to
power, is not neutral and simply a weapon against that power (246).
Said suggests that such a broad conceptualization of power (and over-
looking intentionality) dissolves the subject, thus rendering resistance
unfathomable.
Any future societies that we might imagine now are only the inventions
of our civilization and result from our class system. Not only would imag-
ining a future society ruled according to justice be limited by false con-
sciousness, it would be too utopian to project for anyone like Foucault
[T]he idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented
and put to work in different societies as an instrument of a certain political
and economic power or as a weapon against that power. (ibid.)
In Foucault and the Imagination of Power (1986), Said continues to

elaborate on the implications for thinking about resistance. He rearticu-
lates his paradoxical relationship with Foucault. On one hand, he notes,
Foucault was certainly right and even prescient in showing how
discourse is not only that which translates struggles or systems of dom-
ination, but that for which struggles are conducted (153). Said also
concurs with Foucaults argument that power is unremitting. Foucault
argued that in the modern period, there is an unremitting and unstop-
pable expansion of power favoring the administrators, managers, and
technocrats of what he calls disciplinary society. Power, he writes in
his last phase, is everywhere. It is overcoming, co-opting, infinitely
detailed, and ineluctable in the growth of its domination (150). On the
other hand, Said points out that with this profoundly pessimistic view
went also a singular lack of interest in the force of effective resistance to
it, in choosing particular sites (151).
Synthesizing Marx and Foucault
In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said poses a challenge: We must
not let Foucault get away with letting us forget that history does
not get made without work, intention, resistance, effort, or conflict, and
that none of these things is silently absorbable into micronetworks of
power (1983, 245). Indeed, beginning with Orientalism, in addition to
pointing to his reservations concerning Foucault and Marxism, Said
attempts to suggest ways to integrate what he defines as the strengths
of Foucault with a more Marxist analysis of power, class, and state. As a
result, if we trace the course of Saids writings, we see an attempt to rec-
oncile aspects of Marx and Marxism with discourse theory. Most nota-
bly, Said turns to Gramsci in thinking through these connections. Said
begins with the intellectual project that to him seems central not only
to theorizing, but also to the study of, Orientalism: explaining the role
of the writer. My whole point is to say that we can better understand
the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like
culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers
and thinkers were productive, not totally inhibiting. It is this idea that
Gramsci, certainly, and Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very
different ways have been trying to illustrate (1983, 14).
In Orientalism, Said suggests that Gramscis concept of hegemony
offers an important bridge between Foucault and a deterministic Marx-
ism. Said points out that Gramscis focus on the way in which consent
72 Enakshi Dua
of the subaltern sectors of society is solicited in the domain of civil

society through sites such as education and cultural practices offers an
important bridge to Foucault. Culture, of course, is to be found operat-
ing within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and
of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci
calls consent (1978a, 7). Notably, when discussing consent, Said refers
to the ways in which some ideas become dominant, coming close to
referring to this process as ideology. In any society not totalitarian,
then, certain cultural forms predominate others; just as certain ideas
are more influential than others. It is hegemony, or rather the result of
cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and
the strength I have been speaking about so far (7).
In The Problem of Textuality, after reiterating his concerns with
Foucaults concept of power and pointing out the importance of Marxs
understanding of class, state, and ideology, Said notes that [w]hat one
misses in Foucault therefore is something that resembles Gramscis
analysis of hegemony, historical blocks, ensembles of relationships
done from the perspective of an engaged political worker for whom
the fascinated description of exercised power is never a substitute for
trying to change power relationships within society (1978b, 71011).
In The World, the Text, the Critic, Said continues to point to aspects of
Gramscis theorizing of the state as important to the study of culture.
The real depth of the strength of the modern Western State is the strength
and depth of its culture, and its cultures strength is its variety and its het-
erogeneous plurality. This view distinguishes Gramsci from nearly every
other important Marxist thinker of his period. He loses sight neither of the
great central facts of power, and how they flow through a whole network
of agencies operating by rational consent, nor of the detail diffuse, quo-
tidian, unsystematic, thick from which power draws its sustenance, on
which power depends for its daily bread. (1983, 171)
Importantly, in the chapter Travelling Theory, Said suggests that not

only can Foucault be recuperated if one distinguishes between his his-
torical studies and more theoretical writings, but furthermore, Foucault
may be more similar to Marx than even Foucault realized.9 Said argues
that the difficulty posed by Foucaults writings is when he moves from
specific historical study to more general theoretical claims. It is when
Foucaults language becomes general (when he moves his analyses of
power from the detail to society as a whole) that the methodological
breakthrough becomes the theoretical trap (244). Said suggests that if

one goes back to The Archaeology of Knowledge, there may be a way of
thinking about power in a more Marxist way. Thus he [Foucault]
refers to such things as acceptability, accumulation, preservation, and
formation that are ascribed to the making and the functioning of state-
ments, discourses, and archives; yet he does so without spending any
time on what might be the common source of their strength within
institutions or fields of knowledge or society itself (243).
In passages that are far too short, Said outlines his view of power one
that offers the insights of both Marxism and Foucaults c ontributions
as one that mediates between a more centralized view and a view of
power that is more diffuse. Thus, for Said, power certainly requires
an understanding of class. No society known to human history has
ever existed which has not been governed by power and authority
[E]very society can be divided into interlocking classes or rulers and
ruled (169). It also requires understanding the ways in which indi-
viduals, the texts, and the critics are implicated in networks of power,
[i]n understandably, wishing to avoid the crude notion that power is
unmediated domination (221). In The Problems of Textuality, Said
states, In short, power can be made analogous neither to a spiders
web without the spider nor to a smoothly functioning flow diagram; a
great deal of power remains in such coarse items as relations of produc-
tion, wealth and privilege, monopolies of coercion, and the central state
apparatus (1978b, 710). Said reiterates this conceptualization of power,
culture, and subjectivity in Criticism between Culture and System, a
chapter in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983, 221; see also Said and
Viswanathan, 2001).
Reinterpreting Orientalism: Power as

both Material and Diffuse
Orientalism was met with a series of criticisms, not only from those
who work within a Marxist framework (Clifford 1988; Ahmad 1994;
Porter 1994), but also from those who work within a postcolonial
framework. Interestingly, critiques located in both frameworks focus
on Saids deployment of Foucault. On one hand, a number of Marx-
ist writers questioned Saids move to Foucault, suggesting that a Fou-
cauldian methodology led Said to be unable to differentiate between
various forms of Orientalisms, leaving no room for the ability of indi-
vidual authors to stand outside its power, and thus totalizing the scope
of Orientalism. On the other hand, a number of postcolonial writers
74 Enakshi Dua
questioned Saids interpretation of Foucaults theory and method.

These theorists argued that Saids deployment of Foucault is based on
a narrow reading of discourse analysis. I would suggest that, except
for comments from Moore-Gilbert (1997), most of these criticisms have
overlooked Saids attempt to integrate a Marxist and Foucauldian epis-
temology in an analysis of the history of Orientalism.
Aijaz Ahmad (1994), Dennis Porter (1994), James Clifford (1988),
and Leila Gandhi (1998) have provided the most notable critiques of
Orientalism. Ahmad (1994) argues that Said displaces the materialist
context for Orientalism, and as a result attributes the power of Orien-
talism simply to the narrative rather than to the histories of conquest,
economic exploitation, and political control. Clifford (1988) argues that
Said conflates the discourse of Orientalism with the material practices
and politics of imperialism. Porter (1994) suggests that Saids Foucaul-
dian vision of the operations of power in colonial relations leads him to
fail to explain how Orientalist discourses became dominant in the first
instance. Porter also points out that Said, in Orientalism, provides an
insufficient account of resistance or contradiction within imperial cul-
ture. Finally, Leila Gandhi (1998) argues that Orientalism fails to account
for the possibility of differences of place and time.
Surprisingly, postcolonial theorists have also argued that Saids use
of Foucault is problematic, though for very different reasons. Robert
Young (1990) argues that Said misreads Foucaults methodology as
simply textual analysis, leading Said to overlook aspects of the materi-
ality that are central to Foucaults epistemology. Bhabha (1994), in The
Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colo-
nialism, attributes the totalizing tendencies of Saids notion of dis-
course to his inadequate attention to representation as a concept (103).
He points to Saids refusal to engage with the alterity and ambivalence
in the articulation of these two economies which threatened to split the
very object of Orientalism discourse as a knowledge and the subject
positioned therein (199). Notably, Bhabha suggests this discrepancy
arises from Saids reliance on the earlier Foucault, which he character-
izes as one of discursive regularity, and points to the importance of
Fanon and Lacan to theorize ambivalence of consent (109).
As Said stated, however, Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent,
and I designed it that way (Said and Viswanathan 2001, 80). I would
suggest therefore that these critiques overlook Saids methodology,
particularly his attempt to combine a centralized and a decentralized
concept of power in order to theorize the role of culture, the place of the
text, the individual writer, resistance, and subjectivity. Particularly if we

place Orientalism alongside The Problem of Textuality (both of which
were published in 1978), we cannot simply reinterpret Orientalism as an
attempt to depart from a Marxist concept of power, but must also see it
as a methodology that departs from Foucault in critical junctures.
While critics are correct in pointing out that in Orientalism (1978a)
Said offers an insufficient account of resistance, and at moments,
appears pessimistic about the persistence of Orientalism, it is not clear
that these positions are a consequence of deploying a Foucauldian con-
cept of power. As I have illustrated, Saids focus in Orientalism on the
place of the author, and on intentionality, makes a crucial break from
a Foucauldian epistemology. Moore-Gilbert has argued that Saids
view of agency and intentionality is tied to the humanist tradition
(1997, 37). However, if we place Orientalism in the context of The Prob-
lem of Textuality (1978b), as well as in relation to subsequent work,
I would suggest that this departure is also tied to Saids employment
of Marxist theorizing, particularly of subjectivity and resistance. Said
retains a conception of the individuals capacity to evade the con-
straints of dominant power and its normative archive of cultural
representations in proposing a methodology to analyse Orientalism.
Moreover, Said illustrates cogently in Orientalism that Western domina-
tion of the rest is a conscious and purposive process shaped by the
will and intention of individuals as well as by institutional imperatives.
The result of such departures from Foucaults method is profound, as
they signal an alternative methodology for theorizing the operations
of power.
In Orientalism, Said shows that the power through which Oriental-
ism emerged and was maintained is located in both dominant material
interests as well as through discursive practices. Orientalism includes
the material structures of power economic, military, and political
that Said illustrates have kept the East subordinate to the West. Thus,
it is not surprising that at times Said deploys a Marxist epistemol-
ogy and points to the operations of material power in Orientalism. At
the same time, Said notes that the traditions of representations of the
Orient preceded and even determined expansion into the East. As a
result, he points to the ways in which knowledge that comes to con-
stitute ideologies pre-exists outside of material interests. On the other
hand, Said integrates a Marxist concept of ideology, as he also demon-
strates that the pursuit of knowledge in the colonial domain was not
disinterested, because such knowledge, whether of the language,
76 Enakshi Dua
customs, or religions of the colonized, was consistently put at the ser-

vice of the colonial administration.
Thus, Saids conceptualization of discourse, ideology, and power
does lead him to conflate the spheres of knowledge, culture, and mate-
rial relations, illustrating that the three are intimately connected and
constituted through each other. Each aspect of the Orientalist formation
reinforces the others. Pre-existing notions of an Orient allowed for
military expansion. In turn, the military conquest made available new
peoples and cultures for study. Such study provided representations
of the customs of subject peoples. These representations of the colo-
nized circulated in the metropolis, encouraging support for interven-
tion in the conquered territories. Knowledge then formed the basis for
colonization, enabling hegemony to be confirmed and extended.
A rereading of Orientalism points to a deliberate conflation of dis-
course, culture, and material relations. Much of Saids method illustrates
that the discourse of Orientalism, the material relations of colonialism,
and the concomitant ideologies were mutually constitutive. As a result,
Said does indeed present Orientalism as totalizing, in that the forces
that constitute it are not only multiple but also mutually reinforcing.
Thus, I would argue, the contradictions that many critics have noted
in Orientalism do not derive from Saids deployment of a Foucauldian
method. Rather, they arise from Saids deliberate attempt to show that
Orientalism was in fact fractured in its inceptions, aims, operations, and
affective economy. Part of what Said illustrates is the complex workings
of power in the emergence and maintenance of Orientalism, in which
power operates both through diffuse and centralized mechanisms. As
I will suggest in the conclusion of this chapter, such an epistemology
and methodology has left a profound legacy among those who theorize
race and racism.
Stuart Hall: Discourse, Ideology, Identity,

and the Limits of Foucault
The second theorist to establish Foucaults work as central for the study
of race and racism is Stuart Hall. Despite attesting to the importance of
discourse as a conceptual and methodological tool for the study of race
and racism, Hall joins Said in putting forward a number of reserva-
tions concerning Foucaults theory and method. Notably, Hall shares a
number of Saids concerns. First, Hall points to the limitations in Fou-
caults notions of discourse and power, arguing that these limitations
pose considerable challenges to understanding knowledge and iden-

tity. Second, Hall suggests that a productive way to resolve the tensions
in Foucaults concept of discourse is to turn to tenets in Marxism. Like
Said, Hall also identifies Gramsci as an example of a Marxist theorist
who offers a more nuanced approach to ideology.
Hall (1980, 1983) suggests that Gramscis concept of hegemony allows
social theorists to conceptualize ideology in nondeterministic and his-
torically contingent ways. For Gramsci, ideologies cannot be reduced
to the transparent, coherent class interest of their class-subjects, and
are transformed, not by one class imposing a unitary world vision
upon all other classes, but by a process of distinction and of change
in the relative weight possessed by the elements of old ideology
[W]hat was secondary or subordinate or even incidental becomes of
primary importance, it becomes the nucleus of a new doctrinal and
ideological ensemble (Hall 1980, 335). Similar to Said, Hall sees con-
ceptual similarities between Gramscis and Foucaults theories. As
with Foucault, Gramsci is less concerned with the workings of capital,
and more with the ways in which consent of the subordinate classes of
society is solicited in the domain of civil society through education
and cultural practices (1996c, 43). Notably, Hall expands on Saids res-
ervations, pointing to the implications of Foucaults notion of power/
discourse for theorizing subjectivity.
In an often-overlooked interview titled On Postmodernism and
Articulation, Hall outlines a number of substantial reservations with
Foucaults epistemology. Hall begins by noting what he finds useful
in Foucaults concept of discourse, which allows for a rethinking of
the relationship between subjectivity, identity, and difference. As Hall
states:
Ive gone a long way on rethinking practices as functioning discursively

The discursive perspective has also brought into play a very important
insight, namely, the whole dimension of subjectivity, particularly in the
ideological domain The discursive perspective has required us to think
about reintroducing, reintegrating the subjective dimension in a non-
holistic, non-unitary way The discursive metaphor is thus extraordi-
narily rich and has massive political consequences. For instance, it enabled
cultural theorists to realize that what we call the self is constituted out
of and by difference, and remains contradictory, and that cultural forms
are, similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or sutured.
(1996b, 145)
78 Enakshi Dua
However, Hall goes on to note a number of significant reservations

with Foucaults epistemology and methodology. First, like Said, Hall
raises the thorny question of the relation of discourse to power. Hall
argues that without a more nuanced conceptualization of power, Fou-
caults understanding of discourse is riddled with an idealist method-
ology. The question is, can one, does one, follow that argument, to
the point that there is nothing to practice but its discursive aspect?
[T]hat the world, social practice, is language, whereas I want to state
that the social operates like a language I would say that the fully dis-
cursive position is a reductionism upward, rather than a reductionism
downward, as economism was (146). Hall cautions that a movement
towards a reductionist idealism is not a solution to crude materialism.
Hall, going back to his writings on ideology,10 reasserts the importance
of a methodology that not only includes but also focuses on material
conditions in understanding the operations of language and practice.
Material conditions are the necessary but not sufficient condition of all
historical practice. Of course we need to think of material conditions in
their deterministic discursive form, not as a fixed absolute. I think the
discursive position is often in danger of losing its r eference to material
practice and historical conditions (147).
Hall points out that without integrating the concept of ideology into
a conceptualization of power, Foucaults understanding of discourse
fails to differentiate between various kinds of knowledges and power.
If Foucault is to prevent the regime of truth from collapsing into a syn-

onym for the dominant ideology, he has to recognize that there are differ-
ent regimes of truth in the social formation In other words, as soon as
you begin to look at a discursive formation, not just as a single discipline
but as a formation, you have to talk about the relations of power which
structure the interdiscursivity I dont care if you call it ideology or not.
What matters is not the terminology but the conceptualisation. The ques-
tion of the relative power and distribution of different regimes of truth in
the social formation at any one time which have certain effects for the
maintenance of power in the social order that is what I call the ideologi-
cal effect. (136)
Like Said, Hall cautions that without a more nuanced understand-

ing of power and ideology, Foucault fails to understand the politi-
cal. He states, So I go on thinking about ideology [B]y abandoning
the term, I think Foucault has let himself off the hook of having to
retheorize it in a more radical way: he saves for himself the political

with his insistence on power, but he denies himself a politics because he
has no idea of the relations of force (ibid.). Hall argues that without
a concept of ideology, Foucault is unable to theorize resistance. But,
while I have learned a great deal from Foucault in this sense about the
relation between knowledge and power, I dont see how you can retain
the notion of resistance, as he does, without facing questions about the
constitution of the dominance of ideology (135). Moreover, Hall points
out that in the concept of ideology, the basis, source, or construction of
resistance is not only left unexplained, but also assumed. Foucaults
evasion of the question is at the heart of his proto-anarchist position
precisely because his resistance can be summoned from nowhere.
Nobody knows where it comes from. Fortunately, it goes on being
there, always guaranteed: in so far as there is power, there is resistance
(ibid.). Finally, Hall points out that absent a more nuanced concept of
power, it is impossible to understand the power of different knowl-
edges. But at any one moment, when you want to know how strong
the power is, and how strong the resistance is, and what is the changing
balance of forces, its impossible to assess because such a field of force is
not conceptualizable in this model (ibid.). As a result, Hall points out
that in his writings, I still talk about ideology, whereas Foucault talks
about the discursive which has no ideological dimension to it (136).
Synthesizing Marx and Foucault: Towards Identities
Similar to Said, Hall attempts to synthesize aspects of Marxism with

Foucaults writings, arguing that there are in fact points of convergence.
In particular, he suggests that if one thinks of the economy in nonreduc-
tive ways, the concepts of ideology and discourse may be compatible.
Lets take Foucaults argument of the discursive as against the ideo-

logical. What Foucault would talk about is the setting in place, through
the institutionalization of a discursive regime, of a number of compet-
ing regimes of truth and, within these regimes, the operation of power
through the practices of normalization/regulation/surveillance. Now
perhaps its just a sleight of hand, but the combination of regime of truth
plus normalization/regulation/surveillance is not all that far from the
dominance of ideology that I am trying to work with I think the move-
ment from that old base/superstructure paradigm into the domain of the
discursive is a very positive one. (1996b, 135)
80 Enakshi Dua
Thus, Hall argues that a nonreductive concept of ideology would

point to processes of normalization, regulation, and surveillance.
Drawing on his earlier writings in critical race theory and on ideol-
ogy, Hall points to the ways in which a nondeterminist Marxism is nec-
essary for a Foucauldian method. In this, Hall puts forward his concept
of articulation as a method for conceptualizing the relationships among
economy, power, culture, and knowledge.
An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity
between two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage
which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time
The unity which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse
and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions,
but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is
both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under cer-
tain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of ask-
ing how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures,
to certain political subjects. Let me put that the other way: the theory of
articulation asks how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to
begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their socio-economic or
class location or social position. (1996b, 1412)
As a result of such criticisms of Foucault, Hall proposes a theory of

subjectivity that draws on Foucaults notion of the nonessential subject,
but further integrates this framework with Marxs concepts of ideol-
ogy, agency, and social location. Notably, Hall proffers a framework in
which the subject is conceptualized as an agent who is both subjected
by power and also capable of acting against those powers. In a conven-
tional Marxist position, subjectivity is seen as located in particular class
locations, as concomitant experiences, cultural practices, needs, and
interests that result in a particular position in the economic relations
of capital. On the other hand, for Foucault, structural unity and iden-
tity are deconstructed, leaving in their place complexity, contradictions,
and fragmentation. The agent is fragmented and the agents intentions
decentred from any claim of origination/determination. Agency is
nothing but the product of the individuals insertion into various and
contradictory codes of social practices. Thus, the social totality is dis-
solved into a pluralism of power, practices, and subject-positions.
In contrast to both Foucaults and classical Marxist methodology,
Hall proposes a methodology that combines the epistemology of the
decentred subject with that of Marxist concepts concerning the power

of dominant groups and resistance. On the one hand, Hall posits that
there are no necessary relations, no correspondences between a par-
ticular position of the economic relations of capital and identity or
political struggle; at the same time he suggests that the subject is con-
stituted through concrete struggle (1983, 79; see also Hall 1996a).
Thus Hall offers a synthesis of Marxism and Foucault to put forward
a nonessentialist theory of identity. Hall cogently argues that social
identities are themselves complex fields of multiple and even contra-
dictory struggles; they are the product of the articulations of particular
social positions into fields of experiences, interests, political struggles,
cultural forms and between different social positions. This is a frag-
mented, decentred human agent, an agent who is both subject-ed by
power and capable of acting against those powers (1997, 1556). Based
on this methodological and epistemological framework, Hall, in much
of his writing, offers a reformulation of how to simultaneously study
class and racially based identities.
As I illustrated in Chapter 2, Hall, in his early writings, presents a
nondeterministic approach to class-based politics. Hall states, [W]e
must not confuse the practical inability to afford the fruits of modern
industry with the correct popular aspiration that modern people know
how to use and master and bend to their needs and pleasures modern
things Not to recognize the dialectic in this is to fail to see where real
people are (1983, 142). In his later writings, especially pointing to the
ways in which whiteness fragments the working class, Hall goes on
to argue that a nonreductive approach to class implies challenging the
notion of working class unity. Indeed there has never been a unified
class, with a unified ideology already in place. It is cross-cut, deeply
intersected by a variety of other determinants and ideologies
[T]herefore it is not the case that the social forces, classes, groups, politi-
cal movements, etc. are first constituted in their unity by objective eco-
nomic conditions and then give rise to a unified ideology. The process
is quite the reverse (1996b, 144).
Such divisions within working class unity point not only to the work-
ings of whiteness, but also, as importantly, to the imperative of retheoriz-
ing identity. Hall argues that rather than objective economic conditions
leading to class solidarity, the reverse is the case. One has to see the way
in which a variety of different social groups enter into and constitute for
a time a kind of political and social force, in part by seeing themselves
reflected as a unified force in the ideology which constitutes them (ibid.).
82 Enakshi Dua
In Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities (1997), Hall
extends such a nonessentialist epistemology to questions of cultural,
racialized, and ethnic identities. First, as did Said and other postcolo-
nial theorists, Hall points out that racialized subjectivities have been
constituted through colonization, nationalist projects, and decoloni-
zation throughout the history of capitalism.11 Second, Hall cogently
argues for the end of the innocence of the essential black subject
(444). He maintains that recognition of the black subject cannot be
represented without reference to divisions of class, gender, sexuality
and ethnicity (ibid.). As Hall suggests, such recognition makes ques-
tions of racism irrevocably linked with questions of sexuality and
gender. Moreover, through such a theoretical move, Hall destabilizes
particular conceptions of black masculinity, the notion of a black
politics, and the evasive silence with reference to class within anti-
racist debates in the 1980s (446). As crucially, he offers a framework for
theorizing the concept of difference, which simultaneously is non-
essentialist and constructed through history, power, and historically
constitutive struggle.
Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities generated sub-
stantial subsequent debate. For example, Kobena Mercer (1994) coun-
tered that notions of black unity can reinforce anti-racist struggles,
especially in the context of the perception of otherness and marginality
of the subject itself. In his article, Hall not only opened up subsequent
debates on theorizing black subjectivity, but also offered the tenets for
a nonessentialist method for the study of identity, proposing a middle
ground between traditional Marxist and post-structural frameworks
for understanding identities. As Lawrence Grossberg noted, Stuart
Hall offers a methodology for studying social identities as the product
of the articulations of particular social positions into chains of equiva-
lences, between experiences, interests, political struggles, and cultural
forms, and between different social positions, portraying social identi-
ties as complex fields of multiple and even contradictory struggles
(1996, 156). This methodology has made a considerable impact on those
theorizing race and racism.
Conclusion: Genuine Struggle and Theoretical Synthesis
tienne Balibar has noted that Foucaults work can be characterized

as a genuine struggle with Marx, this struggle being one of the
principal sources of its productivity (1992, 39). In this vein, I would
suggest that the work of several of those who theorize race and rac-
ism has been a genuine struggle to synthesize aspects of Foucauldian
epistemology with that of Marx(ism); similarly, this struggle is one of
the principle sources of its productivity. While my focus has been on
the writings of Edward Said and Stuart Hall, beginning with Saids ini-
tial turn to Foucault, a number of other key theorists such as tienne
Balibar, Robert Young, Ania Loomba, David Scott, Ato Quayson, and
Aiwa Ong have pointed to similar concerns with several aspects of
Foucaults epistemology and methodology. Thus, in contrast to those
genealogies that suggest that postcolonial theorists are devoid of
Marxs legacy, I suggest that, similar to Edward Said and Stuart Hall, a
number of, though certainly not all, postcolonial theorists retain crucial
elements of Marx(ism) in their theorizing.
David Scott (2004), Robert Young (1995a, 1998) and Ann Laura Stoler
(1995) have echoed Saids concern with Foucaults lack of attention to
colonization, raising questions on the implications of this omission
for Foucaults conclusions about power, modernity, and sexuality. As
David Scott states, I am not overwhelmed by the fact that Foucault
wrote little or nothing about the non-European world. This is partly
because I think his interrogation of modernity, Europes modernity,
has to have implications for how we think of the transformations that
modernity produced in the worlds it colonized (2005, n.p.). Ato Quay-
son (1999) and Ania Loomba (2005) have pointed to the implications
surrounding the absence of material relations for studying the produc-
tion of knowledge around race. As Ato Quayson points out, There is
a need to attend to the material, social and economic factors within
which any discourse is framed (1999, 7). Finally, concerns over the
lack of an analysis of material relations have led to concomitant ques-
tions about Foucaults method of analysing and interpreting history.
As David Scott notes, But beyond identifying the large contours of
our modernity, Foucault gave little thought to the details of the present
these histories were meant to illuminate (2005, n.p.).
Given these concerns, it is not surprising that a number of theorists
have suggested that Foucault requires some supplementation (Scott
2005, n.p) and that they have turned to Marx(ism) to address these
concerns. Ato Quayson resonates with many of those studying race
and racism when he states, I wish to clearly align my own project of
postcolonializing to Marxism as a broad discourse of continuing sig-
nificance to understanding the conditions of the world today. Marxism
provides a particular constellation of concepts to account for the facts in
84 Enakshi Dua
the socio-cultural configurations of the postcolonial world order, with

plenty of room for internal development and debate (1999, 13).
I would suggest that synthesizing Foucault and Marx has led to
theoretical frameworks in the study of race and racism that integrate
three aspects of each theorists epistemology and methodology. First,
drawing on Said, many postcolonial contributions attempt to employ
a nondeterministic method to questions of culture, and see power as
dispersed, while simultaneously acknowledging that culture and ideas
of race are powerfully shaped by material interests (see, for example,
the work of Stoler 1995; Stoler and Cooper 1997; McClintock 1995;
Ong 1999, 2006). Located in these writings is the unique mapping of
the relationship of ideas/culture to colonial and capitalist power. Sec-
ond, and concomitantly, located in the interstices of the workings of
discourse, material relations, and culture in practices of race and rac-
ism are both Foucauldian and Marxist conceptualizations of power.
The practices of racism are shown to be constructed in multiple and
diverse sites of power. Third, drawing on Hall, many postcolonial the-
orists employ both Marx and Foucault to conceptualize subjectivity,
individuality, and agency. While pointing to the role of racialized lan-
guage and discourse in constructing racialized subjectivities, a number
of scholars also point to the importance of agency, especially as it has
been constituted through white subjectivities, and in turn, to the role
of white subjects in constructing hegemonic power (see, for example,
Fanon 2008; Hall 1980; Razack 2002). Thus, thinking through the forces
of the idea of race as a discourse has led a number of those who theo-
rize race and racism to draw on aspects of a Marxist conceptualization
of subjectivities.
In contrast to those genealogies that suggest postcolonial theorists
have been devoid of Marxs legacy, I would argue that many, though
certainly not all, postcolonial theorists retain crucial elements of
Marx(ism) in their theorizing. What emerges is an approach that com-
bines aspects of the Marxist tradition, with its realist epistemology, its
notion of the subject as an agent, and its vision of power as repressive
and working on behalf of dominant material interests, together with
Foucauldian theory, with its employment of power as decentred, its
focus on knowledge and practices, and its nonessentialist epistemol-
ogy for studying identities. Indeed, implicit in the writings of many
critical race theorists is a synthesis of two seemingly incompatible
epistemological frameworks: Marx and Foucault. Such a syncretism of
Foucaults and Marxs concepts of power, identity, and discourse has
allowed us to understand the location of race and racism in Oriental-

ism, colonialism, nationalism, culture, modernity, and whiteness.
Despite the richness of such a syncretism, I would suggest that these
theorists overlooked what seems to me as two crucial questions. First,
how do we integrate an analysis of the centralized working of power
through capital, state, and economy with more decentralized workings
of power? While a Foucauldian concept of power has allowed post-
colonial theorists to offer a more nuanced exploration of the histories
of race and racism, and while many postcolonial theorists continue to
reference the histories of race and racism to the economic imperatives
of colonialism, capitalism, and globalization, the links between the two
are often obscure. Often the emphasis on plurality of power obscures
the relationship of race and racism to capitalism. Orientalism, European
culture, modernity, and whiteness are constituted, in part, through a
dynamic and ever-changing capitalist mode of production, and most
often such connections have not been elaborated. It remains critical to
consider how capital, and capitalism, has shaped the idea of race and
the articulations of racism. Furthermore, what are the theoretical con-
tradictions in conceptualizing power as located in multiple sites? As
we have seen, both Marxs and Foucaults concepts of power can be
understood to be concomitantly tied to conceptualizations of ideology,
resistance, and class subjectivity. How these theorists go about integrat-
ing these radically different concepts of power, on one hand as diffuse
and on the other hand as centralized in the hands of capital and
the capitalist state, remains to be elaborated. Is it sufficient to simply
place the two together in a frame of analysis? The challenge is to elabo-
rate these links without reducing race to class, or racism to economistic
concepts of colonialism and capitalism.
Second, while Marxs and Foucaults concepts of power, discourse,
and ideology are radically different, I would suggest that the concepts
even more difficult to reconcile are those of Marxs and Foucaults con-
cepts of subjectivity. Said and Hall are correct in arguing that although
a Foucauldian concept of subjectivity has allowed scholars to offer a
more nuanced exploration of the relationship of language, culture, and
discourse to the construction of subjectivity, Foucaults epistemology
overly determines subjectivity by erasing the imprint of the individ-
ual, agency, and resistance. But is it sufficient to address this limitation
by combining Foucaults epistemology of the decentred subject with
Marxist notions about the power of dominant groups and resistance?
Notably, for Marx, the bases of agency and resistance do not appear out
86 Enakshi Dua
of nowhere, but are located in the experience of the subject in labouring

and exploitation. Yet, for most of those who theorize racialized sub-
jectivities, the social constructions of subjectivities, identities, agency,
and resistance are not centrally tied to the processes of labouring or
exploitation. The question that remains is: what are the epistemologi-
cal roots for subjectivity, individuality, and agency? Here seems to lie
the main conundrum. I would therefore suggest that thinking through
precisely such questions remains crucial to any reconsideration of the
divide between Marxism and postcolonial/critical race theorizing.
NOTES
1 In addition to these theorists, notably both Bhabha and Spivak have cri-
tiqued Foucaults method. Spivak, in Can the Subaltern Speak (1988), also
criticized Foucault for ignoring the question of ideology. Bhabha, in The
Location of Culture, suggested that Foucaults work should be interrogated
for its disavowal of colonialism, particularly, the legacy of the ways in
which the Wests sense of itself is constituted as progressive, civil, and mod-
ern (1994, 2789).
2 Foucault proposed his concept of discourse as an alternative to Marxs
concept of ideology, which he argued was problematic for three concomi-
tant reasons. First, Foucault maintained that it [ideology] always stands in
virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth
(1984, 61); that ideology is a problematic concept because it implies the
existence of a universal rationality and a universal truth. Foucault rejected
both concepts. Second, Foucault contested Marxs notion of ideology as sim-
ply repressive. Foucault asked, [I]f (capitalist) power were never anything
but repressive, it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one
would be brought to obey it? What makes (capitalist) power hold good,
what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesnt only weigh on us
as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces
pleasures, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It (capitalist power)
needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the
whole social body much more than as a negative instance whose function
is repression (ibid.). Thus, Foucault argued that the notion of ideology as
repression does not allow for an effective understanding of capitalisms
innovative character and its ability to withstand crises. While contesting the
notion of repression, Foucault, in much of his writings, retained the idea
ofthe domination of ideas as the fundamental force in the creation of
the subject. As much of his writing illustrates, the modern subject is

formed through minute and pervasive material practices exercised on the
body through which the modern well-disciplined subject is produced.
Third, Foucault challenged Marxs notion of ideology because the concept
of ideology refers to something of the order of a subject (60).
3 Notably, many other writers have also attempted a synthesis of the writ-
ings of Marx and Foucault. For examples in Marxist theory, see Balibar
(1992) and Barrett (1991); in Foucauldian theory, see Hunt (2004); and in
feminist theory, see Hennessy (1990, 1993) and Phelan (1990).
4 It is important to note that what follows is the history of the ways in which
postcolonial writers have interpreted both Marxs and Foucaults writings.
For a review of the different interpretations of Marxist writings, see Lar-
rain (1983). For a review of different interpretations of Foucaults writing,
see Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983).
5 While some writers have pointed to the importance of Gramsci in Saids
writings (for example, see Moore-Gilbert 1997), most reviews of Saids
work have overlooked his references to both Marx and Marxist thought.
I will argue these references to Marx and Marxism signal crucial insights
into Saids epistemology.
6 Concomitant to Foucaults rejection of the concept of ideology is his
rejection of the Marxist idea that the subject is an ideological construct in
which the true self is repressed (Foucault 1982, 1988). Having rejected the
phenomenological subject, Foucault elaborated a new theory of power, in
which power does not repress the subject but rather creates it (ibid.). For
a more detailed discussion of Foucaults work on subjectivity, see OBrien
(1988) and Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983).
7 It is important to note that this article was published in the same year as
Orientalism. As I will suggest, reading The Problem of Textuality: Two
Exemplary Positions (1978b) in relation to Orientalism (1978a) suggests a
very different interpretation of the epistemological framework that Said
employs in Orientalism.
8 Notably, Janmohamad, Porter, and Gandhi have made similar criticism of
Saids methodology in Orientalism.
9 tienne Balibar (1992) has also suggested that Marxs and Foucaults
epistemologies are more similar than commonly interpreted by social
theorists.
10 Notably, Hall has been engaged in a project of rethinking the concept
of ideology since his early writings in the 1950s. In this work he had
questioned more economistic interpretations of ideology, class, and
identity, offering the concept of articulation as a methodology for a
88 Enakshi Dua
nondeterministic study of ideology. For an elaboration of Halls concept of

articulation, see Hall (1980, 1983).
11 As a result, Hall points out that anti-racist projects focusing on reconstruct-
ing a national culture so those racialized as minorities can find legitimate
positions from which to speak within it are as important as more tradi-
tional forms of class struggle (1997, 404).
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PART II
Revisiting Marx
Introduction to Part II:
Marx and Anti-Racism
In order to disrupt the claim that Marxs vast body of writing does not
offer critical resources with which to study race and racism, this sec-
tion is comprised of two articles that revisit Marxs work in order to
propose alternative, and arguably more accurate, readings. Notably,
such a claim can overlook the number of critical race theorists who
work within a Marxist framework. In this section, we look at two such
theorists. First, Abigail B. Bakan, in a chapter titled Marxism and Anti-
Racism: Rethinking the Politics of Difference, reconsiders the core
concepts of Marx. She stresses that while exploitation has commonly
been read as the sole and singularly most important contribution to
our understanding of social difference, Marx, in fact, also provides
insights into alienation and oppression. The latter, according to Bakan,
often underpin contributions to critical scholarship suggested in critical
race theory. A reading of Marxs core concepts as inclusive of exploi-
tation, alienation, and oppression suggests greater commonality with
critical race theory than has traditionally been assumed.
Second, Himani Bannerji, one of the most notable critical race theorists
working within a Marxist framework, reflects on her extensive body of
work and its implications for future scholarship in an interview-style
essay titled Marxism and Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice: Reflec-
tions and Interpretations. Bannerji, rather uniquely, has published a
substantive body of work, the methodology of which can comfortably
be placed within the paradigms of both Marxism and critical race/
postcolonial theory. Moreover, her work has focused primarily on rac-
ism and anti-racism. In this interview, Bannerji offers insights on the
importance of theoretical tools, such as ideology, the social, and Doro-

thy Smiths notion of the everyday world as problematic, for theoriz-
ing race and racism. Bannerjis work brings an important perspective
to this volume and opens up considerable possibility for advancing
anti-racism as central to an anti-capitalist project.
5Marxism and Anti-Racism: Rethinking
the Politics of Difference
abi g ai l b . b akan
Introduction: Considering Difference, Anti-Racism, and Marxism
An extensive literature on the politics of difference now exists, inspired

largely by the philosophical debates between what has generically come
to be called postmodernism and Marxism. Anti-oppression theorists,
including critical race and postcolonial scholars, have embraced recog-
nition of difference as a theoretical and methodological starting point,
often seen as a welcome corrective to a perceived economic reduction-
ism associated with Marxism (Saul 2003; Solomos and Back 1999). This
chapter1 suggests that the divide between Marxism and anti-racist
theory informed by the politics of difference needs to be reconsidered.
There are, arguably, far more grounds for commonality than may be
apparent or assumed.
Central to this argument is recognition of a certain politics of dif-
ference that exists in Marxs work. The notion of difference as it has
been developed in contemporary debates was not a category employed
by Marx. Certainly, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the
postmodern sense (Anderson 2010, 244), as he clearly attends to a cen-
tralized concept of power. But difference can be understood, shall we
say, differently, to refer to various forms of conflictual social relation-
ships that occur within the totality of capitalist society. In this sense, it
is implicitly integrated into the categories of human suffering identified
in Marxs work. Such difference can be read in three forms of human
suffering, or socially constructed human difference, which operate
together. Exploitation is one of these conflictual social relationships,
but it is commonly seen to be the only one relevant to Marxist analysis;
the other two are alienation and oppression. While difference is often
98 Abigail B. Bakan
presented as chaotic and inexplicable, messy and apparently arbi-

trary (James 2000), reading difference through Marx suggests that this
apparent chaos can be rendered knowable. Difference can be under-
stood not as the result of unchanging relationships that point to frag-
mentation, or as multiple but universally equivalent forms of power,
but as processes of social conflict disciplined by an underlying if
anarchic and competitive order. This competitive order is the product
of a capitalist system that depends upon and reproduces atomization
and separation among human actors. Each process exploitation, alien-
ation, and oppression operates with its own dynamic. Each is histori-
cally specific and shaped by concrete interactions between subjective
relations and objective conditions that contribute to the reproduction
of the capitalist totality. These distinct and interacting processes are
manifest in historically specific social formations. Understanding such
a complex and unstable world requires, as Balibar points out, complex
notions dialectical notions (2002, 75). These core concepts in the
original framework developed by Marx can be seen as a contribution to
what would today be termed the politics of difference.
The focus of investigation here is specifically racialized difference,
understood as ascribed physical or cultural attributes not grounded in
scientific patterns of human differentiation, but expressed in real mate-
rial and institutional practices, experiences, and outcomes (Baum 2006).
Racism is not, of course, the only form of oppression, but coexists with
sexism, homophobia, national oppression, and so on. As Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam have stated, racism often travels in gangs, accompa-
nied by its buddies sexism, classism, and homophobia (1994, 22). Rac-
ism also interacts in specific ways with state borders and accumulation
processes that are intrinsic to capitalism and imperialism. Suggesting
how such core concepts as exploitation, alienation, and oppression in
Marxism can allow us to understand the relationship between racism
and capitalism through a lens of difference, differently understood,
is the focus of this chapter.
This argument restores a philosophical notion of totality, as under-
stood in Hegel and maintained in Marx. The emphasis, however, is
not on totality as purely universalistic, but as a contradictory totality
dependant upon both difference and its opposite, the overcoming of dif-
ference through solidarity. Such a perspective interrogates how really
existing capitalist societies produce and reproduce social relations with
a variety of socially, politically, and economically constructed forms of
difference and a variety of forms of racism. But in the development of
Marxism and Anti-Racism: Rethinking the Politics of Difference 99
what Raya Dunayevskaya has termed the assertion of the revolutionary

subject, anti-racist responses also develop, which attempt to challenge
and overcome certain forms of difference grounded in alienation and
oppression while stressing unity against capital and imperialist power
(Dunayevskaya 1973, 1981; Anderson 1995; Rein 2007).
This chapter attempts to elaborate this understanding of Marxist the-
oretical categories. Alex Callinicos (1982) identifies the tension between
Marxism and the politics of difference, and points to a philosophical
root. The notion of difference as put forward by Hegel is something
essentially both transient and negative, to be overcome by a higher syn-
thesis in a unitary totality. Theorists of difference challenge this prem-
ise, implicitly if not explicitly. Alternatively, theorists such as Foucault
and Deleuze elevate a Nietzschean concept of pluralism. An econo-
mistic reading of Marxist theory that reduces all human suffering to
one specific type of difference, grounded in social relations defined by
processes of exploitation, does appear to minimize or marginalize the
applicability of a Marxist framework. Manifestations of racism that can-
not be explained in these terms, either historically or in present condi-
tions, have tended to become the focus of non-Marxist anti-oppression
theoretical approaches. This chapter attempts to broaden the spectrum
of forms of conflict that stand in dialectical and contradictory relations
within and throughout that totality, and thereby to explain the complex
and variable relations between racism and capitalism.
Considering the Divide
A brief summary of the terrain on both sides of this theoretical divide

is in order. In theorizing racism within the context of contemporary
capitalism and imperialism, much that is written from the perspective
of anti-racist critical theory is informed by the politics of difference
(Dhamoon 2010). Marxism is often acknowledged but circumvented,
dismissed for its apparent tendency to emphasize class relations and
economic materiality to the exclusion of other forms of oppression and
other ways of understanding domination. Cedric J. Robinson (2000)
stresses the inherent incompatibility of a Marxist perspective with a
consistent anti-racist paradigm. Paul Gilroy states that anti-racist
theorists have largely been inspired by the antagonistic approach to
identity pioneered by Michel Foucault (2004, 7). Many have seen this
approach to be more useful than all the economistic theories that mini-
mize the distinctiveness of the resulting racial order and then reduce
100 Abigail B. Bakan
racism to the machinizations of strictly economic life (78). Frances

Henry and Carol Tator trace the origins of the notion of a specifically
cultural politics of difference (1999, 108) to Cornell West (1990). Their
analysis of racism as part of the construction of discourses of domina-
tion in Canada rejects what they see as the simplistic reductionism of
Marxism in favour of an approach inspired by Foucault based on cul-
tural studies (Henry and Tator 2002, 312).
The divide between the paradigms is identified by John Sanbon-
matsu to be historically rooted in 1960s US politics. In this period,
experimental social movements, including the US-based civil rights
movement and Black Power, joined with the New Left and antiwar
movements in an expression of a visceral impulse to tear down the
remaining structures of the colonial world system, capitalism, and
bourgeois property (2004, 212). In this context, Marxism was either
subjected to a new and unrelenting scrutiny or entirely thrust aside, no
longer the primus inter pares that seemed to proffer such a promising
vision of hope for the oppressed (22).
The divide is not, however, definitive. There are prominent Marx-
ists who clearly are also analysts of racism. These include, for exam-
ple, such authors as Robin Blackburn (1997, 1998, 2011), Angela Davis
(1983), W.E.B. Du Bois (1969), C.L.R. James (1989), August Nimtz (2003),
Walter Rodney (1972), and Eric Williams (1944). From the standpoint of
the other side of the debate, a number of anti-racist theorists of differ-
ence identify the importance of a dialogue with at least certain elements
of Marxism, particularly with regard to imperialism. Such a perspective
can be seen, for example, in the works of Carole Boyce Davies (2007),
Ania Loomba (2005), Charles Mills (1997), Sherene Razack (2004),
Nikhil Pal Singh (2004), and Ella Shohat (1993). Then there are those
who attempt to develop analytical tools that bridge the theoretical gap.
David Roediger (1999), while embracing historical materialism, chal-
lenges the universal applicability of a Marxism that minimizes the
experiential dimension of racism. Edward Said (2003) acknowledges
the contributions of certain Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukacs
and Antonio Gramsci, but rejects the general Marxist framework as
Eurocentric and a victim of Orientalism (Jarah 1999). Theodore Allen
(1994, 1997) challenges classical Marxist views from within a Marxist
historical framework, and considers the development of racism and
whiteness as integral to the emergence of the consciousness and divi-
sions in the US working class. Allen attempts to redefine the concept of
class formation in the process.
The theoretical premises regarding the politics of difference premises

that allow for a significant if not universal divide between anti-racist
and Marxist approaches provide the ground for the focus of this
investigation. A central issue is the relationship between race and class.
There is a strand of Marxist intellectual thought regarding racism that
is vulnerable to the charge of economic reductionism, which has char-
acterized postmodern critiques and the politics of difference. For exam-
ple, Robert Miles (1982, 1984, 1987, 1988; Ashe and McGeever 2011),
from a position favourable to Marxism, has counterposed the notion
of labour migration to what he considers to be the misplaced concept
of race, a suggestion that has provoked extensive debate, not least
among anti-racist Marxists who resist such reductionism (Galabuzi
2007). According to Miles, racism, rather than race, is motivated by the
same or similar production forces that generate the accumulation pro-
cess. This emphasis on production is readily applicable to the relations
of some social formations, such as racialized slavery or settler states
with colonial or apartheid institutions. But it tends to minimize the sig-
nificant role of racism in advanced capitalist states, particularly in shap-
ing elite hegemony in periods of formal democracy. Further, insistence
on a direct association between racism and the process of accumulation
minimizesthe complex and often contradictory experiences of racism
across classes in capitalist society. Moreover, there is little doubt that
Marxs work, while prescient regarding the general workings of capi-
talism as a system, was also marked by the dominant Eurocentrism and
Orientalism of his place and time (Anderson 2010). A long legacy of vul-
gar Marxism has engendered particular challenges in moving beyond
the limitations of both the ossified pseudo-Marxism of the Stalinists
and the critical tendencies of modern Marxism (Banaji 2010, 61).
Himani Bannerji acknowledges the problematic tension, insisting on
the integration of Marx and Fanon in explaining the complex interac-
tions and intersections of class and race as well as gender. She calls for
an understanding of difference as more than classificatory diversity,
but as something that encodes social and moral-cultural relations and
forms of ruling, and establishes identities by measuring the distance
between ruler and ruled, all the while constructing knowledge through
power (1995, 30). Similarly, Bruce Baum identifies the partial eclipse
of racialized nationalism in the development of capitalist competition
over the period from 1840 to 1935, a trend identified in its earliest phase
by Marx. However, this pattern has not been linear or universal. Race
remains one of the most important axes of social power and inequality
in the contemporary world Sorting out these issues particularly

the continuing power of race along with class as a source of socially
structured inequality is surely one of the great political challenges of
the twenty-first century (2006, 118, 248).
The Difference in Marx: Exploitation and Beyond
If racism cannot be reduced mechanistically to a system of exploitation,

it is also important not to reduce Marxs conception of exploitation to
a purely economistic category isolated from oppression and alienation.
Resnick and Wolff (1989) have contributed to our understanding of the
relationship of class exploitation to other forms of difference by indicat-
ing that it is not only the process of surplus production that shapes class
relations in the capitalist system, but also the process of surplus distri-
bution. These processes are not only connected in the lived experience
of capitalist social relations, but are also the subject of Marxs Capital.
While much attention has been devoted to volume one where the pro-
cess of surplus production is expounded, it is in volumes two and three
where the essential place of class-based patterns in the reproduction of
capitalist social relations is analysed (Marx 1961, 1977, 1978).
Exploitation for Marx is not specific to capitalism, but characteristic
of all class societies. There is a unique characteristic to capitalist exploi-
tation, however, in terms of its motivating force: the drive for commod-
ity production. This drive generates a historically unique tendency
for units of capital to be self-expanding or to suffer elimination in a
competitive market where all commodities are compared against one
another. Capitalist exploitation compels the universalized, competitive
drive towards extraction of surplus labour from the mass of the popu-
lation. However, exploitation does not necessarily involve surplus pro-
duction, as capitalism also relies on the production of services. This can
take a variety of forms, including the social reproduction of labourers in
mind and body or the production of servicing commodities produced
to ensure that the surplus value embodied in them is realized on the
market. Moreover, capitalist social relations of production can be asso-
ciated with a variety of specific forms of exploitation, including various
forms of free and unfree labour (Bakan 1987; Bakan 2003; Banaji 2010).
Exploitation for Marx, then, is not a relationship between things, in
the sense of crude economic measurement, but a social relationship that
is mediated through the process of production. Exploitation therefore
interacts with various types and forms of human difference, which
serve to define and redefine certain human characteristics. As Resnick

and Wolff argue:
The method of Marxian theory calls for constructing the connecting links
between abstract concepts of class as process and the concrete conjuncture
of social relationships, social conflicts, and social change. This method
does not collapse these links into the simplistic view that such relation-
ships, conflicts, and change are the mere phenomena of classes as the ulti-
mate, last instance or final determinant. (1989, 115)
In the lived conditions of capitalism, economic and extra-economic

forms of surplus extraction work together. Another way to think of this
is that the system of capitalist exploitation and the capitalist state arise
together; they are mutually dependent upon one another. Exploitation
is not the only factor in the continuation and expansion of capitalism.
The processes involved in maintaining a system of capitalist rule, or
what Gramsci referred to as ruling class hegemony, are not only eco-
nomic, but also social and political. The economic drive of capitalism
tends to nullify differences among human beings as commodified
labourers; but these commodified labourers interact in a competitive
relationship for scarce means of reproduction and survival. The hege-
monic state tends to emphasize differences. The competitive individual
is theorized as the universal man, articulated in liberal democra-
cies through the principle of individual rights and freedoms, and the
assertion of the abstract individual as citizen (Bakan and Stasiulis
2005). The state in Western democracies has relied upon atomization as
part of the way in which systemic relations of exploitation, as well as
alienation and oppression, are rendered invisible and reified.
Alienation and oppression are central to the reproduction of capital-
ist exploitation. These are other concepts to explain and understand
dynamic forms of differentiation that were also part of Marxs original
framework; they explain relationships that remain central to the ability
of capitalism to continue to expand and reproduce itself.
Alienation in Marx
Alienation, a concept drawn originally from Hegel and the German

school of idealist philosophy, refers to the general distance of humanity
from its real potential. Unlike exploitation, which is, at least theoreti-
cally, materially measureable in terms of value production, alienation is
not quantifiable. It is, however, no less real in shaping how humans

relate to one another, either in ways that are solidaristic, which resist
alienation, or competitive, which express and exacerbate alienation. For
Marx, all those who live under class society any form of class society
and not only capitalism suffer from alienation. This concept is devel-
oped most clearly in the early writings of Marx and Engels from the
1840s, and later by Marx in the Grundrisse, the notebooks that outline
the foundations of Capital (Marx 1963, 1973a). While there has been sig-
nificant debate regarding the place of Marxs original theory of alien-
ation in his lifelong intellectual development, it is without question that
this theory was formative to his original contribution to contemporary
thought (Althusser 1969; Althusser and Balibar 1970; Lukacs 1971;
Meszaros 1972; Rosdolsky 1977; Thompson 1995).
Marx aimed to challenge the notion that human suffering, and
human alienation specifically, were natural, the inevitable result of the
will of God or of a spiritual being outside the realm of human action.
Distinct from Hegel, Marx considered alienation to have material roots
in concrete historical conditions. The contradictions so starkly visible
in capitalist society the immense gap between potential and reality
indicate the extent of human alienation. For Marx, alienation arises
from four sources: the distance of humanity from the products of
human labour; from the process of labour itself; from fellow human
beings, where antagonisms between classes and, importantly, within
classes are endemic; and from what makes human beings unique, or
what Marx called species being. This can be understood through
the lens of a politics of difference. For Marx, alienation is rooted in the
construction of several levels of contradiction, or difference: between
humanity and nature; between humanity as lived reality in specific
historical conditions and humanity as potential; and between some
humans and others artificially separated and pitted against one another
in the interests of the narrow material interests of an elite minority class
(Cox 1998, 4751).
The centrality of alienation in Marxs thought has received exten-
sive attention in contemporary philosophical explorations. In regard to
debates that address the politics of difference, however, it has received
scant notice. Alienation explains another form of human suffering,
abstractly distinct from exploitation though, in concrete terms, interact-
ing with it. Alienation is expressed in the distance between the sense of
self and the sense of other. This is not reducible to the geographic
space of the workplace, nor to the temporal space of the working day.
Alienation creates a sense of aloneness and isolation, grounded in a

universalized experience of competition with other human beings. It
is not bounded by class or defined by any totalizing laws of motion.
But it remains endemic to class society, and takes an extreme form in
capitalist society in particular. Competitive relations among individu-
als, cultivated by the fetishism of the market and the universalization of
the commodity form, compel a sense of alienation of one human being
from another, without rational or apparent reason.
This approach to the contradictions posed by various forms of differ-
ence can explain not only the sense of distance from the other, but also
the potential for the active creation of its opposite: a movement of soli-
darity and a vision of a new world free of human alienation. The ethos
of individualism in bourgeois or liberal democracies combines with
the lived, alienated experience of isolation and a sense of separateness,
or difference, from other individuals. Alienation, then, is not counter-
posed to exploitation, but is expressed within and through these other
processes. As long as humanity has not achieved its full potential in a
society motivated by the satisfaction of human need what Marx con-
sidered a world of genuine socialism then alienation will continue.
Moreover, alienation affects all classes, so that the oppressor and the
oppressed alike are considered alienated from the human condition a
condition that for Marx is inherently social and collective.
From this perspective, racism can be understood in part as an ide-
ological codification and practical expression of extreme alienation,
affecting not only the oppressed other, but the ascribed white
hegemonic oppressor as well. Balibar similarly describes racism as an
aggravating factor in contributing to a sense of mass insecurity
(2002, 43). Racism divides human beings from other human beings in
a manner that is, as Miles rightly stresses, entirely unfounded scientifi-
cally and, in fact, random, but that appears, or feels, not to be ran-
dom but meaningful. In Gramscis (1971) terms, racism is integrated
into the process of capitalist hegemony so as to appear as common
sense. Racism provides an organized, ostensibly coherent ideology and
an institutionally enforced system of us and them, as if to have a
rational element. Racism therefore serves to offer systematization, at
least to some aspects of alienation. It provides a framework,defined
by certain ascribed characteristics of physical or cultural traits, that
pits members of the exploited against other members of society,
including members of their own class. The impact of racism in low-
ering wages, shaping reserve armies of labour, and dividing labour
markets is widely recognized (Galabuzi 2005; Agocs 2002; Allen 1994,

1997; Leiman [1993] 2010). At the same time, racism blurs class distinc-
tions that might otherwise be more visible (Singh 2004). In this sense,
racism can blur one form of difference, class difference, while cultivat-
ing differences that isolate individuals from potential allies within the
same classes.
Alienation and Hegemonic Whiteness
There is considerable debate in Marxist historiography regarding the

specific nature of the relationship between racism and the rise of capi-
talism. Though a detailed historical elaboration goes beyond the scope
of this discussion, it is not hard to see how a Marxist notion of alien-
ation is useful in explaining difference and racialization as manifest in
globalized processes of the subjugation of entire sections of humanity
through conquest, colonization, and slavery. Moreover, it is a matter of
historical fact that mercantile capitalism and slavery and the ideol-
ogy of scientific racism specifically associated with Atlantic slavery
develop and advance as part of a single, simultaneous process (Baum
2006). For the purposes of this discussion, it is important to note that
(i) the racism of Atlantic slavery was unique in linking the barbaric
trade in human bodies to the capitalist notion of private property, and
(ii) a specific version of racist ideology emerged in this context that
was understood to be compatible with the universal rights of man
on the grounds that certain humans, defined by ascribed racial char-
acteristics, were in fact not to be considered human at all. Slaves, as
chattel, were treated as animals that were bought, sold, and tamed in
a way similar to or worse than the treatment of cattle or horses (Black-
burn 1997). This ideological expression of extreme inhumanity legiti-
mated the mass brutality and abuse meted out to those of black skin
and African origin, a pattern that was typical during the period of the
dominance in the Americas of the plantation slave system of produc-
tion, in full ascendance between 1640 and 1715, and continued in the
US south at least until the Civil War (186165). The English and French
colonies in particular saw the construction of intensive systems of
exploitation [based on] newly elaborated social distinctions and
racial identities (311).
With the dehumanization of blackness came the ascendancy of
the white elite as defined by race and exempt from the exploita-
tion and oppression experienced by the enslaved. This separation, or
construction of difference, a component in the making of the European

ruling class, expressed the development of a culture, ideology, and
mythology of whiteness as part of the origins of capitalist expansion
in Europe and throughout the Americas (Ignatiev 1995; Levine-Rasky
2000; Razack 2002; Baum 2006). Whiteness, though apparently neutral,
became defined and generalized at the same time as the development
of the other in racialized slavery. Peter Fryer (1984) traces the devel-
opment of racism as a scientifically justified ideology specifically in
the oral tradition and diaries of the plantocracy of the British Carib-
bean from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Racism emerged
as one form of systematizing alienation and as a central component of
capitalist expansion, as part of a single historical process.
Allen (1994, 1997) identifies the use of whiteness as a means to
develop a system of social control in the US antebellum south. Those
who could not become employers or even long-term leaseholders could
be recruited in the interests of social control to the promoted status
of the white race. This was an elite response specifically to threat-
ened unity between bond-labourers and the free poor. The construction
of whiteness in the US south presents a graphic historical example of
the emergence of hegemonic whiteness and its interaction with both
exploitation and gender oppression in the context of alienation.
This arrangement was implemented by conferring on the poor European-

Americans a set of white-skin privileges, privileges that did not require
their promotion to the class of property owners. Such were the civil rights
to possess arms, to plead and testify in legal proceedings, and to move
about freely with the presumption of liberty. Thus, rights that were the
birthright of every man in England were passed off as privileges in Amer-
ica, but privileges that, by the principle of racial oppression, necessarily
excluded any person, free or bond, of any perceptible degree of African
ancestry (the one-drop rule).
Among these white race rights was the right to marry. (The dimin-
ishing proportion of European-American bond-laborers, being bound for
a limited term of years, had marriage as a prospective right.) This right,
however, was denied to the African-American hereditary bond-laborers
who, in the eighteenth century, became the main labor force in the plan-
tation colonies. The denial of coverture to African-American females
contributed to the creation of the absolutely unique American form of male
supremacism, the white-male privilege of any European-American male to
assume familiarity with any African-American woman or girl. Men of the
employing classes have customarily always exercised this privilege with

regard to women of the laboring classes. What the white race did that
was unique was to confer that privilege on an entire set of laboring-class
men over the women of another set of laboring people, and underwrote
the privilege by making it a capital offense for any African-American man
to raise his hand against any white man. (Scott and Meyerson 1998, n.p.)
The central significance of slavery in the origins of capitalism in the

United States cannot be separated from the centrality and legacy of
racism. W.E.B. Du Bois put the case clearly, writing in 1946:
Despite desperate efforts to rewrite and distort this history, a few of us

must recall that in 1776, when three million white Americans proclaimed
equality of all men, they were at that very moment holding five hundred
thousand black folk in slavery and classifying them not even as ani-
mals but real estate. Their prosperity had been built on two centuries of
this slavery and the independence which they demanded was mainly free-
dom to pursue this exploitation of men in raw materials and trade. (Foner
1970, 1923)
Racism, well beyond the period of Atlantic slavery, has proven to be

an immensely adaptive source of division, even in the most demo-
cratic phase of capitalist development (Singh 2004). Specifically, the
centrality of the slave trade in the original expansion of capitalism and
racism as a defining element of how really existing capitalism has
developed are important in terms of understanding post-slavery cul-
tures of hegemonic whiteness. Racism as a means of codifying and, in
Gramscis terms, making sense of alienation takes varied and diverse
forms in specific moments of capitalist accumulation, not least in colo-
nial and imperialist occupation. Frantz Fanons (1963) contributions
can be understood to be pivotal to our understanding of this process,
though he does not operate in a self-consciously or consistent Marxist
framework. In graphic detail, Fanon articulates the experience of deep
alienation of the colonized, affecting the bodies, thoughts, and feelings
of life under imperialist military, political, economic, and social occupa-
tion. This could equally be applied to the experiences of numerous pop-
ulations that have been subject to conquest and oppression, the focus of
many authors influenced by the politics of difference and postcolonial
studies (Loomba 2005).
However, specific racialized relationships within and between classes

can also be more refined than the broad notion of hegemonic white-
ness serves to explain. The complex adjustments of the US ruling class,
for example, to resistance to overt racism through limited accommo-
dation to equality, while maintaining systemic oppression, is traced in
detail by Nikhil Pal Singh (2004). If alienation is the background music,
the specific performances on the stage need to be viewed through a
more focused lens. Here, a Marxist concept of oppression can prove
illuminative.
Marx on Oppression
Marxs ideas regarding exploitation have been amply addressed and

debated in Marxist literature. And his writings on alienation are well
known in Marxist circles, if not normally considered in terms of their
relevance to anti-racist theorization. Far less attention, however, has
been given to Marxs views regarding processes of oppression. Oppres-
sion is the least complete in its theorization of all the forms of human
relations studied by Marx. There is no doubt that neither Marx nor his
lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels, was free of certain prejudices
of his time. Given that their lives and experiences predated univer-
sal suffrage and the social movements against oppression that have
contributed to the common sense of the Left today, this should not be
surprising. The point emphasized here, however, is that significant ele-
ments of an anti-oppression framework were nonetheless suggested in
the method developed by Marx. This framework is not produced in
a single work, but is exemplified in various historical and analytical
writings addressing slavery in the United States, the Irish question, the
Jewish question, women and the family, and issues such as poverty and
suicide (Marx 1972; Anderson 1999; Bakan 2004).
A detailed investigation of Marxs writings from the perspective of a
theory of oppression cannot be accomplished in this limited discussion.
Generally, however, for Marx oppression includes both ideological and
material elements. It is also historically specific, not subject to gen-
eral, common laws of motion. Like alienation, and unlike exploitation,
it defies quantification; but unlike alienation, and like exploitation,
it is a socially concrete category that can only be studied and under-
stood in historically specific conditions. Oppression in Marx can be
described to take two distinct forms: (i) class oppression, and (ii) the
specific oppression of sections of classes, or what we may call special

oppression. Class oppression is the lived form of the experiences of the
exploited, but can include those who are not directly exploited, such
as the unemployed. Marx often referred, for example, to the oppressed
classes meaning the proletariat, the unemployed, the peasantry, share-
croppers, slaves, serfs, and so on. What can be called special oppres-
sion divides the working class or any other oppressed class against
itself, and in turn obscures class differences by creating new lines of
demarcation that are used as means of subordination. Special oppres-
sion is particularly necessary where there is a threat of unity among
the oppressed classes against the hegemonic bloc. Special oppression
forces a sense of competition among the workers and thereby weakens
their collective ability to resist. It is particularly important in conditions
of advanced capitalist society, where it works against the threatened
universality of experience imposed by the system. Capitalist soci-
etys relations of production, of exploitation and the drive for profit,
by treating workers as common and unitary in the service of supply-
ing commodified labour power, threaten to reduce difference and forge
bonds of solidarity.
Basic contradictory tendencies regarding oppression, then, are found
within capitalism. Capitalism tends to both divide workers on the
grounds of special oppression within the class and, at the same time,
press them into a common experience of oppression as a class, where
their interests are shared. Workers are divided by special oppres-
sion, but this division also serves to hide, or reify, the lived real-
ity of each individual, intensifying alienation but also rendering it
apparently rational.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx elaborates a distinction between
class oppression based on the common experiences of the working class,
which provides the basis for the formation of a class in itself, and the
act of resisting class oppression, which depends upon the conscious self-
emancipation of the working class or becoming a class for itself. His
argument, developed as a polemic challenging the views of his contem-
porary Proudhon, is in the context of defending the rights of workers to
unite in early forms of trade union associations or combinations. Marx
saw the experience of collective workplace organization as an exercise
in class organization and the development of collective class conscious-
ness, shaped through its conflict with capital. He saw this as a limited
and defensive form of resistance, but also as a necessary and valuable
step beyond efforts merely to survive or to resist as individuals rather
than collectively. Thus, [e]conomic conditions had first transformed

the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination
of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common inter-
ests. The mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet
for itself. Marx notes the phenomenon of class oppression, a distinct
category from exploitation, and its particular form in capitalist soci-
ety. He notes that [a]n oppressed class is the vital condition for every
society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the
oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society
Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is
the revolutionary class itself (1973b, 1734).
Class oppression compels the drawing together of workers in com-
mon conditions of labour as the system expands. It is organized through
the process of labour extraction, or exploitation, but it entails the vast
realm of experiences that take place both in the workplace and away
from it. Limited access to employment, poor housing, limited access
to schools and medical care, ideologies of elitism, and so forth can all
be seen today as aspects of class oppression. The penetration of ruling
class ideology as part of the training and socialization of the working
class is also a feature of class oppression. In The German Ideology, Marx
famously wrote that the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the
ruling class. It is worth reconsidering this view in the context of racist
ideology (1970, 64).
Racism, Class Oppression, and Special Oppression
As the capitalist system expanded, a tendency to universalize class

oppression developed. For a period of time during the industrial
expansion in Europe and North America, this development mani-
fested itself in a tendency to treat all workers like slaves rather than
as free labourers. Marx identifies the connection with slavery in the
ideas of some of the most competitive sections of the capitalist ruling
classes. The work of supervision and management is dependent upon
the antithesis between labour and capital. And it is justified, at least in
part, by reliance on the racist ideology and practices learned by the rul-
ing class in the period of slavery. In the third volume of Capital, Marx
addresses this reliance by citing a specific example to demonstrate
how the US ruling class learned the importance of class servitude, or
class oppression, from plantation slavery. Marx sarcastically cites one
particular champion of slavery in the United States, a lawyer named
OConnor, at a meeting held in New York on December 19, 1859, under

the slogan Justice for the South. Quoting Mr. OConnor, Marx indi-
cates how the US capitalist class learned the benefits of wage labour, as
the wage-labourer, like the slave, must have a master who puts him to
work and rules over him (1978, 385).
The condition of class oppression is not, however, one-dimensional.
The commonality of experience as a class is contradicted by the dif-
ferentiation imposed by special oppression, where designated groups
within and across classes identified by ascribed characteristics are sub-
jected to specific discriminatory practices. Common class oppression is
also affected by the generalized condition of alienation, which provides
the background to why sections of the oppressed classes are receptive
to racist and other oppressive ideas and practices. The notion of divide
and rule was originally used by the Roman emperor Tiberius in the
first century AD, but has proven very useful as a guiding principle for
subsequent ruling classes (Callinicos 1993, 39). In an atmosphere of
competition, the most successful sections of the bourgeoisie learn to
rule by divide and conquer tactics, where special oppression serves to
hide common oppression as a class. Some forms of special oppression
precede capitalist development, the oldest and most enduring being
the oppression of women.
Racial oppression has proven to be a very effective, and adapt-
able, mechanism for advancing capitalist interests. The core features
of the racist ideology that defined the accumulation of capital dur-
ing the period of Atlantic slavery and marked the rise of the capital-
ist system on a global scale are consistent with the ruling class project
of the industrial phase of capitalist accumulation. This is not to suggest
that racism has not evolved and changed. However, the elements of
the racism of slavery, the racism of colonialism, the racism of immi-
gration controls, and the racism of post-9/11 clashes of civilizations
bear more similarities than differences (Alexander 1987; Bakan 2005).
Ascribed characteristics of lower status, considered to be universal to
a subset of humanity on the basis of characteristics of birth, whether
part of biology or culture associated with land of origin, have defined
racialized ideologies over various historical periods. Though the bio-
logical basis of race has been repeatedly demonstrated to be an ideo-
logical construct without scientific basis, the real, lived experience of
overt and systemic discrimination grounded in the idea of race, and the
commitment to racism, is no less incontrovertible.
The twofold nature of oppression for Marx is related to the contradic-

tory relations associated with exploitation. Capitalism in its dynamic
industrial form unites the working class in common labour removed
from sources of subsistence other than the wage economy; but it also
compels competition among workers. This contradictory, dialectical
pattern is described by Marx in his writings on the Irish question (1971).
Marx stresses the interplay between capitalist class interests and the
use of anti-Irish racism to divide the working class. Focusing on what
we term special oppression, Marx identifies how the ideology of anti-
Irish prejudice projected an artificial cross-class identity between Brit-
ish workers and the British imperialist state (Callinicos 1993, 346). In
a letter written on 9 April 1870 regarding the relations of Irish oppres-
sion to British capitalism, Marx summarizes how oppression, here rac-
ist oppression in particular, in combination with nationalism, operates
within the capitalist system.
Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working

class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish pro-
letarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a com-
petitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he
feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a
tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus
strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social
and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the
same as that of the poor whites to the niggers in the former slave
states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own
money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid
tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive
and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all
the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret
of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the
secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully
aware of it. (1975, n.p.)
The tendency to divide workers in competitive relations with one

another takes the form of differential access to wages and labour rights,
and the selective offering of a psychological wage (Du Bois 1969). It
also affects the lives of workers away from the immediate site of exploi-
tation, or the workplace, regarding the distribution of the surplus.
Discrimination in access to the distribution of the social wage affecting

services such as medical care, public education, the justice system, and
so on are similarly affected by special oppression.
Oppression is fluid, operating in part to render the exploitation
process opaque, reified, or fetishized, hiding the reality of the ruling
classs minority and exploitative status (Lukacs 1971, 83222). It is also
a means through which certain sections among the oppressor group
within the working class can explain their sense of alienation from oth-
ers, who are more like them than different, but with whom they feel a
sense of competition and distance. Through the perpetuation of con-
structed ideological and institutional mechanisms of identifying with
the ruling class, one section of the exploited can come to believe that
they are in fact superior to another section of workers.
Privilege Reconsidered: Racism, Alienation,

and Special Oppression
The relationship of oppression to privilege can be considered in this

light. The notion of white privilege, or white supremacy, needs to be
considered historically as a feature of specific and dynamic relation-
ships. The changing nature of privilege does not mean that it is unreal
or purely ephemeral to the social structures of exploitation. While the
privileges of the oppressor class are structured into the process of
accumulation and enforced by alienation and oppression, the relative
privileges meted out to sections of the oppressed classes are contin-
gent. A given form of oppression may be cultivated by the exploiting
class, including through the state, to encourage competition among the
workers. Members of the working class can and do embrace oppres-
sive ideologies and practices against others of their own class, not in
an instrumental manner, but because they come to believe and support
such views. At the same time, these ideas can be challenged and are
often contradicted by experiences of common class oppression. There
are no general, abstract laws of motion about these processes; they need
to be considered in specific historical contexts.
For example, the construction of working class whiteness as privi-
lege was in some historical circumstances the product of considerable
effort on the part of sections of the ruling class. Noel Ignatiev describes
the original, spontaneous identification of poor Irish immigrants with
the American black population in the United States. This was met by a
conscious and sustained effort on the part of elite interests to divide the
Irish-American working class and to win a majority of Irish-Americans

of all classes to identify with white society. The ideological construction
of a culture of racism defined by hegemonic whiteness can be traced
historically.
What did it mean to the Irish to become white in America? It did not mean
that they all became rich, or even middle-class (however that is defined);
to this day there are plenty of poor Irish To Irish laborers, to become
white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of
being sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres
instead of being confined to certain work; to Irish entrepreneurs, it meant
that they could function outside of a segregated market. To both of these
groups it meant that they were citizens of a democratic republic, with
the right to elect and be elected, to be tried by a jury of their peers, to
live wherever they could afford, and to spend, without racially imposed
restrictions, whatever money they managed to acquire. In becoming white
the Irish ceased to be Green. (1995, 23)
In another US example, evidence suggests that in the tobacco planta-

tions of colonial Virginia the plantocracy first relied primarily on the
backs of English indentured servants, not African slaves (Fields 1990,
102). A shortage of labour attracted the interests of planters to import
labourers from Africa; an abundance of land was available immediately
if labourers escaped, resulting in planters bonding labour to the land.
The relationship of white to black labourers was altered as historical
conditions changed. A similar pattern of labour recruitment occurred
in the English Caribbean, moving from European white indentured
labour to African black slavery (Williams 1944).
How whiteness and blackness impact on labour force development
in any given capitalist society cannot be discerned by assuming that
inexorable laws of motion are determinate. Racial oppression, more-
over, is also affected by and affects other forms of oppression based
on nationality or gender, for example (Sugiman 2001). In a study of
white and black workers in the southern United States, Al Szymanski
found that the higher the black earnings relative to white, the higher
the white earnings relative to other whites in other states (1976, 409).
White workers earning power was enhanced by greater organization
on the part of black workers. In such cases, the psychological wage, or
ideology of privilege, operates as a substitute for a loss of, rather than a
justification for and increase in, material gain.
The sense of privilege cultivated among one section of workers over

another may or may not be accompanied by material benefit, and the
nature of that material benefit is variable. Individuals in the oppres-
sor group can and do develop a sense of superiority over other work-
ers. But this sense of superiority is not the only sentiment. Maintaining
that sense of superiority is part of how oppression operates in capitalist
society and part of the contested terrain in the battle for ruling class
hegemony. The sense of superiority or privilege is contradicted by the
experience of common class oppression. This is a subjective question,
about the development of a class for itself, not one that is the product
of linear or universal laws. There are contradictory dynamics that vary
historically and cannot be reduced to a single, consistent pattern, even
among capitalist societies.
This sense of privilege over another human being, however, can be
and often is propped up by certain levels of social or political advan-
tage. Such advantages are also contingent, determined not by the work-
ing class or other oppressed classes, but by those who have access to
the surplus labour extracted from the working class as whole. Differ-
ential access to economic, political, and social rights, and differential
experiences of subordination and exclusion, are endemic to processes
of modern capitalism. Such patterns of systemic discrimination have
been extensively documented and indicate the scope of oppression
(Agocs 2002).
Conclusion: Extending the Dialogue
This chapter has suggested that there is room to extend a dialogue

between anti-racist theory grounded in the politics of difference and
Marxism. It has been further suggested that concepts of exploitation,
alienation, and oppression, rooted in Marxs original framework, can
be useful in providing some common theoretical notions, and, more-
over, in establishing ways of framing interconnected processes in really
existing capitalism. Exploitation refers to social relations that develop
and are reproduced in the process of the economic extraction of sur-
plus. Alienation refers to the general distancing of human beings from
what makes them in fact human. Oppression can be seen to operate
in two distinct ways, as class oppression and as special oppression.
Oppression is variable and contingent; it is, however, necessary to the
reproduction of the social relations of capitalism.
Oppression is distinct from both exploitation and alienation; it is part

of how any given, historically specific class society operates how the
ruling class rules and perpetuates divisions among those it rules over.
It is variable and subject to specific conditions, options, and restraints
that are historically concrete. As part of the cultural, legal, and social
fabric of society, oppression operates with exploitation and can express
specific forms in which exploitation concretely occurs.
Oppression also operates with alienation, often as the concrete expres-
sion of any given form of alienation at a specific moment. However, when
oppression occurs, only the dominated are oppressed; the oppressor does
not suffer in the same way as the oppressed and may benefit in various
ways from the act of oppressing the other. But, again, the nature of the
benefit needs to be studied historically. It may be the appearance of
benefit, a feature of the reification of human relations, but in fact actu-
ally hide a material deficit or loss. Both oppressor and oppressed suf-
fer alienation, but the condition of oppression ensures that they do not
experience their alienation as a common human condition. Rather, the
experience of the alienation of the oppressor and the alienation of the
oppressed is reinforced, codified, rendered rational, and reified, as if to
constitute a permanent condition of separation and distance.
Racism is a set of ideas and institutional practices that assign divisions
of superiority/inferiority according to an ascribed and constructed set
of biological and/or cultural characteristics that are falsely considered
to be inherent and permanent within the human subsets. Racism is
variable and adaptable, but has proven to be remarkably valuable to
capitalism and imperialist interests over centuries. Specific categories
suggested here within this framework are racism as a codification of
alienation, where alienation is articulated as hegemonic whiteness;
racism as special oppression; and racial privilege as a historically con-
crete category that needs to be placed in specific lived contexts. This
approach is suggested as a contribution to a dialogue between anti-
racist perspectives informed by the politics of difference and Marxism.
While extending such a dialogue is challenging, there are, perhaps,
risks involved in an alternative path of conflict avoidance. Anti-racist
theorists may in fact be suggesting a focus on racism as alienation and
oppression, while Marxists focus on the effect of racism on the process
of exploitation. A renewed dialogue may offer the promise of a creative
synthesis and an emergence of strengthened strategic alliances against
racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
NOTE
1 This chapter is substantially based on the following article: Abigail B.

Bakan, Marxism and Anti-Racism: Rethinking the Politics of Difference,
Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 20, no. 2
(April 2008), 23856. Thanks to Colin Barker, Paul Kellogg, Leo Panitch, and
Alan Sears for comments on various earlier versions.
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Introduction to Chapter 6: Marxism
and Anti-Racism: Reflections
and Interpretations
Himani Bannerji is one of the earliest critical theorists in Canada and

internationally to turn her attention systematically to anti-racism, inte-
grating Marxist and feminist theory as foundational to the project. In
addition to her substantive body of literary works, she has published
an influential and substantial corpus of writings over several decades,
including Introducing Racism: Notes Toward an Anti-Racist Femi-
nism (1987); Writing on the Wall: Essays on Culture and Politics (1993);
Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (1995);
The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and
Gender (2000); and Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy
and Colonialism (2001). The interview format for the following essay
engages this work as a unique contribution to the volume.
Bannerjis writing holds singular importance in anti-racist theorizing.
Her writings are renowned for her consistent emphasis on intersection-
ality, drawing connections that theorize state, class, race, and gender.
Further, her deployment of Marxist epistemology makes her writ-
ings uniquely placed in anti-racist thought and in crossing the divide
addressed in this volume. As she states in Thinking Through, In this,
as every essay shows, my debt to Marxs theories of capital, class and
ideology, social forms and political content, is incalculable (1995, 14).
Notably, as Bannerji explores issues such as colonial discourse, racism,
whiteness, identity, and nationalism, often drawing on the ideas of a
number of anti-racist theorists such as Fanon, Said, Goldberg, and Fou-
cault, she consistently reads these issues and writers through Marxs
epistemological frame. Her work thus offers important parallels with
those who employ a more Foucauldian framework. At the same time,
Bannerjis corpus of writings offers important ways of thinking with
and through Marx to theorize race and racism.
In Introducing Racism, Bannerji begins with a discussion of the

process by which non-white women are silenced, raising the issue
of whiteness that is central to anti-racist theorizing. However, unlike
many critical race theorists, Bannerji goes on to locate the processes of
whiteness and othering in the context of Marxs concepts of ideology,
social relations, and capitalism. While chiding contemporary feminist
and Marxist theorists for not illustrating how the organization of race
(or racism) is a fundamental way of forming class in Canada ([1987]
1995, 51), she insists on the utility of Marxs contribution as an attempt
to create a method of social analysis in which the different social
moments can retain both their specificity and reveal their implications
and constitutive relation to all other specific social relations (ibid.).
In her writings, Bannerji elaborates a unique interpretation of Marxs
method, one that is termed reflexive Marxism in Thinking Through
(1995, 18). Again challenging many contemporary versions of Marx-
ism, Bannerji argues that such a reflexive Marxism is certainly capable
of including an analysis of racism. However, resonating the arguments
of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, she argues that such inclusion shifts the
fulcrum of questioning: [T]he problem before us then ceases to be the
overthrow of a simple regime of domination but rather a study of
construction of identities in a history and social organization of ruling
and their deconstruction and reconstruction in an oppositional con-
text (28).
Crucial for Bannerjis reflexive Marxism are several key aspects of
Marxs writings. First, she places importance on the concept of subjec-
tivity, most clearly articulated in the Eighteenth Brumaire, the Grundrisse,
and Capital, where Marx focuses on how people as historical subjects
or agents make their own history though not under conditions of
their own choosing (Bannerji 1995, 19). She suggests that an analysis
of subjectivity needs to be placed with Marxs concept of mediation,
displayed and discussed in Capital as well as in Grundrisse, because
[t]he sole purpose of the concept is to capture the dynamic, showing
how social relations and forms come into being in and through each
other (83). By pointing to Marxs writings regarding subjectivity and
mediation, Bannerji offers an interpretation of Marx that is nondeter-
ministic in studying social relations. Thus, a reflexive Marxism allows
one to challenge binary or oppositional relations of concepts (82).
This approach leads Bannerji to offer an alternative reading of Marxs
concept of ideology, a second key point of emphasis. Similar to Said
and Hall, Bannerji, in Introducing Racism, points to the importance
of Gramscis notion of hegemony ([1987] 1995, 51). This allows her, in

Inventing Subjects, to place Marxs notions of subjectivity and mediation
in the contexts of culture and ideology.
For him the project consists of an introjective and constitutive theorizing

of the two moments of the self or consciousness as being in and of the
world This can only be done in relation to our world, namely, to the
history and social organization of capital and class inclusive of colonial-
ism, slavery and imperialism. In doing so we bring together the Grams-
cian use of the concepts of hegemony particularly seeking to address
everyday life, experience and culture, with Marxist concepts of class
and ideology, and Marxs historical and organizational understanding of
capital. (2001, 53)
While drawing on Gramsci, Bannerji notably puts forward an alter-

native, and original, reading of Marxs concept of ideology. She dis-
cusses the ways in which racism works as an ideology throughout her
writings, but perhaps the clearest exposition of her interpretation of
ideology is found in Inventing Subjects, where she turns her attention
to the study of colonial texts. Bannerji argues that, for Marx, ideology
is not just about the ruling ideas of an age or of a ruling class, but
also how these ideas are implicated forms and products of social rela-
tions necessary for ruling (56). She thus illustrates the ways in which
colonial texts operate epistemologically to erase the social through the
adoption of a metaphysical mode of occlusiveness, displacement, and
objectification. Bannerji points out that her analysis of colonial texts is
exactly what is named as ideology by Marx (56), thereby pointing to
the relevance of Marxs ideas for such a historiography.
In understanding how ideas are implicated forms and products of
social relations necessary for ruling in other words, the relationship
between agency, subjectivity, and ideology Bannerji explicitly turns
to the theoretical frameworks of Dorothy Smith. In The Dark Side of the
Nation, while discussing multiculturalism, Bannerji notes the impor-
tance of Smiths (1990) conception of everyday life, of actual living
subjects for theorizing ideology. Such an emphasis allows Smith to
conceptualize the ideological or a ruling category as a discursive
and practical category for mediating and augmenting the ruling rela-
tions (Bannerji 2000, 11). In Inventing Subjects, Bannerji suggests that
Marxs concept of ideology is expanded on by Smith, whose own
feminist theorization treats ideology as fundamentally a problem of
epistemological method rather than a body of false or distorted ideas

(2001, 23). This approach, Bannerji points out, when queried on the
ground of everyday life, amount[s] to a categorical and segregated
organization of ruling, involving specific semiotic systems (57). Ban-
nerji highlights Smiths insistence on (i)somorphic relations of ruling,
which necessarily invert[s] the actual lived subject/object relations (57).
As this introduction illustrates, many of the above theoretical tools
are embedded in Bannerjis writing. The following chapter is based
on an interview-style conversation with Bannerji in which, for the first
time, she expands on her use of ideology, the importance of Dorothy
Smiths writings, and intersectionality, specifically in the context of
theorizing anti-racism.
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Smith, Dorothy. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology
of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
6Marxism and Anti-Racism in Theory and
Practice: Reflections and Interpretations
h iman i b an n e rji
On Marxism, Feminism, and Anti-Racism
enakshi dua (ed) and abigail b. bakan (ab):

You have said that you have three political and intellectual commit-
ments: as a Marxist, a feminist, and an anti-racist.1 And you have com-
mented that these political and analytical commitments are stated
separately due to a lack of integrative language in the intellectual and
political terrains in which we live. Could you describe the intellectual
and political processes that have contributed to such theoretical separa-
tions and how you see their linkages?
himani bannerji (hb):

I will answer by reflecting on the framework I use to understand the
complex world around me that I feel, see, experience, and act in. I see
social relations and organizations in our world as pivotal: they are
unequal social relations and institutions of power and exploitation of
labour regarding survival and the enjoyment of lifes amenities. These
relations simultaneously extend to a sense of social entitlement or the
lack of it, and influence our participation in the production of our polit-
ical and cultural life. We have referred to these ensembles of unequal
social relations as the concepts of class, patriarchy, and racialization,
which interconstitute each other.
Though appearing to be highly specific, the social relations are not
stand-alone structures or forms, like buildings that are connected
through roads they are complexly involved social formations. If the
building metaphor can be sustained, these social relations are like the
ingredients in each brick that make up the house. They are embedded
128 Himani Bannerji
in the design of the whole society that we live in. They in-form the
overall social formation, what Marx called the mode of production,
shaping and modifying specific life forms in other words our social
habitat. While we live in this habitat, it also lives in us, expressing the
dominant ethos. People and their social life are both internal and exter-
nal to each other; they cannot be separated out as self-contained rela-
tions and forms. By extending my analogy, think of the colours of these
bricks. Once we mix the colours, for example yellow with blue, we pro-
duce green. Once they are mixed, however, once the colour is green, we
cannot pull out the blue from the yellow thus patriarchy or gender
from race and class. This fusion can only be known through a critical
epistemology, but it cannot be experienced or inhabited as segmented
realities of class, patriarchy, or racialization. Instead these realities are
the formative and expressive modes of how we accomplish or carry
on our social being. They are inseparable in our consciousness and
actions as existential modes, unless they are critically and analytically
scrutinized in the examination of the social organizations, local and
extra-local, of which we are a part.
To characterize our social being in a fragmentary fashion, indepen-
dent of the overall social organization, and to try to identify with only
one set of relations and their mediating devices of consciousness is
wrong in my view. That is what we do when we take one set of social
relations and fix or reify them as our primary identifier. This is a syn-
ecdochical attempt to make an independent whole out of a part of our
social existence, daily practices, and consciousness. It is a kind of freez-
ing, a rigidification of our consciousness, and a false representation of
our daily life or culture and politics. It is a reification that is implied in
the conventional usage of what we call identity.
Words are used in such different ways that I want to clarify what
I mean by a fixed identity. What is commonly meant by identity, as
in identity politics, has typifying features, as in Webers notion of
the ideal type. It is a reified and rarified notion, a contra-dynamic
notion. Peoples actual lived experiences are very different qualitati-
tively. To grasp the actuality of our social being and experiences, we
need to move away from this type of fixed identity. In the widest sense
an identity should encompass not only what I am at any point in
time in terms of my cultural self-naming, but also what I do. What
I am is not a fixed thing it lies in a historic social time, and it changes
depending on the changing reality.
Marxism and Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice 129
My being, or anyones being, is bound up with this overall being in

and of the social in which we live. Whatever helps me to understand
that complexity of being, which is a social and not an empty being,
in continuous and dynamic relations, in responsive and creative rela-
tions and actions, and in grasping the varied ways of thinking, know-
ing, and explaining, is what matters. These methods and modes of
knowledge and inquiry and their transmission to others have to
take place within a language of analytic theory. In theoretical terms,
we have called them Marxism, feminism, and anti-racism. They are not
my identity or fixed properties of my being in the world, but rather my
ways of understanding the social relations that build our world. I live
in that world and it lives inside me, and it shaped my consciousness,
which is in a communicative relation with others.
Of course after many years, definite ways of knowing, of analysis or
critique, become an essential part of what John Berger calls our ways
of seeing. You may loosely bring in these critical epistemological and
political features in identifying me, for convenience, but these identi-
ties so-called exceed any originary group belonging of whatever kind.
And these so-called identities of being feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist
are mutually constitutive and dynamic. They are not ways of being
in a static ahistorical and asocial way, but rather defined collectivity.
Depending on how we understand them, they indicate ways of acting
in the world and changing it in the process. If they are identities, then,
they are identities of becoming, involving active participation and
critique. I have spoken about this identity of becoming in my essays in
The Writing on the Wall and Thinking Through.2
You have asked me how this fragmented perception of the social
comes about, this perception that breaks up the social whole into dis-
tinct strands of social relations and forms of consciousness such as
race or gender or class. These strands are then made to inter-
sect, or are added to each other. This amounts to putting up walls
in the social space, thus creating separate, self-contained spheres and
then artificially joining them. This is the essence of liberal thought,
which is based on atomistic and positivist premises that provide aggre-
gative plurality. The reason for such separations lies in the failure to
go beyond phenomenal appearances in empiricism, which should
be distinguished from empirical inquiries. This empiricism is con-
nected with taxonomic and fixating impulses consisting of details that
are accommodative or responsive to history and social organization.
They are disparate facts, and as such they do not help us to grasp the
nature of the overall social formation and accompanying forms of
130 Himani Bannerji
consciousness. My approach is not one of rejection of the empirical

reality or science. By science, I mean the activities of the enquiring
spirit that promote critical insight. In that sense history, for example,
is a scientific endeavour. I am alluding instead to a method of reifi-
cation based on natural sciences, motivated by an urge for unchang-
ing laws and facts about a dynamic entity called society. This is
how laws of nature were promulgated from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries onwards to serve as a methodological template
for social understanding. Seeking the dynamism and the fluidity of
social reality was considered a metaphysical and non-scientific pursuit,
seen as romanticism acceptable in poetic writing. But we see how in
Marxs historical materialist epistemology, in his critique of ideology in
The German Ideology (Part I),3 for example, the organization of a society
with its historical, social, and cultural realities is not understandable
through crude quantification and methods of accounting, such as those
favoured by empiricism and liberal thought.
So, in understanding the source of fragmentation as outlined above,
I find little difficulty in putting together a theoretical framework of
Marxist anti-racist feminism. In other words, I do not experience
difficulty in finding a common ground in the social, relational, anti-
ideological epistemology articulated by Marxism, which incorporates
class, gender, and racialization. The point of departure for my critique
is not any ism, any creed of thought, but rather a method of enquiry
and analysis, namely, historical materialism, which provides a compre-
hensive understanding of the social with all its contradictions and its
protean and prolific nature. The social in its overall determinations and
mediations both understood here in the sense they are discussed by
Raymond Williams, involving social relations, institutions, organiza-
tions, and forms of consciousness4 compels us to seek methods of
inquiry and critique that can grasp these components in their consti-
tutive formations. At the level of their formation, there are no rigid
boundaries possible between forms of consciousness, both immediate
and historical, social organization, relations, and practices. The world
we live in is a creative and dynamic composition of all these elements,
all at once. So, beginning with a project of enquiry, we look to all the
resources of the social we can draw upon to get a larger p icture and
this has to be a picture that does not swallow up all particularities
of formation and complexities of determination and mediation in a
general abstraction. Rather, the particular relations provide the con-
crete and formative aspects of the reality we explore. Otherwise how,
for example, do we understand the differences and similarities of

patriarchy as it is experienced by women of different social groups and
classes all over the world and in history?
On the Contributions of Dorothy Smith
ed and ab:
You were a student of Dorothy Smith, and you have often indicated
how influential she has been in your own work. Can you elaborate how
you see Dorothy Smiths contribution, specifically to understanding
race and racism?
hb:
There is much in my work that I can trace to Dorothys writings, but I
will focus on two key concepts that helped me to understand the con-
cept of race and the processes and practices of racialization: her for-
mulations of the everyday world as problematic5 and her reading of
Marxs epistemological method or critique of ideology, particularly as
found in The German Ideology.6
The notion of the everyday world as problematic is very impor-
tant. By problematic, I see Dorothy meaning two things. There can
be a word-play on the notion of problematic as applied in a critique
related to social movements. In an ordinary colloquial sense, our every-
day world is problematic; yet the everyday world is not just a descrip-
tive expression but is itself a sociological problematic, in the sense
that it presents us a field of investigation, comprises a space of inquiry.
I find Dorothys way of understanding how each little bit of the every-
day is constituted through multiple social relations and textual media-
tions to be very helpful. It expands my point of entry into the social, as
there are many doors to begin the journey of our thinking about reality.
For me, her entry into the social organization of knowledge and insti-
tutions through womens experience and broadening out to the ruling
apparatus and its textual mediations is very useful. Dorothys under-
standing of what we call experience is very important here, because
what she is telling us is that experiences are felt and named moments
of life, of social interaction, and that by exploring and analysing them,
we enter into a more comprehensive understanding about social real-
ity. What is immediate, what is around us, what we are going through,
provide a concrete entry point through which we can get a formative
view of patriarchy, racism, and class. When you enter through any one
132 Himani Bannerji
of the doors of experience, with its specificity, you embark on an under-

standing that a seemingly bounded form is actually a congealed form
of social reality. You enter the path of exploring social organizations
and relations and possible forms of consciousness, modes of mediation
found in any felt and named social moment. If racism is the entry point,
why should this method not be useful for investigating and historiciz-
ing it? Dorothys sociological method is not saying to us that where we
enter our investigation is where we stay indefinitely and at the level of
description or impact alone. It is by coming in through the passage or
the door of an experience and taking it apart and then re-locating it in
the social that we learn to figure out what went into the making of that
experience. It unlocks the door to history and material practices. There
is every reason to find this method crucial for understanding race
and racism. At least that is how I use it.
Dorothy herself developed this critical and investigative method in
the context of patriarchy and class, but this means that she undertook
a task of inquiry, a social analysis, not just a critique of others theo-
rization or a provision of a theory. Her method is rooted in Marxs
critique of ideology as found in The German Ideology and The Holy Fam-
ily, among other of his texts. She discovered in Marx how concepts
and their deployment can lead to an occlusion, a foreclosure, of under-
standing what actually happens. The use of the word woman as a
conceptual category, for example, provides a case in point. The word
woman can be deployed so that it has a general and abstract or a
highly selective meaning, depending on how this word is placed in
capturing social relations. The notion of woman could then either
conceal the social relations, if employed abstractly, or reveal them in
specific uses. Dorothy moved beyond simple abstraction by histori-
cizing and specifying the notion of woman, by socializing it so that
the notion of patriarchy came into play in conjunction with prevailing
social relations. As such, patriarchy could be both present at all social
levels but also implicated in other social relations, for example, in class
or racialization. This refusal to use language in an undifferentiated,
desocialized way is something that I have learned from her. This prac-
tice enables me and others to use concepts critically, not ideologically
for the purpose of concealing or erasing.
Dorothys work has helped me to understand race and racism by
bringing attention to the complex relationship between discourses,
texts, and social relations in syntactical terms, as a kind of grammar
of thought involving practice. Thus the form of thought, not just its
content, becomes important for us by understanding not just the word

but its placement in speech or writing. Her grasp of Marxs three
tricks for producing ideology, in elaborating how ideology is created
through certain technologies of mental labour as ways of displac-
ing words and their meaning through de-socializing, de-historicizing,
and de-politicizing becomes the focal point of her reading of institu-
tional ethnography and social organization of knowledge. These ideo-
logical abstractions, then, are used as reality, while the actual sociality
is treated as their illustrations or evidences of truth. This reading of
Marxs critique of ideology has been the most important part of my use
of Dorothys works.
Ideological forms of knowing that have been explained by Marx and
elaborated by Dorothy deserve a thorough reading by anyone inter-
ested in the use of concepts in their critical work. Nothing is too small
any instance or event, such as a newspaper story, can exemplify
ideology. You can perform ideology by picking up certain bits of details
or ideas in a story, and instead of situating the bits in a historical social
context and content, you can attach them to a fictitious set of assump-
tions, making what Marx called mystical connections. For Marx and
for Dorothy, this is the central trick of ideology.
The empirical details, when attached to assumptions of universality
or essence, give them an ahistorical, asocial aspect of verity. So instead
of making a historical social enquiry about an event, you lift it to the
level of an enduring significance. The outcome of all this is that the
thought object thus composed becomes a kind of a theory a template,
a lens for perceiving the social. This inverted relationship between
theory and social reality provides an ideological epistemological mode
that is not accountable to what the reality actually is or was, around
which develops a disinformation. The concept of race cobbled
together and fitted into moral and physical discourses of difference in
the service of oppressive social relations offers us a prime example of
ideology production.
To make my point a little clearer, let us take a common event: an
incident at a bus stop where a stranger calls you a racist name. You say
to yourself, how is this naming possible, why is she or he doing this, in
what society or country is it being done? This is your entry point when
you are violated, youre upset, youre angry, and even confused. This
is the moment of experience your concrete object of exploration
and inquiry. So you say, lets enter into this moment and see how this
could have happened as a practice as well as a concept a descriptive
134 Himani Bannerji
stereotype and a social judgment of inferiority. And then you try to look
at what name you were called, where else you have heard it or seen it
in written form, who called you this name, and all the surrounding
circumstances. The dynamics of relations in a particular locale are now
placed in a context, at the bus stop, in a city, in a nation state with a
colonial history and familiar to practices of slavery, indenture, and con-
quest of the aboriginal peoples. From this spatial location and moment
in time, you start summoning prevalent knowledge and an analytical
framework that incorporates history, the very formation of a settler
colonial country and state, and the cultural common sense rooted in
the idea of race. With these things in mind, you realize that without
them already available, this racist naming, this violent moment, would
not have been possible.
We should return at this point to the notion of experience and to
the everyday world, which is both our problem and problematic. This
experience of the everyday is of course individually felt, but it is not
individualistic, as it is something we share with others who are targets
of racist slurs. And in fact we share this moment also with those who do
the namecalling. This is a strange kind of sharing, because it involves
an antagonism born of a history it signifies two kinds of presences.
There is the man or the woman who calls you the racist name, and there
is I, the person who gets called that name. Both are parts of the story
that constitutes my experience. So the story and the experience turn out
to be complicated. This experience anti-ideologically considered opens
a door to an exit through the possibility of an anti-racist response.7
This discussion, I hope, shows that the notion of race can be treated
as an ideology. It is a word that has evolved and been used in the con-
text of social relations of domination in order to manage difference
based on power, as well as to obscure and obfuscate them with the help
of reified categories or ideas. The idea of race, therefore, is an ideo-
logical instrument produced in relations of ruling and justification. The
stereotypes give them a substantive quality an illusion of truth.
How does race solidify as an accepted form of knowledge, as a sci-
entific truth, even in our time? The reason for that is the implantation
of an idea of difference involving value judgment in the human body.
Race, situated in the idea of science, is seen to inhere in the body
and biology, rather than being a product of social relations and history.
This concept of race is incorporated in practices, discourses, or texts
that are considered as credible knowledge. Another way to think of it
is that race conceived as a scientific truth does not signal us to read
beyond the abstraction. When seen in terms of biology with a substance

of its own, race takes on a life that separates it from everything social.
It signals to a quality in people themselves. But if you put a question
mark after it, or quotation marks around it, as I do, you can begin to see
it as an exploitive and violent use of language.
To emphasize further, some uses of language are definitely ideologi-
cal. Take the example of the concept of human nature. When you
ask in a classroom, do you think racism will continue, or how did it
begin, a large number of students will say that it is human nature to
be racist. Now, that sort of treatment of language, which naturalizes a
social construction and its ramified practices, is evident in all relations
of oppression and is reproduced through what Dorothy calls textual
mediation, as well as what Gramsci calls common sense. They are of
course not the same thing. From Dorothys work on language and social
relations in Writing the Social,8 we know that concepts or language are
forms of sociality. It is not the lexical but the use aspect of language that
we need to focus on. It is the social use or the manipulation of language
that create systems of meaning. We have to deny the substantiveness
or independence of these ideological notions from social reality, and
Dorothys reading of Marx, Bakhtin, and Mead can help us in this.
While speaking of Dorothys use or reading of Marxs critique of
ideology, I should point out that her reading of this is quite unique.
To consider ideology in terms of the form, or a method of knowl-
edge production, rather than only as a body of content of ideas is still a
novel move. Many important theorists, more important than me, have
ignored the fact that ideology is not merely content only a set of ideas
generated through relations of power. The production of this body of
content or ideology is actually a form of thinking, which can make all
kinds of ideas move from their own social location in language into
becoming this obscuring anti-social content. For example, Edward Said
has shown us that Orientalism is a discursive mode originating from
a colonial mindset born of relations of power between Europe and Asia,
and here I completely agree with him. But what exactly happens to
make the Orientalist discourse come into being as a form of thought?
What conceptual grammar is at work in its production? Speaking of
misrepresentation of the East/Orient in Western colonial discourse,
Said does not tell us if it is at all possible to represent the Arab, to
represent the Orient, or if the very project of representation itself con-
tains the seeds of such discursive uses. This is because there is no the
Arab, no the Orient, or the Oriental. The capital letters themselves
136 Himani Bannerji
create an illusion of homogeneity. No one can for all time give the char-
acteristics of a people. They cannot be singularized or essentialized by
either the Arabs themselves or the Europeans. And Said misses uttering
that fact explicitly, even though he may imply it.
In fact, that is the problem with trying to singularize and homog-
enize, to particularize and essentialize. That can lead us to a stereo-
typical or racialized use of language. I think that Dorothys work, her
reading of Marx and its use, challenges this taken-for-grantedness, this
silence about the use of language. Her epistemology extends to the
query regarding the textually mediated nature of practices of power,
the production of relations of ruling. She understands how texts feed
into texts as living mental labour feeds on dead mental labour, and the
content in this closed circuit becomes a kind of fetish. We do need to
know the content of ideology in order to actually organize specific
resistances, because for this the details are needed. But we also have
to realize that these are details in a context, for a purpose, and only for
now. We cannot just sit on a standard truth about peoples and societies
forever. We need to locate language in its ideological use, in the social
relations and technologies of linguistic and knowledge production, and
refer to history and politics to reality in order for us to create and
participate in resistances of our time.
And so I have my own contribution to understanding race and
racialization, but Dorothy is someone whom I consider as my teacher.
She facilitated critical thinking in me, so I found her to be a pathfinder
for my own work.
On Marxism, Colonialism, and Nationalism
ed and ab:
There is significant debate regarding Marxism in terms of its rele-
vance to colonialism and nationalism. Can you elaborate on how you
understand these connections?
hb:
I find in Marx a reflexive and critical methodology to question Marx
himself. I dont find this reflexivity in liberal thought, for example, in
John Stuart Mills writings. You cannot question liberalism from within
liberalism, but you can question Marx from within Marxism and say
that his work has limits. This you do by applying his own critical
method to his own writings. Take for example Marxs writing on India:
this work, as pointed out by many, such as Edward Said in Orientalism,9
is at times racist, and as such, ideological. But in the course of criticism
of Marx, you can see the usefulness of his historical materialist method
for the purpose of critique and analysis in general.
The question of colonialism generally entails that of nationalism. As
we know, nationalism has come up for extensive criticism in feminist
and transnational feminist critique. In the way these critiques are posed,
nationalism has only one meaning and thus has been singularized.
This broad rejection and denunciation of nationalism poses impor-
tant questions for us. Can we speak of a decontextualized nationalism,
an all-purpose, one-size-fits-all type of politics? Am I then to condemn
Palestinian nationalism? This is, after all, the case of a nation without a
state aspiring to a nation state. And am I to condemn Canadian Aborig-
inal peoples for their national self-identification and aspirations?
Am I to say that their quest for and the fulfilment of the conditions
for nationhood is something that should not have any demanding and
positive role in the Canadian state formation? So even though nation-
alism may be critiqued, we cannot answer every question related to it
with a single answer. We need to take apart these different situations
for nationalist struggles and note that they stand concretely for differ-
ent kinds of social projects and politics. I understand nationalism as a
plural notion, and think that the nationalisms of the colonized and the
colonizer are qualitatively different.
From the point of view of the colonized, we can see nationalism as
a response to an outside conquest and rule with an absolutist power
that takes over the country and encompasses the entire lives of the
conquered peoples. This is the nationalism of colonial powers a
nationalism of the aggressive, the conquering, and the colonizing. The
colonizing powers/countries have a hegemonic intention consisting
of both force and production of consent, and they also possess a colo-
nial common sense. As they go about their colonizing missions, many
among them probably believe these missions to be good for the colo-
nized, as indicated by Rudyard Kipling in his idea of the white mans
burden. I make a distinction between the nationalism of that kind and
the nationalism of the colonized people who are defending themselves
and seeking their independence. We need to consider Frantz Fanon
here, who has been important for my work and has influenced my
reading of Marx.10
138 Himani Bannerji
The resistance to colonization is often expressed by nationalism and

creates a national imaginary, which consists of a resisting identity and
aims to create a state. But not all such resistances are typically national-
ist in either content or form. The word nationalism signifies resistance
with the political aim of structuring a state while also defining a cul-
tural identity. But not all responses to colonialism are geared towards
a state formation. And even within the nationalisms of the colonized
there are differences.
To give an example, there is a mistake in thinking that everything
that happened in India during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries
in relation or response to British colonialism was nationalist. Much
of the resistance to colonization was simply people responding to dif-
ferent forces ideas and practices that came into their world with a
sudden force and violence. Before these responses developed an ideo-
logically clear and articulated position, which nationalism properly
requires, Indian people had ad hoc and spontaneous responses that
were diversely cultural and social and inchoately political. Much of the
poetry, literature, and other forms of social and economic expressions
of the first half of nineteenth century India can be seen in this way,
and they cannot simply be reduced to nationalism. Indians also picked
and chose, especially in cultural matters. Before then we only had verse
narratives, but the presence of European literature gave rise to novels
in the vernaculars, and out of that came brilliant Indian writers and
their prose novels, and they were not written with an eye to Western
popularity as they were not in English.
People took what they were ready for and needed to take. They
learned a language, through which they read all kinds of works
including Karl Marx, Tom Paine, or William Godwin, and so on and
fashioned a new vocabulary and politics. From these kinds of chaotic
cultural and political formations, only some parts were selectively,
carefully, put together as different kinds of nationalist ideologies, for
example, as the ideology of the Indian National Congress and related
movements. But these articulated nationalisms did not spread into
everything else, and not everything social or cultural was done in the
name of the nation or to achieve a nation state.
Speaking of the diversity of nationalisms in the Indian context, we
can pinpoint one form of nationalism as liberal democratic. These
nationalists do not reject capitalism; they just want national control
over capitalism in India. They are not challenging class relations, profit,
or private property, but they would like to do something about poverty.
The amount of poverty that dawned on India thanks to British rule,

they might like to reverse some of it. They consider the existing class
relations as a natural reality of sorts and accept the organization of capi-
talist society from which class relations emanate. Though the Indian
constitution rejects the caste system, it continues as a social practice,
and feudal relations that existed prior to capitalism become partly inte-
grated into the political structure a situation similar to Western liberal
democracies where race and class are foundational. These national-
ists declare that people live in an unjust world and adopt a constitution
which will admit to that. And so the Indian governments begin their
first five-year plan after independence in 1947 and conceive of a rights-
based constitution. Formally, irrespective of gender, race, creed, and so
on, some social goods are considered to be the basic rights of Indian cit-
izens. However, capitalism continues, as do all kinds of relations of rul-
ing, such as patriarchy and class, with attempts at legal redress. In other
words, this Indian nationalism is bourgeois democratic in character.
Another form of Indian nationalism is that of the Hindu funda-
mentalists or the Hindu right, with a high degree of cultural essen-
tialization. These Hindu nationalists also espouse capital, class, and,
of course, caste. They consider themselves as anti-Western and anti-
modernists in ideology and cultural practices, but make economic and
military deals with the United States, Israel, and so on. But at the same
time, they are authoritarian in their politics, reject the equality of citi-
zenship, and eject minority citizens from the sphere of rights. In social
terms, therefore, you will be clubbed by your own religious group,
subjected to religious personal laws, and that will be your only recourse
in family matters and issues of inheritance. Now this too is nationalism.
But while these nationalists talk about the evils of Western culture and
claim to speak in the name of the Indian people or previously of all the
colonized, they want to give to the people of India a fully developed
imperialist capitalism, a neoliberalism replete with an essentialized
cultural identity.
But there is still another form of the nationalism of the colonized,
which I would call national liberation, that Frantz Fanon and other
anticolonial Leftists of the Third World talked about. This is a national-
ism that calls for a decolonization true decolonization, not a false one.
Fanon speaks about this phenomenon of false decolonization in his
critique of the politics of the national bourgeoisie in The Wretched of the
Earth. What is involved in this? In reality, one might say in response, all
these anticolonial liberation projects, even when they are socialist, have
140 Himani Bannerji
reproduced oppressive relations and rely on forms of other national-

isms. And they have. But it is not because they are socialist that these
unequal relations and ideas have been reproduced, but because they
are not yet wholly socialist. At least in theory, their politics are based on
a provision to fight inequality and to do so at all levels and, therefore,
leave room for real betterment.
These templates of nationalism that I offer here, and particularly
my idea of national liberation, would not have been possible with-
out Marxs critique of the bourgeois politics of his time, without his
development of the idea and politics of communism. Nor would I have
believed in the possibility of self and social emancipation. Nor would
national liberation thrive without Marxs idea of people actually mak-
ing their history, and in reality, in society and, therefore, struggling
against circumstances not of their choosing.
As you describe me, I do remain an unashamed and unrepentant
Marxist and a small c communist. I do not think we do anybody any
good if we fail to offer them a dignified life, an enabling wherewithal-
ness, and not just survival. And what would it take to create that digni-
fied wherewithalness for the poorest of the poor? It would involve a
politics of everybody, of white and non-white men and women together,
and would seek to create a community of equals in the nations space.
Among some Marxists who are economic determinists, there is
a separation of culture from everything else in life and society, as in
the notion that the superstructure is less important than the base, or
that gender inequality is a form of secondary contradiction. There is
not much of this base-superstructure separation in Marxs own work,
but there is some of that in Engelss writings. But on the other hand,
Engelss consciousness was distinctly against gender inequality. So we
need a Marxist method, but we also need to consider the question of a
full counter-hegemony, as well as the limits to hegemony. This will help
us in devising our critique of and organization against racist patriarchal
capitalism.
While we are about it, we need to ask why it is that some critical and
political ideas and practices stick, and some do not. We need to con-
sider why some ideas are challenged from within the very space where
they originate. All that is really important. Just as Marxs epistemol-
ogy is important, so is it important to read others, such as Gramsci.11
Gramscis notion of hegemony and his understanding of popular com-
mon sense and the facilitation of the good sense through the work
of the political organizer are significant for our politics. I think it
would be good to do something that uses the possibilities inherent in

Gramscis political thought and its relationship to, as well as departures
from, Marxs work. With these tools at our disposal, we can challenge
the iniquities of patriarchy, racism, and practices of class.
NOTES
1 This text originated as a face-to-face interview conducted by the editors

with Himani Bannerji on 17 June 2011 in Toronto, Ontario. We are grateful
to Angela Pietrobon for the transcription.
2 Himani Bannerji, The Writing on the Wall: Essays on Culture and Politics
(Toronto: TSAR Press, 1993), see especially the Introduction; Thinking
Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-racism (Toronto: Womens
Press, 1995), see especially the chapter The Passion of Naming.
3 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
4 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), see especially the Introduction and the chapter on ideology.
5 Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987).
6 Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of
Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
7 For more on experience, see the chapter But Who Speaks for Us? in my
collection Thinking Through.
8 Dorothy E. Smith, Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
9 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
10 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
11 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
PART III
Legacies and Relationships

Introduction to Part III: Legacies
of, and Relationships among,
Key Anti-Racist Thinkers
Marxism is often narrowly associated with writers located in the West;

even among key contributors in the West, writers of colour are often
neglected. However, since Marx and Engels wrote their classic texts,
many theorists from the global South and writers of colour i ncluding
Naoroji, M.N. Roy, Amilcar Cabral, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and
Frantz Fanon have been central to advancing the Marxist tradition
in critical dialogue with Marxs writings. Collectively, these writers
raise important questions regarding the approach of Marx and Engels
to non-European societies and processes of colonialism, and point to
the scarcity of attention or inconsistency regarding race and racism.
However, no less significantly, these writers also draw upon critical
aspects of Marxs writings. There is a long legacy of writers from the
global South and writers of colour who offer a different conceptualiza-
tion of Marxism, one that places the origins and legacies of racism in
conversation with the development of European formations and capi-
talism. Importantly, this body of work offers to both disrupt the ways in
which Marxist thought has been defined through Western theorists and
provide an opportunity for re-evaluating potential sites of synthesis
between Marxism and critical race/postolonial theory.
The chapters in this section explore the writings of theorists such
as C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon. Anthony Bogues
offers a compelling rereading of two of the most influential Black Marx-
ist thinkers in a chapter titled C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black
Jacobins and Black Reconstruction, Writing Heresy and Revisionist Histo-
ries. In this essay, Bogues explores how black intellectual production
occurs, how it engages Marxist and anti-racist theory in the context of
the Western intellectual tradition, and what discursive practices ensue
from this engagement. Bogues argues that James and Du Bois centralize
the slave/black worker as a social type and recast the Marxist historical
narratives regarding revolution and the nature of the political economy
of capitalism. Bogues identifies how Du Bois in Black Reconstruction
departs from Marxist orthodoxy by pointing out that there were two
systems of labour in the United States and Europe: the exploitation of
white labour and slave labour based upon racial oppression. Du Bois
points to the relationship between these two systems of labour, illus-
trating the ways in which black labour is the foundation of Europe and
America and, moreover, creating a unique set of complications for the
Marxist notion of revolutionary agency of the advanced proletariat in
modern capitalism. Not only does Bogues explore the ways in which
Du Bois and James depart from Marx, however, but importantly, he
also stresses ways in which they draw on Marx. As Bogues notes, such
deployment is not a simple reproduction of Marxs theory, but contrib-
utes new elements to the approach; in their hands, the categories used
to describe historical processes were wrought into something else.
These two figures offer insights into rereading Marxism in ways that
make the history of racialization central to its project.
Following this consideration of Du Bois and James, the volume turns
to Sartre and Fanon. In Colonizing, Colonized: Sartre and Fanon,
Audrey Kobayashi and Mark Boyle point out that one of the most
intense conversations to have explored the themes of Marxism, racism,
and anti-racism occurred between Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon
during the decades after World War II. They argue that these exchanges
focused on universal aspects of Marxs theory, on Sartres cosmopoli-
tanism, and on the potentials of ethnic nationalism. As Kobayashi and
Boyle note, in the end Sartre rejected what he saw as the pretensions
of metropolitan theory, based on his experiences with the Communist
movement in France at the time. He came to doubt Marxisms capac-
ity to render all concrete instances of colonialism and anti-imperialism
intelligible as part of the wider movement of history.
The collection then turns to consider the context of the South African
transition from apartheid. Eunice N. Sahle, in Intellectuals, Oppres-
sion, and Anti-Racist Movements in South Africa, offers a synthetic
journey through Fanon and Gramsci to Steve Biko and Fatima Meer,
demonstrating the links that draw these diverse theorists and activists
together. Sahle suggests that these contributions allow us to theorize
historical transitions, a central question for Marxist theory, and points to
the importance of a synthesis drawing on the contributions of Gramsci,
Part III: Legacies and Relationships 147
Fanon, and Biko. Sahle argues that Gramsci introduced the issue of the
role of intellectuals in his analysis of historical transitions, following the
revolutions in Europe that saw the emergence of social orders charac-
terized by what he terms revolution without a revolution. Fanon and
Biko point to similar processes, but focus particularly on the context of
colonialism, allowing us to understand South Africas complex transi-
tion from apartheid to formal democracy. Sahle also highlights the role
of feminist anti-racist activists such as Meer.
While these various intellectuals focus on different political geogra-
phies and conjunctures, collectively they draw attention to how power
dynamics shape historical transitions, marking shifts from one social
order to another. This section of the volume highlights the wider global
and historical context in which to place contemporary debates.
7C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois:
Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction,
Writing Heresy and Revisionist Histories
a nthony bogue s
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second
sight in this American World.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pio-
neer into regions Caesar never knew.
C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary
Introduction
Two figures whose writings and political practices are increasingly

being recognized as central to twentieth century radical political
thought are C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois.1 However, much of
this recognition is still within the framework of, and is convention-
ally considered as, the marginal black and anticolonial experience.2 In
this essay, grounded mainly in two texts by James and Du Bois The
Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction, respectively I will explore how
the practice of writing a radical revisionist history constitutes heresy
and what that might mean for a black radical understanding of the
twentieth century world. These two texts were radical political inter-
ventionist historical ones, and as such are works of both historical and
political theory. The requirements of political intervention mean that
such texts elaborate a different narrative while they are theorizing. In
reviewing these texts, one needs to consider the historical theory that
informed both texts, and then to grapple with the ruptures implicit
C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois: Writing Revisionist Histories 149
in the authors historical and political analysis. In pursuing this path, I

explore how black intellectual production occurs, its engagement with
radical, political theory, and the discursive practice which ensues from
this engagement.
I begin this exploration with the understanding that the Western
intellectual tradition operates within an exclusionary paradigm. Its sys-
tems of classification, naming, and categorization based upon hierarchal
conceptions placed on the margins, made invisible, significant sections
of humankind. This invisibility and exclusion cannot be collapsed into
simplistic social constructions of savage/civilized, rational/irrational,
Christian/heathen binaries or into conceptions of the so-called other.
For the African human, the exclusion was complete it was both
ontological and epistemic erasure. Both these forms of erasure have pro-
foundly shaped contemporary discussions about thought the mean-
ing and construction of intellectual traditions as well as the general
history of thought. Erasure makes invisible, creates a veil that does not
recognize a black intellectual tradition. Thus, from the perspective of
the Western intellectual tradition, the black radical tradition continues
to be viewed as particularistic, mired in fossilized, irrational concep-
tions and myths not worthy of serious study.
In the contemporary period, we discuss the nature of racism and the
barbarities of colonialism, but there is not much debate on the general
implications of these historic practices for political and historical knowl-
edge. The issue here is what the Latin American philosopher Enrique
Dussel calls the underside of modernity3 and how this underside
has produced a radical intellectual tradition that engages in a critical
dialogical relationship with various Western radical critiques (Marx-
ism, existentialism, critical theory). In the field of postcolonial theory,
the engagement is oftentimes portrayed as mimetic or derivative. What
is missing, however, is the understanding that the products of the dia-
logical engagement have reopened the categories of radical political
theory. Given the structures of racial oppression and, in the early twen-
tieth century, colonialism, the black radical intellectual finds himself or
herself functioning in a mode of criticism that interrogates the essential
elements of the Western intellectual tradition.
The reason for this is obvious. Regimes of domination do not rest
solely upon economic, political, social, and cultural power. They also
exist and conduct politics within a field of political and social knowl-
edge, of ideas that form part of the self-consciousness of all members
of a society. Given the nature of anti-black racism and the racialized
150 Anthony Bogues
object, the black radical intellectual as critic is first of all engaged with
challenging the various knowledge regimes of any dominant power.
What C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois did in their books The Black Jaco-
bins (1938) and Black Reconstruction (1935) was to place squarely before
us historical knowledge about two major events that reorder the nar-
rative structures of Western radical historiography. Both texts created
seismic shifts in twentieth century radical historiography and posited
new theories about the meanings and descriptions of modernity. A
major development in twentieth century historiography is the way in
which social theory became an integral part of historical understand-
ing. In the early twentieth century, James and Du Bois wrote history
with a theoretical turn. Although they were concerned with elabo-
rating a distinctly different political and historical narrative of histori-
cal events, they had to engage in the process of rewriting history,
creating new alternative historical knowledges. Reinhart Koselleck has
suggested that no rewriting of history takes place without recourse
to the stock of experiences already captured.4 But there is a difficulty.
What happens when this human stock of experience has been elided,
silenced, and erased? What kind of historical writing now has to occur?
I would suggest that James and Du Bois in their rewriting had to per-
form a double operation. First, they had to recover these experiences
that had been elided. And in this recovery, they had to engage archives
from the perspective of those who had been marginalized. Second,
they had to reinterpret this archive and posit new historical knowl-
edge. Thus their revisionism was one which reworked an archive, but
then also put forward a set of interpretations that reconfigured what we
thought the events were. By doing this, they were reordering our con-
ventional frames of two historical periods and events. The matter per-
haps becomes more complicated because the political events addressed
in these texts, both the dual Haitian Revolution and the Reconstruction,
have become contested sites of memory in the national imagery of Haiti
and of America.5 In writing The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction,
the authors gaze on the archival sources was shaped by the under-
standing that the African slave in the West was human. This simple
but profound truth meant that while they deployed Marxian catego-
ries in their interpretation of events, both the categories and the events
were invested with new meanings. In their historical writings, James
and Du Bois (to a lesser degree) were guided by what can be called a
frame of vindication.6 As well, James and Du Bois emplotted stories
that challenged a major mode of historical narration in the 1930s. All

of this was accomplished in a form of writing and intellectual practice
far removed from the debates within the Western tradition about the
nature of the political intellectual in the 1930s.
The debates that traditionally animate the conceptual history of the
intellectual do not neatly fit the black radical intellectual. One may
think that since we are speaking about counter-narratives, what is
being argued here is very similar to the Gramscian argument about the
creation of counter-hegemonic ideas. Of course in one sense, the radi-
cal black intellectual is, to use Gramscis term, an organic intellec-
tual. But he or she is organic with a difference. While in the Gramscian
mode, radical organic intellectuals provide the missing inventory for
the spontaneous philosophy of ordinary people, they do so within a
framework and discursive practice that does not call into question their
own ontological natures. Moreover, in their efforts at promulgating
counter-hegemonic conceptions, the subordinate classes and groups
who are non-racialized subjects take seriously some principles that are
normally enshrined in constitutional democracies and expose the radi-
cal contradiction between enunciation, principles, and reality.7 In these
instances the creation of counter-hegemonic ideas demands internal
criticism and critique. There is not an overturning of the philosophical
anthropology of white normativity.
Within the practices of the black radical intellectual, on the other
hand, the process of overturning white normativity clears spaces, a ter-
rain on which to accurately describe black or colonial life. There are
no priests who sustain cults of legitimacy, no black jesters who, in the
words of Leszek Kolakowski, stand outside society from the side-
lines in order to unveil the non-obvious behind the obvious, the non-
final behind the final.8 The engagement of the black radical intellectual
is different; critique and criticism become those of heresy, and catego-
ries deployed oftentimes are stretched to their limits. Invisibility does
not facilitate detached independence; exclusion does not mean isola-
tion and loneliness. Alternatively then, radical black intellectual prac-
tice constructs a tradition, and the examples of Black Reconstruction and
The Black Jacobins empirically demonstrate this process.
A final point deserves mention. In any discussion of radical black
texts, we should take note of some of the issues that confront any dis-
cussion of the black radical intellectual tradition and black intellectual
production in general. Among them are whether or not this form of
152 Anthony Bogues
knowledge is a subjugated one; whether the tradition is a derivative

or hybrid one. There is, as well, the large question of the meanings of
the tradition, the central questions it poses, and the relevance of these
questions both to colonial modernity and the imperial modernity
of the present. All these issues strike us forcibly when we examine the
intellectual practices of C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois.
C.L.R. James: Political Practice and Intellectual Production
The interpretation of political texts requires a methodology that, among

other things, distils the writers political practice, the explicit political
purpose of the text, and the political language and discursive practices
of the tradition in which the author operates. Using such a methodol-
ogy, let us first consider C.L.R. James.
James was born in 1901 in the British Caribbean colony of Trinidad.
He was of a rebellious temperament and challenged the trajectory of
the bright native intellectual then typical of the British colonial native
intelligentsia.9 Set on a literary career, James migrated to England in
1932 in order to pursue his ambitions. There he became absorbed with
Marxist and anticolonial politics, and as a consequence, in his words,
Fiction writing drained out of me.10 Between 1934 and 1938, after
joining the Trotskyist wing of the international Marxist movement,
James became a leading Marxist theoretician in Europe. His reputa-
tion was consolidated by the publication in 1937 of World Revolution
(19171936), which, in the opinion of many, became the Trotskyist clas-
sic of the period.11 He also became a leading cricket correspondent for
the Manchester Guardian; wrote a popular pamphlet on the case for
Caribbean self-government; published a novel, Minty Alley; and wrote
a dramatic play, The Black Jacobins, in which Paul Robeson played the
leading role.
By 1938, then, James was a leading figure in radical English political
circles. His political practice, however, was a dual one. James moved
easily between working within the small Trotskyist movement and act-
ing in concert with George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Ashwood-
Garvey, and others in creating the organizational form and theoretical
positions for the political independence of Africa, the International
African Service Bureau (IASB). This political grouping became one
of the most significant anticolonial groupings in London during the
1930s, and the intense political practice of this organization formed
the immediate impetus for the writing of The Black Jacobins.12
In Trinidad, James had shown interest in the Haitian Revolution. In

an article for the journal Beacon, he opined that Toussaint LOuverture13
was a seminal figure in Haitian history for uniting the country, a feat
that had never been achieved before.14 In a 1971 lecture in London,
James noted that The Black Jacobins was published the same year as
Aim Cesaires Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. He further com-
mented, I dont know why I was writing The Black Jacobins the way
I did. I had long made up my mind to write a book about Toussaint
LOverture. Why I couldnt tell you. Something was in the atmosphere
and I responded to it.15 In the same year, in a series of lectures at the
Institute of the Black World (IBW),16 James again remarked on why
he wrote the book. This time he was more specific:
I also wanted to write a history of Toussaint LOuverture because I believe

that of the books I had read none were satisfactory. I had a good knowl-
edge of history, historical writing and biography, and I didnt see a good
one. I had made up my mind, for no other reason than a literary reason,
that when I reached England I would settle down to write a history of
Toussaint LOuverture.17
Initially it seems that James had purely literary reasons for the writ-
ing of The Black Jacobins. This is an intriguing reflection and indicates
the relationship between literary forms and historical narratives, par-
ticularly when the historical narrative is held together through the
biographical form. It would seem that the protocols of the narrative
form establish Western historical writing as partly one form of a liter-
ary genre which Aristotle referred to as the emplotment of represented
actions.18 However, the problem of narrative form is also linked to a
central problem of the philosophy of history: is historical representa-
tion an accurate description of events? This is not the place to enter
into a debate about this issue. However, one point is notable in this
discussion. Perhaps if one argues that there is no direct mirror repre-
sentation of the past, then it might be possible to operate with a con-
ception of historical truth. Such a truth recognizes that its basis is
interpretive and that while technical skills are applied to archives, the
very act of historical writing is itself an imaginative one. The essen-
tial difference between historical truth and fiction is that archives
act as an anchor and a trace of the past, informing and giving body
to historical writings. This digression is an important one, since
both James and Du Bois spent a great deal of time reflecting on their
154 Anthony Bogues
historical practices. James, for example, in the first preface of The Black
Jacobins states:
The writer has sought not only to analyse, but to demonstrate their move-
ment, the economic forces of the age; their moulding of society and poli-
tics, of men in the mass and individual men; the powerful reaction of these
on their environment [T]he analysis is the science and the demonstra-
tion the art which is history.19
Thus for James the writing of history was an art, while the analysis
and marshalling of evidence called for scientific skills. In our attempt
to examine the historical truth in The Black Jacobins, what becomes
important in our investigation is to grapple with all the conditions
that allowed the production of this form of truth. This does not mean
some kind of cultural relativism, but rather a focus on the influences,
politics, and historical theories that shaped the writing of The Black Jaco-
bins. We will thus be able to see the ways in which James, while using
certain radical historical categories, gave them new meanings. James
tells the story of writing The Black Jacobins this way. In the 1971 IBW
lecture, James discerns that alongside his anticolonial political practice,
Caribbean nationalism, and his preoccupation with historical knowl-
edge, there were other ingredients that framed his writing. He ends a
description of the influences on him in this way:
So I hope that you understand now that this book was not an accident. It
didnt just fall from a tree. It is the result of a whole series of circumstances
by which I thoroughly master, as I did in those days, Marxism. I had come
from the Caribbean with a certain understanding of Western Civilization.
I had read the history of the Marxist movement, and I had written four
hundred pages on the Marxist movement, from its beginning in 1864 to
what was taking place in 1936. I was a highly trained Marxist, and that
was the person who wrote The Black Jacobins.20
As a radical Marxist historian, Jamess historical imagination had

been stirred by reading Trotskys History of the Russian Revolution and
Oswald Spenglers The Decline of the West. Histories on an epic scale,
the narrative of the large historical canvas, were to become for him
essential elements of his historical practice. The audiences for The
Black Jacobins were the anticolonial revolutionaries in Africa and the
Caribbean, and European Marxists. Its political purposes were two-
fold. In the first instance, the book was a vindication of the capacity
of the colonized African to govern. James makes the point in the IBW
lectures, I was trying to make clear that black people have a certain
historical past so by historical method, I tried to show that black
people were able to make historical progress, they were able to pro-
duce men who could lead a revolution and write new pages in the
book of history.21 The second political purpose was that the text inter-
vened in the intense political debates, swirling around the IASB, about
the relevance of armed political struggle for the African anticolonial
movement. The text was thus organically linked to revolutionary
political practice. The telling of the story of the only successful black
slave revolt in modernity rewrote Marxist categories of labour, as well
as the nature of the political economy of early capitalism and of radi-
cal historiography. As a consequence, James pushed Marxist theory in
new directions.
Du Bois and the Black Reconstruction
If by 1938 C.L.R. James was a leading black Marxist in Europe, W.E.B.

Du Bois at the time was the leading black radical intellectual in the
Western Hemisphere. Born in New England in 1868, a few years after
the Civil War, Du Bois exhibited intellectual and political practices that
were chiefly shaped by his being a racial object in late nineteenth and
early twentieth century America. He himself remarked in his first auto-
biography, My life had its significance and its only significance because
it was part of a problem; but that problem[,] the concept of race[,] is
today one of the most unyielding and threatening I have written
then what is meant to be not so much my autobiography as the autobi-
ography of a concept of race.22 Determined at an early age to pursue
an explicitly intellectual life, Du Bois dreamed of attending Harvard.
[M]y heart was set on Harvard. It was the greatest and oldest college
and I therefore quite naturally thought it was the one I must attend.23
However, American racial conditions did not allow the fulfilment of
such a desire, and Du Bois attended a Southern black college, Fisk. The
experience of Southern black life dismantled his Northern outlook.
Reflecting on his period at Fisk Du Bois stated, The three years at Fisk
were years of growth and development. I learnt new things about the
world I came in contact for the first time with a sort of violence that
I had never realized in New England.24
After Fisk, Du Bois gained admittance to Harvard, and continued
there, with important sojourns in Germany, until he completed a PhD
in history in 1895. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave
156 Anthony Bogues
Trade to the United States of America, 16381870, was published by the

Harvard Historical Studies program. Du Boiss education in the hal-
lowed halls of an elite Western academy did not exclude him from racial
oppression and the vicissitudes of being a racial object. He observes in
his autobiography:
[H]ad it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and envelop-
ing me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the
shrine of the social order and economic development into which I was
born. But just that part of that order which seemed to most of my fellows
nearest perfection, seemed to me most inequitable and wrong.25
Du Boiss efforts to vanquish racial oppression in America made him a

committed radical. In the late nineteenth century, clearly influenced by
that centurys developments in the social sciences and the discursive
practices of the period, he announced, The Negro Problem was in my
mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understand-
ing.26 A brief overview of some of his publications would indicate how
he attempted to uphold this position. In the late nineteenth century, Du
Bois produced The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) and then
later on edited sixteen Atlanta University Studies covering all social
aspects of African American life at the time. All this was accomplished
under onerous conditions. His sociological work exploded the Ameri-
can myth of Negro pathology, the basis of the American so-called
Negro Problem.27 In 1903 he published what is perhaps today his most
studied text, the seminal Souls of Black Folk.28 In 1909, he announced his
return to historical writing when John Brown29 was published.
In that same year, the final meeting of the Niagara Movement
was held, and in the following year the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded. It was racial
terror that moved Du Bois from a man of science to a man of politi-
cal action and science. He writes, after his encounter with the conse-
quences of lynching, One could not be a calm, cool, and detached
scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.30 In
1915, observing Europes colonial hold over Africa, he turned his atten-
tion once more to history and produced his first major text on Afri-
can history, The Negro,31 an attempt to begin a complete history of the
Negro people. By then, Du Bois was obviously working well within
the historical practice of black historical writing vindicationism and
in this sense he and James were on similar tracks.
By the late 1930s, Du Bois had come to the conclusion that the policy of
liberalism which he advocated was politically exhausted. The NAACP
had successfully led campaigns against lynching and had developed a
wide-ranging set of legal strategies to fight racial discrimination. But
the fight did not lead to political and formal procedural equality for the
African American population. Racial oppression was formidable. It had
the capacity to reorganize itself and to infect every aspect of American
social life. In his early twentieth century efforts there is no doubt that
Du Bois was intellectually and politically engaged with American lib-
eral pragmatism. Like other pragmatists of the time, he operated within
the confines of what John Dewey has called a renascent liberalism.32
However, while pragmatism was the frame, the fact of race exploded its
efficacy. The struggles against racial inequality pushed the boundaries
of liberal pragmatism. Du Bois observed, The essential difficulty with
the liberalism of the twentieth century was not to realize the fundamen-
tal change brought by the world wide organization of work and trade
and commerce.33 All this once again opened the door for Du Bois to do
what his common practice was throughout his entire life grapple with
political and intellectual practices that would vanquish American racial
oppression and global anti-black racism.
The antecedents of Black Reconstruction are therefore to be found in
Du Boiss search for theoretical answers to the extreme conditions of
racial oppression that continued unabated in early twentieth century
America and his continual historical quest to dissect and grapple with
race and democracy in America.34 In 1909, Du Bois presented a paper
titled Black Reconstruction and Its Benefits to the American Histori-
cal Association. The paper, though not very well received, appeared in
the July 1910 American Historical Review. For many years after, however,
the Reconstruction period continued to intrigue him, and by 1931 he
was ready to write about it. Du Bois was driven to write about this
period as it became clear to him that the construction of the memory of
Reconstruction was central in the continued reworking of white racial
ideology. In a perceptive essay on Du Bois, David W. Blight argues that
[o]ne of [Du Boiss] principal aims of all his future historical work
[was] to forge a social memory that might help solve or transcend
the race problem, rather than simply getting rid of it.35 In correspon-
dence with friends, Du Bois explained that the real hero and center of
human interest in the period is the slave who is being emancipated.36
But if the emancipated slave was the hero, what theory of history would
facilitate Du Boiss telling of that story? Liberalism had demonstrated
158 Anthony Bogues
its incapacities to handle any revisionist historical narratives that high-

lighted the self-activities of the slave population, so Du Bois turned to
a study of Marxism.
He had first come into contact with Marxism as a student in Ber-
lin. However, at the time he was not moved to engage in any serious
theoretical study of it. In 1911 he had become a member of the Socialist
Party, but left it a year later. In the 1920s, he journeyed to the Soviet
Union and wrote glowingly about what he saw. In spite of this, he had
initial problems with American Marxism. These were twofold. First, he
felt that the American Communist movement was deeply racist and
unable to deal politically with racial oppression in the United States;
and second, he had discerned through study and political practice that
race had complicated the character of the American class struggle.
In his article Marxism and the Negro Problem, written for the
newspaper The Crisis in 1933, Du Bois states, While Negro labor in
America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole
capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering
comes not from the capitalist but from fellow white workers.37 Con-
tinuing on this theme, he argues that the imperial expansion of indus-
try had established a worldwide proletariat of colored workers toiling
under conditions of 19th century capitalism. Finally he concludes,
Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in
the middle of the 19th century despite some of its logical difficulties.
But it must be modified in the United States of America and especially
so far as the Negro group is concerned. The article is an important
one because it staked out a new political position that would inform
the historical narrative of Black Reconstruction. It asserted that [i]n the
hearts of black laborers alone, therefore, lie those ideals of democracy
in politics and industry which may in time make the workers of the
world effective dictators of civilization. The world had been turned
upside down black workers were to be the prime agents for a new
order. This unorthodoxy indeed heresy became the central theme of
Black Reconstruction.
The shape of Black Reconstruction was also influenced by Du Boiss
extensive political campaigns against racial oppression in the United
States, his international political activity in three Pan-African con-
gresses, and his consistent efforts to develop a mode of criticism and
writing that debunked the notions of white supremacy and black
savagery. The final factor of influence was the character of early
twentieth century American historiography, which argued that the
Reconstruction period was a hideous mistake. This position was the

dominant one taught in schools and formed the core of Americas social
memory at the time. It obviously served to reinforce the social location
of the black population and white supremacy. It was compounded by
the appearance of D.W. Griffiths film Birth of a Nation. In these contexts,
Black Reconstruction, like The Black Jacobins, became a text of political
intervention.
The Heresy of The Black Jacobins
What theory of history informs Black Reconstruction and The Black Jaco-
bins? Both writers deploy Marxist historical materialist categories.
The major personalities of early twentieth century Marxism appear in
Jamess The Black Jacobins. His use of Lenin and Trotsky as the compara-
tive political standard in his assessment of the political relationship
between Toussaint LOuverture and Moise; his paraphrasing of Marxs
Eighteenth Brumaire about how men make history; the organization of
the text along the lines of social forces and their interplay in the vor-
tex of class struggle and revolution; and the emphasis upon the dia-
lectical relationship between external and internal factors in a political
conjuncture all would seem to point to The Black Jacobins as a work of
historical knowledge which reproduces, without additions or changes,
the major categories of historical materialism.
However, a more nuanced reading with an eye to the relationship of
two elements Jamess dual political praxis at the time and the require-
ments of vindicationism opens the text in different ways. We also
need to consider the event around which the text is organized, the Hai-
tian Revolution. This revolution, called unthinkable by Michel-Rolph
Trouillot,38 has been neglected in studies of revolution. Primarily, it has
been studied as a slave revolt hardly worthy of the name revolution.
But the nature of the event encouraged James to tell a tale that shifted
the main historical axis of the Age of Revolution, narrating a different
historical tale about the rise of modernity.39 How did The Black Jacobins
do this?
In the first place, the text has a remarkable opening. It argues that
the wealth and economic strengths of Europe were based on the slave
trade and the products of slave plantation labour. Such claims were at
that time neither common nor welcome within the discipline of history.
Indeed, it was not until after the 1944 publication of Eric Williamss
Capitalism and Slavery40 that major debates in Western historiography
160 Anthony Bogues
about the general relationship between racial slavery and capitalism

occurred. Although Marx had made the point in The Poverty of Philoso-
phy41 about the relationship between African slavery and the primitive
accumulation of capital, The Black Jacobins reconfigures this relation-
ship, placing colonialism and plantation slavery both at the rosy dawn
of the accumulation process and central to nineteenth century economic
developments.
This shift in periodization meant that James had to rethink the slave
as a social type, thereby recasting the Marxist historical narrative of
both revolution and the nature of the political economy of capitalism. In
standard Marxist historical narrative, the birth of capitalist production
originated during the late 1700s with the emergence of mill produc-
tion and the production of textiles. Plantation slavery was subsidiary
to this, and slave labour an anomaly. For James, such a historical nar-
rative and interpretation would marginalize colonial plantation slav-
ery and thereby the political and social role of the slaves themselves.
Confronted with this problem, he discusses Caribbean slaves in the
following manner:
The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants every-
where, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But work-
ing and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar factories
which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat
than any group of workers in existence at the time.42
This categorization of the Caribbean slave was a rupture from formal

Marxist categories of historical and social analysis, opening the door
for a different set of interpretations of the social formation of Caribbean
society and the characteristics of the black Caribbean colonial. For if
racial slave plantation society was a modern society and the African
slave a modern person, not only was racial slavery morally wrong, but
the continued colonial domination of the Caribbean and Africa was
untenable. Here James was also appropriating the notion of the mod-
ern and using it to make a case for political independence. The opening
for a radical way of characterizing slavery created the conditions for
The Black Jacobins to become a framing text in Caribbean radical social
theory. The Black Jacobins seeks by its investigation of the Haitian Revo-
lution to answer the question: what is the Caribbean? It is no accident
that in the books second edition (1963, one year after the colonies in
the English Caribbean began to achieve their political independence)
James affixed an appendix titled From Toussaint LOuverture to Fidel

Castro, in a postcolonial effort to interpret the history of the Caribbean
on its own terms. Jamess text, written with its gaze firmly fixed on
African independence, was extraordinarily prescient in understanding
one of the central dilemmas of anticolonial leadership the relationship
in the post-independence period between former colony and colonial
power. How that relationship could complicate political leadership is
the story of many anticolonial movements in the later part of the twen-
tieth century.
James was concerned to demonstrate the humanness of the African
slave. Thus he avers, The slaves were subjected to the same historical
laws as the advanced workers of colonial Paris.43 Writing later on in
1939, James makes the point that Negro revolutionary history is rich,
inspiring and unknown.44 But we should pause here and note the terms
of Jamess vindication. His enmeshment with the Western intellec-
tual tradition at the time meant that he granted slaves humanity on
the grounds of their capacity to struggle.45 It was their revolutionary
actions that made them human. Part of the difficulty that James faced
at that time was his failure to rework the conventional pre-modern/
modern divide in ways which would have been more reflective of Afri-
can realities.46 In the final analysis, Jamess achievement was to negate
epistemic erasure. Thus The Black Jacobins placed on the table a revolu-
tion which had been ignored or not considered an important event of
any significance. However, he did not reclaim the revolution on its
own terms, in part because his considerations around issues of political
modernity and the categories that define this modernity did not allow
for the ex-slaves to make a revolution on their own terms. Or to put
the matter another way: What were the various meanings of freedom
that were created by the practices of the revolutionary slaves? How
didthese differ from or in what ways were they related to the concep-
tions and practices that emerged in the French Revolution? James did
not pose these questions, but his achievement was to reorder any his-
torical narrative about what has been called the Age of Revolution.
His writing operation therefore was a delicate one, so what were some
of the conundrums that bedeviled him?
In the IBW lecture, James states that if he were rewriting The Black
Jacobins, there were two things he would do differently. In the first
instance, he would not rely so heavily on the archives of French colo-
nialism; and second, he would pay more attention to the activities of the
slaves themselves.47 Both of these self-critical comments are important,
162 Anthony Bogues
because they point to the central dilemma of The Black Jacobins, one that
does not trouble Black Reconstruction. The dilemma was this: in spite
of rescuing the Haitian slave revolution from oblivion and granting
the slaves agency, James had mixed feelings about these revolutionary
slaves. Modern as they were, in Jamess mind they were sometimes the
proletariat and at other times like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the
Luddite wreckers.48 Even after defeating the best European armies,
James noted, the ex-slave population was backward in relationship to
Toussaint. He makes the point consistently, Toussaint knew the back-
wardness of the labourers; he made them work, but he wanted to see
them civilized and advanced in culture.49 The real dilemma, in Jamess
mind, was that the mode of production had yoked African slaves into
modernity in the New World, but their world view was still rooted in
the Old World. James did not grasp in 1938 (and it is very possible that
he could not have) that there was a different African world view which
was central to slaves revolutionary upsurge.50
This meant that James, by not paying much attention to the archives of
the slaves, writes an interventionist text on slave revolution and leader-
ship but fails to grapple with the ideology of the revolution. In the end,
The Black Jacobins does not tell us why Dessalines, the slave general,
became a Lwa51 in the Haitian religious pantheon and LOuverture did
not.52 Another tension in The Black Jacobins is that while it wonderfully
portrays the dialectic between the French Revolution and the Haitian
Revolution, it does not answer the question of whether or not the latter
was a black Jacobin revolution, a Caribbean revolution, or an African
revolution in the Caribbean. Surely LOuverture was a black Jacobin,
but were the rest of the revolutionary population? There is one final
point: it is becoming clear that any interpretation of the dual Haitian
revolution needs to grapple with the ways in which marronage figured
as a political strategy, particularly as the revolution emerged. Neither
does James pay attention to the political ideas of the revolution as rep-
resented by the slaves. However, one should be clear that the semi-
nal importance of the text was to render visible another revolutionary
history that had been both hidden and erased. One of the principal
purposes of making the unknown visible, of overturning epistemic
erasure, is to fill the silences in history. James does this by drawing
our attention to the relationship of the Haitian Revolution to the 1789
French Revolution. This narrative reconfigured, as was stated before,
the Age of Revolution and the nature of revolutions of the period.53
This unthinkable revolution raised the question that all the other
European and American revolutions of the period had dodged: what

to do about racial slavery? This was not a minor question. The colonies
of plantation slavery were the foundation of the colonial powers; racial
slavery was embedded within American society alongside the conquest
of the Native American population, and on those matters early twen-
tieth century radical thought was both blind and dumb. So with the
sound of booming guns on the European battlefields and the marching
of jackbooted fascists, Jamess The Black Jacobins was a valiant attempt
to bring to the fore the position of colonial blacks. He deployed Marx-
ism, but in his hands the categories used to describe historical processes
were wrought into something else. The French Revolution became the
permissive context for the Haitian Revolution, not the cause of the
revolution; the Haitian Revolution was not the French Revolution
in Haiti. The radical actions of the slaves in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries played a crucial role in the Western worlds transition
from feudalism to capitalism. The magnitude of the contributions the
Negroes made was an integral part of world revolutionary history,
James said, and he chided the Marxists of the period for having far less
excuse for falling into the mistake of historical neglect.54
The Black Jacobins as a historical text integrates the African slave pop-
ulation into modernity as human beings. The decade of the 1930s was
alive with conceptions of the inferiority of the African. The develop-
ment of social Darwinism, the emergence of the French eugenics move-
ment, and the complex relationship between the civilizing mission of
the colonizer and theories of human evolution combined to make his-
torical narratives showing Africans in a positive light a difficult opera-
tion. To challenge these conceptions, even on flawed terms, committed
James to heresy. But while C.L.R. James is nuanced, subtly reworking
the Marxist categories and framework from which he is writing, Du
Bois, on the other hand, makes a frontal challenge.
The Du Boisian Rupture
Black Reconstruction announces its rupture with Marxist orthodoxy,

beginning with the bold enunciation that the black slaves in the United
States were black workers. Early in the text, Du Bois makes the point
that there were two systems of labour in the United States linked to race
and slavery. In one system there was the exploitation of white labor,
which existed both in Europe and the United States, and then there was
slave labour in the Americas, based upon racial oppression. Du Bois is
164 Anthony Bogues
not content to note the existence of these two systems, but thinks about
their relationship. In doing so, he makes the following point:
Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social
structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English fac-
tory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide
scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor
problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America.55
But there was more. Racial slavery created a unique set of complica-
tions for the Marxist notion of the revolutionary agency of the advanced
proletariat in modern capitalism.
Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today
is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern com-
merce was founded [T]he resulting color caste founded and retained
by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor and
resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over.
Thus the majority of the world laborers by the insistence of white labor,
became the basis of a system of Industry which ruined democracy and
showed its perfect fruit in world war and depression.56
This statement obviously overturns the historical narrative of the

nature of the American and European working class and its role as the
revolutionary agency for a new social order. It suggests that capitalism
was also a racial system and that race could not be reduced to an epi-
phenomenon in the American social formation. Second, it suggests that
one had to reconsider issues related to Marxs notion of labour and the
meaning of this category. In Marxist terms, wage labour is perceived as
alienation, and the labour theory of value surrounds the issue of sur-
plus value and notions of exploitation. The question that Du Bois raised
was what would happen when labour was embodied in both body and
person in other words, when labour was combined with the property
of a person. Marx makes the point that wage labour turns the worker
into a fragment of a man.57 On the other hand, racial slave labour
turned human beings into objects in which a private domestic sphere
was often minimal. The slave was a slave he or she was property in
its totality. For Du Bois, this meant that black workers were positioned
in a special location in the Americas. With his eyes firmly fixed on how
race operated in the interstices of American life, Du Bois remapped the
story of capitalist evolution. Racial slavery and oppression were not
peripheral to the world system; they were an organic part of it with

enormous political and social consequences. This was important not
only for Marxist theory but also for American history. Investing the cat-
egory of labour with some new meanings, Du Bois then offered a differ-
ent narrative about the nature of labour in the West.
This led Du Bois to think about the nineteenth century American
debate surrounding wage slavery, racial slavery, and free labour. Michael
Sandel observes that the rapid increase of factory life in nineteenth cen-
tury America was in part the occasion for a debate about the relationship
of freedom to wage labour.58 However, Sandel follows the conventional
pattern of studying this debate in American political thought as one
that involves only fierce arguments about the perquisites of economic
independence and its relationship to human freedom. So although he
notes that some participants in the debate raised the arguments that
compared wage-slavery to slavery, absent from his work is any discus-
sion by the ex-slaves themselves about the nature of freedom.59 This
silence is the norm for discussions in political philosophy about free-
dom in the Americas. For Du Bois, wage labour and slave labour were
both exploitative systems, but slavery was both a system of property
ownership and labour exploitation. It was thus a special form of human
domination. This is what he wrote:
There was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from what we may
apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced per-
sonal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another master; the standing with
hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family
life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual.
[emphasis added]60
The consequence of this theorization of slavery was the possibility of

alternative conceptions of freedom. This emerged as a central focus of
the book as Du Bois wove the historical narrative. His category of black
workers now opened new terrain both for analysis and for vindication.
Thus, for example, black workers in the period of the Civil War were
engaged, he argued, in a general strike the mass movement of slaves
from the plantations to the Union Army. He describes this movement
thus: This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a
wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that
involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted
to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left
the plantations.61
166 Anthony Bogues
By calling this movement a general strike, Du Bois, like James,

made the slaves into a different social category. In Du Boiss case, this
stance was consistently maintained. In the end, Du Bois gestured to
call the Reconstruction a period that was in part a dictatorship of
labor. He observes in a footnote, I first called this chapter the Dic-
tatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina [T]here were
signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes.62 Obviously
such an appellation destabilized the intellectual practices of Marxists
at the time. So it was not surprising that James Allen rushed to the
defence of American Marxism, quickly publishing Reconstruction: The
Battle for Democracy (1937), in which he made the point that while Black
Reconstruction was praiseworthy in its spirited defense of the Negro
in Reconstruction, Duboiss failure to grasp the bourgeois character
of the revolution leads him to mistaken notions.63 But at the core of
Du Boiss representation of Reconstruction were other purposes than
following orthodox Marxism. First, Du Bois wanted to demonstrate
how racial slavery had created racism, and how this racism would
bedevil any alliances between white and black labour. Second, Du Bois
wished to illuminate how in the nineteenth century, black ex-slave
labour had constructed in the South an effort at radical democracy,
which should be placed alongside the efforts of the Parisian working
class of the time. He writes, for example, that Reconstruction was one
of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world,
before the Russian revolution, had seen.64 Like James, Du Bois was
opening new spaces for the interpretation of radical history. The con-
sequence of locating these two events in radical historiography would
raise new questions about political practice and offer possible alter-
native insights into old political ideas. Refuting the social memory of
the Civil War and Reconstruction that held sway in America at the
time, Du Bois offers a historical work which re-narrates a different
story of American democracy, not one of American exceptionalism
but of its limits because it was rooted in racial slavery. At this point, it
might be important to indicate another Marxist opinion of Black Recon-
struction. William Gorman, in a 1950 article on Du Bois, observes that
in Black Reconstruction
Du Bois far outdistances his contemporaries A great work of this

kind is always a climax of historical accumulation. Everything was poured
onto its writing: the slave system, the slave insurrections, the murder of
abolitionists, fugitive slave rescues, the last letters of John Brown [A]nd
if the prosperity of European imperialism was built on the massacre of the

Paris Communards, Americas rise as a participant and leader in world
plunder was built on the unbridled deceit and terror which broke Black
Reconstruction in the South.65
Du Bois was more successful than James in writing about the social mind
of the slaves. In the IBW lectures, James makes the point that while he
had set out in The Black Jacobins to prove the humanity of the slaves, Du
Bois took it for granted. Because of this, James says, Du Bois opened
out the historical perspective in a manner I didnt know (2000, 85). The
narrative of The Black Jacobins stops at the victory of the revolutionary
army led by Dessalines. Du Bois, on the other hand, pursued another
set of questions. What was the nature of the ex-slaves project as it
unfolded in the late nineteenth century? How did they make emancipa-
tion into freedom? James stopped at vindicationism the revolutionary
transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white
man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most
powerful European nations of the day.66 Du Boiss probing of the ideas
of the ex-slaves about freedom and their attempts to construct demo-
cratic communities in the South takes Black Reconstruction out of the
realm of history and into that of political theory.
The Mapping of Transformation
In probing the ideas of the slaves about freedom, Du Bois points us to

the slaves political language of this freedom. In exquisite lyrical prose,
he describes this freedom as the coming of the Lord.
There was to be a new freedom! And a black nation went tramping after
the armies no matter how it suffered; no matter how it was treated, no
matter how it died. First, without masters, without food, without shel-
ter they prayed; they worked; they danced and sang; they studied to
learn; they wanted to wander they were consumed with desire for
schools. The uprising of the Black man, and the pouring of himself into
organized effort for education in those years between 1861 and 1871, was
one of the marvelous occurrences of the modern world; almost without
parallel in the history of civilization.67
But as is usual in radical historical studies, when one excavates a different

archive, alternative categories are opened up. Much of radical Western
168 Anthony Bogues
political theory, following Enlightenment secularization, regards reli-

gion as opiate irrationality or the sighs of the oppressed. However,
the grammar of the freed slaves suggested another interpretation. Du
Bois writes again:
[T]he mass of the slaves even the more intelligent ones, and certainly the
great group of field hands, were in religious and hysterical fervor. This
was the coming of the Lord. This was the fulfilment of prophecy and
legend. It was the Golden Dawn after chains of a thousand years. It was
everyday miraculous and perfect and promising.68
Du Bois then makes the point that the world did not understand the
nature of this freedom.
The world at first neither saw nor understood. Of all that most Americans
wanted, this freeing of the slave was the last. Everything black was hid-
eous. Everything Negroes did was wrong, if they fought for freedom, they
were beasts; if they did not fight, they were born slaves. If they cowered on
the plantations, they loved slavery; if they ran away, they were lazy loafers.
If they sang, they were silly; if they scowled, they were impudent And
they were funny, funny-ridiculous baboons, aping man.69
While The Black Jacobins does not spend a great deal of time reviewing
the political program the social and economic activities of the Haitian
Revolution Black Reconstruction does probe these areas. In scrutinizing
the government of South Carolina, Du Bois elaborates an evolution-
ary theory of democracy. For Du Bois, democracy evolved from notions
of rule of the chosen few to the idea that most men had capabilities,
except the Negro. Clearly, for Du Bois, in this frame democracy was
linked to conceptions of citizenship. What is interesting here is that for
Du Bois, citizenship did not include a notion of politics that concerned
itself primarily with duties, something very common in political phi-
losophy. In Du Boiss political thought, democracy was a function of
freedom. It was the practices of a body politic in which freedom was
not separate from social and political equality, and where questions of
justice were resolved around the issues of political economy, what he
called industrial democracy. In the Du Boisian paradigm, within the
historical domain there were two key questions that faced the Ameri-
can slave emancipation process: freedom and democracy. On the other
hand, for the Haitian Revolution and the ex-slaves, the key questions
were freedom and social equality.
In Du Boiss historical schema, the defeat of the Reconstruction rever-

berated throughout the world and established the ground for the char-
acter of the American Century and the intensification of colonialism
in the late nineteenth century. Du Bois argued that if a popular form of
democracy and citizenship had won out in the Reconstruction period,
world history would have been different. It is here perhaps that we can
better appreciate Du Boiss aphoristic statement, The problem of the
20th century was the color line.70
We know that by the end of the nineteenth century, America had
begun its external expansion and was now what Du Bois called, in
Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, a modern industrial imperial-
ism. This form of imperialism was different from that described by
V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the English political economist John
Hobson. For Du Bois, this kind of imperialism could not be called only
the economic stage of monopoly finance capitalism, because it created
a world of racialized labour and subjects. Modern imperialism, Du
Bois argued, depends upon what can be called modern discovery of
whiteness. He writes in Darkwater, The discovery of personal white-
ness among the worlds people is a very modern thing a nineteenth
and twentieth century matter.71 What we have here from Du Bois is an
early theorization of the nature of race and its functions in the modern
world. For Du Bois, race was a post-Enlightenment invention. Even
up into the 18th century we were hammering our national mankinds
into one, great Universal man, with fine frenzy which ignored color
and race, even more than birth.72 However, Du Bois recognized that
the American Century would have to reckon with the meaning of
race both externally and internally. In 1900, after the Cuban War of
Independence, he wrote:
What is our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses of
dark men and women who inhabit them? Manifestly it must be an atti-
tude of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance We must remember
that the20th century will find nearly twenty millions of brown and black
people under the American flag, and that the success and efficiency of
the nine millions of our own number depends [upon] the ultimate destiny
of Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Indians and Hawaiians.73
Du Bois links the fate of African Americans to that of other non-white,

non-European peoples. As things stood, however, by the 1930s the
defeat of the Reconstruction project and the consolidation of Jim Crow
meant that a new basis had been found for the continued domination
170 Anthony Bogues
of people on the basis of skin colour. It is perhaps not an accident that

in the nineteenth century race became a popular word. Centuries of
racial slavery had removed all inhibitions from Western thought about
the supposed true nature of the African. In his 1896 Sunshine and Storm
in Rhodesia, F.C. Selous captures well this current in Western thought:
Therefore Matebeleland is doomed by what seems a law of nature to

be ruled by the white man, and the black man must go, or conform to
the white mans laws, or die in resisting them. It seems a hard and cruel
fate for the black man, but it is destiny which the broadest philanthropy
cannot avert the law which has ruled upon this planet ever since, in
the far-off misty depths of time, organic life was first evolved upon the
earth the inexorable law which Darwin has aptly termed the Survival
of the Fittest.74
It was in this context that Du Bois sought to propagate an alternative

historical possibility. He painted a picture of radical world history
that had been made invisible because of the nature of Western his-
torical knowledge. In the end, he bemoaned the fact that [a] great
human experiment was present in Reconstruction, and its careful sci-
entific investigation would have thrown a world of light on human
development and democratic government.75
Heresy, Double Consciousness, and Black Radicalism
At this point it might be useful to summarize Du Boiss and Jamess

connections to Marxism and to extract from this relationship and their
writings some understanding of the distinctive elements of black radi-
cal intellectual production. James, as we have stated before, was a
Marxist by 1934. His sojourn on the terrain of Marxism took him by
1948 to an independent Marxist stance critical of the Soviet Union and
the Leninist party into activities with a group then called the Johnson-
Forest Tendency.76 By the mid-1960s, after his failed participation in
the Caribbean nationalist movement and federal projects, James wrote
his famous Beyond a Boundary. He never again participated fully in any
Marxist movement, and by the late 1960s had become a political mentor
for a new generation of radicals. In a 1980 interview, he remarked that
he thought his major contributions to political theory were his book
on Hegel and Marxism77 and his work that attempted to reconfigure
Marxism as a doctrine for the self-emancipation of the working class. In
many of his later interviews, James spoke as an independent Marxist

one who had attempted to use Marxist categories in a creative way.
In what ways can it be said that James was a heretic thinker? Jamess
heresy was rooted in the black radical intellectual tradition and in his
efforts to speak and write a political language reflective of the condi-
tions of the racialized black subject. This did not mean that his thought
and political practice were bereft of tensions. He himself stated in 1972
at a lecture to students at Tougaloo College, in referring to Africa, I was
twice your age before I began to understand [its] juridical systems,
political systems, philosophical systems and its great artistic achieve-
ments in plastic arts and its music.78 There is, I think, something of
note happening here. First, James is admitting his colonial upbringing,
but more importantly, he is admitting to the epistemic frames of his
knowledge. Second, he is suggesting that to understand Africa impacts
significantly upon ones thinking and on the ways in which one thinks
about the world. In other words, just as he was preoccupied with the
categories of Marxist political thought in the 1940s, he was now con-
cerned about the general frames missing from our thinking. I think that
James would wrestle with these issues and that even though he him-
self always made it clear that he was a Marxist, this Marxism was not
only an independent one but one that was shaped by radical thinking
around issues of race and colonial power. It is this critical engagement
with Marxism that makes him a heretic.
For Du Bois, the situation was more complicated. Du Bois had rec-
ognized as early as 1903 the feature of double-consciousness as part
of African American life. Drawing from Hegels Phenomenology of Mind,
and William Jamess and Ralph Waldo Emersons conceptions of double
life, he had carved out both a poetic and a social insight into the intel-
lectual and political practices of African Americans. He writes in The
Souls of Black Folk, It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of
measuring ones soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity.79 But this double-consciousness was not a
Hamlet-like condition of existential anguish and indecision. It produced
a second sight into American life that then formed the basis for a cri-
tique of both dominant discourses and radical critiques. So while Du
Bois formally embraced orthodox Marxism in the last years of his life,
he conducted a political practice that critically engaged Marxist theory.
It is perhaps a misnomer to call the most radical sections of his oeuvre
simply black Marxism, so let us see if thinking about the practices of the
172 Anthony Bogues
political intellectual in the black radical intellectual tradition can lead

us in another direction.
It is the heresy developed in the political and historical writings of
these two men that profoundly marks the shape of twentieth century
black radical intellectual production. Jamess and Du Boiss engage-
ment with the Western intellectual tradition represents a study of con-
flictual discursive practices and creative tension. By the time James and
Du Bois became mature political writers, they had digested the major
intellectual practices of the West. As late as the 1940s, in his biography
Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois would note his relationship to the Western intel-
lectual tradition and its ramifications for his work. In his 1963 semi-
autobiography Beyond a Boundary, James would make the point that
by the age of ten, he was a British intellectual with a literary bent.
For the stream of the black radical intellectual tradition that James and
Du Bois represented, the conflicts and tensions with the Western intel-
lectual tradition would be great, and the Western epistemic erasure of
Africa and Africans was painful.
As in all heretical practices, these two writers began with orthodoxy
and a sense of limits. However, as Pierre Bourdieu points out, heretical
practices occur when the social world does not appear self-evident or
natural, where there is no doxa. In the political practices of the black
radical intellectual, there is no doxa. Engagement means criticism and
the exercise of heretical power, what Bourdieu calls the strength of the
sorcerer who wields a liberatory potency.80 This liberatory potency
begins with black radical intellectual production revising historical
knowledge, reversing its silences in a practice of discursive represen-
tation. In this sense we can say that both The Black Jacobins and Black
Reconstruction represent the coming to the fore of subjugated historical
knowledge.
The emergence of this form of subjugated knowledge in the fields of
history and politics requires two things: a new way of thinking about
the political intellectual and a review of our habits of thinking about
forms of political knowledge. Much ink has been expended on the con-
cept of the intellectual. In Western conceptual history, the emergence
of the intellectual as part of a group, with a public face, was cotermi-
nous with the needs of secular political power and the creation of new
instruments of legitimacy and knowledge.81 Thus, in sixteenth century
Europe there was a shift in the keepers of knowledge from clergy to
members of the laity who became knowledge officers. The need for the
European state to gather experts to carry out its disciplinary functions
and to elaborate the ideology of its existence required the creation of

a trained group of men of ideas. The rapid emergence of schools and
universities in tandem with the growth of the modern state in Europe is
testimony to this relationship. So intellectuals emerged first as priests,
keepers of knowledge, and then, over time, as legitimators of the state
in the transformation of what Foucault calls pastoral power. By
the time of the French Enlightenment, intellectuals, organized in the
republic of letters, were the embodiment of reason.
The kingdom of reason became the lifeblood of intellectual life.
Within this kingdom of reason, intellectuals shared a similar vocabu-
lary, a common world, and a community of interests and meanings.
But the kingdom of reason also allowed for criticism. Two streams
developed within the fold of intellectuals: the critic and the expert. The
expert was the keeper of knowledge, the legitimator of the status quo,
while the critic spoke truth to power. However, this representation
of the conceptual history of the intellectual is highly problematic when
dealing with the radical black intellectual. Racial power is not only a
relationship of power and domination with social consequences; it is
also a way of knowing, of shaping ideas and thoughts. Racism fixes
the boundaries of what can be studied and how it should be studied. It
creates categories of hierarchy and is not simply reducible to personal
prejudice or false consciousness. As a mode of thought, tienne Bali-
bar has suggested, racism connects words with objects, and words with
images, in order to create concepts.82 To fully understand racism as
a form of power therefore, one has also to deal with the questions of
knowledge.
Although the radical black intellectual sociologically falls in a stra-
tum that is superficially similar to that of the Western intellectual and is
educated in the same way to master the conventions and vocabulary
of the West she or he is engaged in a discursive practice that pits learn-
ing and education against the self, Du Boiss double-consciousness.
As a consequence the radical black intellectual becomes both a critic
and a heretic. Michael Walzer suggests that the social critic is primarily
engaged in an internalist argument, that she or he, using Gramscis for-
mulation, initiates a process of differentiation and change in the rela-
tive weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess.83 In
other words, the social critic calls forth the contradictions of the regime
by exploding its ideological conceptions of social life. This might mean
the expansion of new concepts and political knowledge, but this form
of criticism operates within an already defined discursive field.
174 Anthony Bogues
On the other hand, for the radical black intellectual there is the per-
formance of a double negative; there is a double critique that makes
possible a different form of criticism. Extending Gilbert Ryles distinc-
tion between thick and thin descriptions,84 the kind of internal criti-
cism that Walzer suggests should be understood as a thin form of
criticism. This thin criticism is enclosed within the discursive frame-
work. Its force is to open the dominant ideology to its own hypocrisy.
Thin criticism does not destabilize the epistemic field of the dom-
inant discursive order. So, for example, in Western political philoso-
phy the critics of bourgeois equality argue that equality is primarily
a political good, which ignores the way market property relations
stymie social equality. These critics argue that equality in such situ-
ations becomes a foundational procedural claim. However, in a pro-
found sense, the grounds for the argument are already established;
they continue the dichotomy between different political values that are
said in conventional liberal political philosophy to be contradictory, in
particular between that of equality and freedom.85 The genealogy of
this debate is grounded in the intellectual and political practices of lib-
eralism. On the other hand, if we step outside the historical practices
of liberalism and its rationalities to examine the history of rebellions
and movements against racial slavery/oppression and colonialism,
we would find it suggests that the dichotomy between these political
values is a false one.
Thus thin criticism remains within the established boundaries,
seeking to radicalize political values rather than to create new mean-
ings. For the black radical intellectual, criticism challenges the knowl-
edge framework and categories of the discursive order. It does this in
three steps. The first is the call for discursive representation. The
second is the rewriting of history. The third is to establish different
values for the practice of politics. This form of criticism, then, has the
potential to create new radical practices; it is thick criticism, which
troubles the waters. Because the black radical intellectual practices this
form of criticism, she or he is a heretic.
Conclusion
Michel de Certeau makes the point that modern European history

began as an exercise in self-reflection at the time of the European voy-
ages.86 History as the rendering of an account of self is both heuristic
and imaginative. Historical meanings, we know, are always present
constructions. In other words, the questions of history are not posed

by the past but by the present. It is from this standpoint that we should
begin to grapple with the historical methodologies of The Black Jaco-
bins and Black Reconstruction. In the last chapter of Black Reconstruction,
Du Bois flays the American historical profession for what he calls the
propaganda of history. Detailing the historical works of the period,
he queries whether or not history as practised by American historians
can be scientific. At first blush, it seems that Du Bois is reaching for a
Rankean formulation of history as objective truth. But for Du Bois,
truth is not a quality external to human action and subjectivity, but
rather is the correction of the racist propaganda with which the Ameri-
can historical profession was engaged at the time. Du Bois asks how
far truth is ascertainable, and goes on to speak of the moral wrongs of
slavery, which are neglected by American historians. For Du Bois the
propaganda of history is, then, racist historical knowledge.
Like James, Du Bois seems to have had a conception of historical
writing in which the research was the search for facts akin to formal
science, and historical writing was an art. For Du Bois, history was also
about interpretation. He proclaims in Black Reconstruction, in a note to
the reader, This book will seek to tell and interpret.87 It is of interest
to note that in one of his last major works, the Black Flame trilogy (1957,
1959), Du Bois revisited the issues of historical knowledge:
After action and feeling and reflection are long past, then from writing
and memory we may secure some picture of the total truth, but it will be
imperfect, with much omitted, much forgotten, much distorted There is but
one way to meet this clouding of the facts and that is by the use of the imagi-
nation where documented material and personal experience are lacking.88
For Du Bois, when he was writing Black Reconstruction, the documen-

tary evidence existed for the writing of historical truth.
Black Reconstruction and The Black Jacobins set out to challenge forms
of historical knowledge. In doing so, they expanded our understand-
ings of human social and political knowledges. They attempted to con-
front the epistemic erasure of the Western intellectual tradition. Their
examples offer hope not only for a general reflective self-understanding,
but also for a renewal of the logic of the African slaves fight for free-
dom as one stance from which we can begin to retell a different story
of freedom. In the final analysis, we have to ask ourselves what issues
these two theorists raised that are still relevant to the present world.
176 Anthony Bogues
The most obvious ones surround the issues of race and the legacies of
colonialism; but there is something more. If many radical critiques of
modernity focused on questions of exploitation, human alienation,
and politics as involving issues of political obligation, sovereign self,
and citizenship, the works of black radical theorists like James and Du
Bois shift our gaze to questions of domination, oppression, and politics
as a practice of freedom. They offer a different optic on the possibilities
of human freedom.
NOTES
1 This chapter is adapted from Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Proph-
ets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), ch. 3, 6993.
2 There are, of course, exceptions to this; see, for example, Cedric Robinson,
Black Marxism (London: Zed, 1983).
3 See Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Taylor and the
Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Humanity Books, 1996).
4 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spac-
ing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 65.
5 For a discussion of the American Civil War and Reconstruction as a site
of memory contestation, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion (Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). For discussions on the Hai-
tian Revolution, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the
Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), ch. 2.
6 There has been a long history of vindication in black historical thought,
which should not be a surprise since historical knowledge has been one
way in which the humanity of the racialized black body has been negated.
Thus, there is a turn in black historical writings to vindicate the black as a
human being by recourse to history that proves this humanity. One of the
earliest instances of this is James Hollys A vindication of the capacity of the
Negro race for self-government and civilized progress, as demonstrated by histori-
cal events of the Haytian Revolution: and the subsequent acts of that people since
their national independence (New Haven: William Stanley, 1857).
7 For a discussion of this, see Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criti-
cism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42.
8 Quoted in Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch, eds., Intellectuals in
Politics (London: Routledge, 1997), 9.
9 For a revealing discussion of Jamess early life, see C.L.R. James, Beyond a
Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963).
10 James, Beyond a Boundary, 149.

11 C.L.R. James. World Revolution (19171936): The Rise and Fall of the Com-
munist International (Connecticut: Hyperion, 1973). First published in 1937.
For the importance of this text to international Trotskyism, see Anthony
Bogues, Calibans Freedom: The Early Political Thought of CLR James (London:
Pluto, 1997), ch. 3.
12 For a discussion of this group and its newspaper, The International African
Opinion, within the context of radical anticolonialism and as an example
of radical black thought, see Anthony Bogues, Radical Anti-Colonial
Thought, Anti-Colonial Internationalism and the Politics of Human Soli-
darities, in International Relations and Non-Western Thought, ed. Robbie
Shilliam (London: Routledge, 2011) ch. 12.
13 C.L.R. James, The Beacon 1, no. 4 (July 1931).
14 For a discussion of Jamess early writings in Trinidad, see Reinhard
Sander, West Indian Literature of the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1988).
15 C.L.R. James, The Old World and the New, in At the Rendezvous of Victory
(London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 211.
16 These lectures have been published as C.L.R. James, Lectures on The
Black Jacobins, Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 8 (2000): 65112.
17 Ibid., 67.
18 There is still an engrossing debate about history and its relationship to
literary production. For some readings on this debate, see Roger Chartier,
On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997); Hayden White, The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987); and F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
19 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo
Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), xi. This is the edition used through-
out this essay.
20 James, Lectures on The Black Jacobins, 71.
21 Ibid., 85.
22 W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), viiviii.
23 Ibid., 20.
24 Ibid., 30.
25 Ibid., 27.
26 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), xvi. First published in 1899.
178 Anthony Bogues
27 See Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana (New York: Routledge, 2000),

ch. 5 for an excellent review of the philosophical significance of Du Boiss
early sociological work. Another assessment of Du Boiss sociological contri-
butions can be found in Ronald A.T. Judy, ed., Sociology Hesitant: Think-
ing with W.E.B. Du Bois, special issue, boundary 2 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000).
28 This text has remained until today perhaps the most studied text of Du
Bois. In it he develops the idea of double-consciousness. For a version of
this text with essays by different critics, see W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black
Folk, Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 1999).
29 W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: Random House, 1996), reprint.
30 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 67.
31 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Henry Holt, 1915).
32 See John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Prometheus Books,
2000) for a discussion of this renascent liberalism and its relationship to
social criticism and activism. Du Bois and Dewey worked together for a
brief moment in 1929 in the short-lived League of Independent Political
Action. See Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 288.
33 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 288.
34 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 18601880 (New York:
Atheneum, 1969). This is the edition used throughout this essay.
35 David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil
War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 230.
36 Cited in David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and
the American Century, 19191963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 45.
37 W.E.B. Du Bois, Marxism and the Negro Problem, in W.E.B. Du Bois: A
Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995),
53844.
38 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 27.
39 Eric J. Hobsbawms magisterial four volumes stand as the exemplar of rad-
ical historical narratives about the world over the last two hundred years.
The volumes, all published by Vintage Books, are The Age of Revolution, The
Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes. What is interest-
ing to note about this work are its silences. However, for our purposes, in
the Age of Revolution, Hobsbawm argues that the French Revolution
remains the revolution of its time. He then goes on to describe the rise
of the Jacobins and asserts that their actions in the revolution helped to
create the first independent revolutionary leader of stature in Toussaint-
Louverture. After this reference, the Haitian Revolution is consigned to
historical oblivion. What I am suggesting here is that no serious examina-
tion of the Age of Revolution can occur without study of the meaning of
the Haitian Revolution for that period, since it successfully overthrew one
of the foundations of the modern world racial slavery.
40 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1994), reprint.
41 See for a discussion of this point C.L.R. James, The Atlantic Slave Trade
and Slavery, in Amistad 1, ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris
(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 123.
42 James, The Black Jacobins, 856.
43 Ibid., 243.
44 C.L.R. James, Revolution and the Negro, in C.L.R. James and Revolu-
tionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 19391949, ed. Scott
McLemee and Paul Le Blanc (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 77.
(Emphasis added.)
45 It is interesting to note something that is not often talked about with refer-
ence to James. In two interviews done in 1980 and 1981, and published in
Paul Buhle, ed., C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (London: Allison and Busby,
1986), James makes the point about The Black Jacobins that, since he had
returned to the Caribbean, A great deal of my time has been spent in see-
ing how much I failed to understand when I was young and my whole life
was toward European literature, European sociology. Now Im beginning
to see and it is helping me to write (167). One can only speculate what it
would have meant if he were to rewrite The Black Jacobins from this frame.
46 For a discussion of this point about James, see Paget Henry, Calibans Rea-
son: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 48.
47 James, Lectures on The Black Jacobins, 65112.
48 James, The Black Jacobins, 88.
49 Ibid., 246.
50 For discussions of some of these views, see Carolyn Fick, The Making of
Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1990). See also the various articles by John K. Thorton,
in particular his African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution, Journal of
Caribbean History 25, nos. 1 and 2 (1991): 5880. There are, of course, major
disputes about this. See in particular the work of David Geggus; his Slave
Resistance Studies and Saint Domingue Slave Revolt: Some Preliminary
Considerations (Miami, FL: Latin American and Caribbean Center, Occa-
sional Paper, 4th series, 1983) is a good example of the main arguments in
this dispute.
51 For a description of and discussion about Lwa in Haitian religious prac-
tices, see Donald Cosentino, ed., Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995).
180 Anthony Bogues
52 For an excellent discussion of this and the importance of Haitian vodou as

a project of thought, see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1998).
53 I have made a claim that the Haitian Revolution should be considered as
a dual revolution. There were two revolutionary processes that flowed
into each other, an anti-slavery one and an anticolonial one. These two
processes and their relationship also make the revolution a distinctive one
in which new questions were posed about freedom. See for a discussion of
this point, Anthony Bogues, The 1805 Haitian Constitution: The Mak-
ing of Slave Freedom in the Atlantic World, in Freedom: Retrospective and
Prospective, ed. Swithin Wilmot (Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 2009), 14474.
54 James, Revolution and the Negro, 77. Where there was no historical
neglect, the revolution was seen as a manifestation of the bourgeois-
democratic revolution of the period. For this discussion, see Eugene D.
Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in
the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1979), ch. 3.
55 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 5.
56 Ibid., 30.
57 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 53.
58 Michael Sandel, Democracys Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996). For a discussion about the ideology of free labour during
the Reconstruction period, see Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of
Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the PostCivil War North, 18651901
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
59 These discussions can be found in the political discourse of Southern black
representatives, particularly after the 1870s and before black political
equality was destroyed.
61 Ibid., 67.
62 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 381. It is also important to
observe that in this footnote Du Bois makes it clear that he was studying
Marxs theory of the time. He does not use the appellation to describe his
work, and I think that is the only sign of hesitancy in this 737-page text.
He does, however, continue to think in these terms throughout the text,
particularly in his description of the political actions of the black ex-slaves
in the Southern States.
63 James Allen, Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy (New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1937), 11.
65 William Gorman, W.E.B. Du Bois and His Work, Fourth International 11,
no. 3 (1950): 806. Gorman was a close associate of James in the Johnson-
Forest Tendency. Gorman was a political name; his real name was George
Rawick, and he went on to write histories of slave life in America. I want
to thank the late Jim Murray for my copy of this paper.
66 James, The Black Jacobins, xi.
68 Ibid., 122.
69 Ibid., 125.
70 For a discussion of this concept of the colour line and its consequences see,
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dodd, Mead and Com-
pany, 1979), ch. 1.
71 W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Dover
Publications, 1999), reprint, 17.
73 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,
Church Review, no. 17 (1900). Cited in John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture
and U.S. Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203.
74 Quoted in Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American
Thought, 18601945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 205.
76 See Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1996) for a review of Jamess political life.
77 Published as C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics (London: Allison and
Busby, 1980).
78 C.L.R. James (Talk, Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, MS, United States, 9 May
1972). Thanks to the late Jim Murray for sending me a copy.
79 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 3.
80 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 171.
81 This section owes much to Zygmunt Baumans discussion of intellectuals
in his Legislators and Interpreters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1987).
82 tienne Balibar, Masses, Ideas and Politics (London: Verso, 1994), 200.
83 Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, 42.
84 Gilbert Ryle, The Thinking of Thoughts: What Is Le Penseur Doing?
University Lectures 18, University of Saskatchewan (1968), 32.
85 See Steven Lukes, Liberty and Equality: Must They Conflict? in Politi-
cal Theory Today, ed. David Held (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1996), ch. 2.
182 Anthony Bogues
86 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1988).
88 Quoted in Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois
(New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 31516.
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Walzer, Michael. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
8 Colonizing, Colonized: Sartre and Fanon
audr ey k ob ayas h i an d mark b oy l e
One of the most intense conversations to have explored the themes

of Marxism, racism, and anti-racism occurred between Jean-Paul Sar-
tre and Frantz Fanon during the decades after World War II. Their
exchanges were to change forever and dramatically our understanding
of how racism works and, in particular, how colonialism, racism, and
anti-imperialism conspire and combine in different ways during dif-
ferent historical contexts to renew and refresh one another. Both stand
as founding figures of and seminal thinkers in the burgeoning fields of
racial and ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. Moreover, it is pos-
sible to argue that between them Sartre and Fanon fashioned the very
basis upon which post-structural conceptions of activism were sub-
sequently to be developed. But if their relationship was intellectually
rich, it was also politically fraught. Whoever these two may have been
as individuals, both endowed with an immense intellectual gift and
a fervent commitment to overcome the historic effects of colonialism
and racism, they were also what they signified: the colonizer and the
colonized. Theirs was a personal connection and also a relationship that
spanned the impossible divide between the worlds they represented,
both intellectual and visceral. They approached the colonizercolonized
relationship from two very different places, and their intellectual and
political interests radiated in very different directions.
It is commonly held that one of the most significant implications of
Sartres and Fanons respective backgrounds was their differing ideas
of the universal that lies within the particular. Writing from the metro-
politan heartland, Sartre was keen to apprehend European projections
of the racialized other as a pivotal moment in the history of colonialism
and, by implication, capitalism. As a corollary, anticolonial movements,
Colonizing, Colonized: Sartre and Fanon 185
irrespective of their particular form and hue, concealed a universal

rejection of oppressive metropolitan aggrandizement and betrayed a
linear eschatology destined to end with the establishment of a global
socialist and communist polity. While Fanon shared Sartres Marxism,
he was less wedded to the imperative of effacing and transcending the
particular racial, ethnic, and national coloration of concrete anticolonial
movements. For Sartre, ethnic nationalism was useful only insofar as
and only to the point at which it galvanized anti-imperial movements;
when it became an end in itself, it not only risked obfuscating and mys-
tifying its historical meaning and telos, but also risked lapsing into anti-
racist racism. While the black person and only the black person was
entitled to renounce the particular racial and ethnic character of the
negritude movement, in the end such transcendence was vital. In con-
trast, for Fanon the battles of the negritude movement were both partic-
ular and universal, and any demand to relegate the significance of the
specific and the local was tantamount to metropolitan ignorance and
possibly even arrogance. Nonetheless, they shared a common respect
for understanding difference and the puzzle of how politics of differ-
ence represent both oppression and hope (Haddour 2005).
The purpose of this paper is to place this narration of the Sartre
Fanon relationship under critical scrutiny. We approach their con-
versation as a double movement: on the one hand, as an interrupted
discourse across the unbreachable divide of colonialism; and on the
other, as a series of productive moments of understanding the dia-
lectic of identity formation and alterity in situation (Kruks 1996). We
contend that Sartre and Fanon did not depart as widely as it is often
assumed. In fact, in the end Sartre rejected the pretensions of metro-
politan theory and came to doubt Marxisms capacity to render all
concrete instances of colonialism and anti-imperialism intelligible as
part of the wider movement of history. Arguably, he went further than
Fanon in venerating the historically novel and unpredictable social,
economic, political, and cultural formations which different anticolo-
nial movements secrete. At the same time, Sartre remained committed
to contesting the degenerative gene that seemed to turn anti-imperial
movements into fossilized encrustations, and stayed vigilant and wary
of the metastases of anticolonial movements into fascist dictatorships,
military juntas, and virulent ethno-nationalisms. Towards building a
more rounded and complex story of Sartres and Fanons entangled
biographies, we begin with a very brief review of the populist narrative
of the Sartre and Fanon relationship, proceed to an exposition of what
186 Audrey Kobayashi and Mark Boyle
the two thinkers contributed to anti-racist scholarship, provide a brief

description of their intellectual relationship and its ruptures, and end
with a discussion of how Sartres ruminations on racism, anti-racism,
and colonialism led him to rethink his position on the universal versus
the particular dialectic and brought him to a new but still critical align-
ment with Fanon.
Sartre and Fanon in Postcolonial Lore
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905, and by 1931 was a profes-
sor of philosophy at Lyce Le Havre. At the start of World War II, he
was teaching philosophy at Lyce Pasteur in Paris. During the war, he
served in the French Underground and was captured by German occu-
pying forces and detained as a prisoner of war. Remarkably, he wrote
his major work on the philosophy of existentialism, Being and Nothing-
ness (first published in 1943), during this time. Sartre emerged in the
1940s as one of the leading French intellectuals and public scholars, and
cofounded and served as co-editor of the popular left journal Les Temps
Modernes. He remained an independent philosopher, playwright, nov-
elist, political commentator, and activist throughout the 1950s and
1960s. The Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartres major Marxist work,
was written in the form of three different books and two different
volumes, largely between 1957 and 1960 (Sartre 1976a, 1991). In 1964
he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but refused to accept the
award on the grounds that the Nobel Prize was an institution of the
bourgeoisie. By the time of his death from edema of the lung in 1980,
he was widely regarded as one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth
century.
Frantz Fanon was born on the French colonial island of Martinique
in 1925. He served with the Free French and later the Allied forces in
Algeria and in France during World War II, and then attended medi-
cal school in Paris to train as a psychiatrist. As a student, Fanon was
exposed to the heady intellectual ideas of the time, which included
those of the international negritude movement (in particular, Lopold
Sdar Senghor, a future Senegalese President; Martinican poet Aim
Csaire; Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba; and the
Guianan Lon Damas). Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks initially as
his doctoral dissertation, a study of the psychological effects of colonial-
ism, which was rejected as such. He nonetheless published the manu-
script as a book in 1952, and he took up a post at the Blida-Joinville
Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where his radical approach to treat-

ment involved patients directly confronting their cultural experiences
of blackness. It was from this cultural and geographical location that he
wrote his later books, including The Wretched of the Earth. He joined the
Front de Libration Nationale (FLN) in 1954, but contracted leukemia
before seeing the end of the Algerian struggle and died in America in
1961 (Geismar and Worsley 1969).
The context in which Sartre and Fanon lived and wrote is of immense
and ironic importance. PostWorld War II Paris was one of the most
productive incubators of Marxist thought. Recovering and healing from
the atrocities wrought by Nazi occupation, Parisian leftist intellectual,
cultural, and political life became preoccupied by the deviant course
the Soviet Union was taking under Stalin. It was from the struggle over
ideas within the French Communist Party in the 1950s that so-called
Existential Marxism emerged, its two major leaders being Sartre and
Henri Lefebvre. French Existential Marxists sought to rescue Marxism
from its growing critics by offering an alternative to the discredited
and disgraced Soviet and Stalinist communism. The French Existen-
tial Marxists were free thinkers within the Marxist tradition, critics of
dogmatic French and Soviet communism, non-conformist communists,
and eventually non-communist Marxists. Marxisms historical teleol-
ogy remained essentially true, but history would only unfold through
struggle and resistance to fundamental alienation and alterity, which
became the new battlefields. It is entirely unsurprising that Existential
Marxism reached its apex during the violent struggle for Algerian
independence (19541962).
It was in that context that Sartre and Fanon neither of whom was
Algerian crossed paths. As a student, Fanon saw in Sartres early
works, Anti-Semite and Jew and, in particular, the philosophical ideas
laid out in Being and Nothingness, the basis for understanding colonial
subjectivity. Using Sartres ideas, Fanon wrote eloquently initially in
Black Skin, White Masks about the colonial creation of the black subject.
But Fanon also condemned Sartre, accusing him in Black Skin, White
Masks of having appropriated history as a white man who could never
understand what it is to be black. White intellectuals of the metropole
would always be just that, and as such, complicit in perpetuating colo-
nialism and racism. Later, in the midst of the Algerian war, Fanon wrote
a series of articles condemning the French Left, among whom he claimed
he could not differentiate individuals, accusing them tout court of being
paternalistic and ineffectual (Gendzier 1973, 1525). Nonetheless, near
the end of his life, in May 1961, Fanon arranged to meet Sartre in Rome.
Sartre arrived with Simone de Beauvoir, and they listened while Fanon
went on for several hours, in a feverish state, imploring Sartre not only
to understand but to make a difference, to help make an end to racism
possible. De Beauvoir had to encourage Sartre, who was himself not
very healthy, away from the room (Geismar 1971, 17981).1 The result of
that evening was Sartres famous preface to The Wretched of the Earth
published after Fanons death in the United States a few months later
in which Sartre writes what amounts to an apology and a statement
of the impossibility of the white man ever to situate himself fully in
a black society (Fanon 1963). He is therefore condemned to his own
limitations.
Sartre and Racism
Jean-Paul Sartre is not primarily known either as a Marxist or an anti-

racist scholar, notwithstanding his extensive writing on both topics.
He is best known for his monumental Being and Nothingness, in which
he outlines the phenomenological possibility of human existence, the
self in relation to others, widely known as a theory of existentialism
(Sartre 1943). Being and Nothingness sets the conditions for understand-
ing why human freedom is simultaneously inescapable and unattain-
able, always surpassed in the negation of the self through recognition
of the other. Sartres intellectual goal, however, was not to understand
individual existence, and it was partly for that reason that he resisted
the label of existentialism being applied to his work. His objective
was not even to understand the individual in relation to a collectiv-
ity defined as community or nation, but rather to understand the con-
struction of history as a cumulative human project. He came to believe
that only by discerning the structure of a finite history could human
beings end the oppression that permeates the selfother relationship,
an oppression which is bred into systems of capitalism and colonial-
ism. Sartre was motivated by a concern to rehabilitate what he viewed
as an authentic Marxism from its Stalinist version, which he saw as
tyrannical, fossilized, and oppressive. The tension between a concept
of totalized history and his lifelong preoccupation with contingency2
may have been irreconcilable, a situation that made many thinkers see
Sartres work as ultimately a failure and others including ourselves
as an opening of possibilities both intellectual and political.3 Sartres
writing was never to provide more than a pessimistic assessment of
that opening, however, notwithstanding comments made in interviews

towards the end of his life that indicate that his thinking culminated in
greater hope.4
As a public intellectual, Sartre was lionized and adored by some,
repudiated by others, often misunderstood, miscategorized (to the
extent that his work actually could be categorized), and misattributed.
On the one hand, he was profoundly influenced by Marx, whose work
he viewed as the basis for understanding history. Marxism was, to use
Sartres own words, a theory of conditioning in exteriority (1974, 36).5
Sartres unwavering commitment to Marxism was based on two major
aspects of Marxs writing: (1) the contention that history is a process
of class struggle structured by particular modes of production and, by
extension, that the appropriation of the means of production through
capitalism or, more specifically, colonialism leads to material scarcity,
which is the negation of one part of humanity on the part of another;
and (2) his belief that Marx provided the key to understanding history
proper and the basis for an end to history as we know it. In brief, these
issues are identified in The Problem of Method (Sartre 1964a), the first
volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason is an extended definition of
the first point, and the second volume (unfinished and posthumously
published) is a discussion of the second, where Sartre tries to show the
dialectical intelligibility of a movement of historical temporalization
(1974, 53).
Many have written about why Sartres project was destined to fail,
but none has put it more simply than Ronald Aronson (1987, 235): Can
we really expect to add individuals to individuals and somehow arrive
at a larger totality? Does the totality not have to be given in advance,
at least in the form of a totalizing force, in order for it to appear at the
end? Sartres contribution, however, can be seen as having uncovered
the impossible, rather than as having failed to achieve it. As Aronson
also points out, those who condemn Sartre for failure fail to benefit
from what he achieved.
Sartre was one of a group of continental philosophers, known collec-
tively as Existential Marxists, who laid the basis for a post-structuralist
Marxism. Most notable among this group was Henri Lefebvre, whose
work on the city and grassroots movements laid much of the ground-
work for contemporary radical activism (see Lefebvre 1968). As Michael
Kelly notes, While Sartre followed the post-colonial route, Lefebvre
pursued the critique of modernity, which accounts for Sartres greater
emphasis on processes of racialization, but their convergence and
common interests were based in non-communist Marxism (1999, 12).

This key difference between Sartre and Lefebvre became more and
more important, however. As Kelly explains, While Sartre was drawn
into increasing political commitment nationally, Lefebvre was taking
refuge in the ostensibly non-political task of constructing an academic
career in the burgeoning discipline of sociology (7).
Both Sartre and Lefebvre pursued a positive agenda to move Marx-
ism forward; others, such as Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
repudiated Marxism. For Sartre, the result was a rupture of friendships
with both scholars. Much has been written about these and other rup-
tures among leftist scholars, and about Sartres transition throughout
the 1940s and 1950s to a revolutionary post-communism. In 1952, in
reaction to the French governments suppression of the French Com-
munist Party and anti-NATO riots in Paris, Sartre wrote The Communists
and Peace, in which he swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred which would
only die with me (1969, 128). Reminiscing about this time period, Sartre
describes a situation at the beginning of the Cold War when intellectu-
als had to choose between a commitment to socialism and a withdrawal
from political life. He chose the former, and became what Pierre Victor
describes as a malodorous ally (Sartre and Victor 2005). These works
were the precursor to The Problem of Method and finally, beginning in
the late 1950s, the long journey that produced the two volumes of The
Critique of Dialectical Reason itself (Fatouros 1965; Poster 1975; Chiodi
1976; Craib 1976; Lawler 1976; McBride 1981; Catalano 1986; Gerassi
1989; Flynn 1997; Fox 2003; Badiou 2007).
Sartres explicit writing on race begins with Anti-Semite and Jew,
published three years after Being and Nothingness, wherein he extends
the discussion of the relationship between self and other to the over-
determination of Jewish identity as the anti-Semite reduces the Jew to
his essence (Judaken 2006). It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew
(Sartre [1946] 1995, 69). The Jew may be constructed as other by the
non-Jew, but the overdetermination is a double movement: They have
allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have
of them. And they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this
stereotype We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdeter-
mined from the inside (39; quoted in Fanon [1952] 2008, 73). Race is
thus for Sartre a historical product of human relations in which agency
and constraint are negotiated. He asserts a compelling argument for the
social construction of race: If by race is understood that indefinable
complex into which are tossed pell-mell both somatic characteristics
and intellectual and moral traits, I believe in it no more than I do in

ouija boards (Sartre [1946] 1995, 61).
Sartre was one of the first white Western thinkers to advance post-
racialism as a political goal. In Black Orpheus, he describes Europe
as no more than a geographical accident (1964b, 14) and racism as a
product of European colonialism that was generated socially and could
be transcended. He urges Europeans to tear off our white tights in
order simply to be men (15). Notwithstanding that racism is itself a
product of a capitalist and colonial system, the fact of blackness means
that another double movement is required: both the willingness of the
European to shed whiteness and the willingness of the colonized to rise
up against racism.
The unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples
together in the same struggle, must be preceded in the colonies by what
I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this anti-racist racism
is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial differences. (18,
emphasis added)
Both the dialectical creation of the other (the racist act) and its negation
(the anti-racist racist act) depend profoundly for Sartre on situation,
a concept that animates Sartrean thought in its entirety (De Beauvoir
[1948] 1976). The human being
is defined first of all as a being in a situation [H]e cannot be distin-

guished from his situation, for it forms him and decides his possibilities;
but, inversely, it is he who gives it meaning by making his choices within
it and by it. To be in a situation is to choose oneself in a situation, and
men differ from one another in their situations and also in the choices they
themselves make of themselves. (Sartre 1995, 5960)
Peoples identity, both ascribed and affective, is created through the

common bond of community (69). In both Anti-Semite and Jew and
Black Orpheus, Sartre presents a contingent understanding of com-
munity as a struggle between the affective and the ascriptive, in which
race is much more readily transcended than class.
Nevertheless, the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the
former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract; one
belongs to what Jaspers calls comprehension, and the other to intellection;
the first is the product of a psycho-biological syncretism, and the other

is a methodic construction starting with experience. In fact, Negritude
appears like the up-beat [unaccented beat] of a dialectical progression: the
theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the
position of Negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity.
But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men
who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing
the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus
Negritude is for destroying itself, it is a crossing to and not an arrival
at, a means and not an end.6 (1964b, 49)
Fanon, Sartre, and Race
Taking a direct cue from Sartre, Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks,
wherein he claims, It is the racist who creates the inferiorized ([1952]
2008, 73; italics original). Fanons task is an attempt to understand the
BlackWhite relationship (xiii). He does so analogously by applying
Sartrean insights on the relationship between self and other, a psycho-
social relationship in which the black man, beset with images of evil,
fear, and ugliness, in an attempt to negate his own negation by the colon,
dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally par-

ticipating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted
from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or epider-
malized into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between
the black mans consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the
black man is necessarily alienated from himself. (Poulos 1996, n.p.)
For Fanon, too, colonial oppression depends on situation, and his writ-
ings on colonialism display a deft handling of the concept to energize
black consciousness. But notwithstanding his intellectual debt to Sar-
tre, Black Skin, White Masks also contains a visceral response to Black
Orpheus in which Fanon lashes out at Sartres presumption to know
anything about the black man.
We had appealed to a friend of the colored peoples, and this friend had
found nothing better to do than demonstrate the relativity of their action.
For once this friend, this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness
needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining
self-consciousness Black Orpheus marks a date in the intellectualization

of black existence. And Sartres mistake was not only to seek the source
of the spring, but in a certain way to drain the spring dry Jean-Paul
Sartre has destroyed black impulsiveness. He should have opposed the
unforeseeable to historical destiny. ([1952] 2008, 11213)
The balance of the fifth chapter in Black Skin, White Masks presents a
troubled and, in many places, contradictory assertion of Fanons claim
to negritude. On the one hand, he recognizes in himself a wretched
romanticism (114), shattered by Sartres patronizing appropriation.
What is certain is that at the very moment when I endeavoured to grasp

my being, Sartre, who remains the Other, by naming me he shattered
my last illusion [H]e reminded me that my negritude was nothing but a
weak stage [W]ithout a black past, without a black future, it was impos-
sible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely
black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in
his body quite differently from the white man. (11617)
On the other hand, however, Fanon ends the book on a more optimis-
tic tone. His goal is to skim over this absurd drama that others have
staged around me (174) with appeals to human freedom, action, and
solidarity, an end to subjugation (Gendzier 1973). Enigmatically, and
perhaps paradoxically, Fanon arrives at a conclusion that both echoes
and challenges Sartre: The black man is not. No more than the white
man (Fanon [1952] 2008, 206).
Anticolonialism beyond Race
Scholars have written reams about the enigmatic relationship between

Fanon and Sartre at the beginning of their intellectual relationship in
the early 1950s. We make no attempt here to review what is, in many
respects, a highly speculative literature. What remains for this chapter
is to look more deeply at the relationship in terms of that between anti-
racism and postcolonialism, where both exhibit a devout commitment
to revolutionary change, albeit in somewhat different ways.
For neither Sartre nor Fanon can the concept of race be unmoored
from its production as a colonial and Manichean form of human rela-
tionship. Kathryn Gines (2003) contends that in considering the impact
of Sartre and Fanon fifty years later, it would be a mistake to use their
call for overcoming, or transcending, race as a basis for advocating a

raceless society. While we agree with her that race cannot be erased as
a product of history, we would qualify her claim that race conscious-
ness should be maintained (albeit without racism) because it has also
come to represent a more positive category that encompasses a sense
of membership or belonging, remembrance of struggle and overcom-
ing, and the motivation to press forward and endeavour towards new
ideals and achievements (56). She argues for an authentic race con-
sciousness (using the Sartrean concept of authentic as situated) that,
she contends, requires a positive perception of blackness that chal-
lenges the history of oppression and rejection that is associated with
being black (64).
While we may agree with her that Sartres attempt to achieve a
raceless state so that the problems of class can be erased and Fanons
attempt to put the past behind in order to free the black psyche are both
(after a retrospective of fifty years) unrealistic and problematic, we dis-
agree that positive race consciousness represents a solution to the ongo-
ing issues of oppression (see also Cronon [1955] 2007). And we assert
that Sartre and Fanon felt much the same. Rather than remain with the
discourse over race that took place in the early 1950s, however, we need
to move forward a decade to the more significant pairing that occurred
between Sartres Critique and Fanons Wretched of the Earth. This is
precisely the point made recently by Robert Bernasconi, who writes:
However, the important point in this context is that Sartre, like Fanon,
came to understand racism as a passive constitution of things. It is a sys-
tem embedded in the practico-inert before being an ideology (CRD 692;
CDR 739). This is reflected most clearly in The Wretched of the Earth where
Fanon, picking up on Sartres earlier analysis, wrote that the colonizer
makes the colonized, but then added, in keeping with the new position
that they now shared, that the colonizer derives his validity in the form
of his wealth from the colonial system (DT 66; WE 2). Or, as Sartre had
already written in the Critique, the colonised native was produced by the
colonial system (CRD 692; CDR 739). (2010, 39)
We heartily welcome Bernasconis thoughtful and thoroughly convinc-

ing argument that Sartres Critique and Fanons Wretched of the Earth
need to be read in dialogue, recognizing (as is well known) that each
read the others work and that although they spoke from different situ-
ations, both eventually placed their focus upon the systematic effects
of colonialism. Jonathan Judaken likewise argues that Sartre moved

from an existential understanding of anti-Semitism as the product of
the white gaze to a recognition, in the Critique, that the institutional-
ization of racism and its enmeshment in the system of production and
exchange goes beyond the terms of his earlier reflections on antisemi-
tism and his support of the negritude negation of colonialism reach-
ing full fruition in his existential Marxist writings (2008, 38).
The shift in both men from a phenomenological/psychological
understanding of racism to a demand for revolutionary action is thus
well recognized in the work of Judaken and Bernasconi. There is much
debate, however, about the meaning of violence. Clearly the language
of violence, or its possibility, permeates both Wretched of the Earth itself
and Sartres introduction. Sartre apparently sees no way forward but to
join in the violent struggle.
For violence, like Achilles lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted
Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or
rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn
this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the
Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired
soldiers; theyll make you take the plunge. (Fanon 1963, 256)
For his part, Fanon begins the first chapter with the statement that
decolonization is always a violent phenomenon (29). According to
Bernasconi, it is important to recognize the role of violence, as praxis, in
bringing about change, albeit that for Sartre the issue was the relation-
ship between the violence of the colonizer who created oppression and
that of the colonized whose resistance could result in the fused group;
whereas for Fanon it was that the discovery of violence by the colonized
could become a means of liberation (Bernasconi 2010, 40). According
to Judaken (2008, 3941), Sartres affinity for violent revolution was to
continue throughout the 1960s in allegiance to a range of groups who
supported violence as the basis for radical social transformation. Juda-
ken, however, also cautions that we need to read Sartre backwards,
and in its entirety, to recognize that revolutionary violence, espe-
cially the violence of terrorism, is most often Not therapeutic in heal-
ing the scarred body politic of colonial subjects (45), concluding that
[o]nly this persistent work of undermining the passion of racism
will enable us to someday gingerly walk the roads to freedom that Sar-
tre so valiantly helped to pave (46).
According to Ronald Santoni (2003), Sartres take on violence along

that road was curiously ambivalent. The Critique is rife with scenes
that show both the violence of colonialism as oppression and the hope
of counterviolence, or anti-praxis, for overturning the colonial sys-
tem. Sartres ambivalence is not resolved, but Santoni notes that per-
haps the preface to Wretched of the Earth is a logical, and perhaps
overstated, sequel to the Critique, because it seems to allow, in the
name of re-creating human self-respect and bringing about a new
higher-level humanity, a counterviolence by the oppressed that at least
temporarily can transcend the antidialectical, non-coexistential, anti-
communitarian dimensions of violence (74). Nonetheless, it is clearly
the overthrow of the system, rather than violence itself, that Sartre views
as the goal
Judith Butler points out, however, that Sartre was speaking to his
European brethren, not the colonized, paradoxically placing the
European on the margins of the events in Algeria, a displaced compre-
hending that Sartre proposes for the white reader that deconstitutes
[his] presumptive privilege (2008, 213) but at the same time attempts
to bring the European into complicity with the colonized.
Sartre therefore turns the violence of the colon back upon itself, trans-
forming the colonizer, while Fanon uses violence as a call to arms, to
project a new world in which oppression is overcome through coun-
terviolence, transforming the colonized. The dialectical relationship
between the two depends upon a geography of situation.
Colonizing, Colonized: The Geography of Situation
We made the point earlier that the concept of situation is central to the
contributions of both Sartre and Fanon. There are two reasons. First,
context and location are of fundamental importance for understanding
not only what has happened but also what is possible: in the distance
that separates metropole and colony, in the specific constellations of
humanity we call community, in the circumstances in which groups
come together and move apart on the ground, in the streets of Paris
or rural Algeria. This geographical point has received remarkably little
attention in the vast literature that represents Sartre and Fanon stud-
ies, although Bernasconi (2010, 401) very importantly flags the signifi-
cance of geographical scale and the difference between Sartres urban
and Fanons rural context for understanding both the impetus and the
prospects for counter-colonialism. Elsewhere, we have addressed the
significance of spatiality for understanding Sartres anticolonialism

(Boyle and Kobayashi 2011).
One of the most significant aspects of Sartres anti-racist spatial-
ity occurs in his shifting attention to France in the 1970s, a shift that
required a major spatial reorientation. Paige Arthur (2008) has recently
addressed Sartres passionate attention to the streets of Paris, where
immigrants, and in particular North African immigrants who carry the
experiences of colonization afar to their lives in the metropole, expe-
rience the legacy of colonialism in the direct, brutal treatment at the
hands of both the French state and its citizens. Sartre (1972) coined the
now important term new racism (le nouveau racism) in this con-
text, banding together with 136 other French leftist intellectuals to pro-
test the living conditions for immigrants in the banlieux (Arthur 2008,
823). Sartres observations have become more and more important in
the respatializing and interiorization of colonialism that have occurred
across the developed world since the 1970s.
The second point about situation is that for Sartre the concept of situ-
ation was fundamentally relational and defined the possibility of the
human being in relation to others, the central theme of Being and Noth-
ingness and the point most profoundly taken up by Fanon in Black Skin,
White Masks. This point cannot be overemphasized. According to Gilles
Deleuze, it created nothing less than the possibility for the emergence
of post-structuralism in postWorld War II continental philosophy,
because Sartre made the most significant break from the work of Hegel,
Heidegger, and later Bergson.
The situation is not a concept among others for Sartre, but the pragmatic
element that transforms everything, and without which concepts have
neither meaning nor structure. A concept has no structure or meaning as
long as it is not situated. The situation is the functioning of the concept
itself. And the richness and novelty of Sartrean concepts derives from this
point, they are the expressions of situations, at the same time as situations
are assemblages of concepts. (Deleuze, quoted in van de Wiel 2008, n.p.;
originally cited in French in Colombel 2005, 39)
It is not only the novelty of Sartres philosophical achievements that

gives his work its enduring capacity, however, but also that his work is
constantly animated with grounded examples of situated human rela-
tions. He takes praxis deeply seriously. The definition of situational
praxis in Being and Nothingness is always spatial: To apprehend oneself
as looked at is to apprehend oneself as spatializing-spatialized (1943, 242,

emphasis added). This concept underlies both Sartres starting point
for the process of racialization as the dialectic of reciprocal constitu-
tion and, of course, provides Fanons major theme for understanding
the construction of negritude. But the concept also carries forward in
both the Critique and Wretched of the Earth. Both works hinge upon a
historical materialism based on reciprocal praxis, humans constitut-
ing the other not only in the situation of the colonial system but as
colonizingcolonized.
Conclusion: Making Sartre and Fanon More Usable
Apprehending the relationships that exist between capitalist global-

ization, colonialism, racism, and anti-racism remains one of the most
pressing tasks of our times. While for some the entangled biographies
and intertwined intellectual projects of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz
Fanon serve only as an important historical marker of early thought,
we regard Sartres dialogue with Fanon as more than mere historical
curiosity. Insofar as Sartre gazed on the European colonial adventure
from the vista of the white European metropolitan and privileged elite,
and Fanon experienced European colonialism brutally as a constituent
member of the black, oppressed, and subaltern class, Sartres relation-
ship with Fanon has become characterized in postcolonial lore as, in the
end, one between the colonizer and the colonized. Sartres metropolitan
ignorance led him to locate the meaning of all concrete colonialisms
as constituent tributaries in the broader transition from capitalism to
socialism; the particular was always to be subordinated to the univer-
sal. Fanon, in contrast, sought to place the universal and the particular
in constant tension and was not persuaded that the ethnic, racial, and
national consciousness of anti-imperial movements was mere obfusca-
tion or a side show. It was metropolitan arrogance for the white man to
suppose that black consciousness was equivalent to oppressed white
consciousness and that both were mere staging posts in the formation
of a universal class consciousness.
We have sought to scrutinize the meaning and validity of this depic-
tion of Sartres intellectual position vis--vis Fanon and have argued
that the relationship between both scholars was more complex; by cap-
turing these complexities, progress might be made in resolving the dia-
lectic between the universal and the particular in postcolonial studies.
Sartres project to read all concrete colonialisms through the lens of a
rejuvenated French Existential Marxism ultimately failed, and he was

left to conclude that there was no particular meaning or intelligibility to
history. Anti-imperial movements were distinct, separate, and histori-
cally novel social, cultural, and political secretions, and enjoyed open
and unpredictable futures. Here, Sartre was more truculent than Fanon,
recognizing not only the particular, but concluding that the particular
was all there was. But Sartre, too, remained aware of the metamor-
phoses of anti-imperial movements into dysfunctional bureaucracies,
fossilized parties, stultifying encrustation, fascist dictatorships, and
degenerative, despotic regimes. Here Sartre continued to challenge
Fanon to avoid venerating the particular, the nation, the race, the eth-
nic grouping, the tribe, and to recognize the risks in not aspiring to
transcendence, cosmopolitanism, and universalism.
What then do we carry forward? Both men are receiving increased
attention by anti-racist scholars today, Fanon perhaps rightly more
so. Fanons work has developed a mantra-like tendency to be seen as
underpinning anything to do with postcolonialism and anti-racism.
Two decades ago, Henry Lewis Gates devoted an article to Fanonism
as a Rorchach blot with legs (1991, 458), an ethnographic construct
resulting in a usable Fanon.
Thus while calling for a recognition of the situatedness of all discourses,

the critic delivers a Fanon as a global theorist in vacuo; in the course of an
appeal for the specificity of the Other we discover that his global theorist
of alterity is emptied of his own specificity; in the course of a critique of
identitarian thought, Fanon is conflated with someone who proved, in cer-
tain respects, an ideological antagonist. (459)
Even Homi Bhabha, whom Gates calls Fanons closest reader (460), is
guilty of a coaxing devotion: he regrets aloud those moments in Fanon
that cannot be reconciled to the post-structuralist critique of identity
because he wants Fanon to be even better than he is In other words,
he wants Fanon to be Lacan rather than, say, Jean-Paul Sartre (4601).
The point of disruption, for Gates, turns on Fanons depiction of the
black man experiencing himself as the negated other. The result of such
critical romanticism, according to Gates, is a critical double bind.
You can empower discursively the native and open yourself to charges of
downplaying the epistemic (and literal) violence of colonialism, or play
up the absolute nature of colonial domination and be open to charges of
negating the subjectivity and agency of the colonized, thus textually rep-
licating the repressive operations of colonialism. In agency, so it seems,
begins responsibility. (462)
Gates does not mention here, however, that there is a parallel ambigu-
ity throughout Black Skin, White Masks over Sartres simultaneous intel-
lectual inspiration and visceral disappointment.
Without falling into a trap of coaxing devotion ourselves, however, it
seems that if scholars have seen in Fanon more than he actually had to
give, they have taken from Sartre substantially less. If Fanon has become
eminently usable, to use Gatess term, Sartre is remarkably underused.
We can, of course, regret that Fanon did not live long enough to see the
remarkable contrapuntal resonance between the Critique and Wretched
of the Earth fully realized, but recent work that addresses both the intel-
lectual and the political ramifications of these connections has opened
the door to new, and barely explored, insights on anti-racism and anti-
colonialism that have remarkable application in todays world. To be
sure, there are plenty of problems with both works, the most significant
of which are the ongoing issues of how violence fits into contempo-
rary anti-oppression scholarship and the stolid omission especially in
Fanon of a gendered lens (an issue that goes beyond the scope of this
chapter; but see Bergner 1995; Butler 2008, among others).
Perhaps we might end by building our case for a renewed interest
in Sartre, in relation to Fanon, by drawing attention to events which
have unfolded in the past months ironically in Fanons own backyard,
the African Maghreb, and more across the Middle East. Attracting the
label the Arab Spring, since December 2010 political insurrections
and uprisings have occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria,
and Yemen; and political instabilities have arisen in Algeria, Iraq, Jor-
dan, Morocco, and Oman. How might we read these world historical
developments? Were Sartre alive he might speculate on a number of
hypotheses. These insurrections can usefully be read as the localized
and contingent outworkings of the European colonial adventure in the
region. Sartres forewarning that anti-imperial movements that begin
with the motive of liberation risk lapsing into visceral ethno-religious
nationalism and fascist dictatorships would appear prophetic. Were
Fanon alive, however, while he would celebrate the uprisings as com-
munities gaining control over their own destiny, he might also be
wary of the factionalism that impedes a full overthrow of tyrannical
oppression. We note that this second wave of freedom movements a
post-postcolonial echo began with the desperation of a single Tuni-

sian man, Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid, who by setting himself
on fire has triggered a set of totalizing processes that no one could have
predicted a year ago. And while these Arab revolutions have been
regarded variously as the handiwork of Muslim extremists on the one
hand and Western democratic impulses on the other, they remain his-
torically novel groups in fusion, totalizing in an open way into creolized
and unpredictable final forms. The fruits of Sartres cautious venera-
tion and concomitant wariness of the particular in anticolonial move-
ments, as well as Fanons passionate commitment to self-realization
of the oppressed, would appear to offer a tremendously powerful
framework through which the Arab Spring might be rendered intel-
ligible today.
NOTES
1 Fanon and Sartre met once more, a few months later, when Fanon was
en route from Tunis to Washington, DC, where he was to receive medical
treatment. By that time, however, he was too weak to talk (Geismar 1971,
1834).
2 According to Andrew Leak (2006, 32), Sartre expresses the tension in La
nause: The essential thing is contingency. What I mean is that existence is
not, by definition, necessity But no necessary being can explain exis-
tence (translated by Leak).
3 Many scholars have written on the contradictions and failures of Sartres
work, including Aronson (1980) and Santoni (2003).
4 We do attempt here to enter the controversy over whether Sartres inter-
views with Benny Lvy towards the end of his life (Sartre and Lvy 1996)
constitute an accurate interpretation of his thinking; but Santoni (2003,
7587) makes a strong case that Hope Now provides a glimmer of reconcili-
ation over the question of alienation and violence.
5 This line comes from The Itinerary of a Thought, the text of an interview
with the New Left Review (no. 58, 1969) published in translation in English
and later included in a compilation of essays translated by John Mathews
(Sartre 1974).
6 We have used the 1964 translation by John MacCombie. The most recent
edition of Black Orpheus uses a later translation by S.W. Allen (Sartre 1976b,
5960). The translations differ in a number of small but significant ways
that are not germane to our present purposes.
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9 Intellectuals, Oppression, and Anti-Racist
Movements in South Africa
euni c e n. sah l e
The objective of this chapter is to explore the contributions of intellec-

tuals to anti-oppression struggles and movements, drawing on exam-
ples from South Africa. The first section offers conceptual foundations,
which draw upon analytical insights from thinkers associated with
postcolonial and historical materialist scholarly traditions.1 In terms
of postcolonial thought, the section engages with the work of Frantz
Fanon. From the historical materialist tradition, it draws on the work of
Antonio Gramsci. The section also discusses some limitations of these
thinkers by incorporating insights from feminist thought and high-
lighting the contributions of women intellectuals, such as Fatima Meer,
to anti-racist struggles. The conceptual framework hinges, therefore, on
an intersectionality perspective that incorporates class, race, and gen-
der. The premise of this first section is that while the work of Fanon
and Gramsci has limitations, it nonetheless offers important insights
that enable an exploration of these questions in contemporary times.
The intersectionality approach adds a necessary element, generating
a richer analytical framework to the study of racial oppression, for it
intertwines racial, gender, class, and other forms of oppression gener-
ated by a matrix of domination in specific social contexts (Collins
2000, 228). Such an approach, combining elements of postcolonialism,
historical materialism, and intersectionality, offers significant analytical
openings to examine racial oppression and responses to it by intellectu-
als involved in anti-racist struggles h
istorically and in the contempo-
rary era.
The second section situates the argument specifically in the South
African context, with a focus on Steve Bikos contributions to anti-
racist social thought and struggles. This section also briefly considers
206 Eunice N. Sahle
the question of forms of social oppression and responses to them fol-

lowing the transition to multiracial democracy in South Africa, Bikos
legacy, and the contributions of Fatima Meer an activist as well as
a social theorist to social struggles against oppression, including
racial marginalization. In light of engagement with Bikos and Meers
work, an underlying theme of the chapter is that both thinkers made
significant contributions to anti-oppression struggles and emancipa-
tory practices of knowledge production. In this respect, their contri-
butions act as an important reminder of the critical role that diverse
intellectuals from the African continent have played in cultural, politi-
cal, economic, and intellectual processes in the context of significant
constraints. These constraints are generated not only by local struc-
tures of power, such as the apartheid system, but also by a globaliz-
ing economic and political system underpinned by a racial contract
(Mills 1997) and other forms of coloniality of power (Quijano 2007;
Sahle 2010),2 including hegemonic forms of knowledge production and
dissemination.
Conceptual Foundations
The role of intellectuals in anti-oppression social struggles in the con-

text of unequal structures of power, both locally and globally, continues
to be a matter of great scholarly interest, as evidenced by the work of
South African scholars such as Aswin Desai (2006) in his Harold Wolpe
Memorial Lecture. The exploration of the intersection of intellectuals
and anti-oppression movements is not restricted to South Africa, as
indicated in the writings of feminist scholarship on the World Social
Forum (Smith et al. 2008; Conway 2011)3 and other scholarly works in
recent decades (Lemert 1991). Here the analysis focuses on the contri-
butions of Fanon and Gramsci to the question of social oppression and
the role of intellectuals in anti-oppression struggles. To begin with, their
historical approach to this question leads to a contextualized analysis.
While their focus addresses different political geographies and conjunc-
tures, they both pay attention to how power dynamics shape historical
transitions from one social order to another. Consequently, Fanon and
Gramsci both provide analytical openings that lead to a better under-
standing of why various forms of social oppression that underpinned
previous historical moments in South Africa have been reproduced in
the era of multiracial democracy.
Intellectuals, Oppression, and Anti-Racist Movements in South Africa 207
Fanon, Intellectuals, and Oppression
Fanon foregrounds the role of intellectuals in social struggles in his

seminal text The Wretched of the Earth, particularly in the chapters
Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness, The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness, and On National Culture. According to Fanon, in
any given historical moment, intellectuals play a crucial role in social
struggles. For instance, they collaborate on the physical plane (1963,
232) of anti-oppression struggles in the context of colonialism. None-
theless, Fanons conceptualization of their role in such struggles is com-
plex, for it is situated within the terrain of power dynamics in processes
of social change and differentiated forms of political consciousness,
even among the oppressed. Thus, a close reading of Fanons work indi-
cates that the engagement of intellectuals in anti-oppression struggles
should not be considered a natural or automatic phenomenon. Rather,
it is a social practice that emerges out of and is influenced by complex
and contradictory political, cultural, and economic contexts. In this
respect, he situates their role in social struggles on a historical and
local-global analytical ground rather than representing it as practice
outside social-cultural and political developments in a given historical
moment. Commenting along these lines in the context of anticolonial
struggles, he contends that
preceding generations have both resisted the work or erosion carried by

colonialism and also helped on the maturing of the struggles of today. We
must rid ourselves of the habit, now that we are in the thick of the fight, of
minimizing the action of our fathers or of feigning incomprehension when
considering their silence and passivity. They fought as well as they could,
with the arms they possessed then; and if the echoes of their struggle have
not resounded in the international arena, we much realize that the reason
for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally
different international situation of our time. (2067)
In Fanons view, changes at the global level, such as the dismantling

of imperial rule in various regions of the formally colonized world and
the contradictions inherent in the colonial system (238) generated
favourable conditions for the emergence of anticolonial movements
that he theorized and participated in during the 1950s.
Another contribution of Fanons work on the role of intellectuals
in anti-oppression social struggles is his conceptualization of their
208 Eunice N. Sahle
involvement in such struggles as a form of social action that they choose

consciously in light of historical realities and specific social formations
situated within an evolving and uneven world economic and political
order (Harvey 2006). In his discussion of what he refers to as native
intellectuals, Fanon contends that each generation of intellectuals
must out of relative obscurity discover its mission (1963, 206). Fur-
ther, it is important to note that while he considers intellectuals as cru-
cial social actors in anti-oppression struggles, he does not assume that
all of them will become involved in emancipatory political projects.
Intellectuals in a given socio-political context can either fulfill their
historical mission or, according to Fanon, betray it (206).
Intellectuals fulfilling their historical mission articulate liberatory
ideas that contribute to socio-political emancipation. For example, a
writer who writes for his people in a colonial context can bring to
light local practices of cultural production with the intention of open-
ing the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope (232).
However, to ensure hope and to give it form, Fanon states, such an
intellectual must take part in action and throw himself body and soul
into the national struggle (ibid.). In this sense, Fanon is calling intel-
lectuals to link theory, or their ideas, to political projects aimed at the
social liberation of the oppressed. Overall, as a theorist of nationalist
anticolonial social movements, Fanon signals the vital role that intellec-
tuals play in social struggles; they not only generate ideas that facilitate
the framing of political projects of anti-oppression movements, as con-
temporary social movements scholarship4 reminds us, but they are also
a resource that can be mobilized in the physical plane of such strug-
gles (ibid.). For Fanon, ideas generated by intellectuals are significant
in anti-oppression social movements, not only because they enable the
framing of their social grievances and demands, but also due to their
central role in the liberation of consciousness that is brutalized under
colonial and other oppressive socio-political conditions. For Fanon,
the liberation of consciousness leads to liberated forms of subjectivity
and the formation of new political identities, developments that can
contribute to the transformation of oppressive social orders. In his
view, the consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to commu-
nication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its
guarantee (247).
On the other hand, intellectuals can contribute to social processes
that enable the reproduction of structures of power that, in different
but complementary ways, contribute to practices of oppression, thus
betraying their historical mission. A historical example of such a phe-

nomenon is the anticolonial nationalist movements in Africa. In his
critique of these movements, Fanon argues that leading indigenous
intellectuals who were involved in these movements and in the estab-
lishment of political parties that inherited state power at independence
had a limited emancipatory vision. For instance, they did not take
cognizance of the colonial economic project and its attendant conse-
quences (14881). These intellectuals neglected the urgent and impor-
tant social task of analysing colonialism and its implications for future
economic processes. Instead, they concentrated on mimicking politi-
cal organizational structures found in the geography of the colonizing
motherland, such as trade unions and political parties (1078). The
emergence of nationalist parties, according to Fanon, was spear-
headed by an intellectual elite that attache[d] a fundamental impor-
tance to organization, so much so that the fetish of organization [took]
precedence over a reasoned study of colonial society (108).
Fanons work in both Black Skin, White Masks (2008) and The Wretched
of the Earth (1963) indicates the constitutive role of racist ideologies in
the making of what Mignolo conceptualizes as the modern/colonial
world system (Mignolo 2000). Along these lines, Fanon placed rac-
ism at the centre of his exploration of colonial political economy and,
in this regard, made important contributions to our understanding of
the pivotal role that racism played in the emergence and consolidation
of social oppression in the rise of the modern/colonial global order
that Mignolo extensively explores in his work. Fanon (1963; 2008),
for example, systematically demonstrated how European colonialism
in Africa set in motion the emergence and evolution of structures of
power underpinned by racism. For Fanon, this development generated
profound effects on multiple levels: psychological, political, and eco-
nomic. At the psychological level, for instance, the colonial ideologies
of race and attendant racist practices lead to brutal forms of psycho-
logical violence. These ideologies were rooted in but not limited to the
European colonial view of non-white peoples as being deficient on all
social and historical fronts. From such a perspective, indigenous people
were without history, and whatever they considered as their history
and culture was inconsequential. Indicating the multifaceted nature of
Europes colonial racism, Fanon stated:
[A]s if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the set-

tler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not
210 Eunice N. Sahle
simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the

colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better
never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to
ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the nega-
tion of values [H]e is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes
near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with
beauty or morality. (1963, 41)
From the preceding colonial perspective, pre-existing social, cultural,

and political geographies were not important. Essentially, these were
geographies awaiting discovery by Christian Europe, which in the
colonial world view had the divine right to occupy these spaces and
civilize non-white savages, and in the process help them transi-
tion to cultural, political, and economic modernity as mapped out,
projected, and governed by people of European descent. Overall, Euro-
pean colonial projects accepted and promoted an ideology that classi-
fied humanity into socially constructed racial categories (Quijano 2007).
Explaining the historical processes that led to this social phenomenon,
Anibal Quijano posits:
The process of Eurocentrification of the new world power in the following

centuries gave way to the imposition of such a racial criteria to the new
social classification of the world population on a global scale. So, in the first
place, new social identities were produced all over the world: whites,
Indians, Negroes, yellows, olives, using physiognomic traits of the
peoples as external manifestations of their racial nature. Then, on that
basis the new geocultural identities were produced: European, American,
Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania. (171)
Generally, colonial ideology and practices of racism have had signifi-

cant psychological effects, for they dehumanize[d] (Fanon 1963, 42)
non-European peoples, not just in Africa but in Asia, Latin America,
the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Essentially, under colonial racist
political-economic conditions, a non-white person enters a zone of
nonbeing (Fanon 2008, xii), lacking social recognition. For Fanon, in
such a space the man of color, for example, encounters difficulty in
elaborating his body schema. The image of ones body is solely negat-
ing. Its an image in the third person (90). In addition, Fanons work
indicates that in the context of colonial racialized social orders, these
ideologies have material effects. Overall, they enable the exploitation
of economic resources for the benefit of European colonial interests. As

Fanon argues, under colonial rule it is evident that what parcels out
the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to
a given race The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you
are white, you are white because you are rich (Fanon 1963, 40). Above
all, throughout his seminal work on colonialism (1963 and 2008), Fanon
echoes one of Quijanos arguments that remind us of the concrete
political and social effects emerging out of colonial racialized practices.
As Quijano states:
European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the

entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants,
independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically fol-
lowing the same racial lines of global social classification, with all the
implications for the processes of nationalization of societies and states,
and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on,
around the world. (2007, 171)
Gramsci, Intellectuals, and Oppression
As previously indicated, Antonio Gramscis work is crucial to the cen-

tral concerns of this chapter. Gramsci shares with Fanon an interest in
elaborating and interrogating the nature and the role of intellectuals in
struggles against oppressive socio-political orders. Like Fanon, Gramsci
does not abstract intellectuals from social and historical conditions.
He considers this a significant point of departure from a traditional
approach to the role of intellectuals in social struggles. In Gramscis
view, the most widespread error of method seems to me that of having
looked for a criterion of distinction in the intrinsic nature of intellec-
tual activities, rather than in the ensemble of the system of relations in
which the activities (and therefore the intellectual groups who personify
them) have their place within the general complex of social relations
(1971, 8). An example of his historically and socially situated approach
to the role of intellectuals in social struggles is embodied in his concept
of organic intellectuals (5). Conceptualizing intellectuals in such terms,
Gramsci contends that every social group, coming into existence on
the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic
production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata
of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own
212 Eunice N. Sahle
function not only in the economic but also in the social and political
fields (ibid.). Intellectuals closely aligned with structures of power
locally and globally play a crucial role in consolidating such structures.
In any event, Gramsci did not just introduce the concept of organic
intellectuals, but was himself such an intellectual in the context of Ital-
ian social struggles in the early part of the twentieth century. He wrote
his important text, Prison Notebooks, in a prison cell under Mussolinis
fascist regime, where he spent the last ten years of his life. As an organic
intellectual, he not only generated and disseminated ideas that framed
the social grievances of popular social forces through publications such
as Ordine Nuovo (8), but was also a social activist in their struggles.
Overall, organic intellectuals associated with anti-oppression move-
ments, be they in Gramscis Italy or Bikos South Africa, are central to
the articulation of ideas framing political projects of such movements
and highlighting concepts underpinning oppressive structures of
power. Such intellectuals also generate proposals for alternative social
worlds, albeit not in a mechanical manner, given the complexity and
contradictions of specific societal structures, and national and global
political and economic conjunctures.
An important point of convergence between Fanon and Gramsci is
their shared interest in exploring the question of social oppression in
a given national socio-political order in the context of a shifting and
unequal world order (Cox 1981). Nonetheless their entry point is dif-
ferent. When compared to Fanon, Gramscis work does not focus on
racial oppression. Although his work highlights forms of social and
political oppression characterizing North and South Italy (Gramsci
and Verdicchio 2005) that emerged in the making of the modern Italian
political-economic order, Gramscis work tends to explore oppression
in social class terms under conditions of national and global capital-
ism. Still, his attention to social class oppression is not characterized by
economic reductionism. Through his concepts of hegemony, historical
bloc, and consent, he contributes to a nuanced understanding of social
class oppression under capitalist conditions. For Gramsci, social strug-
gles at the national level are struggles for hegemony by social forces.
Social class oppression is produced in these struggles because social
classes with extensive ideological, institutional, and material capabili-
ties construct consent for their politico-economic projects by portraying
them as universal (Gramsci 1971, 182), thus representing the interests
and needs of all in a given politico-economic landscape. According to
Gramsci, in the struggle for hegemony
ideologies become party, [they] come into confrontation and conflict,

until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to
prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself throughout society
bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also
intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the
struggle rages not on a corporate but on a universal plane, and thus
creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of
subordinate groups [Thus] the development and expansion of the par-
ticular group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force
of a universal expansion, of a development of all the national energies.
(1812)
Control of structural, ideological, and material power, and access to

these sources of power, tend to enable factions of the powerful social
class to gain hegemony in historically situated societies that comprise
the contemporary unequal and uneven world order. In a given social
formation, these factions form a historical bloc in the Gramscian sense;
they constitue both structural and superstructural domains of power.
As Gramsci elaborates, for a historical bloc its material forces are the
content, while its ideologies are the form, though this distinction
between form and content has purely didactic value, since the mate-
rial forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the
ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces
(377). Organic intellectuals linked to a historical bloc play a crucial
role in the production and reproduction of social class oppression.
Overall, these intellectuals play a central role, for they generate ideas
that enable the construction of consent even among oppressed social
groups, which naturalizes and normalizes their oppression by rep-
resenting the interests of a hegemonic historical bloc as necessary,
inevitable, and being for the common good. Generally, even though
in the struggle for hegemony a historical bloc takes into consider-
ation the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be
exercised, its agenda on this score cannot touch the essential; for
though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must
necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading
groups in the decisive nucleus of economic activity (161). Nonethe-
less, socio-political projects of a hegemonic historical bloc are not sta-
ble or taken as a given by oppressed social forces. Powerful as these
projects are, they are contested by counter-hegemonic movements
and organic intellectuals closely associated with them. Thus, from a
214 Eunice N. Sahle
Gramscian dialectical approach to the concept of hegemony, powerful

as the latter can be in a given political and economic context, it is never
complete (Sahle 2010).
Beyond their historical and nuanced approach to political and social
struggles in the context of oppressive national and global power struc-
tures, and their focus on the role of intellectuals in such struggles, Fanon
and Gramsci provide rich theoretical insights into the study of histori-
cal transitions from one social order to another. While concerned with
different historical transitions and political geographies, both thinkers
focus on how and why forms of social oppression tend to be reproduced
during periods of transition. Thus, for Gramsci and Fanon, transitions
from one social and political order do not represent a moment of total
rupture from one order to another. For example, in his study of transi-
tions from European colonialism to independence in Africa, Fanon sug-
gests that pre-existing social relations based on class power dynamics
were a key factor shaping these transitions. For Fanon, the failure of the
national middle class (1963, 149) to institute a political project that
established a strong foundation for a significant reordering of economic
and other structures of power that emerged during European colonial-
ism was a product of their position in the local class structure. Overall,
Fanon offers a scathing critique of what he views as the profound fail-
ure of this classs approach to anticolonial struggle. However, given
his historical approach to the study of social change, he situates this
failure within the structural limits and other contradictions underpin-
ning colonial political economy, such as its process of class formation
in the context of an evolving global political and economic order. For
instance, in his critical reflection on the limits set by the colonial struc-
ture in terms of opportunities for capital accumulation for the emer-
gent local elite bloc, he declares that it is only too true that the greed
of the settlers and the system of embargoes set up by colonialism
hardly left them any other choice (150).
Returning to his critique of the national middle class that dominated
the nationalist movements of the 1940s and 1950s in Africa, Fanon con-
tends that rather than joining forces with popular social movements
whose core object was to push for political and economic projects that
could lead to significant social liberation, this class tended to view the
end of colonial oppressive power structures as a means of transfer[ing]
to the native hands of those unfair advantages which [were] a legacy
of such structures (152). Building on this argument, Fanon states, [T]he
national middle class discovers its historical mission: that of inter-
mediary. Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with
transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmis-

sion line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camou-
flaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism (ibid.). For
Fanon then, important as the end of colonial rule is, one of its core results
in Africa and other regions in the global South that experienced Euro-
pean rule colonialism was the securing of social class power by what he
termed as the national middle class.5 However, while there is some con-
tinuity from one social order to another at the structural and political
level, it should not be assumed that transitions from one socio-political
order to another only result in the reproduction of the old order. Transi-
tions, especially those that are mainly passive discussed below are
better understood as representing continuity and discontinuity. Exactly
where the axis lies in this continuum is an empirical question, one that
can only be illuminated through the study of transitions in specific his-
torical, social, cultural, and political geographies.
The sort of transition that Fanon theorizes in the context of colonial-
ism is similar to what Gramsci conceptualizes as passive revolution
(1971, 59). Gramsci introduced this concept based on his analysis of
historical transitions6 following the revolutions in Europe that saw
the emergence of social orders characterized by what he terms rev-
olution without a revolution (ibid.). These social orders tend to be
dominated by social forces allied with the dominant political-economic
class, resulting in the restoration of oppression along social class lines.
In Gramscis view, a successful passive revolution occurs when the rul-
ing class is able to absorb demands from the subordinate classes in a
reformist manner, thus ensuring no radical departure from the exist-
ing political and economic arrangements. Drawing on examples from
European revolutions in the 1800s, Gramsci refers to this type of tran-
sition process as a passive revolution, characterized by reformist pol-
itics. In the specific case of the creation of the Italian state, Gramsci7
examined the role of various class elements specifically the Moderates
(mainly industrialists from North Italy) who controlled the Piedmont
state and the Action Party (a radical party) in shaping the form of the
state that emerged. The bare bones of his thesis are that the moderates
led by Cavour managed to win hegemony over a segment of the bour-
geoisie, mainly Southern landlords, and formed an alliance that pre-
vented a radical break in Italian power structures after the unification.
He describes the Italian passive revolution in the following manner:
One may apply to the concept of passive revolution (documenting it from

the Italian Risorgimento) the interpretative criterion of molecular changes,
216 Eunice N. Sahle
which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces,

and hence become the matrix of new changes. Thus, in the Italian Ris-
orgimento, it has been seen how the composition of the moderate forces
was progressively modified by the passing over to Cavourism (after 1848)
of ever new elements of the Action Party, so that on the one hand neo-
Guelphism was liquidated, and on the other the Mazzinian movement
was impoverished This element is therefore the initial phase of the
phenomenon which is later called transformism. (109)
Fanon, Gramsci, Oppression, and Gender
The preceding discussion indicates the important contributions from

the work of Fanon and Gramsci to an examination of the role of intel-
lectuals in anti-oppression movements in a given historical context.
Nonetheless, crucial as their insights are, their approaches to oppres-
sion and the role of intellectuals in anti-oppression social struggles
bear analytical limitations. Thus, this chapters analytical grounding
departs from Fanon and Gramsci in certain respects. For example, while
acknowledging that oppression along class lines is a feature of capital-
ist orders and former communist social formations such as Russia and
the Soviet Republics (although taking different forms), such oppression
is also gendered. In regard to colonial oppression for instance, while
men and women experienced class-based social oppression, colonial
political economy was a gendered process (Sahle 2008), which affected
men and women differently.
Similar to a focus on class or racial oppression, however, a solely
gendered analytic sheds limited light on our understanding of social
oppression. As Landry and Maclean remind us, [T]he material condi-
tions of womens oppression, and hence womens political interests,
are themselves historically specific and therefore cannot be framed in
terms of gender alone. A feminist politics projected exclusively in terms
of womens equality cannot recognize, much less contest, structural
and other forms of power dynamics that divide women by class, race,
sexuality, and ethnicity (1993, 12). In the context of South Africa, for
instance, race, class, gender, and other forms of social difference have
historically shaped the position of women in the social structure
(Walker 1982, 7). As Walker argues, in the case of black women the
disabilities they suffer as blacks rather than as women have been felt
to press most heavily upon them. At the same time, the experience of
their blackness has varied considerably among different sections of
black women (ibid.).
Consequently, this chapters further departing point from Fanon and
Gramsci is the contention that intersectional theorization of oppres-
sion articulated by African American feminist scholars, leading among
them Patricia Hills Collins, signifies an important conceptual turn in
debates concerned with social oppression. For Collins, an intersec-
tionality framework in the study of social oppression allows for an
exploration of how a matrix of domination in a given social con-
text generates intersecting oppressions (2000, 228). For instance, she
states that in the United States, African-American women encounter
the common theme of having our work and family experiences shaped
by intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and class. But this com-
monality is experienced differently by women situated in different
social classes (66).
The chapters additional point of departure is its suggestion that an
intersectional approach offers a nuanced perspective on the question of
oppression in the context of historical transition such as the one that led
to the establishment of multiracial political democracy in South Africa
in 1994. From this perspective, it is not only class oppression that has
been reproduced in the post-apartheid era, but also gendered and racial-
ized forms of oppression. Lastly, another point of departure relates to
Fanons and Gramscis approach to intellectuals and anti-oppression
movements. Gramscis work, for instance, represents the organic intel-
lectual in universal terms. Harmless as this gender neutrality seems, it
nonetheless reproduces the idea that men are the only ones with politi-
cal agency, thus the historical subjects who engage in anti-oppression
struggles and make history in their capacity as organic intellectuals.
Like Gramscis discussions of intellectuals, in Fanons work there
is an overt and covert assumption that the intellectual who generates
ideas that denaturalize oppression and mobilize resources for anti-
oppression social struggles and joins other social actors in the physical
plane (1963, 206) of such struggles is male. Overall, his native intel-
lectual is always male. He is the one who takes his arms to defend his
nations legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear that legiti-
macy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his
body (211). Further, when womens participation in anti-oppression
struggles is acknowledged in Fanons work, the gender hierarchy
218 Eunice N. Sahle
governing the modalities of anticolonial movements and the limits of

their nationalist project from a gendered lens is ignored. Commenting
on this feature of Fanons work in the case of the Algerian anticolo-
nial struggle, the Algerian feminist scholar Marie-Aime Heli-Lucas
suggests that it is a myth to promote the notion that the Algerian
woman [was] liberated along with her country, for it ignores the lived
experiences of women who were involved in the countrys anticolo-
nial movement and were oppressed in the context of the struggle (1999,
2712). Not only were gender hierarchies reproduced in the anticolonial
movement because even in the hardest times of the struggle, women
were oppressed, but also their work was confined to tasks that would
not disturb the social order in the future (274).8
In general, Fanons and Gramscis work embody a male-centric ap-
proach to the study of the role of intellectuals in anti-oppression strug-
gles. They both ignore the fact that historically and in the contemporary
era, women have contributed to such struggles. For example, in South
Africa female organic intellectuals such as the famed critical sociologist
Fatima Meer contributed to various anti-racist movements during the
apartheid era. In the years 1946 to 1948, Meer participated in the anti-
racist passive resistance movement, which was led by members of the
South Africa Indian Congress. She joined the passive resistance while
attending Durban Indian Girls High School (Reddy and Meer 1996, 115)
and was the founder of the Student Resistance Committee. The passive
resistance movement was a response not only to historical injustices that
Indian people had experienced in South Africa, but also to the intro-
duction of Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Acts. These
state-sanctioned racist measures were aimed at restricting ownership of
property by people of Indian descent to specific areas in exchange for a
limited franchise that would give them the right to vote for white politi-
cians to represent them in parliament. Speaking against these measures
and their racist foundations in one of the passive resistances docu-
ments, Meer states, We have tried to point out to the white man of this
country that we, as human beings, are just as good as them, but they
have always tried to make us believe that we are their inferiors and that
we should not enjoy the same rights and privileges as they do (113).
Meer went on to critique the limited franchise bill, which she claimed
had been established to appease world opinion for it had, in fact, no
substance in it and was essentially like a wax doll placed in the hands
of a woman who was told that it was a real live baby (ibid.). The passive
resistance movement played a major role in the anti-racist struggle for
it initiated discussions at the United Nations9 on racial oppression in

South Africa, not just as it pertained to members of the Indian commu-
nity but also to other marginalized communities. This United Nations
process led to the mobilization of world public opinion in support
of anti-racist movements in South Africa (29). By the 1950s, Meer was
among leading women organic intellectuals such as Helen Joseph and
Lillian Ngoyi who actively participated in processes that led to the
establishment of the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) on 17
April 1954. She was a member of FSAWs National Executive Commit-
tee (Walker 1982, 155) and was involved in the 1956 anti-pass protests
that FSAW organized. FSAW was a non-racial organization drawing
membership from Black, White, Indian, and Coloured women. Further,
FSAW was committed to both the anti-racist nationalist struggle and to
gender equality as indicated in its Womens Charter, which it launched
at its first meeting. Demonstrating an intersectional approach, FSAW
considered race, class, gender, and national oppression as intersected
forms of oppression in apartheid South Africa. In terms of the struggle
for gender equality, the Charter declared:
[W]e resolve to struggle for the removal of laws and customs that deny
African women the right to own, inherit or alienate property. We resolve to
work for a change in the laws of marriage such as are found amongst our
African, Malay and Indian people, which have the effect of placing wives
in the position of legal subjection to husbands, and giving husbands the
power to dispose of wives property and earnings, and dictate to them in
all matters affecting them and their children.10 (quoted in Walker 1982, 280)
Because of her involvement in anti-racist struggles, especially in the

Black Consciousness Movement (discussed shortly), she was detained
for six months in 1976. Overall, as an organic intellectual, Meer con-
tributed to anti-racist struggles as a social activist and through her
practices of emancipatory knowledge production, which included
numerous publications, leading among them Race and Suicide in South
Africa (1976); The Trial of Andrew Zondo (1987); Higher than Hope: The
Biography of Nelson Mandela (1988); Resistance in the Townships (1989);
and, with E.S. Reddy, Passive Resistance, 1946: A Selection of Documents
(1996). These results of her intellectual labour focused on a range of
issues pertaining to social oppression and modes of collective action in
response to them. As the chapter will indicate later, Meer continued her
commitment to anti-oppression struggles in the post-apartheid period.
220 Eunice N. Sahle
The discussion thus far has attempted to provide a conceptual

grounding to the central objectives of this chapter. In this regard, it
has indicated the contributions of Fanon and Gramsci to the study
of struggles against oppressive social-political orders and the role of
intellectuals in such struggles. Further, it has highlighted the contri-
butions of critical feminist scholarship to these matters. Informed by
analytic insights from the preceding section, the discussion that follows
explores Steve Bikos contributions to struggles against oppression in
South Africa, with a particular focus on his role in anti-racist struggles.
Intellectuals and Anti-Racist Movements

in South Africa: Steve Biko
While taking different forms, racist power structures and social prac-
tices have been a salient feature of South Africas political-economic
power structures for centuries. In the main, from the seventeenth cen-
tury, various European interests competed for control of indigenous
peoples territory and engaged in practices that dispossessed them of
material, political, and economic security. Prior to the establishment
of British colonial rule, Portuguese and Dutch interests had been in
competition for control of the Cape from the fifteenth century onwards
(Terreblanche 2002). By the eighteenth century, however, British inter-
ests began a process of consolidating their power in a socio-political
order that relied more on coercion than hegemonic consent.11 During
this period Britains economic, political, and legal systems, culture,
and ideologies become deeply embedded in South Africa, the result
of which were major shifts in political-economic power arrangements,
including the deepening of racist labour practices (17980) and the
racialization of cultural and social geographies in both rural and urban
spaces. Thus, even though the racially based cultural, political, and eco-
nomic order was consolidated following the election of the National
Party in 1948, the transition to a brutal apartheid system was enabled
by ideological and structural, cultural, and political developments
emerging out of earlier Dutch and British colonial rule.
It is important to note that from the onset of colonial rule, the evo-
lution of racist structures and practices was contested by a range of
socially and racially marginalized groups. Overall, while in every his-
torical conjuncture anti-oppression social movements in South Africa
had diverse origins, philosophical orientations, and political strate-
gies, a core thread charactering them was their struggle against racism.
Furthermore, intellectuals played a key role in struggles against racism

in the country. Taking insights from the previous conceptual discussion
as a reference point, the discussion that follows focuses on Steve Bikos
contributions to anti-racist struggles in South Africa.
Biko was born on 18 December 1946 under the racist system that
underpinned the South Africa Union Government, which had emerged
in 1910. Like other members of oppressed communities, his life expe-
riences and chances including his intellectual formation and social
activism was heavily influenced by the apartheid racist social struc-
ture, which was established in 1948. As he states, I have lived all my
conscious life in the framework of institutionalized separate develop-
ment (1978, 29). Yet, in this dehumanizing context of rigid and brutal
social segregation along race lines under the notorious Group Areas
Act, Act No. 41 of 1950, and other oppressive political, cultural, and
economic practices of the state, Biko emerged as a major social actor
and organic intellectual in the anti-oppression struggles aimed at dis-
mantling the apartheid system. For these efforts, which he clearly con-
sidered his historical mission from a Fanonian perspective, Biko paid
a heavy personal price. He did not live to witness the emergence of
multiracial democracy in South Africa, for he died in an apartheid state
prison in Port Elizabeth on 12 September 1977, following his deten-
tion under the Terrorism Act (the Act) on August 18 of the same year.
This was not his first encounter with the states repression machinery,
given his long involvement in anti-oppression social struggles during
his days as a medical student at the University of Natal Non-European
in Wentworth, Durban. Prior to his death, he had been detained under
the Act in 1976.
Biko made significant contributions to both anti-racist social thought
and struggles against the apartheid system. As an organic intellec-
tual, he denaturalized oppression in South Africa by highlighting the
interlocking structures of power and ideologies that were the foun-
dations of the countrys racist social and economic structure. Further,
he not only departed from racist and negative constructions of black-
ness by expanding the concept of black to include the core social
groups of historically marginalized communities, but he also engaged
in numerous emancipatory practices of knowledge production. Fur-
ther, he contributed to the establishment of anti-racist organizations
that expanded space for anti-racist mobilization and networks offer-
ing intellectual and other forms of support in the context of a brutal and
racist social,
political, and economic order. In post-apartheid South
222 Eunice N. Sahle
Africa, his contributions to anti-oppression struggles in South Africa

are being re-articulated in various ways. In the discussion that fol-
lows, the analysis highlights his insights on sources and modalities of
racial oppression and his major contributions to anti-racist struggles in
South Africa.
For most of his short life, Biko was concerned about modalities of
social and economic oppression. A core concern he shared with Fanon
was an exploration of how colonialism had produced and enabled the
reproduction of racism, a process that had served the interests of the
minority European population in different historical conjunctures in
South Africa. Broadly speaking, Fanons and Bikos focus on racism
places their intellectual labours in the critical tradition of Africana
existential philosophy, which, as philosopher Lewis Gordon states, has
provided detailed explorations of this dominating factor in the lived
experience of African people (Gordon 2000, 8). For Biko, racism was
discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of subjuga-
tion or maintaining subjugation and, in this respect, he contended that
it is only those with power who had the capacity to subjugate oth-
ers (1978, 25). In the South Africa of his time, racism emerged out of the
interlocking social structure of the apartheid system, which, according
to him, was tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and
deliberate oppression (28). This matrix of oppression (Collins 2000,
228) generated structural violence and spiritual poverty among the
oppressed (Biko 1978, 28). The racist ideologies that considered Afri-
cans sub-human were the ideological cement (Gramsci 1971) that facili-
tated the emergence of this matrix of oppression (Collins 2000, 228),
including its practices of economic oppression. As Biko posits,
[T]he colour question in South Africa politics was originally intro-
duced for economic reasons. The leaders of the white community had
to create some kind of barrier between blacks and whites so that the
whites could enjoy privileges at the expense of blacks and still feel free
to give a moral justification (1978, 88). Overall, like Fanon, Biko con-
sidered the racial oppression of black people as emerging from social
and historical processes that saw racial problems serve a dominating
role (Gordon 2000, 8) in the making of national social formations and
the modern/colonial world system (Mignolo 2000).
European colonial projects were promoted by their agents in altru-
istic terms such as civilizing mission over the savage non-white
Other and in the postcolonial era, developing the underdeveloped
Third World countries (Sahle 2010) and as such these social agents,
institutional and otherwise, presented them as neutral projects for the

good of humanity at large. These agents ignored and normalized the
horrible effects of racism and other repressive colonial ideologies and
practices. Yet, for Biko, colonial and apartheid modes of racism gener-
ated profound forms of psychological violence. For instance, they led
black people to develop an inferiority complex, a process that had sig-
nificant effects on their political agency. Because of this complex, which
was produced by colonial and apartheid racist systems of power, Biko
declares that the black man [had] convinced [himself] of the futility
of resistance and had become a shell, a shadow of man, completely
defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke
of oppression with sheepish timidity (1978, 28). As the analysis will
highlight, for Biko this social reality underscored an urgent need for the
oppressed to develop liberatory consciousness that could lead to the
restoration of their humanity, which had been violently dehumanized
by centuries of racist ideologies and practices in South Africa.
While an examination of racial oppression was a central focus of
Bikos work given the context of the apartheid system and the lega-
cies of colonial racism in South Africa, he envisioned the possibility
of an alternative social order underpinned by social equality and non-
racialism emerging in his country. As he stated, [W]e are looking for-
ward to a non-racial, just and egalitarian society in which colour, creed
and race shall form no point of reference (139). Nonetheless, while
envisioning such an order, he was resistant to calls by liberal intellectu-
als and their organizations for integration of racialized and marginal-
ized communities, given what he considered these intellectuals limited
understanding of racial oppression and its effects, and their vision of
the future. Overall, what Biko objected to was the promotion by liberal
intellectuals of an integrationist project that ignored the importance of
fundamentally transforming the apartheid systems structures of power
and social relations, the only process, in his view, which could lead to
meaningful social liberation for the majority in the country and to a
just society.12 Along these lines, he criticized liberal intellectuals who,
through their knowledge production networks and political organi-
zations, advocated uncritically for the integration of historically mar-
ginalized communities into the pre-existing societal structure. As Biko
states in one of his Frank Talk pieces titled Black Souls in White Skins:
[I]f by integration you understand a breakthrough into white society by

blacks, an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established
224 Eunice N. Sahle
set of norms and code of behaviour set up by and maintained by whites,

then YES I am against it. I am against the superior-inferior white-black
stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a per-
petual pupil If on the other hand by integration you mean there shall be
free participation by all members of a society, catering for the full expres-
sion of the self in a freely changing society as determined by the will of the
people, then I am with you. (24)
While Biko did not situate his analysis of oppression within a histori-
cal materialist tradition, his work, like Gramscis, was informed by an
understanding of how the economic exploitation underpinning colo-
nial and apartheid capitalist political, cultural, and economic structures
functioned as a major source of oppression in the country. It is impor-
tant to note, however, that while Biko had an astute understanding of
the racist and capitalist roots of South Africas oppressive political-
economic order, he was critical of Marxist intellectuals, claiming that
some of them focused on class as a unit of analysis in their studies of
oppression in order to avoid the category of race (Gerhart 2008, 34).
In his view, racial oppression was linked to the economic interests of
South Africans of European descent, who controlled and had access to
levers of power. These levers of power had produced institutionalized
racism, which manifested itself in various ways (Biko 1978, 88). For
example, in the education sector, under the doctrine of separate devel-
opment, Africans were compelled to speak their ethnic languages in
elementary school while having their academic futures determined by
proficiency in the two official European languages (Halisi 1991, 103).
Biko considered this approach to education as an astute strategy aimed
at the reproduction of the pre-existing unequal and racialized societal
order. Further, he argued that by linking education to the homeland
policy, the white government sought to tribalize the black intelligen-
tsias racial consciousness and to divert its energy into ethnic-based
development (ibid.). On the economic front, Biko considered the
exploitation of Africans in this sphere under the apartheid system as a
reproduction of the colonial order. According to Biko, [B]lacks are still
colonized Our money from the townships takes a one-way journey
to white shops and white banks, and all we do in our lives is pay the
white man either with labour or in coin (Biko 1978, 96).
Given his focus on racial oppression and economic exploitation, as
well as to be indicated shortly his involvement in discourses and
movements that opened space for women to articulate their ideas and
political agency, Bikos approach to oppression is broader than that of
either Fanon or Gramsci. In particular, Bikos approach can be con-

ceptualized as having an intersectional analytical sensibility. None-
theless, his sensibility along these lines is better framed as a weaker
intersectionality approach, for he neglected an overt engagement,
theoretically or otherwise, of gendered dimensions of social o

ppression.
In his exploration of social oppression, the black man is not only the
subject of racial oppression, he is also the social actor who will liberate
his people once he come[s] to himself and pump[s] back life into
his empty shell (29). Thus, even though women were involved in
various organizations and social movements in which Biko was a key
social actor as a founding member and leader, their participation was
gendered, for they were generally relegated to spaces and positions
socially constructed as womens domains. As Mamphela Ramphele
argues, in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM)
there was an interesting disjuncture between the genuine comradeship

one experienced within the movement, and the sexism which reared its
head at many levels. For example, the responsibility for catering, cleaning-
up and other entertainment functions tended to fall all on women par-
ticipants, be it at national conferences, formation schools, workshops or
elsewhere. In those cases where the top leadership was sensitive to gender
discrimination and allocated duties regardless of gender, males feigned
incompetence, and women would then have to take over the entire nur-
turing responsibility, thus positively reinforcing the feigned incompetence
of the men. (1991, 219)
Nonetheless, while gender as a political issue was not raised at all

because the BCM13 considered racism as the dividing line between
South Africans and as such the barrier to access by those not
white to the countrys resources (215), leaders of the BCM such
as Biko did contribute to the emergence of organizational spaces
that enabled women to emerge as organic intellectuals in their
own right and to exercise their, however constrained, agency. For
instance, in discussing her own intellectual formation, Ramphele
contends that
a combination of closer relationships with SASO [South African Students

Organization] activists and the effectiveness of leadership-training work-
shops (formation schools) increased my self-confidence and skills as a
public speaker by the end of 1969 I also read a lot of the literature which
was circulating secretly within a circle of friends; this expanded my own
226 Eunice N. Sahle
horizons and helped me examine social relations in a challenging manner.

Fanon, Csaire, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
were the popular authors, orators and heroes of the time. (218)
The BCM encouraged the participation of women at the grassroots

level, especially in the community projects that it established as a strat-
egy to address economic, health, and other social disparities existing
under the countrys racist social structure (215). Further, in an effort
to create a space to enable the mobilization of women, the BCM lead-
ership launched the Black Womens Federation (BWF) in Durban in
1973. The BWF acted as a national umbrella body for organizations of
women from all walks of life (216). Participants at the conference that
launched the BWF included Fatima Meer, Winnie Mandela, and many
other women engaged in anti-oppression movements.
As an organic intellectual then, Biko made significant contributions
to the anti-racist struggle. In particular, he played a key role in the cre-
ation of anti-oppression organizations in South Africa. For example, in
1969 he was a founding member of the SASO and its affiliated organi-
zations such as the Black Peoples Convention (BPC), and he engaged
in efforts that expanded the intellectual and mobilizing space for anti-
racist struggles. Biko and others activists formed SASO with the objec-
tive of opening a window for meaningful participation of non-white
students in student organizations and in the broader national anti-
oppression struggle (1978, 5). For Biko, the formation of SASO which
white liberal organizations considered as Black racism and which
some black militants viewed as a strategy that would not be of any
real help because the organization was too amorphous was neces-
sary because unless the non-white students used their agency to lift
themselves from the doldrums, they would remain there (45).
Writing to the presidents of the Students Representative Council in
February 1970, Biko reiterated the importance of SASOs emergence: in
his view, it was a direct response to the closing up of non-white students
organizational space by the apartheid state. From his perspective, plac-
ing the historically black university Fort Hare under the direct control
of the apartheid state in 1960 was one of the many strategies introduced
by this racist state aimed at limiting the organizational capacity of non-
white students (9). Throughout the 1960s, as Biko explains, non-white
students in Fort Hare and other universities such as the University
College of the Western Cape (for Coloureds), University College of
Zululand (for Zulus), University College of the North (for Sothos),
[and the] University College of Durban (for Indians) (910), found it

increasingly difficult to articulate their grievances given the strict con-
trols by university authorities under the directives of the apartheid
state. Further, the exclusionary practices of the National Union of South
African Students (NUSAS) the main student body in the country
had rendered non-white students involvement invisible (5). According
to Biko, a disjuncture existed between NUSASs principle of repre-
senting the interests of all students and its practice, which margin-
alized non-white students (13). For example, during the 1967 NUSAS
Conference, black students were made to stay at a church building
somewhere in the Grahamstown location, each day being brought to
Conference site by cars etc. On the other hand their white brothers were
staying in residence around the conference site So appalling were the
conditions that it showed the blacks just how valued they were in the
organization (11).
Overall, SASO played an important role in the emergence of an
autonomous intellectual and organizational space for non-white stu-
dents during an extremely difficult conjuncture in which the apart-
heid state deepened its racist practices and surveillance systems.14 For
example, it laid the foundation for the formation of new anti-racist
movements, which contributed to the destabilization of the apartheid
system and its accompanying ruling bloc. Further, out of SASO, Biko
become a founding member in 1969 of an anti-racist movement that
has come to be closely associated with him: the previously mentioned
BCM. Through BCM, Biko made significant contributions to the anti-
racist struggle in South Africa. Notably, he introduced a new approach
to racial oppression under apartheids matrix of oppression (Collins
2000, 228) and new responses to it by reconceptualizing the idea of
blackness. According to Biko, blacks were those who [were] by law
or tradition politically, economically and socially discriminated against
as a group in the South African society, namely, Blacks, Coloureds, and
Indians (1978, 48). In addition, with his reconstitution of blackness, the
word black became synonymous with the word freedom (Mon-
gane Wally Serote, quoted in Pityana 1991, 9) in a socio-political and
economic order that constructed black people as sub-human. In this
respect, Biko turned a concept that had historically been considered a
sign of social, historical, and intellectual absences into a political tool.
The new notion of blackness created a significant political oppor-
tunity structure15 for Africans, Indians, and Coloureds to create
organizational networks committed to the dismantling of the racist
228 Eunice N. Sahle
apartheid system, and it became an important resource in the political

mobilization of members of these oppressed communities. Blackness
in the Biko sense could be called upon to create a unified identity of
resistance that could lead to stronger solidarity among the oppressed,
a process that could enable them to remain united in the face of the
apartheid state's sustained strategies of divide and rule. For Biko, unity
among the oppressed was an important tool in the fight against racist
oppression. In the struggle against the apartheid system, he insisted
that members of the oppressed communities had to resist all attempts
at the fragmentation of their resistance in order to ensure solidarity
and relevance to the situation. According to him, Black people needed
to recognize the various institutions of apartheid for what they were
gags intended to get black people fighting separately for certain free-
doms and gains which were prescribed for them long ago (1978, 39).
Invoking Bikos ideas on the use of the term black as a tool for
social resistance and solidarity, Don Mattera, a public relations officer
of the Coloured Labour Party stated, [I]t is when all Black groups
Coloured, African, Indian can come together in a common brother-
hood that there will be hope for us (The Rand Daily Mail, 11 July 1972,
quoted in Buthelezi 1991, 121). In a similar vein, Strini Moodley, a for-
mer member of the Natal Indian Congress, declared in the SASO News-
letter of MayJune 1972, [W]e have come together on the basis of our
common oppression We have similar fears, the same desires and the
same experiences. We have to use the same trains, the same buses, the
same restaurants (ibid.). Overall, while cognizant of the constraints
generated by capitalistic exploitative tendencies, coupled with the
overt arrogance of white racism, which according to Biko had con-
spired against his broadly defined black community, he urged mem-
bers of this community to evolve a strategy against the structures of
oppression, even under these unfavourable conditions (1978, 96).
Moreover, through the BCM, Biko engaged in practices of knowledge
production geared to the liberation of the oppressed. In publications
such as the SASO Newsletter16 where he signed his contributions with
the name Frank Talk to avoid the extensive surveillance systems of
the apartheid state Biko generated ideas that he hoped would, in dif-
ferent but complementary ways, lay a foundation for the liberation of
historically oppressed communities from the psychological, material,
and political dispossession they had experienced in the making of South
Africas oppressive societal structure by a white minority. For example,
in one of his Frank Talk essays titled We Blacks, he challenged the
complicity (29) of black people in their continued oppression because

of what he considered to be their internalization of the racist narrative
and the naturalized representation of political, economic, and cultural
power by the apartheid state and its supporters locally and interna-
tionally. According to Biko, the black man had been reduced to an
obliging shell who looks in awe at white power structure and accepts
what he regards as the inevitable position (28). While he is angered
by this situation, argued Biko, the black man directs his deepening
anger not against the system but in the wrong direction on his fellow
man in the township (29). From Bikos perspective, practices of knowl-
edge production that drew attention to the structural and other sources
of racial oppression were an important starting point for black people
in their anti-racist struggles. Such a process denaturalized structures
of oppression by locating them within the power dynamics governing
economic, cultural, and political processes in apartheid South Africa.
An understanding of the role of power structures in racial and eco-
nomic oppression and of the complicity of the oppressed in this
process was central to Bikos intellectual work. In his formulation of
anti-racist social thought, knowledge was power, for it contributed to
the shifting of consciousness and the formation of new political subjects
committed to social liberation. As part of this process, Biko invoked the
practice of conscientisation (125), which involved oppressed social
groups interrogating their social conditions, understanding them, and
figuring out how to address them. Through listening to each other and
drawing on their everyday experiences, Biko believed that members
of oppressed communities could generate ideas that would contribute
not only to their understanding of the mechanisms of oppressive social
orders but also to their ability to respond to them (ibid.). From such
processes, they would emerge as critical knowledge producers, and
thus as organic intellectuals in their own right.
In addition to publications such as the SASO Newsletter and Black
Review, Biko was involved in other emancipatory knowledge produc-
tion activities, including the famed formation schools. These schools
held extended workshops running four to five days (Gerhart 2008,
35), whose objective at a given time was to explore an issue of interest
to members of the oppressed communities. For instance, Biko states
that in 1971 the formation schools explored the question of black anti-
oppression struggles, focusing on religious movements, trade union
[and] political movements of the past (ibid.). The formation schools
offered a space whereby members of racially marginalized communities
230 Eunice N. Sahle
gathered to study their history and share strategies for anti-oppression

struggles against South Africas racist and repressive social structure.
Further, these schools enabled the reproduction of critical agents of
social change by offering workshops for high school students and
getting them engaged in BCM activities. According to Ramphele, the
engagement of high school students from the black townships in the
BCM led to the formation of new students organizations such as
the South African Students Movement (SASM) and the National
Youth Organisation (NAYO), with local, regional and provincial for-
mations. These organizations were the direct outcome of a leadership
training campaign by SASO and the Black Community Programmes
(BCP) between 1971 and 1973 (1991, 215).
Bikos knowledge production activities also included efforts aimed
at challenging the psychological violence emerging from colonial and
apartheid social orders that dispossessed African people of their histo-
ries. As previously mentioned, a core ideological foundation of colonial
and apartheid racist orders was the notion that Africans were sub-
human, thus without historical significance. Erasure and delegitimiza-
tion of their histories and cultural practices were a constitutive element
of the racist ideologies of these orders. Thus, the European colonists
acts of dispossessing (Sahle 2010) non-European peoples of their histo-
ries and cultural practices provides a critical and historical understand-
ing of the passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence
of their national culture, even though such an approach tends to be a
source of amazement for the colonialists (Fanon 1963, 209). For Fanon,
however, those who condemn this [with] passion are strangely apt
to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently
sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof
of its existence and which is uncontested (ibid.) or dehumanized.
From the perspective of agents of the dominant and coercive colo-
nial and apartheid social orders, local history in South Africa and in
other African societies was irrelevant; in their view, only European
experiences represented universal human history and culture. Such
an approach resulted in the representation of black history in South
Africa as a long succession of defeats. The Xhosas were thieves who
went to war for stolen property; the Boers never provoked the Xhosas
but merely went on punitive expeditions to teach the thieves a lesson.
Heroes like Makana17 who were essentially revolutionaries are painted
as superstitious trouble-makers who lied to the people about bullets
turning into water (Biko 1978, 95). Reclaiming African history on its
own terms was an important project in the struggle against racist social
orders whose knowledge production industry perpetuated colonial

ideas of African backwardness and a continent devoid of human his-
tory and culture. From Bikos perspective, a close exploration of Africa
history was necessary in anti-racist struggle in order for black people
to gain critical consciousness (ibid.). His position on the importance of
reclaiming African history and culture echoes Fanons statement: The
claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate the
nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national cul-
ture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for
an important change in the native, for colonialism is not simply con-
tent to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated
country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in
its grip and emptying the natives brain of all form and content. By a
kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and
distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing precolo-
nial history takes on a dialectical significance today (Fanon 1963, 210).
Overall, like Fanon, Biko challenged the dispossession of Africans of
their history and highlighted the psychological violence and the lega-
cies emerging from colonial processes and practices contributing to this
development. Further, Fanons and Bikos work indicated the impor-
tance of reclaiming local history and practices in the struggles against
social oppression, albeit critically to avoid re-articulation of prac-
tices and histories that would contribute to the interests of powerful
elements in society.
To sum up, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Bikos
work remains vital to political projects aimed at the emergence of
socially just political, cultural, and economic worlds in South Africa
and other parts of Africa. In this regard, the Steve Biko Foundation is
keeping his legacy alive through events dedicated to his work and by
the establishment of a Steve Biko Centre in Eastern Cape Province.18
Further, the scholar activist Andile Mngxitama has introduced New
Frank Talk, drawing on the inspiration of Bikos original Frank Talk,
and is a co-author of a key text focusing on Bikos complex legacy.19
The discussion now turns to brief highlights of social oppression and
anti-oppression struggles in post-apartheid South Africa.
Concluding Notes: Post-Apartheid Conjuncture,

Oppression, and Bikos Legacy
Biko died seventeen years before the 1994 transition to multiracial

democracy in South Africa. However, one wonders what he would
232 Eunice N. Sahle
have thought of the current state of affairs in the country. While the
racist doctrine of separate development and other state racist practices
associated with the apartheid system are gone, social exclusion along
racial lines among other social divides continues in the era of democ-
racy. This is not to say that nothing has changed for the historically
marginalized communities. The transition to multiracial democracy
has expanded the space for political mobilizing in a manner that was
not possible during the apartheid era. This development has seen the
rise of numerous social movements that strategically engage with the
state, such as the Treatment Action Campaign, a social movement that
has made significant gains for people living with HIV/AIDS (Friedman
and Mottiar 2006), and many others (see generally, Ballard, Habid, and
Valodia 2006). Further, some public policies for racial redress have
been instituted by the post-apartheid state. For example, while viewed
in some quarters as being racist and ineffective, affirmative action
policies in the public service have been created as mandated by the
Employment Equity Act, No. 55 of 1998 (EEA). By 2007, Blacks (in the
Biko sense) made up 68 per cent of senior management. Of this Africans
accounted for 52 per cent, Coloureds 8 per cent, and Indians 8 per cent
in the public service (Ndletyana 2008, 79). Nonetheless, important as
social gains emerging from such policies and social struggles by social
movements are, they are generally cancelled out by human insecurities
generated by policies of the post-apartheid state, such as the privatiza-
tion of water, health, and electricity services, and economic instabilities
that characterize the trajectory of post-apartheids political economy in
the age of global casino capitalism (Strange 1986; see also Strange
1998; Sahle 2010) and neo-liberalism in South Africa (Bond 2004).
In the main, South Africas transition to multiracial democracy has
resulted in the reproduction of social and economic power in the context
of a global neoliberal order. As Greenberg argues, [D]espite the histori-
cally significant process of political democratization [neoliberal] eco-
nomic restructuring has favoured the owners of economic power over
those without (2006, 7). Essentially, while the African National Congress
(ANC) was committed to social emancipation during the anti-apartheid
struggle, the transition period and its aftermath saw the new historical
bloc (in the Gramscian sense) which included the ANC, its aligned
organic intellectuals, and local and global owners of capital deepen
the pre-existing neoliberal capitalist project. Consequently, this histori-
cal blocs commitment to an economic project that calls for rolling back
the role of the state in the economy and the privatization of public goods
has meant that members of the historically marginalized communities
have had limited room to manoeuvre in pressing the state to deliver on

basic economic rights. The role of the ANC in the transition to multi-
racial democracy echoes Fanons theorization of nationalist struggles
in the 1950s, which saw the nationalist elites fail in what he refers to as
their historical mission (Fanon 1963). While the ANC-led transition to
the post-apartheid era has seen the involvement and inclusion of elites
drawn from historically marginalized communities in the making and
consolidation of South Africas new historical bloc, essentially the pas-
sive nature of this process has resulted in the reproduction of economic
power and social privilege. Overall, social groups that benefited from
colonial and apartheid systems have been its main beneficiaries.
Even campaigns aimed at remedying some of the social harms gen-
erated by the apartheid system have been resisted by members of the
post-apartheid historical bloc, such as South Africas former president
Thabo Mbeki. This bloc resisted calls by social movements and organic
intellectuals such as the late Dennis Brutus (Karim and Sustar 2006)
for multinational corporations to pay reparations to those who suf-
fered under apartheids racist capital accumulation regime that benefit-
ted these corporations. As Patrick Bond argues, in his effort to contain
demands for reparation, Mbeki and his justice minister Penuell Mad-
una went to even greater lengths to defend apartheid-era profits, argu-
ing in a nine-page brief to a US court hearing a reparation case, that
by permitting the litigation, the New York judge would discourage
much-needed foreign investment and delay the achievement of the
governments goals (2004, 42).
Overall, while some segments of historically marginalized commu
nities, notably members of a small African elite that has emerged
in the post-1994 period, have access to social and political power in
post-apartheid South Africa (Seekings and Nattrass, 2005, 30810), the
majority of Africans and other historically marginalized communities
continue to experience poverty and significant forms of social exclu-
sion. In the case of gender inequality, Shamin Meer argues that while
some opportunities in the public sphere have opened up for women
during this period, a close examination indicates that it is not black
working-class or poor rural women who have made gains but rather
mainly white women, as a result of empowerment strategies that
aimed making proportional the numbers of women workers in pub-
lic and private sector institutions (2007, 4).20 In general, both in rural
and urban social geographies, the most marginalised under apartheid
bear a heavy burden in post-apartheid economic restructuring. Farm
dwellers and labour tenants face mass retrenchments and evictions as
234 Eunice N. Sahle
landowners are exposed to global competition and reorganize their

product mixes and workforces (Greenberg 2006, 134).
On the whole, the South African transition to multiracial democracy
is better conceptualized as a passive revolution in the Gramscian
sense. While this development saw the dismantling of the repressive
apartheid system and its racist foundations, the negotiated settle-
ment between the National Party and the ANC secured the reproduc-
tion of structural power for the wealthy and the emerging new Black
elite, social groups that have also benefitted from neoliberal economic
policies such as the privatization of formerly state-owned public enter-
prises and other developments. The killing of thirty-four miners and the
injuring of others in Marikana by state security forces on 1 August 2012
is but one example of the effects of the human rightsnegating effects
of the post-1994 historical blocs economic policies and its oppressive
approaches to social grievances by citizens.21
The entrenchment of elite power in South Africas post-apartheid so-
cial structure does not, however, mean that marginalized social forces
have been docile. While the post-apartheid conjuncture has generated
new contradictions and a complex social landscape that does not offer
easy moral satisfaction of the anti-apartheid struggle (Desai 2000, 5),
the social movements that have emerged and the previously mentioned
re-articulation of Bikos ideas provide a discursive and political space to
address intersected forms of oppression based on race, class, and gender
in the era of neoliberal democracy in South Africa. As in other histori-
cal moments, organic intellectuals such as the critical sociologist Fatima
Meer whose work was highlighted in the previous section and who
died on 12 March 2010 and many others have been engaged in anti-
oppression struggles in the post-apartheid era.22 Before her death, Meer
had been involved in social movements committed to fighting racism,
inequality, and deepening commodification of basic services under the
neoliberal regime, especially in Chatsworth.23 The latter was established
as a township for Indians under the apartheid states Group Areas Act.24
Yet, in Chatsworth and other historically marginalized geographies,
echoes of apartheid past are present in contemporary South Africa
where evictions, relocation and disconnections by the governing elites
(Desai 2000, 5) are a core part of their economic policies. In this context,
terms such as agitator [and] radical (ibid.) that were deployed in the
apartheid period to delegitimize social struggles are invoked by the post-
apartheid historical bloc and its organic intellectuals to refer to the
work of anti-oppression activists such as Fatima Meer and many others.
Figure 9.1 The above picture was taken by the author at the memorial forum
held in Chatsworth, Durban, on 17 April 2010 to celebrate the life and work of
Fatima Meer. Her active involvement in social struggles against injustice was
echoed by speakers at this forum and others organized following her death to
celebrate her lifetime contributions to such struggles and emancipatory forms
of knowledge production.
Meers involvement in social struggles in Chatsworth emerged fol-

lowing a visit by her Concerned Citizens Forum (CCF), during which
marginalized residents in Chatsworth shared their social grievances
emerging from their living conditions and experiences (8). According
to Desai:
The residents took Meer from house to house showing her how many of
them were unemployed, single mothers or aged and infirm As is the
way of sociologists, Meer decided to conduct a survey of the flatdwell-
ers socio-economic circumstances. While this was being planned, Winnie
236 Eunice N. Sahle
Mandela came to visit Chatsworth looking for votes. The tears she shed
could well have summed up the interim results of the research. The statis-
tics confirmed that something was terribly wrong. Meer expected evidence
of some social and economic distress but the level of poverty and degrada-
tion was much worse than imagined. Unemployment was running at sev-
enty percent, many children of school-going age were not in classrooms
for lack of fees, diseases of poverty raged unchecked and, for the lucky,
whole families were completely reliant on pensions and grants.25 (9)
Following her initial visit to Chatsworth, Meer became increasingly

involved in collective action led by local community-based organiza-
tions in post-apartheid Durban, such as the Westcliff Flats Residence
Association (WFRA) in Chatsworth. Community-based organizations
in KwaMashu, Mulazi, and other marginalized areas in Durban, which
were facing evictions and issues related to the privatization of basic
services and marginalizing practices from the state, collaborated with
those in Chatsworth in their struggles against social oppression (Dwyer
2006, 93; see also Desai 2000, 2002). Their repertoires of collective action
(Tilly and Wood 2009) included legal and direct action (Dwyer 2006,
93). Over time, ideas and practices of these community-based organiza-
tions spread on the community grapevine, and meetings got bigger,
enabling them to mount more substantial challenges to the [Durban]
municipality (ibid.). Saturday meetings organized in 2001 by CCF at
the Natal Technikon and the University of Natal provided opportuni-
ties for members of community organizations to meet with intellectuals
such as Meer and students to share and discuss strategies for col-
lective action (94). Such meetings enabled the formation of organiza-
tion identity (ibid.), a development that served as a resource for social
mobilization in the post-apartheid era. According to Dwyer, as [par-
ticipants] sat and painted banners laughing, working together, swap-
ping anecdotes and stories, a camaraderie developed. One participant
recalls how participation in these forums made him feel as being part of
something bigger: by meeting those people what came to my mind
is that I am not alone in this thing (ibid.).
Meer, like other members of CCF and aligned community-based
organizations, also contributed to anti-racist struggles in a very specific
manner by placing the question of racial oppression in post-apartheid
South Africa on the national and global map during the United Nations
World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia,
and Related Intolerance (WCAR) held in Durban from 31 August to
8 September 2001. From the perspective of the South African state, the
country had been chosen to host the intergovernmental conference
because of its experience in defeating institutionalized racism and the
processes put in place for a peaceful transformation to democracy and
reconciliation. As such, the state saw the conference as providing an
opportunity for it to boost its image as the paragon of non-racialism
and egalitarianism (Desai 2002, 121). However, CCF and members
of community-based organizations had a counter-narrative. The lat-
ter was based on the knowledge by these organizations of the lived
experiences of marginalized communities as well as the organizations
expos[ure] to the ANC-led historical blocs economic policies that,
but for a small crony elite, actually entrenched white control of the
wealth and deepened Black misery (122). From these organizations
perspective, the conference provided a political opportunity structure
to attack the ANC for its Thatcherite policies and expose its hypocrisy
on the question of race (123). Leading up to the conference, CCF orga-
nized meetings to plan strategy at the Workers College; meetings
were also held in CCF-aligned townships (ibid.). Out of these meet-
ings and discussions, the Durban Social Forum (DSF) emerged and
facilitated the protest march proposed by CCF and community-based
organizations; the march was held on the first day of WCAR. The pro-
cesses leading to the march left an indelible mark, far beyond putting
the race question in post-apartheid South Africa on the national and
global political landscape. For example, it led to the establishment of
the first radical national organ of the Left since 1994: the DSF (Desai
2000, 138),26 which would provide an organizing space for future anti-
oppression struggles, including ongoing anti-racist struggles in the
context of racial tensions generated by legacies of colonialism and the
apartheid system, such as unequal access to land (Mngxitama 2006)
in both urban and rural areas, evictions, and forms of social exclusion
emerging from the neoliberal project. Further, it generated critical his-
torical memories of the power and importance of collective action that
continue to inspire emancipatory projects of marginalized women in
Chatsworth who participated in the march.27
The preceding discussion indicates the relevance of Fanons and
Gramscis common insight that historical and conjunctural develop-
ments influence transitions from one social order to another. While the
transition to multiracial democracy in South Africa restructured the racist
ideological foundations of the state and opened up space for capital accu-
mulation and other forms of power for an emerging black elite, overall
238 Eunice N. Sahle
it resulted in the reproduction of historical patterns of social power and

intersected forms of oppression along race, class, and gender lines. This
development was enabled by the neoliberal conjuncture in which the
transition occurred and the existence of a historical bloc committed to
the deepening of a neoliberal project as indicated in its economic devel-
opment blueprint: Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR).28
The discussion further demonstrates the political agency of marginalized
communities. Through their organizations, the contributions of organic
intellectuals such as Meer, and their links to forums such as the CCF and
others, these communities challenged the hegemonic drive and policies
of the ANC-led historical bloc during WCAR and in their everyday prac-
tices of resistance to privatization of public goods such as social housing,
water, education, and electricity that were contributing to the deepening
of historical forms of social exclusion. The projects of resistance by these
communities against social oppression based on race, class, and gen-
der embody the best of Bikos and Meers work as organic intellectuals.
Thus, it is not only Biko who lives (Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gib-
son 2008, 18) in contemporary South Africa, but also Meer. These organic
intellectuals, and others who continue to emerge are making signifi-
cant contributions to the reproduction of the critical scholarly tradition
in South Africa, elements of which this chapter has highlighted. These
intellectuals live in spaces of resistance that now appear and disappear
and are revived in different forms and different parts of post-apartheid
society (ibid.). Overall, the legacy carriers of the [Black Consciousness
Movement] are the excluded majority who continue to make life under
extreme conditions and who, as Frantz Fanon once put it, cannot con-
ceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation,
misery, and hunger (1819).
NOTES
1 Further, in the spirit of the overall concerns of this volume, the chapter
does not engage in the extensive debates pertaining to the merits and limi-
tations of these traditions in the study of political, economic, and cultural
processes in formally colonized societies. For examples of such debates,
see generally Parry 2004; Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002; and Williams and
Chrisman 1994.
2 Quijanos concept of coloniality of power captures the reproduction of
colonial ways of knowing and political and economic power arrangements
following the end of formal colonial rule. As he states, [C]olonial struc-

ture of power produced the specific social discriminations which later
were codified as racial, ethnic, anthropological or national, accord-
ing to the times, agents, and populations involved. These intersubjective
constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination, were even
assumed to be objective, scientific, categories, then, of a historical
significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of
power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which
operate the other social relations of classes or estates. In fact, if we observe
the main lines of exploitation and social domination on a global scale, the
main lines of world power today, and the distribution of resources and
work among the world population, it is very clear that the large majority
of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are precisely
the members of the races, ethnies, or nations into which the colonized
populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world
power, from the conquest of America and onward (2007, 1689).
3 In her book, Conway engages with this question extensively from a femi-
nist perspective. She shared some of her work in a public lecture titled
Women, Gender and Feminism: At the Edges of Global Justice, that took
place at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on 2 April 2011.
4 See Staggenborg (2011) for discussions of the framing perspective in stud-
ies of social movements.
5 For extended discussions, see Fanon (1963, 148205).
6 See Gramsci (1971, 51113).
7 This paragraph summarizes Gramscis (1971, 90118) detailed examination
of the emergence of the modern Italian state.
8 For a feminist critique of Fanons approach to the gender question in the
context of the Algerian nationalist struggle, see Helie-Lucas (1999).
9 The government of the first prime minister of independent India, Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru, played a key role in these discussions. The country had
filed a complaint concerning racial oppression in South Africa prior to
its independence and continued to raise this issue following independence
from Britain (Reddy and Meer 1996, 45).
10 For further details on the Womens Charter, see http://www.sahistory.org.
za/topic/federation-south-african-women-fedsaw. The FSAWs commit-
ment to the nationalist struggle saw the dominant national movement, the
African National Congress, setting the political agenda of this struggle, a
development that saw FSAWs demand for gender equality marginalized.
See Walker (1982) and Hassim (2006b) for detailed discussion of womens
involvement in social resistance during the era of apartheid. Hassims text
240 Eunice N. Sahle
also offers an excellent discussion of the tensions between feminism and

nationalism in the context of South Africa.
11 The years 17951814 saw intense competition between British and Dutch
colonial interests for the control of the Cape colony. During this period,
power was shifting on and off between these two European colonial
powers. For example, the Dutch controlled the colony between 1803 and
1806. In 1814 Britain took control of the colony until 1910 (Terreblanche
2002, 179).
12 For an extended discussion of these issues, see Biko (1978, 1926).
13 It is important to note that it was not only the BCM that neglected and lim-
ited the contributions of women to anti-oppression struggles. For instance,
although some women did become leaders in their own right in other anti-
oppression movements such as the African National Congress and Pan
Africanist Congress, these movements were characterized by sexism and
male dominance in their organizational structures. For detailed discus-
sions of the gendered dimensions of anti-apartheid social movements, see
Walker (1982), Ramphele (1991), and Hassim (2006b).
14 While not new, the 1960s saw the deepening and consolidation of these
strategies by the apartheid state especially after the the Sharpeville massa-
cre on 21 March 1960. During this period, key anti-oppression movements
such as the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress
were banned.
15 A political opportunity structure opens possibilities for social movements to
emerge and evolve and also sets constraints for these movements. For fur-
ther discussions of the concept, see McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996).
16 Black Review was another notable publication that Biko was involved in.
17 Makana was an early nineteenth-century Xhosa prophet, sentenced to
life imprisonment on Robben Island and drowned while escaping in a
boat (editors note, Biko 1978, 95).
18 For more information on the Foundation, see http://www.sbf.org.za.
19 See, Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson (2008) for extended discussion.
20 For a detailed discussion of the gendered dimensions of political in/
exclusion in the post-apartheid era, see Hassim (2006a).
21 For more details on the Marikana massacre of mining workers, see Saul
and Bond (2014).
22 The nature and role of some intellectuals in contemporary social move-
ments in South Africa is highly contested. For instance, Bhmke (2010)
contends that social movements, especially the Abahlali baseMjondolo the
shack dwellers movement have been romanticized in various stud-
ies. However, Fatima Meers significant contributions to anti-oppression
struggles in the post-apartheid era are well known and respected (see,
for instance, Desai 2000 and 2002). Speakers at memorial forums held to
celebrate Meers work, which the author attended in the spring of 2010,
echoed Meers contributions that are highlighted in Desais work and
beyond. The forums were held in Chatsworth and at the University of
Kwazulu Natal, respectively.
23 See the photo, taken by the author at a memorial forum held in Chartsworth,
Durban, on 17 April 2010 to celebrate Fatima Meers work, indicating some
of the social issues Meer was committed to in the post-apartheid period.
24 The state repealed this Act in 1991.
25 During the authors visits to Chatsworth, especially while attending the
womens meeting on Sundays, these social conditions that Meers research
indicates were echoed by various residents during informal talks and
sharing of lived experiences during introductions at the beginning
of each meeting.
26 To review the Durban Social Forum origins and declaration, see
http://libcom.org/community-struggles-in-south-africa-1994-2004/
the-durban-social-forum.
27 Interviews with members of the womens circle, June 2012.
28 For extended discussion of GEAR and South Africans neoliberal project,
see Bond (2000, 2004).
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PART IV
Interventions in Race, Class, and State

Introduction to Part IV: New Interventions
in Intersections of Race, Class, and State
This fourth and final section of the volume attempts to move the con-
versation forward, suggesting examples of theorizations that address
the relationships among race, class, and the state in new ways. The aim
is to reconfigure the questions and move beyond historic tensions. Cri-
tiques that Hall and Gilroy have made of Marxism are that it conflates
class with race, ignores whiteness, and fails to examine the relation-
ship between culture and political economy. A common critique raised
by Marxists of postcolonial/critical race theory is that it fails to centre
materiality, political economy, and the state. The chapters in the fol-
lowing section suggest synthetic methodologies for approaching the
relationships and intersections of race, class, and the state, indicating
a much more heterogenous Marxism (Bartolovich 2002, 3), and more
nuanced postcolonialism/critical race theory (Dua, Not Quite a Case
of the Disappearing Marx, this volume) than commonly identified.
The first two chapters in this section present synthetic methodologies
that reframe global and local questions regarding specific examples
associated with theorizing anti-racism. In Race, Class, and Colonial-
ism: Reconsidering the Jewish Question, Abigail B. Bakan suggests
that contributions drawn from Marxist analyses as well as the pivotal
contributions of Edward Said can help us to understand the Jewish
question as it has emerged in late twentieth and twenty-first century
politics. A focus on the changing historical contexts in which anti-Jewish
racism, the colonial encounter with Palestine, and geopolitical relations
following World War II have emerged offers new insights to address
this thorny question. Next, Sunera Thobani, in Race, Sovereignty, and
Empire: Theorizing the Camp, Theorizing Postmodernity, illustrates
the ways in which discourses of race and whiteness have historically
shaped, and continue to shape, the place of state and sovereignty in

geographies of nationhood. Framing the analysis in the recent condi-
tions of racialization generated by the War on Terror, Thobani offers
a critical examination of Agambens Homo Sacer as a post-structuralist
text and Hardt and Negris Empire in the framework of neo-Marxism.
She argues that neither of these influential texts offers sufficient focus
on the relationship of race to Western sovereignty within the global
order.
In the next chapter, Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism, and the
Bourgeoisie in the Age of Neoliberalism, Sedef Arat-Ko points out
the ways in which the emergence of discourses of whiteness in an
age of neoliberal globalism have moved beyond race to incorporate
culturalist terms and meanings. She insists on the significance of
specific historical and geopolitical contexts, addressing changes that
have occurred in postCold War conditions of neoliberalism. This work
demonstrates how whiteness is a feature of transnational class con-
figurations and identities, with a focus on three examples of class dis-
courses: the underclass in the United States; the urban poor in Third
World countries; and workers and peasants in post-socialist societies.
The last chapter in this section revisits a formative historical moment
in the United States, with specific attention paid to how the regulation
of race interacted centrally with accumulation strategies of capitalism.
In Race and the Management of Labour in United States History,
Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger demonstrate how capital and class
are embedded with racialized managerial strategies, based on a docu-
mented history of early twentieth century US capitalism. Managers,
they maintain, were never outside the US racial system. This con-
tribution suggests that previous work on race and class in US history
commonly places race-making as pivotal only in periods associated
with slavery or the appropriation of indigenous lands. However, as
Esch and Roediger indicate, race management was central to indus-
trial accumulation, which relied on using racialization strategies drawn
from slavery and settlement and on advancing specific techniques
for modern conditions. This section indicates the potential for critical
anti-racist scholarship to advance our understanding of how race and
racism operate in concrete experiences of capital accumulation and
reproduction.
The section, and the volume, is closed with an afterword on Theorizing
Anti-Racism.
Part IV: Interventions in Race, Class, and State 251
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10Race, Class, and Colonialism:
Reconsidering the Jewish Question
a b ig ail b. b akan
Introduction: Reframing the Jewish Question
In this chapter,1 the Jewish question is revisited, considered in the con-

text of race, class, and colonialism concepts central to both a consistent
Marxist and an anti-racist analysis. The argument considers the role of
Zionism in the transition of Jewishness from non-white to a specific
form of whiteness, what I term whiteness by permission, in the post
World War II, Western geopolitical context. This analysis is informed
by an engagement with both Marxist and postcolonial literatures that
have attempted to problematize the intersection of political economy
and ideology, grounded in specific contexts that generate and repro-
duce relations of power. It is also informed by an extensive literature
addressing race as a socially constructed assignment of cultural and/
or phenotypical characteristics in unstable and ambiguous productions
of whiteness (Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1999; Ong 2004; Fernando
2006; Agnew 2007; Gmez 2007; Loomba and Burton 2007; Baum 2008).
The Jewish question has taken different forms in various contexts
of time and place, often not intersecting or interacting with discussions
of race, class, and colonialism. As Hannah Arendt noted, It has been
one of the most unfortunate facts in the history of the Jewish people
that only its enemies, and almost never its friends, understood that the
Jewish question was a political one (Arendt 2000, 77).
Regarding the political context of the twenty-first century, the Jew-
ish question has become inextricably linked to the state of Israel, a
state established in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust and which is rec-
ognized to bear a Jewish identity. While the association of states with
identity is a constructed and contested political claim, Israel is also a
Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering the Jewish Question 253
state established through military force on expropriated indigenous

Palestinian national territory and sustained through the permanent
expulsion of and denial of equal citizenship to the Arab Palestinian
population (Pappe 2006; Abu-Laban and Bakan 2008; Bakan and Abu-
Laban 2010). These realities have become embedded in contemporary
debates surrounding the Jewish question.2 The ongoing economic and
political crisis of the Middle East region, and the concomitant geopoli-
tics of post-9/11 global imperialism, suggest interconnected relation-
ships linking the Jewish question not only to Israel/Palestine, but also to
specific configurations at the intersection of race, class, and colonialism.
Israels political system is challenging, in that all the main politi-
cal parties within that state and all the main political parties of the
most powerful states internationally identify its exclusively Jew-
ish character as both acceptable and necessary within the bounds of
modern democratic norms. This is further complicated because the
states raison detre has been defined largely as a form of redress for
the genocide of Jews as a racialized category during the Nazi regime
of German imperialism in the 1930s and early 1940s. Such factors ren-
der the linkages among race, class, colonialism, and the state in need
of specific contextualization. Notably, the place of Israel as a state of
exception has been a subject of debate in comparative politics (Lentin
2008; Abu-Laban and Bakan 2011). Moreover, the context is not static,
having shifted considerably over time and place.
The transition to whiteness, significantly, presumes a shift from
a position of something less than white, including demonstrable
changes in the class configurations of Jewish immigrant groups in
the West. This shift is traced most clearly in the US context by stud-
ies such as Karen Brodkins How the Jews Became White Folks (1998).
Brodkin identifies how the US 1944 Servicemans Readjustment Act,
dubbed the GI Bill of Rights, served as a kind of affirmative action for
white males. These were the beneficiaries of the GI Bill, constituting the
majority of marginalized working class US citizens who served in the
army. Included among these white males were recent Jewish European
immigrants (368). Brodkin further identifies the impact of class on race
in the United States.
Did Jews and other Euro-ethnics become white because they became
middle-class? That is, did money whiten? Or did being incorporated into
an expanded version of whiteness open up the economic doors to middle-
class status? Clearly both tendencies were at work. Some of the changes set
in motion during the war against fascism led to a more inclusive version of
whiteness. Anti-Semitism and anti-European racism lost respectability
Theories of nurture and culture replaced theories of nature and biology.
Instead of dirty and dangerous races that would destroy American democ-
racy, immigrants became ethnic groups whose children had successfully
assimilated into the mainstream and risen to the middle class. (36)
Brodkins framework only partly explains the unprecedented upward

mobility of American Jews in the postWorld War II period. Issues of
nationalism and national identity are also relevant, though they do not
figure centrally into Brodkins account (Peto 2010, 22). Also significant
is Ira Katznelsons study When Affirmative Action Was White (2005). He
indicates how American Jewish participation on the side of the Allies
in World War II was important in the change of class position in the
United States (103). Matthew Frye Jacobson (2006) notes particularly
the significance of the 1960s and the impact of the US civil rights move-
ment, where Jewish identity claims were influenced by and expressed
in new cultural images.
This literature, however, addresses changes in the US context only,
with minimal attention to the transnational context, not least regard-
ing extensive Western interests in the Middle East. I argue that a trans-
national historical turning point occurred after World War II, marking
the failure of earlier promises of Jewish emancipation and the simul-
taneous ascendance of Zionism to a position of hegemony, coinciding
with changes in the class and racial configuration of Jewishness. The
close association of Zionism with Jewish whiteness in the United States
ascribed these claims specifically with Ashkenazi (European) Jewish
populations and intersected with the idea of Israel as an abstract Jew-
ish space. This space was also considered to be a humanistic alterna-
tive to the barbarism of the holocaust and became closely associated
with the elevation of various mythological tenets associated with Zion-
ist ideology.
The argument that follows is developed as a theoretical synthesis,
including contributions on the Jewish question informed by debates
within Marxism in the non-Stalinist, self-emancipationist tradition
(see, for example, Leon 1970; Rodinson 1973; Weinstock 1979; Seigel
1986), but not one reliant exclusively on such contributions. It is notable
that one of Marxs first articles was on the right of religious freedom
for Jews, later published as On the Jewish Question (Marx 1963). In
1840s Germany, where Marx began his intellectual and political work,
he argued in favour of legal emancipation as a democratic right and

insisted that complete social emancipation was only possible when all
humanity, including Jews, Christians, and other such groups, could be
free from all oppressive conditions and ideologies (Draper 1977, 109
28). Marxs commitment to a rights framework for oppressed minori-
ties is recognizable from the perspective of contemporary advances in
liberal democratic and social movement theorizations. His writing on
this front was certainly not, however, unambiguous (Rose 2008; Mills
2003; Anderson 2010), not least because his ideas on race, ethnicity,
and the rights of nationally oppressed peoples developed and changed
throughout his adult life. Arguably, Marxs views were based less on
a critique of capitalism as an abstract universal, than capitalism as
a concrete social vision in which universality and particularity inter-
acted within a dialectical unity (Anderson 2010, 7). A Marxist analytic
can be augmented through intersections with other critical approaches
in extant literature.
The argument presented here, therefore, also relies on the contribu-
tions of postcolonialism (drawing principally on the work in this field
developed by Edward Said) and critical race theory (associated with
critical whiteness studies). It proceeds in four sections. The first two
sections frame the argument theoretically, considering anti-Semitism
then and now, and discussing really existing Zionism and whiteness
by permission; the next two sections place the argument in a historical
context, identifying the period of the Nazi holocaust and the 1967 war
as turning points, followed by an examination of the ascendance of
Zionism in post-war hegemony. The argument concludes with a con-
sideration of these issues in advancing consistent anti-racism.
I. Anti-Semitism Then and Now
Anti-Semitism, an unclear and imperfect term in the context of a dis-

cussion of racism and anti-racism (Achcar 2009), can be delineated
for the purpose of this discussion to refer to two distinct phenomena
in addressing the Jewish question. Historic anti-Semitism, as anti-
Judaism, was dissimilar from modern anti-Semitism, as anti-Jewish
racism; the former allowed for the possibility of conversion, while the
latter was considered a feature of biological assignment associated with
Jewish blood. Jews have historically been the victims of both anti-
Judaism and anti-Jewish racism, which tend to be termed, confusingly
and without differentiation, anti-Semitism.3
Where then does anti-Semitism fit into discussions of racism?

There is considerable debate regarding the origin of modern racism and
its relationship to capitalism, particularly concerning the significance of
the transatlantic slave trade (Bakan 1987; Blackburn 1988, 1997). How-
ever, as Helen Scott (2002) notes, a discernable change clearly arises with
the public discourse of modernity regarding the frame of possessive
individualism and the attendant ideology of equality among humans.
Race, as a constructed, ascribed condition of birth and inheritance,
emerges historically in association with specific scientific and biological
justifications associated with colonialism and the enslavement of Afri-
can agriculturalists (Baum 2008). To rationalize the ideology of univer-
sal equality, associated with capitalism, with the economic reality of the
capture of humans and the subordination of forced human labour to
work in the profitable plantations of the Americas, the notion of heredi-
tary race was generalized as part of the hegemonic project (Williams
1964; Bakan 1987; Blackburn 1988, 1997). Whiteness can be understood,
then, as an element of the construction of difference in the hegemonic
bloc historically associated with the making of the Euro-American rul-
ing class. It was emergent in the period of colonial expansion and the
Atlantic slave trade throughout the Americas, in close association with
Christianity (Ignatiev 1995; Levine-Rasky 2000, 2008; Razack 2002;
Baum 2008).4 Whiteness, though apparently neutral, became defined
and generalized at the same time as the development of the other as
black in racialized slavery. But the binary of white-as-neutral versus
black-as-other, though claimed to be rooted in the biologically ascribed
differences of blackness, was and is unstable.
European Jews, though not black, as non-Christian were also not
white, and were the victims of various forms of discrimination, col-
lectively referred to in contemporary parlance as anti-Semitism. What
could be considered pre-modern anti-Semitism (anti-Judaism or reli-
gious prejudice) and modern anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish racism) were
distinct, but also related in specific contexts. An important marker link-
ing one to the other was the generalization of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. Originally a collection of documents based on articles produced in
Russia in 1903, the Protocols was circulated after the Russian Revolution
of 1917 as a clumsy forgery that attributed the rise of bolshevism to a
sinister Jewish plot for world domination (Sacher 2005, 383). In 1920,
the Protocols was published in English and widely distributed interna-
tionally. Notably, ruling class interests in the West coincided with those
in the East. As Sacher summarizes:
Circulated throughout Europe by a group of embittered White Rus-

sian migrs, the Protocols was republished in the United States by the
renowned automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. Indeed, for several years
Fords private newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and then his privately
published book, The International Jew, quoted extensively from the Proto-
cols, and issued repeated warnings against the putative Jewish menace to
world order. (ibid.)
On the other end of the political spectrum, immigrant workers inter-

nationally, including many European Jewish refugees in the West,
identified with the early years of the Russian Revolution as a beacon of
anti-oppression politics. Significantly, one of the central attractive ele-
ments was the Bolshevik partys opposition to the Russian Tsarist state,
which was notoriously violent towards the Eastern European Jewish
population.
As capitalism developed in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Jewish ghettos (or ethnically isolated villages)
were being strangled by the growth of urban manufacture and trade. As
the nineteenth century approached, the semi-feudal Tsarist regime in
Russia was able to channel traditional hostility against the Jewish mer-
chants into a mass escape valve for the hostility to the brutally repres-
sive state. Historic anti-Semitism as anti-Judaism moved to a version of
modern racism. Violent pogroms massacres of Jewish ghettos, includ-
ing burning of homes and mass murders were o rganized by Tsarist
police with popular participation.
This was the message of capitalism in Eastern Europe for the Jewish
people. It was also the background for the waves of emigration from
Eastern Europe to Western Europe, the United States, and elsewhere
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the immigrant
experience in these countries was hardly one of equality and prosperity.
The alternative vision of a universalistic and internationalist message,
promised by the revolutionary wave, appealed to elements of tradi-
tional Jewish spiritualism. Zionism, with its particularistic appeal for
an ethnically exclusive Jewish state, was a minority view in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries (Arendt 2007; Rose 2004).
Clearly, by the mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this had
changed; Zionist ideology moved from a marginal to a mainstream
perspective, hegemonic in global capitalist politics and among Jewish
advocacy organizations in the West (Freeman-Maloy 2006; Piterburg
2008). Whiteness, then, is a relational characteristic. Anti-Jewish racial-

ized stereotypes in contemporary times continue to be widely accepted
in significant regions of Canada, the United States, and Europe.5 More-
over, neo-Nazi organizations and adherents that specifically defend the
legacy of Hitlers genocidal politics continue to be active, promoting
racism against Jews and other minorities, and advancing such notions
as denial of the reality of the holocaust. However, in liberal Western
states, most formal educational and political barriers that were in place
well into the twentieth century have now been removed, and it is offi-
cially unacceptable to discriminate against Jews according to liberal
common sense (PFEX 2010).
With this reality duly noted, the assumption of a thousands-year-long
consistent and uninterrupted pattern of hatred against Jews, as the
Zionist narrative claims, is inaccurate and counterproductive. Nor is
the remedy to such an ascribed and entrenched pattern in varied and
uneven conditions redressed by the existence of an ethnically defined
Jewish state. It is important to stress, therefore, along with Judith
Butler, that a simple reduction of Jews with Zionism, or indeed, Jew-
ishness with Zionism will not do (2004, 119; see also Butler 2008, 2012;
Rosenfeld 2007). In contemporary politics, however, the most influen-
tial Jewish organizations in, for example, the United States and Can-
ada assert such an equation, and are closely allied with advocacy for
the policies and practices of the existing state of Israel. This brings us
to a closer consideration of really existing Zionism and the attending
condition of whiteness by permission.
II. Really Existing Zionism and Whiteness by Permission
If citizenship on grounds of Jewish rights to freedom of culture and reli-

gious expression was unattainable within other state forms, the Zionist
notion of a particularistic and exclusively Jewish state would seem to
fill the vacuum. The dramatic historical failures of the major emancipa-
tionist projects regarding Jewish oppression with both enlightenment
liberalism in the West and the shattered dream of universalist commu-
nism in its Stalinist incarnation in the East witnessing renewed accom-
modation to anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish racism left an atmosphere of
overwhelming despair regarding prospects for achieving Jewish equal-
ity (see Weinryb 1978). This ascendance into statehood in the realpolitik
of postWorld War II global capitalism coincided with the denigration,
occupation, ethnic cleansing, and racialization as non-white and state-

less, of the Palestinian population. Western Jews, in turn, moved from
less than white to a certain type of whiteness, with really existing Zion-
ism serving as a key element of the transition.
Whiteness by permission, then, coincided historically with the mak-
ing of the new (European, or Ashkenazi) Jewish ruling class in the
modern capitalist state of Israel, where the ruling class ideology is
articulated as Zionist ideology. Zionism needs to be understood as a
political ideology, like other isms associated with the contemporary
academic discipline of political science. It is a conservative political
perspective closely associated with empire and colonialism, but self-
proclaimed through the expression of the language of equity, or in mod-
ern terms, anti-oppression politics. This renders Zionism a complex
ideology, slippery in its efforts to escape comparison or analysis, not
least from the perspective of critical scholarship. Zionism presents as a
necessary corrective to modern anti-Semitism. In Israel, it is the ideo-
logical foundation of all the major political parties; outside of Israel,
since 1948, Zionism stands as a secular political perspective associated
with an increasingly conservative social movement, where redress for
anti-Semitism is based on defence of and advocacy for the actions of
Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
Really existing Zionism has involved a racialization project associ-
ated with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (Pappe 2006) and the estab-
lishment of a racialized other not in any way responsible for or
associated with the European experience of anti-Jewish racism. In the
name of anti-racist redress for racism against Jews in Europe, Zionist
Jews and advocacy organizations claimed a place beside the lords of
Christian empire, now serving as the settlers of the land of Palestine.
Not coincidentally, this project assured imperial access and control
over a territory that is strategically located in the oil-rich region of the
Middle East (Hanieh 2003). This association dates back to the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 (addressed below), but took more specifically state-
centric forms after the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The construction of an Israeli state claiming to be the only legitimate
politically safe haven for Jews who are victims of anti-Jewish racism
all over the world, and doing so according to a set of permanent insti-
tutions that deny Palestinian existence, rights, or claims commonly
associated with notions of apartheid (Davis 2003; Bakan and Abu-
Laban 2010) is a critical political element in the advancement of
Jewish whiteness. Moreover, though the gender dimension of this con-

struction takes us beyond the scope of this chapter, it is notable that
a model of the new Jew as framed by modern Zionisms founder,
Theodor Herzl ([1896] 1988), is consistent with the European enlight-
enment tradition and its attendant image of white colonial superiority
expressed as competitive, hetero-normative masculinity (Massad 2006).
Whiteness is a relational category that involves the racialization of
the non-white other. In the Middle East, the other was clearly the
Orientalized Palestinian (Said 1992, 1978). However, in the West this
other was commonly resident racialized peoples, specifically the
black population of the United States. The transition of European Jewish
immigrants, particularly in the United States but also internationally,
from being strongly identified with progressive movements in the trade
unions and the Left to a close association with conservative forces was
an uneven and complex process. As Eric Goldstein notes, it was com-
mon for post-war American Jewish communities to publicly identify
themselves as a religious group while privately pursuing Jewishness
as something different, and frequently speaking of Israel as a land of
religious and democratic values rather than as an anchor for Jewish
group consciousness (Goldstein 2006, 2067). Meanwhile, a gradual
process of change took place in the main organizations of Jewish com-
munity groups in the United States, as well as in Canada and other
countries in the West. As the state of Israel cultivated relations with
diasporic Jewish organizations, specific programs designed to advance
Jewish emigration, funding, and political mythologies extended con-
nections to the Zionist project in Israel (Peto 2010; Freeman-Maloy 2006;
Mearsheimer and Walt 2007).
The Jewish settler project on indigenous Palestinian land coincided
with the promise of the right to further and continuous Jewish settle-
ment embedded in Israeli state law, particularly the Jewish Law of
Return. This law is foundational in Israels establishment as a state that
is universally accessible to Jews across the globe, regardless of other
conditions normally associated with immigration policies and practices
(Tilley 2005). Rather than being a state of all its citizens, regardless of
religion or culture, Israel was established as a state where ethnic iden-
tity was primary, unusual in the post-war period of decolonization (see
Butler 2012). Accordingly, anyone of Jewish identity where such Jew-
ish identity was defined according to Israeli state policy and was there-
fore a political designation of a civil status (and notably a global and not
a national one) had an immediate right to residence in Israel with

full citizenship participation. The establishment of the state of Israel
on very specific terms therefore effectively constructed a similarly spe-
cific type of Jewish whiteness associated with global geopolitical
interests, notably linked to policies that would accord with expansion
of Western interests in the Middle East.
This transition to whiteness enabled diasporic Jews to access a level
of influence and status previously unknown, contrasting sharply with
the historic normalization of Jewish oppression, and modern anti-
Semitism, in the Western world. However, this specifically constructed
whiteness was not, and has not been, universally distributed to all
Israeli Jews, indicated by the exclusionary positioning of Zionisms
internal others, the Mizrahim. As Joseph Massad aptly summarizes:
In addition to defending European Jews against anti-Semitic attacks, Zion-

ism was also going to make available to them a whole range of economic
activity denied it in Europe, especially in agriculture and soldiery. Hence,
the objective of the Zionist movement was not simply to transplant Euro-
pean Jews into a new geographical area, but also to transform the very
nature of European Jewish society and identity as it had existed in the
diaspora until then. (2006, 41)
The despised Jews of Auschwitz (Agamben 2005) found a ticket, as it

were, to whiteness; but the ticket was offered by a reconstructed post
World War II global order only on certain conditions. It was subject to
the permission of a distinctly Euro-American and traditionally Chris-
tian whiteness associated with Euro-American capitalism, which had
historically excluded the largely (though not exclusively) working
class and immigrant (though again not exclusively) Jewish population.
Permission to enter the realm of whiteness in the West became inti-
mately linked to and reliant upon the social construction of the Jew
as a full citizen, or citizen-in-waiting, of the state of Israel, regardless
of residence, or linguistic, or national identity. The ideological and polit-
ical positioning as Israeli-citizen-in-waiting in the West, principally the
United States (where the largest concentration of Jews outside of Israel
resides), has both constructed and presumes a prior positive relation-
ship between Jewishness and Zionism. The expectation has developed
that to be Jewish demands a close identification with and defence of
the state of Israel and its associated policies regarding racial markers, in
terms of both domestic and international politics.
III.Turning Points: The Jewish Question, the Holocaust,

and the Six-Day War
The role of Zionism as a ticket to Jewish whiteness can only be explained

in the specific historical context of its construction and ascendance.
While there are several distinct turning points in the history of the
changing political contexts of the Jewish question, the rise of fascism
in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s moved this issue clearly into the
centre of international politics. Another notable transition occurred in
the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel demonstrated its
role by militarily halting the movement for Arab national sovereignty
in the Middle East. Each of these moments also indicated changes in
the legitimacy of Zionism in Western hegemony, and dramatically
marked transitional moments in the ascendance of Jews into whiteness
by permission.
The coming to power of Hitlers National Socialist Party, the Nazis,
and its official policy of extermination (Dwork and van Pelt 2002), saw
the embedding of modern anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish racism. While
a detailed analysis of the complex nature of fascism generally, and its
German variant specifically, goes beyond the scope of this discussion,
the explicit racialization of whiteness as Aryan, and Jews as a specifi-
cally non-Aryan race, codified anti-Semitism as a version of modern
racism (Baum 2008). Class distinctions became blurred in this form of
racial othering, where all Jews, regardless of class or social status, were
explicitly deemed non-white. The notion of a Jewish race, subject to
legal extermination in such explicit form, marked a type of one drop
rule associated with a form of European capitalism characteristic of
precivil rights laws in the southern US states regarding the biological
construct (one drop of blood) as a determinate of blackness.
However, anti-Zionist and anti-racist scholars have challenged the
claimed exceptionalism of this particular holocaust as it has been
framed in the Zionist narrative. Norman Finkelstein, for example,
the son of Jewish holocaust survivors, has carefully documented the
construction of an intellectual holocaust industry that has stressed
beyond any recognizable proportion the uniqueness of this event and
the concomitant distortions of its memory (Finkelstein 2003). Mah-
mood Mamdani has argued that the Nazi regime is exceptional, not in
the scale of the barbarism, which was in fact characteristic of colonial
wars, but because its victims were exceptionally European and white.
He notes:
By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to

distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The laws of war
applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were
said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races
was seen as a biological necessity The Holocaust was born at the meet-
ing point of two traditions that marked Western civilization: the anti-
Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples. The
difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exter-
minated as a whole. In that they were unique but only in Europe (italics
in original). (2004, 7)
Moreover, the discursive history of World War II has focused on the

slaughter that accompanied European fascism. Another holocaust, the
one that accompanied the US victory in the war in the form of atomic
attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has received far less attention in
the common sense narratives, and has influenced contemporary dis-
cussions of redress (Miki 2005). The trauma of a holocaust on the scale
of the military slaughter of Japanese society, remembered as a victory
march in the centre of Western civilization, merits considered atten-
tion, not least for its racialized implications historically and into the
present.
Understanding this historical context is significant in the changing
position of Jews internationally from less than white to those ascribed
with a specific type of whiteness. Zionism ascended dramatically in
the aftermath of the racist genocide against the Jews that was one, if
not the only, marker of World War II. The establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948, on very specific terms, as a white colonial settler state in
the most oil-rich region in the world, and simultaneously, as a mark of
closure of World War II in the Western imaginary, marks a continuation
of this turning point. The major world powers, associated particularly
with the United States as it emerged into world dominance in the West,
and with the complicity of countries such as Canada and Britain, had
only recently turned a blind eye to Jewish refugees literally fleeing for
their lives.
With the establishment of Israel, these states began a process that
would embrace a combination of economic and political interests at
home solving an uncomfortable situation widely held by global elites
to be a condition the Jews themselves were responsible for (Sacher
2005, 516) as well as in the Middle East. The Western imperial proj-
ect found in an ideological fusion with Zionist interests an opportunity
to facilitate a new form of white settlement, as Jewish settlement, in a

region of ostensibly uninhabited land. The mythologized absenting of
indigenous Palestinians was a necessary corollary, and was consistent
and reminiscent of generations of earlier settler colonial projects (Karmi
2007). This new state project was therefore a moment of colonialism of
an old type, but with a new justification, operating in the name of offer-
ing justice and reparation (Winbush 2003, xviii). Israel was established
as a national capitalist state that served as normative redress for the
victims who had been despised by a constructed pre-modern German/
European colonialism; it rendered racism, ostensibly, a relic of earlier
times, a legacy of the past. In this sense, Israel solved the Jewish
problem of Europe and America in terms that rendered West and East
as allies in a new modernity. The fact that it was consistent with a very
old Orientalism assured Zionisms successful service in the transition
to whiteness.
Another elision in the mainstream legacy of World War II, and an
essential element in the role of Zionism and Jewish whiteness in its
aftermath, is the significance of the complicity of Western liberalism
in the Nazi holocaust. The racism of the holocaust is not only a story
of particularized racism expressed in the Nazi states genocide of six
million Jews (as well as other sexual, ethnic, and political minorities)
(Dwork and van Pelt 2002), but is also a story of the Western liberal
democratic states refusal to provide safe haven for Jewish refugees
(Abella and Troper 1983). This refusal is expressed most clearly in the
vian conference of 1938, attended by state representatives from all
over the world, to address Jewish refugee claims. The outcome saw
these claims soundly rejected, as states facing the depression conditions
of the 1930s kept borders tightly closed.
[T]he vian conference was afflicted by a bias that was scarcely dis-
guised. The Australian delegate stated plain-spokenly that as we have
no real racial problem in Australia [sic], we are not desirous of importing
one. The Canadian delegate repeated the observation of Frederick Blair,
his nations commissioner of immigration, that the Jews themselves were
responsible for their suffering (Prime Minister Mackenzie King earlier had
asserted that the Jews were a people who were bound to pollute Canadas
bloodstream). (Sacher 2005, 516)
The vian conference was followed a year later by another moment of

complicity, when Russia agreed to sign the HitlerStalin pact. Despite
an inspiring promise of emancipation for Jews in the first years of the

1917 Russian Revolution, the counter-revolutionary moment associ-
ated with Stalinism meant that by the late 1920s and into the 1930s anti-
Semitism, in a form that combined both modern anti-Jewish racism and
pre-modern anti-Judaism, was once again enlisted by the post-Tsarist,
and post-emancipatory, socialist state (Rothenberg 1971).6
Another significant turning point in the entrenchment of Zionist
hegemony followed with Israels expansion during the infamous Six-
Day War of 1967, when the territorial borders of occupation expanded
more deeply into remaining Palestinian homelands in the Gaza Strip,
the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Neve Gordon aptly summarizes
Israels relationship to the Palestinian territories and population:
For many years the occupation operated according to the coloniza-

tion principle, by which I mean the attempt to administer the lives of the
people and normalize the colonization, while exploiting the territorys
resources (in this case land, water and labor). Over time, a series of struc-
tural contradictions undermined this principle and gave way in the mid-
1990s to another guiding principle, namely, the separation principle. By
separation I mean the abandonment of efforts to administer the lives of
the colonized population (except for the people living in the seam zones
or going through checkpoints), while insisting on the continued exploit-
ation of nonhuman resources (land and water). The lack of interest in
or indifference to the lives of the colonized population that is character-
istic of the separation principle accounts for the recent surge in lethal
violence. (2008, xix)
Clearly, the effective permanence of the 1967 occupation, despite its

recognized violation of international law, indicates the Israeli states
similarly permanent dismissal of the Palestinian populations human
rights. The Wests compliance with this reality, regardless of periodic
rhetorical opposition from, for example, those such as former US Presi-
dent Jimmy Carter, means that the racialization of the occupied Pal-
estinian other is notably distinct from the Israeli, and by extension,
Western Jew. The linkages between Zionism and permitted white-
ness tightened in the context of a deepening association between US
and Israeli geopolitical interests in the region. The ascendance, after
1967, of an ideological industry associated with the memory of the
Nazi holocaust is well documented, serving to advance the legitimacy
of Zionism in Western hegemony (Finkelstein 2003). As Matthew Frye
Jacobson notes, 1967 also marked a turning point in the distancing of

sections of the New Left in the United States from the mass of the anti-
racist movement associated with black civil rights and black power.
Nineteen sixty-seven marked the heightened fragmentation of the New

Left, as the language of Black Power ramified through the Civil Rights
movement a growing rift between blacks and whites which, for Jews,
was exacerbated by diverging Jewish and African-American interpreta-
tions of events in the Middle East. At a Conference on New Politics in Chi-
cago (August 1967), a number of Jews walked out when the black caucus
demanded a resolution condemning Zionist imperialism. (2006, 222)
Zionism has served, then, as a divisive force in the anti-racist move-

ment, not only in the Middle East but internationally. Arguably, the
failure to integrate a consistent anti-racist analysis has also been
reflected among the most radical elements. For example, even a lead-
ing Marxist theorist such as Ralph Miliband did not adopt a consistent
stance in opposition to Israels 1967 war, though this view was chal-
lenged by other Marxists, such as Marcel Liebman (Achcar, Miliband,
and Liebman 2006).7
IV. Zionism and Post-war Hegemony
It was in the specific context of failed state alternatives to anti-Jewish

racism that Zionism emerged as a more credible political force. A new
social base developed among holocaust survivors in the Jewish com-
munity, coinciding with Western geopolitical interests in the post-war
scramble for empire. The forces that combined to establish the state of
Israel adopted Zionism as an ideology to defend specific political inter-
ests. Israels political economy is closely linked to the United States and
other Western powers, serving as a kind of sub-imperialist power in
the Middle East region (Hanieh 2003). However, as a country that wel-
comes Jewish emigrants from any country in the world, it also serves as
a place to address the problem of Jewish refugees. Zionism today is
therefore a political ideology with both historical and religious claims;
it asserts that the worlds Jewish population has a biblical claim on
territory that has been the home to Palestinian Arabs of many reli-
gious backgrounds for thousands of years. Zionism was a marginal
political ideology until sustained outbreaks of anti-Semitism in Europe
rendered it meaningful (Rose 1986, 26). Zionism has been presented

as a way to address the Jewish question, based on an assertion that
Jews are a single national people that has been dispersed, and therefore
weakened and fragmented, within a modernist nationalist narrative.
The remedy is therefore posed in terms of the necessity of return and
a reconstruction of nationhood.
[T]he Jews were dispersed in various countries around the world, and
in each country they constituted a minority. The Zionist solution was to
endthis anomalous existence and dependence on others, to return to Zion,
and to attain majority status there and, ultimately, political independence
and statehood. (Shlaim 2000, 2)
The term Zionism was introduced in 1885 by a Viennese writer,

Nathan Birnbaum, referring to Zion as one of the biblical names for
Jerusalem. Early Zionism was essentially a messianic interpretation,
expressing a spiritual yearning to return based on the biblical story
of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC and the exile to Baby-
lon. This was a sentiment expressed in Jewish prayers, but it was not
a political movement. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism,
altered the meaning from a spiritual place to a geopolitical nationalist
project. This marked a fundamental shift in the framing of the Jewish
question, including a reconfiguration of the relationships among race,
class, and colonialism. Herzl, notably, was an admirer of Cecil Rhodes
the British colonialist after whom apartheid Rhodesia was named and
of the imperialist project associated with European modernity (Herzl
1941). The Zionist vision of developing a state for Jewish settlement
was consistent with European colonization, and has been critiqued as
such in much of the literature addressing the Jewish question in both
Marxist and postcolonial writings (Rodinson 1973; Said 1992; Rose
2004; Massad 2006).
Zionism moved from a theoretical idea to geopolitics with the enact-
ment of the Balfour Declaration. After attempting to give a charter
for the formation of a Jewish Kenya, and then Cyprus, on 2 Novem-
ber 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour passed a declara-
tion in Britain promising the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people (Sacher 2007, 109). Following World War
I and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Britain could not refuse the
opportunity for extending colonization in the region. Notably, as Sir
Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, put the
case, the Zionist enterprise was one that blessed him and gave as well
as him that took, by forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster
in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism (Schechtman, quoted in Brenner
1984, 321).
In the 1920s, an even more overtly self-conscious imperialist wing of
the Zionist movement, which became known as the revisionist move-
ment, was led by one Zeev Jabotinsky. This wing specifically saw the
need for a military strategy of domination and control over the indig-
enous Palestinian population, referred to as the strategy of The Iron
Wall. Jabotinsky maintained there could be no peaceful accommoda-
tion with the Arab Palestinians. In response to critics, he defended the
morality of conquest. In Jabotinskys words:
A sacred truth, whose realization requires the use of force, does not cease
thereby to be a sacred truth. This is the basis of our stand toward Arab
resistance: and we shall talk of a settlement only when they are ready to
discuss it. (quoted in Shlaim 2000, 15)
Two features marked modern, or political, Zionism, in both its labour

and revisionist forms: the absenting of the indigenous Palestinian
people on the land; and an alliance with a great power to enforce the
mandate of the new state (Rose 2004). By the 1940s, one extreme Zion-
ist military wing, Lehomai Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of
Israel), or the Stern Gang, was prepared to establish a military alliance
with the Axis powers in the interest of increasing pressure for Jewish
emigration (Shlaim 2000, 245). The head of the Irgun (National Mili-
tary Organization), the organization from which the Stern Gang origi-
nated, was Menachem Begin, who was to become prime minister of
Israel from 1977 to 1983.
Britain, as the imperial overlord, had hesitated in carrying through
the Balfour Declaration in the face of Arab resistance. Zionist advo-
cates actively sought support from the most aggressive alternative
emergent imperialist force, the United States. After the Nakba (Arabic
for catastrophe) of 1948, the state of Israel was established with a
close relationship to the United States. Following the 1967 expansion of
Israel into Palestinian territories, this relationship became much closer;
Israel proved effective in repressing the development of a pan-Arabic
nationalist movement under the leadership of Egyptian leader Abdul
Nasser (Gordon 2008; Sacher 2007; Finkelstein 2003). As David Theo

Goldberg notes:
Israel was an anomaly at its founding, reflecting conflicting logics of world

historical events at the time between which its declarative moment was
awkwardly wedged. On the one hand, it mimicked rather than properly
mirrored the logics of independence fueled by decolonizing movements
On the other, it embodied in potential as structural conditions of its very
formation some key features of what coterminously was emerging as the
apartheid state In the latter spirit, Palestinians were the indigenous
inhabitants of Palestine. (2009, 107)
Israel today remains a place where rhetoric and reality are oddly out of
synch. Promised as a safe haven for Jews, instead Jews in Israel live in
perpetual fear. Ostensibly modern and considered uniquely democratic
in the region, at the same time it claims an origin story that cites fic-
tional biblical text as evidentiary truth and draws on symbolism associ-
ated with pre-modern historical tradition. The reconfiguration of race,
class, and colonialism that accompanied the establishment of Israeli
apartheid has become the subject of open public debate.
Moreover, much of the early Zionist theorization on the nature of
the Jews was explicitly racialized. As Sand summarizes, this was not
to render support to an abstract notion of race purity, as later adopted
by the Nazis; it did serve, however, to advance the project of ethnic
nationalist consolidation in the taking over of an imaginary ancient
homeland (2009, 265). Specifically, the Zionist movement emphasized
the exclusivity of a Jewish race that demanded for its preservation an
exclusive national, and nationalist, geopolitical home.
[T]he Jewish blood theory was not held exclusively by the handful of lead-
ing thinkers It was popular in all currents of the Zionist movement,
and its imprint can be found in almost all of its publications, congresses
and conferences The concept of Jewish heredity, and even the theory of
eugenics associated with it, was especially prominent among the scientists
and physicians who joined Zionism. (266)
Zionism, then, is a complex racialized political ideology. It is grounded

in a specific colonialist class project, one that supports a Euro-American
imperialist agenda in the Middle East and assumes a close relationship
between Jewish whiteness internationally and the construction of an

ethnically defined Jewish class hegemony associated with the state
of Israel. Palestine, and the Palestinian experience of Israeli occupation
and exile from 1948, after 1967, and into the present have been con-
structed as the racialized other within the Zionist framing of whiteness.
The racialized Palestinian other is a necessary and underlying feature
of this particularized Zionist Jewish whiteness. This matrix of linked
relationships collectively comprises a condition of a certain type and
form of whiteness, associated with a particularized relationship to geo-
politics, whereby permission to be white is granted if the conditions are
met, and moreover, if their interconnectivity is unchallenged.
This is not to suggest that Jewish subjects have been universally sub-
missive or willing participants in this process. In fact, Zionism before
World War II was widely contested and largely rejected by the Euro-
pean Jewish community, not least because of its acceptance of global
anti-Semitism as a permanent condition. A Zionist strategy for attempt-
ing to win international governments support for Jewish settlement
in Palestine often included suggestions that this could overcome the
problem of unwanted Jewish refugees in other countries (Tulchinsky
2008, 354). The nationalist project of Zionism rejected many of the cul-
tural characteristics of European Jewish identity, including the wide-
spread adoption of the Yiddish language and a perceived lower class
and politically left orientation (Anctil 2001). Jews of Arabic or African
origin were either absented or disdained. Other non-Zionist or anti-
Zionist strategies to escape oppression and isolation to escape from
the historic less-than-white status including liberal democracy and
revolutionary Marxism were far more popular. Only upon the failure
of both of these approaches did Zionism move from a marginal to hege-
monic status. Even in the period of Zionist hegemony, it was a minority
of Zionist political leaders, in close association with Western capital-
ist states, who formed a new class, ultimately the Israeli ruling class.
The contested character of Zionism, like all hegemonic ideologies, con-
tinues, though throughout the post-war years it became entrenched,
significantly supported by its association with Jewish whiteness. Since
1948, Zionism has been specifically associated with the class ideology of
the Israeli state elite and its defenders, though the making of this class
project dates back to the founding of modern Zionism in the works of
Theodor Herzl. An apartheid model shaped Jewish whiteness within
the Israeli state project that, unlike its South African iteration, does not
say its name. The legalized racial separateness that defines apartheid,
however, is endemic to the construction of Israels political economy

(Bakan and Abu-Laban 2010).
Conclusion: Towards Consistent Anti-Racism
The contradiction between Zionist mythology and the realpolitik of

Israels state structure has come under strain periodically over the
decades, both outside and inside Israel, most clearly perhaps in the
aftermath of the December 2008January 2009 war on Gaza. The ongo-
ing Palestinian resistance is at the centre of the exposure of this con-
tradiction (Said 1992; Lentin 2008). There is, however, a widespread
presence of Zionist Israel advocacy organizations that falsely claim to
be representative of all Jewish people and which serve as active oppo-
nents to the advance of the rights of other minorities (Goldstein 2006).
This process was well established in the post-war years, when sections
of American Jews, as white, actively struggled to be distinguished from
American blacks (Katznelson 2005). In the post-9/11 context, Jewish
organizations that are closely tied to Israel advocacy have articulated
particular distance from the Arab/Muslim population domestically
and internationally (Bakan 2014). As Noel Ignatiev has noted, draw-
ing on the example of the divisions of Irish immigrants from black
Americans, advancing the politics of division between one minority
and another at specific historical moments can serve to advance elite
interests (Ignatiev 1995).
The hegemony of the Zionist framework also serves to blur distinc-
tion among the Jewish population, whether based on political views,
regional, ethnic, or national contexts, or class positioning. Some recent
theorizations, even those that take a critical approach, have accommo-
dated various aspects of this Zionist framing. Liberal theorists have
emphasized the Israel lobby (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007), or, in a
more worrying frame, especially given its left gloss, a Jewish lobby
(Petras 2006) in the United States. While such perspectives attempt to
name the ties between Western Jews and the state of Israel, the explana-
tory analysis is unconvincing, regressing to a form of interest group
politics at best, or reductive ethnic or racial stereotyping at worst.
Other theorists misread the holocaust in the context of Western criti-
cal scholarship. Giorgio Agamben, for example, while contextualizing
the camp as a feature of Western capitalist states, mirrors an element
of Zionist theorizing in the assertion of hierarchies of suffering, where
the Nazi holocaust is at the pinnacle and European fascism is framed
as the decisive lesson of the century (Agamben 1999, 14). At the other
end of the spectrum, Stuart Hall, who pioneered the advancement of
cultural studies, accepted in a 1990 essay the claimed association of
Jewish diasporic identity with Zionist political positioning regarding
Israel/Palestine, and on this basis rejected both the identity and the
political claim in a homogenized critique (Hall 1990, 235). Jonathan
Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, writing from a perspective of Jewish cul-
tural studies, have challenged Halls elision. They assert a place for a
diasporic cultural Jewish identity that is inherently anti-Zionist, noting
how such an identity is grounded precisely in its absence of uniformity
or national boundaries (2002, 1213).
Clarity regarding the Jewish question is not only a matter of theoret-
ical significance, but forms a flashpoint in post-9/11 mainstream poli-
tics and discourse. In contemporary political life, Jews who challenge
Israels actions and reject Zionism are commonly accused by Zionist
adherents to be engaging in a form of ethnic treason, abandoning the
essence of an ascribed Jewish identity as self-haters (Kushner and
Solomon 2003). The heightened politics of emotion (Ahmed 2004) asso-
ciated with debates within the Jewish diasporic community regarding
Israel and Palestine can be traced, at least in part, to the central position
of Zionism in the transition to whiteness. The cost of attaining permis-
sion into whiteness has been high, and there is considerable defensive-
ness associated with exposure of the project. Those who reject a direct
linkage between the Israeli state and Jewish identity are assumed in
the Zionist narrative to be willfully accepting historic exclusions associ-
ated with anti-Jewish racism. This is a false and irrational assumption,
but one that has been remarkably successful in serving to silence and
inhibit a consistent anti-racist discourse.
There are, however, encouraging advances. In particular, the Pales-
tinian call for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions in a campaign com-
parable to the movement that challenged South African apartheid has
found considerable resonance in civil society across the globe (Bakan
and Abu-Laban 2009). Also pivotal have been the publications of a
new generation of Israeli intellectuals, including historians and social
scientists sometimes identified collectively as post-Zionist whose
research of previously undisclosed documents has definitively chal-
lenged a series of assertions of the Israeli ruling class and its Zionist
allies (Silberstein 2008; Pappe 2010). Israeli historian and journalist
Tom Segev published in 1986 one of the first historical works in this
wave, 1949: The First Israelis. His work called into question deeply
held beliefs that served as the foundation for most Israelis national
identity (Silberstein 2008, 2). Specifically challenged were notions that

configured Israeli settlers as innocent victims of global anti-Semitism,
and Palestinian Arabs as either willingly departed from the region or
uninterested in peaceful coexistence.
The argument presented here attempts to shift the focus in address-
ing the Jewish question, considering the specific relationships that
intersect race, class, and colonialism. Zionism and the state of Israel are
taken here as legitimate subjects for sustained questioning and critique
from a perspective of anti-racism, combining Marxist, postcolonial,
and critical race literatures. It presumes that recognition of the rights
of Palestinians to national self-determination is intrinsic to a consistent
anti-racist analysis. Significantly, Jewish voices that oppose Zionism,
and Israeli apartheid, are increasingly making themselves heard, stand-
ing in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. Central to maintaining
these advances is a consistent anti-racist positioning, one that opposes
racism in all its forms.
NOTES
1 I am indebted to Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Paul Kellogg, Amelia Murphy-

Beaudoin, Kevin Ovenden, and Alan Sears for comments on earlier drafts
of this paper. Sections of this paper and earlier iterations were presented
at Historical Materialism Toronto, York University, Toronto (May 2010);
Department of Political Science Colloquium Series, University of Alberta,
Edmonton (October 2010); Historical Materialism London, University of
London, London (November 2010); and Historical Materialism New York,
New School for Social Research, New York City (May 2011). Earlier itera-
tions of some of these ideas are in Bakan (2003).
2 Notably, the reference point in global politics is largely the Ashkenazi or
European Jewish experience. Such a reference point does not have the same
relationship to the ongoing subordinate status of Sephardic or African Jew-
ish populations internationally. The implications of these issues for the lat-
ter groups are important, but are, however, beyond the focus of this chapter.
3 The term anti-Semitism has come to artificially equate Jewish experience
with the biblical, linguistic, or cultural category of Semite. However, in
the context of the vernacular, a third meaning of the term anti-Semitism is
used in regard to legitimate criticisms of the policies and practices of the state
of Israel and its various governmental administrations. This is anunhelpful
use of the term, sometimes phrased as the new anti-Semitism. For further
discussion of the latter, see Abu-Laban and Bakan (2012) and note 5 below.
4 The relationship of racialization and religion is significant and operates

differently in specific historical contexts. A full discussion of the relation-
ship between Christianity and whiteness takes us beyond the scope of this
chapter. Notable, however, is the changing context of divisions, where, for
example, Catholics in Ireland were racialized as non-white, and later, in the
United States, moved from non-white to white (see Ignatiev 1995).
5 Regarding the normalization of such stereotypes, common discourse sug-
gests a measure. In January 2011, a doctoral student re-told me the fol-
lowing joke that had been recited to him over a meal in an established
urban university in Canada: Question: why do Jews have such big noses?
Answer: because air is free. The phenotypical stereotype of the Jewish nose
and the cultural stereotype of Jewish financial avarice, both encapsulated
in this casual conversation as humour, indicate the continued normaliza-
tion of anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish racism. This is indicative of, arguably,
traditional or old anti-Semitism. It is not coterminous with the politically
constructed notion of a new anti-Semitism, contrived to discredit chal-
lenges to Israeli state practices, particularly regarding Palestinian rights (see
PFEX 2010; Keefer 2010).
6 The failed efforts in the politics of Jewish emancipation span the examples
of the French enlightenment, marred by the Dreyfus Affair (Begley 2009),
as well as the rise and fall of the Russian Revolution (Callinicos 1991). A
detailed consideration of these efforts, however, takes us beyond the scope
of this chapter.
7 Post-1967 is notably a period of the increasing political ascendancy of the
Christian Zionist movement in the United States, asserting both a remark-
able anti-Semitism and a strong identity with Jews as the chosen people.
In rejecting international law regarding the 1967 occupation, the Christian
Zionist perspective has maintained that [n]o UN resolution can compete
with the power of God (Bach 2010, 88).
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Williams, Eric. 1964. Capitalism and Slavery. London: Andre Deutsch Ltd.
Winbush, Raymond A., ed. 2003. Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging
Debate on Reparations. New York: Amistad/Harper Collins.
11Race, Sovereignty, and Empire:
Theorizing the Camp, Theorizing
Postmodernity
s un er a th ob an i
Introduction
The US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan raise politically urgent

questions about the ways in which sovereignty is being reshaped
within global politics. Given that the colonial order of the nineteenth
and (mid) twentieth centuries was predicated on the sovereign sta-
tus of Euro-American nation-states and the subjugation of the colo-
nized world, and given that race was central to colonial projects of
these earlier centuries, what do these new invasions reveal about
the relation between race, colonialism, and sovereign power? In this
chapter, I explore a number of critical questions raised by the War on
Terror. First, what do the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq reveal about the nature of sovereignty? Second, how have
radical theoretico-political traditions approached the question of
sovereignty, and what conceptual tools might they offer in explicating
the nature of sovereignty in the present? Third, what insights would
a critical race analysis bring to theorizing sovereignty in the early
twenty-first century?1
My examination of these questions begins by discussing the impli-
cations of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the context of the
racialized discourse of the War on Terror. Next, I examine two highly
influential theories of sovereignty, one post-structuralist and the other
neo-Marxist. In Homo Sacer (1998), the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben theorizes sovereign power in Western politics. Engaging
with Foucaults theory of bio-power and rereading the classical Greek
texts to trace the development of Western sovereignty, Agamben argues
that sovereigntys central paradox is revealed in the state of exception,
Race, Sovereignty, and Empire 281
a circumstance in which the sovereign suspends the rule of law. The

state of exception has become the rule, and the capture of bare life,
that is, life stripped of all rights, lies at the heart of sovereign power.
Agamben has famously argued that the concentration camp is exem-
plary of the consolidation of this relation between sovereign power
and bare life. In another text, the highly acclaimed book Empire (2000),
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that the global economic order
has transcended twentieth century forms of imperialist domination that
were characterized by the nation-state system. The new order that has
emerged, Empire, is instead defined by postmodern forms of decen-
tralized power with multiple locations, new forms of deterritorialized
sovereignty, and hybrid forms of subjectivity.
My reading of these texts draws upon critical race and Third World
theories of sovereignty to demonstrate that neither Homo Sacer nor
Empire engage with the central question of sovereignty, namely the
relationship of race to Western sovereignty within the global order. In
the case of Agamben, I argue that despite his interest in the camp as
the exemplary site for the constitution of bare life, he does not recog-
nize the camp as a pre-eminent site of racial politics, nor of bare life as
the quintessential racial target of Western sovereign power. Engaging
with Agambens analysis of the Nazi camp, I demonstrate that the logic
of racial power as reflected in the limit figure of the Muselmann
was central to the camps politics of death and life, as attested by the
survivors in the very testimonies that are referred to by Agamben.
Although Empire makes mention of race and the Third World, it
does so in passing; the relevance of race and the Third World to theo-
rizing global sovereignty is entirely dismissed by Hardt and Negri.
In contrast to Empires argument that the modern state system has
been transcended by a postmodern sovereignty based on the decline
of the nation-state system, attending to the role of race and coloniality
in global relations reveals a strengthening of the repressive powers of
Western nation-states.
My main argument in this chapter is that the omissions of race and
coloniality from their theoretical frame not only limit the potential of
Homo Sacer and Empire to explicate the crisis in sovereignty that has
been highlighted by the War on Terror, but that through these exclu-
sions, both texts further the reproduction of forms of sovereignty that
are deeply invested in Western processes of race-making. In contrast,
I draw on my earlier work, Exalted Subjects: The Making of Race and
Nation in Canada (2007), and that of other critical race theorists, to offer
282 Sunera Thobani
an alternative way of theorizing sovereignty that recognizes modern

practices of sovereignty as re-enacting ongoing histories of race,
colonialism, and empire. The constitution of Western forms of sover-
eignty as universalist has been integral to Western domination of the
non-West, and both Agambens and Hardt and Negris texts reproduce
this ideological practice while rendering irrelevant the extensive Third
World (including Muslim) critiques of and resistance to Western
domination of the global order.
Rethinking Sovereignty in the Twenty-first Century
The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US-led

coalition of the willing have highlighted the complex and changing
nature of sovereignty within the international juridical order. Invasions
and occupations widely treated by major Western intellectual tradi-
tions as phenomena of a colonial order safely consigned to the past
have emerged as central to global politics in the early twenty-first
century. Racial profiling of Muslims, rendition, detention without
charge, torture, targeted assassinations, and collective punishment

have now become commonplace and are finding new public sanction
within Western societies. The imposition of compliant native regimes
by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq are legitimized by the
international community through democratic elections held under
the vigilante eyes of the North American-Anglo occupation forces and
their privatized hired guns. As these new forms of violence become
institutionalized globally, they raise urgent questions about the impact
of the War on Terror on the nature of sovereignty with its attendant
state system of rights and entitlements.
Launched in retaliation for the attacks of 9/11, the invasion of Afghan-
istan was widely accepted as a just war for which the United States
enjoyed widespread international support. The heightened attention
directed by the Bush Administration to the Islamist affiliations of the
Taliban regime and its Sharia-based juridical order allowed the United
States to garner support not only from political elites and mainstream
populations around the world, but also from many in international left-
ist and feminist movements. Anti-war and anti-globalization activists
who might otherwise have been expected to oppose US foreign policy
treated this war as the lesser of two evils: the necessity of overthrowing
the Taliban regime, defined now as singularly barbaric and misogynist,
made the war tolerable, if not actually desirable. The sovereignty of
Afghanistan, such as it had been, was deemed entirely disposable due

to the fanatic and hyperpatriarchal nature of the Taliban regime.
Although a few legal scholars and activists defined the Afghan war as
illegal from the outset,2 challenging the claim to self-defence made by
the United States3 and pointing out that not even the Bush Administra-
tion could make the case that the Taliban had been involved in the 9/11
attacks,4 their perspectives were quickly silenced in the media and by
the overwhelming public support for the war.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, however, was widely seen to be
a different matter. Where the Taliban had been judged guilty by its own
nature (fanatic) and by its associations (housing Usama bin Laden
and the al-Qaeda network), public scepticism remained high about
Saddam Husseins relations with al-Qaeda and his involvement in the
9/11 attacks, despite repeated attempts by the Bush Administration to
link the two. In contrast to the fanaticism of the Taliban, which was
deemed self-evident in its identification as an Islamist regime and in its
banning of women from urban public spaces, Iraq was arguably one
of the most secularized of the Middle Eastern countries. Iraqi women
were highly educated and integrated in the workforce and in public life
to a degree unequalled in many other parts of the world. The Taliban
had emerged in a country impoverished and devastated by the Soviet
occupation and the subsequent Afghan civil wars, but Iraq was eco-
nomically well developed with a highly educated population. More-
over, reeling from the effects of the punishing sanctions imposed by
the United States and Britain under United Nations (UN) auspices
after the first Gulf War, the suffering of the Iraqi population, especially
the Kurds, had garnered it considerable sympathy around the world.
Claims by the Bush Administration that Iraq possessed weapons of
mass destruction were viewed with cynicism outside the United States,
as were claims that Saddam Hussein presented an imminent threat
to the United States. This cynicism was evident in the massive anti-war
demonstrations held in major cities around the world on the eve of the
invasion of Iraq. Consequently, the US-led coalition willing to aid in
the Iraq invasion was much smaller than the one that had been brought
together to invade Afghanistan. Without a UN resolution sanction-
ing it, the invasion of Iraq was publicly denounced by many as illegal
under international law, driven more by the US desire to control Iraqs
rich oil fields and to eliminate the threat Saddam Hussein presented
to Israel than by the need to protect the United States against any real
danger from Husseins regime.
284 Sunera Thobani
In the ideological framing of the War on Terror, however, questions

of sovereignty, and of the legality and illegality of the two invasions,
were quickly shunted aside as secondary. Ideologically, the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq soon morphed into each other in public dis-
course as the larger objective, that of protecting Western civilization,
womens rights, and freedom from the Muslim world gained ground
among different political constituencies in the West. In the United
States, Vice President Cheney publicly defended going over to the
dark side to defeat an enemy so evil that any and every measure to
eliminate it was not only legitimate, but also absolutely vital.5 In Brit-
ain, the Labour leader, Tony Blair, supported such a view, as did the
Canadian Liberal government, including the then high profile leader-
ship contender, Michael Ignatieff. The attacks of 9/11 were defined as
so unprecedented, the enemy so heinous, that a state of exception and
the suspension of the rule of law had become imperative.
One war was popularly accepted as just, the other widely
declaimed as unjust. One claimed international legal sanction hav-
ing secured a vague UN resolution, the other failed to commandeer a
similar pronouncement. One regime was defined as medieval and
Islamist, the other modern and unmistakably secularist. What, then,
was the common ground on which the sovereignty of Afghanistan and
Iraq could be so readily destroyed by the US-led occupation forces with
such compliant international acceptance? Given how swiftly both
countries were invaded and occupied, the meaning of sovereignty in
the post colonial era demands urgent attention, as much for effective
political activism as for theoretical considerations.
It is important to underscore here that despite the popular presenta-
tion of the War on Terror as provoked by Islamic fundamentalism
with its allegedly irrational hatred of the West, the question of sover-
eignty clearly loomed large in the charges made by Usama bin Laden
and the al-Qaeda network against the United States, as it did in Saddam
Husseins nuclear ambitions and his support for the struggle of the Pal-
estinians. Upon forming the al-Qaeda network prior to the 9/11 attacks,
bin Laden had announced that al-Qaeda was committed to three major
causes: ousting US bases from Saudi Arabia; ending the Israeli occupa-
tion of Palestine; and lifting the UN sanctions on Iraq. In the case of Iraq,
Saddam Husseins attempt to acquire nuclear weapons was not unre-
lated to acquisition of the same by Israel, with the implicit sanction of the
international community, chief among which were the United States
and other major Western powers, themselves likewise in possession of
these weapons. Sovereignty and the right to self-determination were

thus at the heart of the challenges presented by al-Qaeda and the Iraqi
state in their respective responses to the US, Israeli, and other Western
states domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, and no amount
of chest-thumping about the clash of cultures could fully obscure this
reality. Yet, even as the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration
sought to contain public discussion in the culturalist logic of an epic
clash of civilizations, leftist and feminist movements no less myo-
pically sought to confine their otherwise sophisticated critiques of US
foreign policy within an equally simplistic formulation of the clash of
fundamentalisms or the clash of patriarchies.
Given the political urgency of the question of sovereignty within
global politics raised by the War on Terror, how might critical theoreti-
cal traditions aid us in understanding and responding to the changes
and challenges briefly outlined above? My examination of this question
begins by way of engagement with two highly influential theories of
sovereignty, one post-structuralist, the other neo-Marxist.
Sovereignty and the State of Exception
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben examines
the nature of sovereignty and its relation to the human life subjected to
it.6 Drawing on Michel Foucaults theorization of bio-power, Agamben
begins by noting that Foucaults formulation is characterized by a rejec-
tion of the traditional definition of power, that is, of power as based
on juridico-institutional models.7 Instead, Foucault examines the dis-
ciplinary practices of a form of power that penetrates subjects very
bodies and forms of life and defines this distinct form as bio-power,
which, he argues, has become characteristic of modern societies. Fou-
caults work therefore examines both the political techniques (such as
the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates
the care of the natural life of individuals into its very centre as well
as the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring
the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness,
and, at the same time, to an external power.8 Agamben disagrees with
Foucault that such a clear separation can be made between the juridico-
institutional and disciplinary forms of power, and it is at the interstices
of these two aspects of power that Agamben situates his own study.
Drawing on Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, Agamben argues that
the paradox of sovereign power is that the sovereign is at once outside
286 Sunera Thobani
and inside the juridical order.9 With the power to suspend the rule
of law and thus determine what lies outside its zone of sanction, the
sovereign has the power to legally place[s] himself outside the law.10
In this, the exception defines the limits of the law and delineates the
extent of the juridical order, which is regulated and managed by the
law. However, through this exclusion of the exception from the juridi-
cal order, the exception becomes simultaneously bound to the law. As
Agamben explains:
The exception is a kind of exclusion. What is excluded from the general

rule is an individual case. But the most proper characteristic of the excep-
tion is that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded,
absolutely without relation to the rule. On the contrary, what is excluded
in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the
rules suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in
withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that pre-
cedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension. In this
sense, the exception is truly according to its etymological root, taken outside
(ex capere), and not simply excluded.11
Agamben argues that sovereignty has been defined as power over

life since the earliest origin of the political tradition of the West: [i]n
Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose
exclusion founds the city of men.12 Going back to the classical Greek
theorists, Agamben points out that they had no word equivalent to the
concept of life as it is currently used. Instead, the Greeks defined two
forms of life: zo, which was natural, biological life, and bios, which
defined political life. Agambens task, as he sets it out, is to examine
how the bare life neither zo nor bios, but yet the innermost secret of
sovereign power (that is, life stripped of all protection and absolutely
vulnerable in face of sovereign violence) is captured by this sover-
eign power: the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes
the original if concealed nucleus of sovereign power.13 Arguing
that the link between the state of exception and bare life has persisted
since the transition of socio-political life from its religious, metaphysi-
cal ordering to the modern form of sovereignty, Agamben defines the
concentration camp and the totalitarian state as the exemplary places
of modern biopolitics,14 in contrast to Foucaults identification of the
pre-eminent sites of biopolitics as the clinic, the prison, and the school.
In tracing the political evolution of the status of this bare life, Agam-
ben draws on the enigmatic figure of homo sacer (sacred life) in Roman
law, which he defines as the protagonist of his book.15 This figure,

who could not be sacrificed but could be killed with impunity, allows
Agamben to differentiate his analysis from Foucaults regarding the
origin and function of bio-power. Agamben outlines the crux of his
own thesis in the following manner:
The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, com-
pleted, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much
the inclusion of zo in the polis which is, in itself, absolutely ancient
nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the pro-
jections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that,
together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the
rule, the realm of bare life which is originally situated at the margins of
the political order gradually begins to coincide with the political realm,
and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zo, right and
fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare
life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of excep-
tion actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation
on which the entire political system rested. When its borders begin to be
blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes
both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place
for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it. Every-
thing happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which State
power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another
process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of
modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no
longer as an object but as the subject of political power. These processes
which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with
each other nevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of
the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity.16
The Nazi concentration camp illustrates most starkly for Agamben this
extension of sovereign powers capture of bare life, in which form he
also includes other figures, such as the refugee without rights and the
comatose patient who hovers between life and death. Although Agam-
ben frames his study as a theory of Western sovereignty, his analysis
ends by universalizing this experience of the West to all of humanity,
a point that I will return to later in this chapter.
Agambens formulation of the state of exception has been used
widely to shed light on the changed juridico-political context that is
the War on Terror. Here, the designation of the believing Muslim/
288 Sunera Thobani
Islamist as (potential, if not already actual) terrorist and unlawful

combatant has stripped him/her of every right and protection offered
by the state and placed him/her outside the rule of international law.
As is widely known, the Geneva Convention was treated by the Bush
Administration and its allied states, including Canada, as inappropriate
to the new form of warfare required to destroy the Islamist enemy. In
the globalized state of exception that is the War on Terror, the rule of
law applies to the Muslim body designated enemy by not applying
to it: this body can be, indeed, as many already have been, incarcer-
ated, tortured, even assassinated by state and state-mandated private
mercenary forces who operate above the international regime of law,
citizenship rights, and entitlements. Although Guantanamo Bay and
Abu Ghraib may well prove to be the clearest illustration of the zone
of indistinction that the state of emergency described by Agamben has
brought into being in the early twenty-first century, Agamben cannot
help us understand why it is that Muslim bodies, bodies racialized as
black and brown (who look like Muslims), have become constituted
as bare life, as the specific target of enhanced state violence in the War
on Terror.
In other words, Agambens analysis cannot help explain why partic-
ular kinds of bodies, not all bodies, and certainly not white bodies, are
routinely captured by sovereign power as bare life. As a number of crit-
ical race scholars have demonstrated, the colonized native, as barbar-
ian and savage, was not only stripped of every right in the structure
of colonial power alien to their societies imposed by thegenocidal
violence of European empires, but was constituted as the very antith-
esis of the civilized human life (bios) that was the Western wo/
man. The Western tradition of constituting bare life, to use Agam-
bens terminology, has thus, from its very inception, relied on constitut-
ing this life form as a racially distinct form, a not-fully-human form,
and this racializing tradition has remained ongoing within the mod-
ern politico-juridical order. Moreover, even in the camp that captures
Agambens attention, it was not just any body, but a specifically racial-
ized body, the racialized Jewish body, that was the target of the geno-
cidal violence of the Nazi regime. In other words, even as Agambens
formulation reveals the relation between bare life and sovereign power,
it conceals two essential facts: first, the bare life that is the innermost
secret of Western sovereign power is racialized in the violence of its
originary constitution as such, and second, along with the racialization
of this bare life, the very constitution of the category of the West as
the proper province of sovereign power was likewise an articulation of

racial-as-modern power.
As I discuss below, the key categories that concern Agamben, namely
modernity, sovereignty, bare life, the camp and, most particu-
larly, the West, were all borne of the racial violence that constituted
the global order under Euro-American domination. Without the slight-
est regard for the historical experiences and political philosophies of
those ontologically and juridically placed outside the West, Agamben
naturalizes the category of the West as existing in, of, and for itself,
complete and self-contained in its internal dynamic of development.17
In his analysis, it is as if there truly is nothing outside the West with
which one needs to concern oneself. My point here is not that Agam-
bens account of the trajectory of Western sovereignty requires inclu-
sion of the non-West in order to be complete. Rather, I suggest that
the very trajectory of sovereignty that Agamben traces was brought
about through the European encounter with, and response to, the
non-Western world; it was in constituting the non-West as the Wests
original site of exception the colony, with its native reserves, enslaved
African bodies, and Arab medinas that the West constituted itself as
such, as a unitary entity. Instead of making an argument for the inclu-
sion of these less-than-human racialized Others into Agambens
framework, I demonstrate below the pervasive presence of racial poli-
tics even in Agambens chosen site of study, the Nazi camp, albeit his
analytic bent is such that it covers up this presence and obfuscates an
understanding of the specific relation of race to sovereign power.
Race, the Camp, and Sovereign Power
Although Agambens interest lies in tracing the trajectory of the state of

exception and the capture of bare life by sovereign power, the relation
of race to bare life within Western sovereignty goes unexamined and
is consequently reduced to redundancy in his analytic frame. Agam-
bens identification of the camp as the exemplary site for the state of
exception within modernity ignores the historical antecedents of the
camp, the Indian reservation and the residential school in the settler so-
cieties,18 the plantations and slave labour camps,19 as well as the native
medina in the terror formation that was the colony.20 The Indian res-
ervation was marked as the site for the extinction of the Aboriginal, and
the colony was a space where commandment was the form of power
exerted on native life by colonizers; both were governed by a specifically
290 Sunera Thobani
racialized logic of violence concentrated not only in the hands of the

state, but also in the hands of white settlers, who would presumably
feature in Agambens analysis as bios. So forceful is this racial logic of
power that even the site that captures Agambens interest for being
exemplary of the state of exception, the Nazi camp, was defined by the
racial politics of the Nazi regime. Although Agamben makes reference
to the Nazi regimes identification of Jewish people in Europe for elimi-
nation on the basis of their racial inferiority, considered by the Nazis
as polluting the purity of the superior German Aryan race, race as
an analytic and theoretical category does not feature in his study.
Defining the concentration camp as a limit situation, Agamben names
Auschwitz the decisive lesson of the century.21 In his discussion of the
testimony of the camps survivors in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben
highlights the relation of the survivors to the limit figure who stands
at the heart of the extreme situation that is Auschwitz, the figure known
as the Muselmann (that is, the Muslim) to the camps Jewish inmates.
This most abject of figures, the Muselmann, utterly broken, degraded,
and dejected, represented to the Jewish inmates an individual who had
given up all hope of survival, indeed, had given up on life itself. The
Muselmann documents [the] total triumph of power over the human
being, Agamben quotes from a study of terror in the camp;22 this
figure marks the moving threshold in which man passed into non-
man.23 In this space between life and death, of living death-in-life, the
Jew came to know himself as a Muslim. The Muselmann, starved and
emaciated, with the glazed eyes and stunted movement that revealed
a near-death status, apparently recalled for the Jewish survivors the
image of a Muslim in prayer.24
However, lest one think that such identification resulted in a rela-
tion of solidarity felt by the Jewish survivor, him/herself racialized as
Semite and Oriental, with the racialized figure of the Oriental/
Arab Muslim in the Western imagination, that it may have forged a
bond in recognition of their shared cultural and historical experiences,
the testimonies of the camps survivors clarify that this was not the
case: No one felt compassion for the Muslim, and no one felt sympa-
thy for him either. The other inmates, who continually feared for their
lives, did not even judge him worthy of being looked at. For the prison-
ers who collaborated, the Muslims were a source of anger and worry;
for the SS they were merely useless garbage. Every group thought
about eliminating them, each in its own way.25 The fear and hatred
of the Jewish survivors towards this figure, who represented to them
what they could become, indeed, what they had become in the camps, is
amply attested in the survivors testimonies referenced by Agamben. It
was thus not sympathy, but terror and fear turned into hatred, that asso-
ciated the dying Jewish inmate with the Muselmann for the Jewish sur-
vivor; it was the Jew-as-Muslim who was to perish in the camps, for, as
Agamben astutely points out, [W]ith a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews
knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews.26 In other words,
the Jew who died at Auschwitz did so as a Muselmann; the Jew who sur-
vived the camp did so by turning his/her back on this Muselmann. The
testimonies of the survivors reveal the extent to which they believed
thatthe condition of possibility for their survival was that they not
become the Muselmann themselves, and so they did everything they could
to avoid this Muslim-in-the-Jew, guarding their own humanity by an
absolute denial of their identification with the Muselmann-as-Oriental.
These testimonies give rise to a troubling question: was the severing
of the bond of his/her shared humanity with the Muselmann a condi-
tion of possibility for the Jewish survivor to leave the camp alive as
European, not Oriental? Could it be that the desperate conditions in the
camp reveal that the only possible condition for survival was race-as-life
(European), and the turning away from race-as-death (Oriental)?
How is this relation between the Jewish survivor and the Musel-
mann who perished to be understood? Survivors testimonies attest to
the intense psychic pain, as well as the guilt, horror, and shame, they
experienced in the perishing of the Muselmann. Identification with this
figure brought about a complete collapse[d] as far as [my] psycho-
logical life was concerned, stated a survivor.27 But dis-identification
was no less painful; it gave rise to a lifetime of being haunted by this
figure. For Agamben, the relation of the Jew-as-Western survivor to
the figure of the Muselmann engenders a philosophical discussion
regarding the zone of indistinction between the survivor and the
Muselmann, between the human and the non-human, and between
testimony, legal responsibility, ethics, guilt, shame and morality. The
question of race as represented in the figure of the Jew-as-Muslim, who
was to embody the innermost secrets and terrors of the racial hatred
of the Nazis, is neglected in this most extraordinarily fraught relation.
Projecting their abjection onto the hated figure of the Muslim could be
a factor that enabled the Jew to remain human in Western terms, to
survive the camps both psychologically and physically, in the face of
the racial violence of the camp. Agamben points out that in the camp,
ethics begins in this figure of the hated Muslim: in Auschwitz,
292 Sunera Thobani
ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the com-
plete witness, makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man
and non-man.28 But neglecting the critical role of race, both man
and non-man remain staunchly Western in Agambens analysis; the
actual, embodied Muslim in his/her historical and ontological specific-
ity never enters his analytic field.
Indeed, as Agamben accepts the seemingly innocent explanation that
the limit figure of the Muselmann reminded the survivors of Muslims
in prayer, the Muselmann remains only a metaphor in his analysis, as
it does in the recollection of the Jewish survivors; the Muslim remains
a non-entity in and for him/herself in such deliberations. Yet the issue
remains: Why would Jewish inmates of the camp fantasize themselves,
in their most abject, victimized status, to be Muslims? Why would they
give the name Muslim to Jewish life-in-death? What was the secret
of this image in all its aw/fullness? Why the Muslim? Why the Muslim
in prayer?
The Muselmann of Auschwitz was, of course, not the actual histori-
cal and embodied Muslim; yet, although the figure was a phantasm
conjured in the starkest Orientalist fashion and a projection of the racial
dreads of the era, it was also most certainly much more than a met-
aphor. The association of the Muselmann with the Muslim at prayer
was not innocent, as becomes clear when attention is paid to the other
names used to refer to this figure, the complete witness of the camp,
names that included mummy-man, donkey, camel, cretin,
useless garbage, cripple, and tired sheik.29 The Orientalist chain
of signification that ties these names to the figure of the Muslim is
unmistakable. However, Orientalism, as a discourse, did not originate
among Jewish peoples. In his study, Ziauddin Sardar credits the emer-
gence of Orientalism to the writings of the Christian John of Damascus
and the popularizing of this discourse to the Crusades, while Edward
Said has tied this discourse to the eighteenth century conquest of Egypt
by Napolean and to secularist Western ideology.30 Indeed, Sander Gil-
man, among many others, has pointed out that Jews and Muslims were
racialized through the shared trope of the Oriental within Western
imaginaries.31
How then might race be thought of in the extreme situation that
was Auschwitz, through the limit figure that was the Jew-become-
Muselmann? Could it be that it was in identifying the figure of the Mus-
lim as the real racial object, as the real Oriental, so utterly degraded and
degenerate that s/he was really not human at all, that the Orientalized
Jew became European? Could it be that it was in severing him/herself

from this quintessential racial Other of Europe that the (European) Jew-
ish survivor managed to cling to his/her own humanity, staking his/
her claim to the status of the human by expunging the Oriental (that is,
the racial mark of the less-than-human) that had been defined as also
to be found within his/herself? If that was the case, than Auschwitz
can be identified as the site of the birth of Jewish whiteness and the
death of Jewish Orientalness. Certainly the pressure on Jewish people
in Europe to convert to Christianity and to assimilate was intense dur-
ing the nineteenth century, and the contradictions of such assimilation
and conversion were not insignificant.32 While some level of conversion
and assimilation had occurred prior to the rise of the Nazi regime, my
research suggests that the emergence of Jews as a people into whiteness
occurred after World War II, not before.33
The Oriental Jew was considered very much like the Oriental
Muslim in Europe, except of course, for the religious difference.
Could this religious difference help explain the association of the
Muselmann with the Muslim in prayer? It would be in the act of prayer
that the religio-racial difference with the Oriental Muslim would be
most clearly demonstrable by the Jew. In such a case, the Muselmann,
both metaphor and archetype of the non-human in the Orientalist dis-
course of the period, could be loathed as the real origin of racial degen-
eration, not the European Jew, who was really not quite as abhorrent
as the Muslim. If the European Jew, in his/her deepest state of abjec-
tion, came to recognize that status as belonging to the real racial Other,
the Muslim-as-Oriental, and that survival depended on disowning this
racial self and clinging to life through identification with the Occiden-
tal human self, then the racial logic of the camp made the survival
of the Jewish-as-Western contingent upon the expulsion of the racial
Other within the white Jewish-Self. It is this expulsion that could pos-
sibly allow access to the dignity, respect, and status of the human as
white, as Western; hence, this expulsion would be vital to becom-
ing European, to maintaining the distinction between human and
non-human, between man and non-man.
Indeed, most of the West (that is, Euro-America) shared the Nazis
racial hatred of the Orientalized Jews, a hatred reflected in the immi-
gration policies of the Western states that refused entry to the majority
of the Jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust. Agamben recognizes that
the relation of the witness to the Muselmann was one of a splitting of
the self; however, what he does not study is how this splitting of the
294 Sunera Thobani
self was a process of race-making, a process by which the subsequent

redefinition of the West as Judeo-Christian was to become possible.
This is precisely the definition of the West that has emerged hege-
monic in the War on Terror. The camp, then, as the site of the destruc-
tion of the racial Other as bare life, became also a site of the birth of
the racially same, that is, the Jew-as-Westernized-self. The cost of this
expulsion of the racial Other in the Jewish self was to prove devastating
to the survivors, who were to remain forever haunted by the figure of
the Muselmann, as they describe so intimately and powerfully in their
testimonies.
Empire and Postmodern Sovereignty
The publication of Empire, a politico-theoretical tract by Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri, created a sensation in the international Left.34 Inte-
grating the insights of post-structuralism into a redefined Marxism for
a new millennium, the authors argued that the end of colonialism, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and the globalization of the world econ-
omy had given rise to a qualitatively distinct global order at the end
of the twentieth century. Characterized by a postmodern form of sov-
ereignty and juridical order, this new formation, Empire, had tran-
scended the previous mode of sovereignty organized in the modern
nation-state system. Sovereignty in the postmodern era was instead
deterritorialized and decentred, with no singular power or nation-state
at its centre.35 Indeed, the nation-state system itself was on the wane,
in this view.
Hardt and Negris argument was based on their claim that the devel-
opment of the global market, with its immense flows of finance, tech-
nology, people, and commodities, had eroded the modernist form of
sovereignty that had been vested in state control over clearly delineated
territorial borders. While indispensable to the development and expan-
sion of the capitalist mode of production, particularly in its twentieth
century imperialist phase, the end of the state system was heralded by
the increasing inability of states to assert control over their borders, dis-
rupted as these were by international movements of finance, capital,
and labour.36
Modern sovereignty had initially emerged in Europe, Hardt and
Negri argued, and was subsequently globalized. The concept had origi-
nated within the Roman Empire, based on the notion of the universal-
ity of the ethical and juridical and the necessity of a single power that
could maintain peace and stability while defending the Empire from
its internal and external enemies.37 This tradition persisted through the
Middle Ages, and with the rise of modernity, two different concepts of
international right emerged, the first being the idea of treaty mecha-
nism between states that reflected the systems and relations in place
within their national space, and the second being the idea of perpet-
ual peace as an ideal of reason, a light that had to criticize and also
unite right and ethicality, a presupposed transcendental of the juridical
system and ideal schema of reason and ethics.38
European modernity thus became inseparable from the principle of
sovereignty, and although Hardt and Negri argue that modern sov-
ereignty emanated from Europe, they also note that it was born and
developed in large part through Europes relationship with its outside,
and particularly through its colonial project and the resistance of the
colonized.39 In this observation, and like the many others peppered
throughout the text, colonialism is referenced mainly as historical fact
with little to offer to Empires theorization of modernity or sovereignty.
With the focus fixed firmly on the centrality of materialist imma-
nent powers and forces (that is, classes and class struggle) within
Europe, any role that colonialism or race might have played in shaping
Europe itself, or its modern sovereignty, is made marginal to Hardt
and Negris theorization of Empire.
Hardt and Negri identify three key moments in the development of
European modernity and sovereignty: the radical discovery of the
plane of immanence; the reaction against the transformative potential
of these immanent forces as reflected in the crisis of authority it gave
rise to; and finally, the incomplete resolution of this crisis as sover-
eignty was vested in a state that transcends and mediates the plane of
immanent forces.40 In other words, Empire offers a typical materialist
analysis in its narrative of the origins of modern capitalism, which cen-
tres the overthrow of the rule of the divine law vested in the f eudal
Church and landed aristocracy by the rise of the bourgeoisie and its
form of secularist law vested in the state through the legitimizing
liberal concepts of the social contract and democracy.
The conceptualization of postmodern sovereignty that Empire pres-
ents emerged under a single logic of rule, argue Hardt and Negri,
with the sovereign right of nation-states (and the international right
that followed from it) being replaced by the first postmodern global
figures of imperial right.41 Initially centred in the supranational
role of the United Nations and its various affiliated institutions,42
296 Sunera Thobani
this new form of sovereignty moved beyond its origins to transform

national constitutional and juridical processes through the develop-
ment of global institutions, including the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.
Moreover, according to Hardt and Negri, the nation-state system
had been central to colonialism as European powers ruled over their
colonies from within their respective national borders,43 but in con-
trast, postmodern Empire was expansionary and not reliant on fixed
boundaries of any sort.44 These changes in the global juridical order
were indicative of a profound paradigm shift: international law had
previously been defined by a process of internationalization of the laws
of nation-states, but the postmodern juridical order was organized
through international institutions that were reconfiguring the domestic
laws of the nation-state.45 The imposition of this global juridical order
upon nation-states operates on the basis of exception, Hardt and
Negri note, so that it is in the name of averting various forms of cri-
ses (humanitarian, violation of international accords, and so forth) that
postmodern sovereignty mandates international institutions and domi-
nant states to intervene in non-conforming societies. As such, power
assumes a mainly policing function.
Hardt and Negri argue that although the UN Charter has always
included the right of intervention, its postmodern version is quali-
tatively different: Now supranational subjects that are legitimated not
by right but by consensus intervene in the name of any type of emer-
gency and superior ethical principles. What stands behind this inter-
vention is not just a permanent state of emergency and exception, but
a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to
essential values of justice. In other words, the right of the police is legiti-
mated by universal values.46 As mentioned above, this right of the
police now operates globally, and Hardt and Negri do not interrogate
where these shared essential values of justice might originate.
Although Hardt and Negri argue that the postmodern sovereignty
of Empire is decentralized and deterritorialized, they do recognize that
the United States has a privileged position within this new order.
Despite this privilege, their claim is that [t]he United States does not,
and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project.
Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way mod-
ern European nations were.47 Hardt and Negri acknowledge that the
United States is a superpower that holds hegemony over the global use
of force, but they argue that this superpower can act alone but prefers
to act in collaboration with others under the umbrella of the United

Nations.48 The new order, they argue definitively, is notablemore for
its differences from the old imperialist empires of Europe than for its
similarities with them. Hardt and Negri go on to argue that Empire has
given rise to new forms of subjectivity: whereas the purity of identi-
ties had been policed by imperialist nation-states through their exclu-
sions of racial Others, Empires postmodern sovereignty manages
hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies and plural exchanges through
modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of
the imperialist map of the world have merged in the imperial global
rainbow.49
Empires theorization of modern and postmodern sovereignty is thus
not only incomplete for ignoring colonialism and race, and thereby fur-
thering a Eurocentric world view for a new millennium,50 it also dove-
tails quite comfortably with the claims of the US Administration that
the attacks of 9/11 created a global emergency (not a national one
for the United States) and that both the Afghan and Iraqi states were
in violation of superior and essential ethical values (those of a lib-
eral democratic imperialist power such as the United States). Such a
view would justify an international response, in this case, invasion
and occupation by the US-led international coalition in defence of
essential and superior international values. Hardt and Negris
perspective thus enables rather than contests the reproduction of a
number of incendiary fictions, namely that sovereignty is a univer-
sally shared phenomenon, that there exists an international commu-
nity with shared ethical values that structure the global order, that
a disinterested deterritorialized sovereignty mandates intervention
in the name of a universally recognized humani(tariani)sm, and that
international institutions, including the United Nations, are the site of
a global sovereignty equally accessible to all nation-states. As I dis-
cuss below, Empires analytic frame obfuscates the deeply asymmetrical
relations of power between Western and Third World states, as well
as the racial violence that is the only condition of possibility for a
global order based on modern or postmodern shared values, that
is, a universalism that actually sustains Western expansionism.
Empire, Race, and the State
Although Hardt and Negri make reference to race and colonialism

in their analysis, they do so only to erode the significance of both by
298 Sunera Thobani
simultaneously treating Europe as a sovereign, pre-existing entity.

This allows them to evade the recognition that Europe became Europe
that is, constituted itself as a unitary, even if not fully unified, entity in
and through its racially constitutive encounter with the colonized Other.
There was no Europe, and as is the case with the War on Terror, no
Euro-American West, outside of this ongoing mutually c onstitutive
racial engagement with the rest.
In his study of the origins of the modern doctrine of sovereignty
and the system of international law which it founded, Antony Ang-
hie rejects the contention that sovereignty historically emerged within
Europe and was subsequently extended to the rest of the world, or even
that the system of international law based on the sovereignty doctrine
was concerned primarily with the regulation of relations between sov-
ereign states.51 Hardt and Negris treatment of sovereignty is based on
just such an account.
Anghie instead offers a theorization of sovereignty that refuses to
relegate colonized peoples and the Third World to the fringes of social
and legal theory. Where Hardt and Negri treat the sovereignty of the
previously colonized world as being of no particular pressing concern,
assuming it to be of the same quality as that of Western states, Anghie
problematizes the concept of sovereignty itself by asking why it is
that the sovereignty of Third World peoples and states has remained
so tenuous through the centuries. Rereading the founding texts of the
sovereignty doctrine, Anghie demonstrates that Europes civilizing
mission and its notion of its cultural difference from uncivilized
natives was and remains the sole legitimating force of this doctrine.
Highlighting the relation between culture, sovereignty, and the law,
Anghie argues that colonialism was the central impetus for the devel-
opment of the international system of law. He finds that regulating
relations between sovereign European states as they fought to control
non-sovereign colonized societies underpinned the emergence of the
international juridical order, as well as its subsequent transformation
in the nineteenth century from its naturalist to positivist and pragmatic
legalistic paradigms. Anghies study demonstrates that colonialism
was constitutive of European sovereignty, which was facilitated by, and
reliant upon, the destruction of the complex forms of sovereignty
among polities in the colonized world.
Regulating relations between the civilized, developed, modern states
and uncivilized, barbaric, and rogue peoples/states has remained
the central concern of this doctrine, such that the colonial origins of
international law have create[d] a set of structures that continually

repeat themselves at various stages in the history of international
law.52 What appears to Hardt and Negri as a new form of postco-
lonial sovereignty is defined by Anghie as yet another repetition at
a different historical juncture of the structures of sovereignty born in
colonial violence. These colonial relations have made the sovereignty of
the Third World qualitatively different from that of the Western states,
a form of sovereignty that is rendered uniquely vulnerable and
dependent by international law.53 Anghies claim is that as colonialism
destroyed the sovereign status of native societies, the sovereignty
these societies acquired in the postcolonial period continues to remain
uniquely vulnerable.
Intense European rivalry over control of the colonies was a driving
force in the creation of the Peace of Westphalia, as well as the other
international treaties and institutional mechanisms of sovereignty,
argues Anghie. In the colonial order, European states organized them-
selves as the international community with the power to shape the
nature of sovereignty, such that even when postcolonial states achieved
some measure of political sovereignty from their colonial masters, this
international community continued to govern their compliance with
the imposition of universalist values and norms. Indeed, sovereignty
amounts to the adoption of European values and institutions for the
Third World, concludes Anghie, and is a negation of their own cultural
and political systems and values. The result of such sovereignty remains
ongoing alienation and subordination, rather than empowerment.
Anghies formulation of the sovereignty doctrine as deeply and
perhaps irrevocably shaped by its colonial origins provides a frame
for understanding how and why the sovereignty of both Iraq and
Afghanistan could be so cavalierly attacked and destroyed, with the
tacit when not active support of Western states. Indeed, perhaps
the only manner in which Third World countries might be able to
protect their claims to sovereignty could well be through the acqui-
sition of means sufficient enough to repel the violence of sovereign
Western states.
The United States, singled out in Empire as the originary site of a post-
modernist form of sovereignty that is open, expansive, and inclusive,
assumes a very different characterization when it is recognized that col-
onization and race were the foundation for both its expansionary and
inclusionary mechanisms. Both were, of course, vital to the expansion
of the modern US Empire. The American Revolution, argue Hardt
300 Sunera Thobani
and Negri, was a moment of great innovation and rupture in the

genealogy of modern sovereignty.54 Exemplifying an extraordinarily
secular and immanentist idea, they claim,
the American constituents thought that only the republic can give order to
democracy, or really that the order of the multitude must be born not from
a transfer of the title of power and right, but from an arrangement internal
to the multitude, from a democratic interaction of powers linked together
in networks. The new sovereignty can arise, in other words, only from
the constitutional formation of limits and equilibria, checks and balances,
which both constitutes a central power and maintains power in the hands
of the multitude.55
Moreover, the frontier was the open space that became the concep-
tual terrain of imperial sovereignty, they state.56 Surprisingly for a
Marxist perspective, the multitude becomes a classless conglomera-
tion that is defined as the real beneficiary of the American constituents
in their making of the US Constitution.
Although Hardt and Negri recognize that indigenous peoples were
excluded from the expansive project that was the US Constitution as
a postmodern foundational moment, and that black people counted
as only three-fifths human in its calculations, they remain enamoured of
this document, in which, they insist, liberty is made sovereign and
sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and con-
tinuous process of expansion.57 In this, Hardt and Negri demonstrate
little difference from the intellectual and political perspectives that
have historically been adopted by the Euro-American Left from Marx
onwards who typically regret the brutality of Euro-American domi-
nation of Third World peoples, yet accept that such brutality was the
tragic and necessary price of the essentially liberatory trajectory of the
Western-led project of human progress and emancipation. As Peter Fitz-
patrick also remarks about Empires rapturous descriptions of the fron-
tier as a progressive and expansive space, this expansionism is treated
as innocent because its relentless and acquisitive expansion took place
in a space that was ever open, a completely new space, a wilderness
awaiting its taming telos, a space befitting the quest for freedom from
an Old World colonialism.58 Indeed, in their wholesome embrace of
this US constitutional expansionism, Hardt and Negri subscribe to the
idea of American exceptionalism that was to prove so central to the
Bush and Obama Administrations view of their own nation-state. For
Bush, this exceptionalism was defined in Christian terms, for Obama in

secular-liberalist terms, and for Empire in revolutionary neo-Marxist
terms.
The limitations of Hardt and Negris analytic frame result from its
Eurocentric investments, their general neglect of race as a theoretical
and analytic category, and their cavalier attitude towards the Third
World, so that their theory remains oblivious to the reality that it is
largely Euro-American populations who have had access to sovereign-
tys liberatory aspects, while it is Third World and indigenous peoples
who have been subjected to the most brutal forms of subordination
referred to in Empire.59 This observation apparently gives no pause; it
raises no need for a rejection of the notion of the historically progres-
sive nature of a sovereignty that not only exempts indigenous and
black peoples but has specifically denied their humanity. The point is
not that indigenous peoples were simply excluded from the Consti-
tution and black Americans only partially included, as even Hardt and
Negri are compelled to recognize. The point is that indigenous popula-
tions were constituted as less than human within the constitutional and
juridical order of the United States, and blacks were constituted as only
partially human. And even more to the point, the juridical order Hardt
and Negri celebrate continues to reproduce them as such even now.
Moreover, in asserting their own humanity, Hardt and Negris
colourless multitudes have shown little hesitation in destroying the
humanity of their racial Others. It is this murderous dynamic that has
come to the fore once again in the War on Terror, a dynamic driven by
Western states as well as their nationals against Muslims who are as
excluded from Hardt and Negris deracialized and degendered concept
of the multitudes as they are from the US Administrations concept of
the universal civilized human. In short, Hardt and Negri, like other
Eurocentric intellectuals, are mainly concerned with the production of
Western life, its social order, and its sovereignty, not with its murderous
and destructive dynamics, as is clearly evident in the case of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Critical Race Theory: Empire, the State, and Sovereignty
The question thus arises: what does the centring of race and colonial-
ity reveal about the dynamics of contemporary forms of sovereignty?
In my earlier work, Exalted Subjects, I argued that the emergence of the
modern Western state, nation, and national subject (specifically, in
302 Sunera Thobani
the case of the Canadian settler society) were bound in an isomorphic

relation that was central to their constitution as such. Defining national
subjects as deserving of sovereign status and access to the rights
extended by the state, indigenous and immigrant populations were con-
stituted as racially distinct and hence as belonging to different orders of
(in)humanity.60 The Euro-Canadian nation-state was thus established
by violence and genocide that translated into the right to rule by those
recognized and thus empowered as the states true subjects, exalted
subjects, as I defined them. The juridical and socio-economic systems
and citizenship rights granted by the state were organized so as to exalt
the humanity of white subjects above that of indigenous peoples by
marking the latter as doomed to extinction due to their alleged racial
and cultural incommensurability with modern forms of life and sover-
eignty. Exalted national subjects were also constituted as racially and
culturally superior to the non-preferred racial immigrants, marked
as perpetual outsiders to the nation by their cultural difference from the
nation and its values. Different forms of sovereignty were thus brought
into play through these racially differentiating triangulated relations
between these subjects/objects of state power, with these populations
also becoming deeply implicated in reproducing the triangulated social
relations in their practices of self-constitution.
Given this history of the modern Canadian state and nation forma-
tion, to assume that the attributes of sovereignty, citizenship, rights, and
entitlements are universally attainable is to engage in liberalist abstrac-
tions that have had immeasurably damaging consequences in the lives
of indigenous peoples and peoples of colour, including Muslims, living
in a multicultural and democratic Western society. Attempts to
engage with the question of sovereignty from philosophico-theoretical
abstractions that naturalize the West while erasing the presence of
its Others is to further the universalist pretensions of Western forms
of racialized sovereignties and subjectivities; indeed, such abstrac-
tion serves to recuperate and restabilize the institutions that produce
whiteness as a form of racially sovereign subjectivity and statehood
in the new millenium. From a centring of race instead, the continu-
ities between the ongoing coloniality that shapes the modern and
postmodern Western nation-state and the invasions and occupa-
tions of Afghanistan and Iraq become highlighted, as do the forms of

integration, contestation, and complicities that are available to vari-
ous sectors of the population in their relationships with the Western
state form. Such a centring of race and coloniality also helps reveal the
changing forms and practices through which both race and coloniality
are being rearticulated in the War on Terror.
Conclusion
The dismantling of the British and French Empires in the mid-twentieth

century contributed to a widespread belief that the age of colonial-
ism had passed. Although settler societies such as the United States,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel have remained stubbornly
colonial in the postcolonial era, colonial rule is nonetheless seen by
many as irrelevant to the constitution of the West, a view reproduced
implicitly in Homo Sacer, or as a relic of the past, a view reproduced
explicitly in Empire. The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and
Iraq have proved both views to be deeply problematic.
The War on Terror is shaped by the attempt of the US-led coalition
to restabilize the globalization of Western sovereignty in the face of the
Islamist challenge, such that the Western alliance claims the right of
intervention in the name of protecting its particular national and col-
lective interests around the world, albeit couched in the universalist
language of defending ethical values, human civilization, or even
global justice. Certainly Hardt and Negri claim that the new impe-
rial constitution is still in process, but by not paying attention to the
centrality of race and violence in the Western historical tradition of
empire-making, their theory cannot equip us to understand the inte-
grally flawed and deeply asymmetrical nature of sovereignty, global
justice, or, indeed, the global juridical order. These institutions and
their legitimizing concepts were born in and helped reconsolidate
racial power and colonial divides in response to the various crisis in the
international system of relations at different junctures.
In the War on Terror, US power relies on that states willingness to
repeatedly deploy violence at various sites around the globe, a will-
ingness that has made it the biggest military machine on the planet.
It is this willingness that it draws upon to persuade others to act
in accord with its interests, notwithstanding the rhetoric of operating
from a higher ethical and moral ground. This ability to wage violence
is the basis on which the international community goes along with
the various US aggressions, and even when not actively advocating its
use, nation-states support this violence out of their unwillingness to
be excluded from the benefits accruing from inclusion in the Western
project. Both Empire and Homo Sacer engage in further silencing the
304 Sunera Thobani
perspectives from the Third World and those injured most acutely by
the very sovereignty that is the object of their respective study. In this,
they help extend the reach of this violence by erasing the political chal-
lenges and intellectual contributions of the Third World.
NOTES
I would like to thank the reviewers of this chapter for their insightful com-
ments and suggestions.
1 This chapter is based on a research project funded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to acknowledge
a previous version of this chapter, published as Empire, Bare Life and the
Constitution of Whiteness in borderlands ejournal 11, no. 1 (2012).
2 Michael Mandel, Illegal Wars and International Criminal Law, in The
Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization, ed. Antony
Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Michelson, and Obiora Okafor (Leiden/
Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003), 11732. Pointing out that the UN
passed two resolutions on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, Michael Man-
del argued that neither of these resolutions specifically mentioned the use
of military force. The UN Charter allows for war only when it is deemed
absolutely and demonstrably necessary, Mandel argues, and even then,
[n]ecessity is entirely a matter for the Security Council with only one
exception: the strictly limited right of self-defence (119). Given that the
United States claimed the right to defend itself in launching this war, Man-
del examines this right to self-defence that is enshrined in the UN Charter.
He notes that the right depends on four factors: it is of limited duration
until the UN can intervene; only the state that carried out the initial attack
can be attacked in self-defence; there must be an element of necessity for
war; and the attack conducted in self-defence is required to be proportional
to the initial attack (121). By these criteria, Mandel concludes that the US
war in Afghanistan is illegal and violates the UN Charter. He goes on to
make the following case: The Security Council passed two resolutions on
terrorism between September 11 and Americas attack on Afghanistan on
October 7 (SR 1368 of September 12 and SR 1373 of September 28). Its hard
to see how any honest reading of these resolutions could possibly conclude
that they authorize the use of force. They condemn the attacks of Septem-
ber 11 and take a whole host of measures to suppress terrorism, especially
SR 1373 which has two dozen operative paragraphs outlining legislative,
administrative and judicial measures for the suppression of terrorism and
its financing, and for co-operation between states in security, intelligence,

investigations and criminal proceedings. The resolution sets up a commit-
tee of all its members to monitor progress on the measures in the resolution
and has given all states 90 days to report back to it. But not once does either
of these resolutions mention military force or anything like it. They dont
even mention Afghanistan by name. Nor do they use the accepted formula
all necessary means of Resolution 678 of November 29, 1990, by which the
Security Council authorized the Gulf War of 1991 (119).
3 Mandel expands on this right of self defence: In the first place, and most
importantly, the right of unilateral self-defence (viz. not authorized by
the Security Council) in Article 51 is expressly stated as a temporary right.
There is simply no getting around the word until. It is limited to the right
to repel an attack that is actually taking place or to dislodge an illegal
occupier (in Kuwaits case Iraq remained a military occupation of Kuwait
throughout). This temporary right of self-defence does not include the
right to retaliate once an attack has stopped. Nor does it include the right
to overthrow the government one holds in some way responsible for the
attack, or to undertake long-term preventive measures of a military nature.
The idea is there for all to see in black and white in Article 51. A state is
allowed to exercise self-help when there is not time for the Security Council
to intervene and until it can intervene. The right of self-defence in interna-
tional law is like the right of self-defence in domestic law; it allows you to
defend yourself when the law is not around, but it does not allow you to
take the law into your own hands. It defies the imagination how one of the
Permanent Members of the Security Council one who has indeed voted
for the extensive, non-violent anti-terrorism measures taken by the Security
Council could justify a long, open-ended war against terrorism on the
ground that the Security Council has not had time to intervene (Mandel,
Illegal Wars, 121).
4 Mandel points out that in 1986 the United States argued at the World Court
that Nicaragua allowed insurgents from other countries to operate from
its territory, and therefore the United States was acting in collective self-
defence when it bombed and mined Nicaraguas harbours. The World
court rejected this claim (ibid., 1223).
5 See Janet Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror
Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
6 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
7 Ibid., 5.
8 Ibid.
306 Sunera Thobani
9 Ibid., 15.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 1718.
12 Ibid., 7.
13 Ibid., 6.
14 Ibid., 4.
15 Ibid., 8.
16 Ibid., 9.
17 For an alternate analysis of the category of the West, see Stuart Hall,
David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Modernity: An
Introduction to Modern Societies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996).
18 See Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of
American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2004);
and Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks
(Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1995).
19 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
20 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001).
21 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New
York: Zone Books, 2002), 14.
22 Wolfgang Sofsky, quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 47.
23 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 48.
24 Agambens discussion of the Muselmann in Remnants of Auschwitz draws
on Ryn and Klodzinskis study, which offers the following explanation
for the use of the name Muslim for the most dejected Jewish inmates of
the camps: They excluded themselves from all relations to their environ-
ment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without
bending their knees. They shivered since their body temperature usually
fell below 98.7 degrees. Seeing them from afar, one had the impression of
seeing Arabs praying. This image was the origin of the term used at Aus-
chwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muslims. Quoted in Agamben,
Remnants of Auschwitz, 43.
26 Ibid., 45.
27 Feliksa Piekarska, quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 166.
29 Ibid., 447.
30 See Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham, UK: The Open University
Press, 1999); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
31 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti Semitism and the Hidden Language of
the Jews (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
32 See Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred.
33 This is an argument that I develop more fully in my soon-to-be published
manuscript, Race, Sex and Terror in the 21st Century.
34 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000). For some excellent responses to Empire, see Paul
A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, eds., Empires New Clothes: Reading Hardt and
Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004). For discussion of US imperialism and
Empire, see also Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., The Empire Reloaded,
Socialist Register 2005 (London: The Merlin Press, 2004).
35 Although Empire was written before the attacks of 9/11, Michael Hardt
argued in an essay written after the attacks that nation-states are no
longer sovereign, not even the United States and that the rhetoric of US
leaders since the events [of 9/11], however, has been based on a nostalgia
for the era of national sovereignty. See Michael Hardt, Sovereignty,
Theory and Event 5, no. 4. (2001): doi:10.1353/tae.2001.0040.
36 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, imperialism contributed to cap-
itals survival and expansion, argue Hardt and Negri. The partition of
the world among the dominant nation-states, the establishment of colonial
administrations, the imposition of trade exclusives and tariffs, the creation
of monopolies and cartels, differentiated zones of raw material extraction
and industrial production, and so forth all aided capital in its period of
global expansion. Imperialism was a system designed to serve the needs
and further the interests of capital in its phase of global conquest. And yet,
as most of the (communist, socialist and capitalist) critics of imperialism
have noted, imperialism also from its inception conflicted with capital.
It was a medicine that itself threatened the life of the patient. Although
imperialism provided avenues and mechanisms for capital to pervade new
territories and spread the capitalist mode of production, it also created and
reinforced rigid boundaries among the various global spaces, strict notions
of inside and outside that effectively blocked the free flow of capital, labor,
and goods thus necessarily precluding the full realization of the world
market (Empire, 332).
37 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 1011.
38 Ibid., 11.
39 Ibid., 70.
40 In the period 12001600, something extraordinary happened in Europe,
Hardt and Negri argue: Humans declared themselves masters of their
own lives, producers of cities and history, and inventors of heavens
308 Sunera Thobani
(Empire, 70). Rejecting the dominant worldview of the time that vested
power in a transcendent entity, [t]hey inherited a dualistic consciousness,
a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science; but
they handed down to future generations an experimental idea of science,
a constituent conception of history and cities, and they posed being as an
immanent terrain of knowledge and action (701). The discovery appar-
ently not only launched modernity, but also a strong response, ultimately
successful, to quash the power of immanent forces, as Hardt and Negri call
them.
41 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv.
42 Ibid., 4.
43 As Hardt and Negri explain, Imperialism was really an extension of the
sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundar-
ies (Empire, xii). Most juridical theorists of the international order and
sovereignty tend to follow two main theoretical traditions, they note:
the Hobbesian view that focuses primarily on the transfer of the title of
sovereignty and conceives the constitution of the supranational sovereign
entity as a contractual agreement grounded on the convergence between
pre-existing state subjects, with power primarily concentrated in the
hands of the military, and the Lockean view that focuses more on the
decentralized and pluralist networks of global constitutionalism that
constitute a global civil society (7). While the former defines state sover-
eignty as monarchic power and the latter in its liberal variant, both views
use their respective frameworks for the domestic state to interpret the
supranational power. Neither, then, is capable of grasping the paradigm
shift that shapes the new nature of imperial power (7). Empire goes on
to argue that what distinguishes this new power is that competition and
conflicts between imperialist powers have been replaced by the idea of
a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary
way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly
postcolonial and postimperialist (9). Their point of departure is thus a
new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new
design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that
guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts (9).
44 According to Hardt and Negri, [i]t is a decentred and deterritorializing
apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm
within its open expanding frontiers (Empire, xii).
45 As Hardt and Negri explain,Through its contemporary transformation
of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution tends either
directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of
the nation-states, and thus supranational law powerfully overdetermines

domestic law (Empire, 17).
46 Ibid., 18.
47 Ibid., xiv.
48 Ibid., 309.
49 Hardt and Negri argue that Empire is also defined as a system in which
the materiality of the juridical order entails a shift from the disciplinary
society theorized by Foucault to the society of control. Foucault theorized
power as productive and enabling, immanent in its field of operation,
rather than simply repressive and housed in the apparatus of the state.
Defining bio-power as central to modernity, he studied the disciplinary
practices of its operation that shaped life by instilling regulatory prac-
tices into the conduct of daily life, thus constituting the subjectivities,
pleasures, and desires of the individuals subject to it and subjectivated
within its realm. Hardt and Negri draw upon this Foucauldian notion of
bio-power, but argue that within the postmodern order, power assumes
ever more democratic forms and reaches much farther into the minds
and bodies of citizens. The transformation from the disciplinary society
into the society of control thus represents both an intensification and a
generalization of disciplinary practices, Hardt and Negri argue (Empire,
xviixviii).
50 Empires Eurocentrism has been pointed out by Kevin Dunn, who argues
that the books conceptualization of sovereignty, the relationship between
the nation-state, and the concept of the multitude as the revolutionary
subject of history marginalize Africa and the revolutionary potential of
Africans. Defining Empire through a universal civilization is not only
Eurocentric but deeply problematic when one recognizes that many domi-
nant Western discourses and practices continue to exclude Africa from the
civilized realm, argues Dunn. See Kevin C. Dunn, Africas Ambiguous
Relation to Empire and Empire, in Empires New Clothes, 14362; Quote
from page 152.
51 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
52 Ibid., 3.
53 Ibid., 6.
55 Ibid., 161.
56 Ibid., 168.
57 Ibid., 169.
58 Peter Fitzpatrick, The Immanence of Empire, in Empires New Clothes, 49.
310 Sunera Thobani

60 Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in
Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books,
2002.
Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Fitzpatrick, Peter. The Immanence of Empire. In Empires New Clothes: Read-
ing Hardt and Negri. Edited by Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, 3156. New
York: Routledge, 2004.
Gilman, Sander. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti Semitism and the Hidden Language of the
Jews. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Hardt, Michael. Sovereignty. Theory and Event 5, no. 4 (2001). doi:10.1353/
tae.2001.0040.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000.
Mandel, Michael. Illegal Wars and International Criminal Law. In The
Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization, edited by
Antony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Michelson and Obiora Okafor,
11732. Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003.
Mayer, Janet. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into
a War on American Ideals. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Sardar, Ziauddin. Orientalism. Buckingham, UK: The Open University Press,
1999.
Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in
Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
12Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism,
and the Bourgeoisie in the Age of
Neoliberalism
sedef ar at -ko
In thinking about the relationship of race and class, there is an urgent

need to historicize and contextualize race-thinking in the present, to
take account of its complexity and contradictions in the postCold
War era of neoliberal globalism. This chapter investigates the analyti-
cal possibilities offered by pushing the boundaries of the concept of
whiteness beyond race. Arguing that class under neoliberalism is
increasingly conceptualized in racialized and culturalized terms, the
chapter analyses the new meanings and formations of whiteness
emerging in different parts of the world. In the world that emerged
after the Cold War, post-socialism and postThird World, whiteness
is increasingly related to a form of class identity. In the ways in which
white identity may be denied poor whites and a white underclass
but claimed by the globalized elites in non-European countries, white-
ness seems to be specifically associated with a transnational bourgeois
identity with being on the side of winners in globalized capitalism, or
at least having an aspiration to, and identification with, belonging in a
new, global capitalist modernity. Even though these new developments
appear to have increased the flexibility of whiteness as a narrowly
racial category, they do not represent the end of its racial connota-
tions, as the new formulations involve a continuation, and even further
entrenchment, of the links of whiteness to a Euro-American capitalist
modernity.
In addition to investigations of how race is classed and class is raced,
a better understanding of the relationship between race and class also
requires analyses of how class and race are popularly conceptualized
and how these concepts change over time. Studying popular con-
ceptualizations of class is important if we want to understand how
312 Sedef Arat-Ko
neoliberalism works. As Wendy Brown suggests, neoliberalism is not

just a historically specific mode of organizing the economy, the state,
or the relationship between the economy and the state; it is also a form
of governmentality. It is a mode of governance that organizes social life
and constructions of subjectivity, a mode of governance that produces
subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of
the social.1
I would like to propose that neoliberalism produces subjects, and
specifically middle class subjects, who see themselves and their other
in increasingly culturalized ways. Culturalism works as a form of race-
thinking or race-like thinking, even in contexts when it applies to
forms of unequal relationships other than race. Attempts to histori
cize and contextualize race-thinking in the present would need to take
into account its complexities in the postCold War era of neoliberal
globalism and the new imperialism. Such a project would need to
involve an approach to critical race theory that takes political economy
and geopolitics seriously. In a period of neoliberal globalized capital-
ism, this may necessitate rethinking the concept of race beyond the
colour line as technologies of power that involve the historic reper-
toires and cultural, spatial, and signifying systems that stigmatize and
depreciate one form of humanity for the purposes of anothers health,
development, safety, profit and pleasure.2 When we approach race
this way, we may be able to identify the ways in which race-thinking
and race-like language are used in the exclusion, stigmatization, mar-
ginalization, and subordination of people beyond as well as along
the colour line. This would be in the spirit of an expansive theory and
politics of anti-racism that addresses class inequality as much as it deals
with racial inequality and oppression.
One of the important questions to ask about public discourse and
academic theory in recent decades is why the concept of class has
diminished in significance in academic and political discourse precisely
at a time when social and economic polarization has reached unprec-
edented levels. I argue that culturalism, or what Mahmood Mamdani
in his 2004 book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, calls culture talk,3 plays
a very important role in what I would characterize as the annexation
of the language of class. What we may be witnessing today is a class
struggle, an ever more ubiquitous class struggle waged by the bour-
geoisie, but a class struggle that does not speak its name. What we see is
a situation in which class as class regarding inequality and power
is cast out from the middle class imaginary at the same time as class as
Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism, and the Bourgeoisie 313
social and cultural difference is ever more important in middle class

culture and minds, as well as in material class reality and relations. The
political and ideological significance of this situation is that a cultur-
alist perspective tends to present/represent the dispossessed and the
powerless as culturally alien. This perspective on class difference and
uneven development leads to notions of incommensurable, irreconcil-
able, cultural differences, and therefore has enormous implications in
shifting the gaze from capitalism and neoliberal globalization to the
poor themselves as the source of problems.
In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mamdani argues that the period after
the Cold War, typically characterized as the era of globalization, is
marked by the ascendancy and rapid politicizing of a single term:
culture. He points out that the current hegemonic use of the term
is very different from a material and lived notion of culture, the cul-
ture studied by anthropologists face-to-face, intimate, local, and
lived [and that] the talk of culture is highly politicized and comes in
large geo-packages. Even though the term is used in highly politi-
cized ways, it is employed precisely to avoid discussing issues socially,
historically, and politically. Rather, what is presented is an essentialist
notion of culture that explains politics as an outcome of the cultural
essence attributed to groups, communities, and societies.4 Mamdanis
book focuses on the geopolitical use of culture talk. The displace-
ment of the worlds problems onto the realm of culture,5 however, is a
more general condition. I would like to suggest that in addition to the
geopolitical uses, which clearly help justify current forms of imperialist
intervention, culture talk is also utilized extensively in class relations
at the local and national levels.
Most blatantly, culturalism has been applied against racialized
groups and societies at the national and international levels to proj-
ect simplistic, essentialist, caricaturized generalizations about them.
Culturalism is not the only but perhaps, increasingly, the most popular
contemporary form of racism.6 It is not this dimension of culturalism,
however, that is the main focus of this chapter. The focus rather is on
culturalist discourses on class. The chapter will identify the ways in
which culturalist discourses of class are gaining increasing popularity
in different parts of the world today, and attempt to explain how and
why this is a product of a postCold War and post-development era of
neoliberal hegemony.
Culturalism is emerging in a context of globalized capitalism, as the
distinctions between the First and Third Worlds, the North, and the
314 Sedef Arat-Ko
South are being reconfigured along new lines. In this context, North
and South designate not merely concrete geographic locations but
also metaphorical referents: North denotes the pathways of trans-
national capital; South denotes the marginalized populations of the
world, regardless of their location.7 According to Arif Dirlik, [T]he
globe has become jumbled up spatially as the ideology of progress is
temporally: with the appearance of Third Worlds in the First World and
First Worlds in the Third.8
Several authors have articulated what social inequalities and class
differences will look like in this new era. Mike Davis9 predicts that most
of the world population increase in the next generation will be absorbed
in urban slums and shantytowns. He suggests that this section of the
urban population will never be incorporated into industrial growth
and formal jobs, but rather constitute an outcast proletariat a mass
of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumu-
lation and the corporate matrix.10 Distinguishing the new poor from
the traditional unemployed and the reserve army of labour, Z ygmunt
Bauman11 also characterizes them as wasted humans, excessive or
redundant for the economy.
As the South has grown in both North and South in this era, so has
there been the appearance, as Dirlik points out, of the First World in
the Third. An important actor in the articulation and popularization of
culturalist conceptions of class in this context has been the rising global-
identified new middle classes, who are increasingly linked, materially
and ideationally, with a transnational bourgeoisie. Mike Davis and Daniel
Bertrand Monk argue that the contemporary period of neoliberal global-
ism is characterized by an unprecedented spatial and moral secession
of the wealthy from the rest of humanity.12 Compared to earlier periods
of developmentalism in postcolonial Third World states and the welfare
state in the First World, in recent decades an increasingly transnational
bourgeois elite, along with the new middle classes, have been in a pro-
cess of cutting their obligatory social solidarity with other social classes.
Their relationship to their local and national surroundings has more and
more become characterized by disembeddedness and extraterritoriality.
Physically embodied in gated communities, gentrified neighbourhoods
in globalizing and global cities, and in other new urban formations,
these classes now live in gilded dreamworlds that represent willful,
narcissistic withdrawals from the tragedies overtaking the planet.13
To capture the nature of a new transnational tendency to culturalize
class, this chapter will examine three examples of class discourses. In
the context of advanced capitalist countries, the focus will be on new

middle class discourses concerning the working class as well as on the
notion of the underclass, especially popular in the United States. This
is followed by a look at the new middle class discourse regarding the
urban poor in Third World countries and an examination of Oriental-
ized depictions of workers and peasants in post-socialist countries.
After explaining how and why these discourses constitute the hege-
monic common sense about social inequalities in the present (geo)polit-
ical economic context, the chapter will discuss the political implications
of culturalism in terms of class relationships and solidarity.
Advanced Capitalism and the New Representations

of the Working Class
The Notion of Underclass in the United States
Under neoliberalism broad sections of the working class are being

materially and ideologically placed outside what are thought to be
the normal structures of society and economy. According to Man-
ning Marable, the new racial domain in the United States is based
on mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disfranchise-
ment.14 Loic Wacquant15 identifies the prison as the main racial insti-
tution at the present time and shows the way in which the carceral
system contributes to exclusion from social welfare, denial of cultural
capital, and political disenfranchisement. So central is the prison-
industrial complex to the contemporary structures of capitalism that
some academics and activists such as Angela Davis and Julia Sudbury
see prison abolition as central to their anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and
anti-imperialist struggles.16
The overwhelming popularity of the term underclass17 in media
and public discourses in the United States and Britain in the last few
decades is telling in terms of the racialization and culturalization of
class differences it represents, as well as in its association of whiteness
with class position in these countries.18 Introducing the term to a broad
audience, a 1977 Time magazine cover story stated:
Behind [the ghettos] crumbling walls lives a large group of people who
are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost any-
one had imagined. They are the unreacheables: the American underclass.19
316 Sedef Arat-Ko
The term underclass has gained increased popularity in the United

States since the 1980s. The term emphasizes social and cultural differ-
ences that go far beyond what class inequalities would produce, denot-
ing a form of marginality, an existence outside what are thought to be
the normal structures of society and economy. The underclass is treated
as somehow different from the rest of society and indeed as standing
outside of society The underclass is seen as composed of aliens and
outcasts: A Nation Apart as one US newspaper described it.20
According to Chris Haylett, it is not racialization that provides the
primary process of cultural division in the discourse of the under-
class. Rather, she argues that the working-class poor black and
white, male and female are subject to inseparable processes of clas-
sification and racialization, marked as abject beings who have fallen
from the nation.21 In this discourse, poverty is not linked to structural
characteristics of capitalism but rather to alien values different from
the dominant work ethic and individual and cultural pathologies.
References to underclass attribute an absolute difference of charac-
ter to those marginalized. When class differences and class injuries are
understood not as class issues to be discussed economically, socially,
and politically but pushed to the realm of culture, they become prob-
lems of individuals who are perceived as essentially and insurmount-
ably different, and whose experiences are not within the realm that
those outside this class can understand, sympathize, or identify with.
When class differences are othered to this degree, there is a normaliza-
tion and legitimation of inequalities and exclusions structurally built
into capitalism. As Bauman argues, the abnormality of the underclass
phenomenon normalizes the issue of poverty.22 When the under-
class becomes the focus of attention and is presented as a big, urgent
problem, the larger issue of poverty ceases to be serious or urgent.
Against the background of the uniformly ugly and repulsive landscape

of the underclass, the merely poor shine as temporarily unlucky but
essentially decent people who unlike the underclassers will make all
the right choices and find their way back into the accepted boundaries of
society. Just as falling into the underclass and staying there is a matter of
choice, so the rehabilitation from the state of poverty is a matter of choice
the right choice this time.23
The processes of racialization and culturalization of class that we see

in the discourse of underclass are not totally new. There are strong
historical parallels with the Victorian notion of dangerous classes, as

well as with Oscar Lewiss more recent notion of the culture of pov-
erty.24 Despite the parallels, though, there is an important difference
from the latter. As Malik points out, the culture of poverty was taken
up by a liberal political tradition that believed in state intervention to
eliminate it, whereas the conservative use of underclass suggests
that state intervention to eliminate the difference may be unnecessary
or futile.25
Representations of the White Working Class
What is said about the more overtly racialized underclass also has
significant implications for the working class proper, as well as for the
white working class. In her work on Britain, Beverly Skeggs argues
that significant shifts have taken place in recent years in the position
of the working class in British society. According to Skeggs, Britain has
moved from historical attempts to incorporate the working class into
the nation to now delineating them as a hazard to modernity.26
The class struggle is being waged on a daily basis through culture as a

form of symbolic violence, through relationships of entitlement that are
legitimized and institutionalized, and it is these processes that set limits
on who can and cannot belong, be, and have worth on a national and
global stage.27
Skeggs notes that there is an understated ubiquity of class in Britain,

that class is continually referenced even when not directly spoken.28
She argues, however, that there is a shift in the meaning of class from
an economic category to one based in cultural practices. She refers to
processes in which economic deprivation is more and more under-
stood through moral deprivation, whereby class is being increasingly
defined as a moral-cultural property of the person, related to their
attitudes and practices (not named and known directly as class).29
What Skeggs calls the rebranding of class involves the ways in
which class is defined as a cultural property and as cultural practices
come to have (or not) a worth and value for others.30 The working
class has been identified with excess, waste, and entertainment, and
as lacking in taste, unmodern, backward, escapist, dangerous, unruly,
and immoral.31 It is also seen as a resource, some cultural elements of
which can be convertible and propertisable for the middle class.32
318 Sedef Arat-Ko
Skeggs interprets the negative judgments about the working class, and
the distance, denigration and disgust as well as appropriation by the
middle class against the working class, as ways for the middle class to
create value for themselves.33 Skeggs regards the shifts in the meaning
of class as significant in terms of class struggle. She argues that through
the re-branding, re-figuring, re-moralizing and re-making of class
relations [c]lass struggle becomes not just about the entitlement to
the labour of others, but also the entitlement to their culture, feelings,
affect and dispositions.34
In her study on welfare reform and discourses of social inclusion
in Britain, Haylett looks at how these discourses have focused not on
the economic predicament of the poor but on their culture or cul-
tural impoverishment, a poverty of identity based on outdated ways
of thinking and being.35 Haylett argues that in the modern multicul-
tural Britain, there is no legitimate space for class-based discourses,
but that the impulse is for class to be remade as an ethno-difference.36
In the hegemonic discourses of multiculturalism, the white working
class comes to represent the unmodern, a generalized backward-
ness, a culturally shameful and burdenous whiteness, whereas a
representative of the middle class is positioned at the vanguard of the
modern which becomes a moral category referring to liberal, cosmo-
politan, work and consumption based lifestyles and values.37
Culturalization of class takes several forms in this context. In addi-
tion to the mockery of the lifestyles of the working class, the poor, and
the marginalized as tasteless, crude, and unsophisticated, there is often
a tendency to blame them for what no longer seems acceptable in bour-
geois culture: certain forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia are no
longer associated with middle class values, but are rather considered as
attributes of racialized groups and/or the white working class.
The New (Urban) Middle Class in the (Former) Third World
Neoliberal capitalist globalization has been associated in many urban

areas, including those in the (former) Third World, with a process of
citadelization of cities: processes whereby the middle classes have been
involved in separating themselves from the working class and mar-
ginal groups by mechanisms such as establishing gated communities
of their own; increased participation in private as opposed to public
institutions and spaces; expulsion of the poor from their former urban
locations through gentrification, urban renewal, and colonization of
public spaces; and urban planning schemes that enable freeways to

bypass slums or eye-sore areas. Such separation and segregation of
classes in space corresponds to a fragmentation of the city, in physical
and material, as well as social, administrative, political, and economic
terms. Gated communities represent the fears of the middle class occu-
pants against those located outside the walls, as well as a withdrawal of
the middle class from the public sphere. Gated communities, gentrified
neighbourhoods, exclusive public spaces that keep the poor at a dis-
tance create a division between the middle class and the masses. As
the middle class now shares a lifestyle and consumption patterns with
middle classes elsewhere, it may identify more with middle classes
globally than with its neighbours and fellow citizens.
While gated communities and the creation of segregated spaces are
growing realities everywhere, they represent an especially striking
development in the (former) Third World. Asking Are Indian Cities
Becoming Bourgeois At Last?, Partha Chatterjee discusses whether
there has been a reversal in recent years of the pattern of development in
Indian cities established in the post-independence period: a pattern of
urban development where most neighbourhoods were mixed in terms
of class, and where a dense network of public spaces and institutions
existed in the form of schools, markets, libraries, parks, sports clubs,
and so forth.38 Several recent developments appear to be challenging
or reversing the previous pattern in important ways. Hand in hand
with concerted attempts to clean up the Indian cities, to rid streets
and public lands of squatters and encroachers, and to reclaim public
spaces for the use of proper citizens, there has been a proliferation of
segregated and protected spaces for elite consumption, elite lifestyles,
and elite culture. While there has been a rapid suburbanization of the
middle class, there have also been growing middle class concerns about
the preservation of the architectural and cultural heritage of the his-
toric city, whether pre-colonial or colonial.39 Centred on finance and
service sectors as opposed to manufacturing, this post-industrial city,
like its counterparts in other parts of the world, is highly differentiated.
[W]hile the new metropolis is globally connected, it is frequently locally

disconnected from large sections of its population who are functionally
unnecessary and are often seen to be socially or politically disruptive.40
Concerns about security, however, are not the only motivation for the
middle class attraction to gated communities. Observable through
320 Sedef Arat-Ko
advertisements for these developments is the creation of new forms

of subjectivity that buy into a transnational bourgeois identity and
lifestyle.41
Leela Fernandes argues that the management of liberalization in
India occurs through the production of the boundaries of the new
middle class, boundaries that are simultaneously constructed through
a politics of distinction from and a politics of forgetting of the poor and
working classes.42 Characterizing the political culture of the new mid-
dle class in India as a politics of forgetting, Fernandes refers to active
processes of exclusion that seek to produce a sanitized vision of the
economic benefits of globalization a political-discursive process in
which specific marginalized social groups are rendered invisible and
forgotten within the dominant national culture.43
In addition to helping middle class citizens separate themselves from
their working class counterparts and express their elite status, gated
communities also allow middle class inhabitants to imagine themselves
as part of a global elite. Class segregated spaces become significant in
the material and discursive construction and representation of spaces
in a transnational culture, a global culture of consumption. In his
study of the elite housing projects sprouting up all over the big cit-
ies in India following liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s,
Anthony King argues that these spaces help create the complex con-
ditions under which new local as well as travelling global class
identities are being formed.44
[I]nternational and India are positioned as being mutually exclusive,

rather than inclusive of each other. Thus, advertisements for the Manhat-
tan apartments in Delhi suggest that when you come home to India, you
dont have to leave your international lifestyle behind. International
here, therefore, is other than, or different from, India. Take, for exam-
ple, Draw the curtains and you could be in one of Londons fashionable
designer homes (but not, apparently, in India).45
So strong does the identification with the global elite sometimes become
in the political culture of the middle classes that Arundhati Roy sees the
Indian middle class in the neoliberal era to be engaged in the most
successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India.
Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful seces-
sionist struggle ever waged in India the secession of the middle and
upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere

where they merge with the rest of the worlds elite. This Kingdom in the
Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of
India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality
plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals.46
As an expression of the middle class desire to separate from the masses

and join with the middle classes transnationally, the so-called global
city comes to be defined in ways where concerns about aesthetics turn
into a new urban aesthetics of class purity.47 The city, in this perspec-
tive, belongs only to its wealthier inhabitants, an international business
elite and tourists.
How do we create a pleasing living environment for the culturally diverse

and mobile managers and workers associated with these global firms, so
that they will desire to come and live among us for a while?
The global aestheticised city is thus made beautiful to attract others
rather than to make its local occupants feel at home within it More so
than any of its predecessor cities the global city has no room for margin-
als. How are we to rid ourselves of the homeless sleeping on the citys
benches? How are we to rid ourselves of those underclasses, with their
high proportion of indigenous people, third-world looking (i.e., yucky-
looking) migrants and descendants of migrants, who are still cramming
the non-gentrified parts of the city?
In the dominant modes of representation the poor become primarily
like pimples, an aesthetic nuisance. They are standing between us and
the yet-to-land transcendental capital. They ought to be eradicated and
removed from such a space. The aesthetics of globalization is the aesthet-
ics of zero tolerance.48
Even when new discourses are articulated as genuine concerns about

the challenges rapid urbanization poses for the architectural, histori-
cal, or ecological aspects of urban life, these discourses on cities turn
against the poor as the source of problems that threaten the city. An
article by Oya Baydar,49 Istanbul as Defeated by the Other, is a good
example. In her article Baydar complains that the squatter settlements
surrounding Istanbul are not just destroying the natural environment
through their cancer-like growth in masses of concrete, but that they
are also threatening the historical heritage of the city and its very urban
culture. Baydar characterizes settlements occupied by rural migrants as
322 Sedef Arat-Ko
other by declaring that these settlements are separated from the cit-
ies through psychological, social and cultural boundaries.50 Arguing
that the cultural identity of the city is being almost erased by the other
Istanbul, Baydar declares that the main social conflict in Istanbul is no
longer a class struggle, but rather a cultural conflict between an urban
culture and a rural reaction.
It is interesting to note the decisive shift in the terminology used to
depict these squatter settlements in Turkey. Until the 1980s, the term
used for squatter settlements was gecekondu, which literally means
built overnight, describing the speed at which this type of housing
needed to be completed on public land in order to avoid demolition.
Whereas the term gecekondu was associated with some sympathy for
the poverty, marginality, and precarious conditions of recent rural
migrants, the newly invented and popularized term varos is heavily
loaded with negative connotations, representing the fears, anxieties,
and hostility of the urban middle class.
The cultural othering of the working class and marginal inhabitants
of cities goes to such extremes in new middle class discourses that it
is not unusual to see this othering moving in the direction of outright
racialization. Ays e nc51 and Ali Sims ek52 have studied depictions of
the urban poor in cartoons a highly consumed medium of popular
culture in Turkey. S ims ek argues that the class character of popular car-
toons in Turkey changed radically in the 1980s, from casting a critical
eye on the dominant groups in the 1960s and 1970s to depicting, in
growing intensity, the outlook of the new middle class on the poor and
marginal groups. nc finds that the character of maganda,53 widely
and popularly used in cartoons since the 1980s, provides a total and
totalizing other. Often drawn as a very grotesque figure, maganda
represents a racialized and classed masculinity. He appears as a rude
and vulgar figure, a dark, hairy, over-sexed, animal-like, socially and
morally repugnant creature, especially abusive to women. His social
and moral repugnancy is clearly inscribed in his body. Significantly, the
image of maganda lacks, or deliberately avoids, any reference to poverty
and marginality, and instead focuses on presumed cultural and gender
attributes of men from marginalized or specific ethnic backgrounds.
According to Sims ek, another important feature of the cartoons popular
among the new middle class in the 1990s is their parody of Turkishness.
Not simply a critique of official nationalist ideology, these cartoons dis-
play an intense self-Orientalization, looking at everyday life in Turkey
through what is imagined as a European lens. Once again, the images
specifically parody the daily habits, patterns, and mannerisms of those

sectors of the population who are seen as not fitting in with Turkeys
aspirations to become part of the European Union or Istanbuls aspira-
tions to become a global city.54
What may seem ironic about the cosmopolitan aspirations of the
new middle class is that they sometimes exist side by side with a poli-
tics of nativism and ethnicism on the part of the same actors. Similar
to neoconservatism in the West, right-wing populisms can articulate
capitalist and (economic) globalist interests with ethnicist, racist, and
even fundamentalist positions. It is now well established, for example,
that in India much of the political support for the Hindu fundamental-
ist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come from the global(izing) mid-
dle class.55 Likewise, in Turkey, there has been significant growth in
recent decades of a conservative Muslim bourgeoisie, which adheres
to an Islamist nativism and populism ideologically and claims to be
the ordinary, common people of the country, but is elitist in its lifestyle.
Some of the most radical neoliberal reforms in the economy have been
achieved under the government of the ruling Islamist party, the Adalet
ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) (AKP).
Even though the neoliberal class elitism and the populist nativism
of the middle classes may appear contradictory, they are not neces-
sarily so. As Vijay Prashad has argued, with the assassination of the
Third World Project and the emptying of nationalism from its social
and economic objectives, cultural nationalism has been the only kind of
nationalism left. With the demise of the Third World, Prashad argues:
Dominant classes in these states adopted two postures, and sometimes

both: an eagerness to be untethered from their societies and/or linked to
their population through ascribed identities of faith and race. The domes-
tic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda.56
Racialization and Orientalization of the Working

Class in Eastern Europe
Culturalized and racialized depictions of class are also appearing in the

former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. In a post-socialist context,
not only have social inequalities grown significantly, but the ways in
which inequalities are characterized have changed, now appearing in
culturalized, specifically Orientalized, forms. Michal Buchowski argues
324 Sedef Arat-Ko
that the [p]ostmodern, postindustrial and postsocialist meaning of

orientalism stretches beyond Saids and his followers definition of
the concept.57 In this context, Orientalism is not confined in space and
time, nor does it just apply to places and peoples of the East and/or
the past. Even though Buchowskis application of Orientalism in this
context may seem significantly different from the original development
of the term, one could argue that his definition is very much in the
spirit of the analytical qualities Said wanted to attribute to it. Accord-
ing to Said, the logic of Orientalism does not work as a static monolith.
Rather, it works through strategic positional superiority.58
In his study on contemporary Poland, Buchowski observes that since
the end of the Cold War and the introduction of market economies in
Eastern Europe in the 1990s, Orientalism has become a specter that
haunts peoples minds and serves as a tool for concocting social dis-
tinctions across state borders as well as within them.59 Specifically, he
argues, Orientalism provides a mental map through which growing
social inequalities are interpreted. By applying the mental map of Ori-
entalism within state borders, East Europeans have found otherness
in their sisters and brothers as the border between the East and the
West now runs mostly across societies.60
Buchowski suggests that an Orientalist logic is used to make sense
of differences between capitalism and socialism, civility and primitiv-
ism, and class distinction into elites and plebs.61 In Poland, Orientalist
logic is applied to the characterization of the working class in the post-
socialist period. Defined as homo Sovieticus, workers are seen as stuck
in time, longing for old working habits and security. They are seen as
civilizationally incompetent, showing a general lack of discipline
and diligence. The characteristics attributed to workers are in sharp
contrast to those attributed to the new elite, who are seen as dynamic,
hard-working, innovative, and able to adapt. Workers in this context
are blamed both for resistance to capitalist normality and for projects
in the new economy that do not go well.62
In her analysis of the treatment of shop-floor workers and sales rep-
resentatives in a privatized Polish firm, Elizabeth Dunn observes how
management ideology projects the dichotomy it has of socialism versus
capitalism on to these two groups. Shop-floor workers are depicted as
embodiments of socialism: immobile, backward, and out-of-date. Just
as the market ideology of management sees socialism as unreform-
able, Dunn argues, it also sees shop-floor workers as untrainable and
unchangeable. In turn, sales representatives are seen as highly mobile,
active, dynamic, and modern individualists perfectly deserving of dif-

ferentials in pay and treatment.63 Analysing the terms used by leading
Polish magazines for the impoverished people in urban and the rural
areas, Alison Stenning confirms Dunns and Buchowskis observations.
She argues that the adjectives used are quite similar today to those
used by the new right in Western countries for post-industrial com-
munities.64 In a radical shift from the official ideology of the socialist
period, the working class is now portrayed as useless, worthless, and
an obstacle to the transition.65
In his study of the post-socialist working class in Romania, David
Kideckel refers to the unmaking of the working class.66 He observes
that even those parts of the working class once considered to be the
labour elite, such as miners, presently experience not only economic
uncertainty and insecurity, but also indifference towards their con-
ditions in academic and political realms, where any concerns for the
plight of workers are marginalized and delegitimized.67 Kideckel
characterizes the change in workers status in a society in which schol-
ars and politicians react with indifference as a change from elevation
to denigration.68 Being the new other in Romania, workers receive
visibility in the media only when they protest. This visibility, however,
comes with denigration of their symbolic status, as they are negatively
depicted by the media as aggressive and morally spoiled.69
In the new culturalist perspective, those at the bottom end of the
post-socialist economy are defined by their assumed personal traits and
cultural characteristics. Rather than through a structural analysis of the
economy and/or a class analysis, success or failure in the new economy
is explained by focusing on the differences between the apt and the
inept: the civilized who are future oriented versus the civiliza-
tionally incompetent who remain primitive.70 Within this frame-
work, it is not only poverty that is viewed in civilizational terms, but
also in line with the wholesale Orientalization of socialism p olitical
resistance to the new economy, which is interpreted as primitivism
and populism, out of touch with the realities and demands of a new
world.71
The Place of Culturalism in Neoliberal Globalism
Through transnational perspectives on whiteness, this chapter sug-

gests that some of the developments of the last few decades have led
to a close relationship between whiteness and class. Whiteness
326 Sedef Arat-Ko
here refers specifically to the cultural connotations of being identified

as belonging to a (globalized) capitalist modernity. It is also associ-
ated with perceiving class and treating subordinate classes as cultural-
ized others. What we see through analyses of the different contexts of
advanced capitalist, postThird World, and post-socialist societies are
cases of a hyperconsciousness about class, even a class war, although
class is not addressed as class but rather as forms of culture and lifestyle
that the middle classes do not want to associate with. In what Haylett
calls a class-based but class-silent politics,72 we see not only an ideo-
logical annexation of the language of class73 taking place, through an
exaggerated depiction of differences as cultural in the representation
of those of another people or another form of (sub)humanity. We also
see an invisibilization of class inequalities through a material reor-
ganization of cities and countries that enables a forgetting, an era-
sure of working class and marginalized people from national political
discourses, development policy, public policy, and social conscience.
Along with this politics of forgetting, perhaps even more important,
is a growing hyperconsciousness of and obsession with class differences
through discourses in which they are culturalized, criminalized,
and pathologized.
What can be observed in terms of culturalization of class in all these
different contexts are discourses and practices that involve a cultural-
ization of structure and a naturalization of culture.74 Culturalization
of class also assumes processes of racialization, where culture dis-
course tak[es] over some of the same tasks as race becom[ing] a
naturally occurring difference, a simple fact of life, and a self-sufficient
form of explanation.75 As Aziz Al-Azmeh has argued, culturalism
does, in many contexts, function in ways very similar to racialism.
I have concluded not only that culturalism uses the same figures and
tropes that had been previously employed in racialist discourses, but
that like racialism it operates in a rather simple manner, which consists
of selecting visible tokens of ethnographic distinctiveness, which could
be the colour of skin, a certain manner of dress, or certain propositions
concerning the organization of gender relations, then proceeding to give
these the status of iconic markers of stigmata of otherness.76
In this section I would like to address the questions of how and why an
expanding culturalism has come to assume so central a place in domi-
nant political imaginaries at the present moment. As many observers
of neoliberal capitalist globalization have remarked, one of the most

important characteristics of this period is the marginalization of sig-
nificant parts of the worlds population seen as superfluous to the
economy. This marginalization takes place at both international and
national levels. Dirlik argues that globalism involves an acceptance of
uneven development as a permanent condition.
Contrary to the globalization of faith in development, even globalizers

concede in our day that not everyone, not even the majority of humankind
will share in the fruits of global capital.77
As Robert Cox perceptively observed in the mid 1990s, years before

the onset of a decisive imperial surge in the early twenty-first cen-
tury, many international organizations have accepted the reality and
the logic of this marginalization, and have therefore reoriented their
policies away from promoting economic development towards policies
supporting poor relief, riot control, and military solutions. The United
Nations, for example, has cut back development assistance to put its
main emphasis on humanitarian relief and military intervention.78
With marginalization taking place in advanced, developed countries,
as well as in (former) socialist and Third World nations, significant
shifts are occurring in the core/periphery or North/South metaphors,
moving from geographical connotation(s) describing the dominant-
subordinate relationship of national economies to applying more
accurately to social relationship(s).79 As the developmentalist state
and the welfare state decline, Ghassan Hage suggests that the world
may be moving in the direction of the neo-feudal times
where the boundaries of civilization, dignity and hope no longer coin-

cide with the boundaries of the nation, but with the boundaries of upper-
class society, the social spaces inhabited by an internationally delineated
cosmopolitan class. Increasingly, each nation is developing its own third
world, inhabited by the rejects of global capitalism.80
In the specifically Third World context, the end of the era of import-
substitution as the dominant development strategy enabled the
national bourgeoisie to cut loose its obligatory social solidarity with
other social classes. Instead of cross-class alliances, Prashad argued,
[t]his class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer
relationship with the West for economic gain and consumer pleasure.
328 Sedef Arat-Ko
The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the
standard of the First World.81
James Fergusons analysis of the nature of the shift globalism rep-
resents focuses specifically on the (former) Third World. Neverthe-
less, some of his arguments are also applicable to the former socialist
countries. According to Ferguson, the shift from the previous (devel-
opmentalist) modernization project to the more recent globalist one
marks a radical change in the way inequalities are seen and addressed.
Acknowledging the wide variety of problems that modernization dis-
course had in both theory and practice, especially regarding expec-
tations of the pattern of development and the social and economic
benefits modernization would bring, Ferguson emphasizes that the
discourse was still significant in terms of the political promises it
made. The developmentalism of the modernization project, Fergu-
son argues, promised socio-economic convergence of different coun-
tries and regions around the world. It assumed/promised that given
time, there would be a movement everywhere from tradition to
modernity. This promise of convergence, however, has disappeared
from contemporary discourses altogether. With the end of the prom-
ise for socio-economic convergence over time, the concept of moder-
nity, according to Ferguson, has changed from telos to status, from
a collective vision and hope for the future to a condition of becoming
first-class.
Now with the idea of temporal sequence removed, location in the hier-
archy no longer indexes a stage of advancement, but simply a rank in a
global political economic order.
[R]anks become not stages to be passed through, but nonserialized
statuses, separated from each other by exclusionary walls, rather than
developmental stairways. Modernity in this sense comes to appear as a
standard of living, a status, not a telos.82
As it moves from telos to status, modernization becomes an exclusion-

ary project, despite all the talk about multiple or alternative moder-
nities. The social, economic, and cultural fragmentation that results
is of great significance. Ferguson suggests that [t]he status categories
of the contemporary global order may even come to resemble the
fixed status categories of the preindependence era, when the color bar
segmented the social world into a rich, white, first-class sector and the
poor, black, second-class world of the natives.83
As classes of people, as well as nations, become stuck in the lower end

of the global hierarchy, unable and not expected to move up, their sta-
tus increasingly comes to be seen as naturally or even racially beneath
the ones who have achieved the status of modernity.84 The political
implications of this are very significant. As modernization ceases to be
a promise for all, as ranks in the global order become not stages to be
passed through, but nonserialized statuses, separated from each other
by exclusionary walls, rather than developmental stairways, the key
questions are no longer temporal ones of societal becoming (develop-
ment, modernization), but spatialized ones of policing the edges of a
status group.85
With the collapse of socialism and the death of what Prashad calls
the Third World project, capitalism, and specifically, neoliberal, glo-
balized capitalism, has come to appear inevitable. With the closure of
imagined social, economic, and political possibilities, there has devel-
oped a taken-for-grantedness, and, ultimately, a naturalization of
capitalism. Ironically, what makes capitalism ubiquitous is also what
makes it invisible to most social and political analysis these days.
With the closing off of alternatives and possibilities, neoliberalism
has even in times of apparent failure and crisis gained what we
can call a totalitarian grasp over the common sense mentality that
prevails in society. A totalitarian grasp means that not only is there
market fundamentalism the belief in and celebration of the market as
the criterion with which to judge everything and solve all problems
but there is also an incomprehension, an unintelligibility of or an
absolute refusal to recognize inequality and poverty as systemic and
integral to capitalism. I would like to suggest that this incomprehensi-
bility is what makes the logic of culturalism so central to (totalitarian)
neoliberal mentality. Turning what would be socially, economically,
and politically comprehensible issues into problems of culture, prob-
lems rooted in different and wrong beliefs, values, and lifestyles
of different sectors of humanity, culturalism enables invisibilization,
ridicule, and/or pathologization of resistance to or rejection of the
system and its failures. As neoliberal hegemonies exclude theories that
demonstrate failure as central and integral to the functioning of capital-
ism and inevitable, as social, economic, and historical explanations for
failure are excluded from hegemonic discourses, culture (as a reduc-
tionist, essentialized, shrunk, caricatured version of what the term
could otherwise mean) becomes the only accepted explanation in
mainstream discourse.
330 Sedef Arat-Ko
The increased class distance throughout the world that neoliberal,

capitalist globalization represents materially, but also in social, cultural,
psychological, and political terms, leads to a neoliberal subjectivity on
the part of the middle classes, some of whom benefit from the changes
that this shift involves. Even within sections of the middle class who
are experiencing increased insecurities in the new economy, a new
form of subjectivity often arises, born from the spatial and institutional
fragmentation of societies and from their identification with, and aspi-
rations to join, a global elite. It is in this context of privatization and
fragmentation of public space that notions of public good, civic respon-
sibility, and social justice disappear from middle class imaginaries. As
Brown comments, A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the
opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public.86
As notions of public good disappear, and those who are marginal and
losing in the new economy increasingly appear as other to the win-
ners and winner aspirants, the conditions are created for culturalization
and racialization of (class) differences through the suspicion against
others, the intolerance of difference, the resentment of strangers, and
the demands to separate and banish them, as well as the hysterical,
paranoic concern with law and order.87
Implications of Culturalist Approach to Class
The ethico-political implications of a culturalist language are radically

different from those of a language of class. Discourses that culturalize/
racialize inequalities and injustice conveniently displace explicit char-
acterization of these concepts. The language of class, alternatively,
helps create a shared political space, demonstrating the relationality,
connectedness, and interrelatedness of wealth versus poverty, win-
ning versus losing, in a globalized economy. This language enables
demands for accountability, justice, and change. A language of cul-
ture, on the other hand, fractures and divides social and political
space through the often essentialized and racialized notion of culture
that it uses. An essentialized, ahistoricized, dematerialized language
of culture is precisely the medium through which social inequalities
can be maintained without reference to structural relations, abolish-
ing struggle at an imaginary level so that they need not resolve at a
political one.88
Culturalism attributes race-like qualities to subordinated and
marginalized classes. It makes othering absolute and naturalizes
inequality by attributing social, cultural capital to the new middle class

and justifying the inequalities suffered by those losing or marginal-
ized by neoliberalism as related to their culture, lifestyle choices, and
wrong values. Culturalism leads to invisibilization, or otherwise paro-
dying, to criminalization, and to pathologization of the poor, marginal,
and those struggling under the new economic order. It constitutes the
poor and marginalized as outside the modern nation and globalized
modernity. In doing so, culturalism discourages, disables, or invali-
dates claims to entitlement and challenges possibilities of solidarity
among those negatively affected by modern capitalism and neoliberal-
ism. As culturalism may be central to the ways in which subjectivities
are produced under neoliberalism, challenging culturalism is essential
to challenging neoliberal governmentality and hegemony.
NOTES
1 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37.
2 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for
Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 223.
3 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and
the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
4 Ibid., 17.
5 Arif Dirlik, Interview, in Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with
Contemporary Critics, ed. Shaobo Xie and Fengzhen Wang (Calgary: Univer-
sity of Calgary Press, 2002), 946, 34 for the quotation.
6 Etienne Balibar, Is There a Neo-Racism? Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London and New
York: Verso, 1991), 736; Pierre Andr Taguieff, The New Cultural Racism
in France. Telos, no. 83 (1990): 10922.
7 Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of
Global Capitalism, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial
Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock et al. (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1997), 50158, esp. 518.
8 Ibid., 520.
9 Mike Davis, The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of
Chaos. Social Text 22, no. 4 (2004): 915; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Lon-
don and New York: Verso, 2006).
10 Davis, The Urbanization of Empire, 11.
332 Sedef Arat-Ko
11 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2004).
12 Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, Introduction, in Evil Paradises:
Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2007), ixxiv, xiv for
the quotation.
13 Ibid., xvi.
14 Manning Marable, Globalization and Racialization, Znet (13 August
2004), http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/globalization-and-racialization-by-
manning-marable/.
15 Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the Race
Question in the U.S. New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002): 4160.
16 Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003);
Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture and Empire (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Julia Sudbury, Global Lockdown: Race,
Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005).
17 Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western
Society (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 73. Malik argues
that the original use of the term was much different from the later, popular
uses. He cites Gunnar Myrdal for coining the term in 1963 to emphasize
the dangers of de-industrialization.
18 Alastair Bonnett, How the British Working Class Became White: The
Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialized Capitalism, Journal of Historical Soci-
ology 11, no. 3 (Sept. 1998): 31640, esp. 333. In his article Bonnett demon-
strates the contingent relationship of white privilege to class and shows a
specific relationship to the (welfare) state. The transition in Britain, accord-
ing to Bonnett, from whiteness as a class exclusive, specifically bourgeois,
identity in the laissez-faire capitalism of Victorian Britain to whiteness
as a popular, mass identity applying to the majority of ordinary white
working-class Britons has been achieved largely by the development of the
welfare state and the formation of a white national community through
improvements in public education, health and housing, as well as social
assistance. In recent years, it has not been clear whether such generaliza-
tion of whiteness to the white working class is necessarily the reality
anymore. At the end of his article, Bonnett wonders whether the rollback
of the welfare state, through the exclusion of a section of the working class
from citizenship, will lead to a return to a Victorian order of class and race.
19 Cited in Margaret Weir, From Equal Opportunity to the New Social
Contract, in Racism, the City and the State, ed. Malcolm Cross and Michael
Keith (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 93107, 100 for the
quotation.
20 Malik, The Meaning of Race, 199.
21 Chris Haylett, Working-Class Subjects in the Cosmopolitan City, in
Cosmopolitan Urbanism, ed. Jon Binnie et al. (London: Routledge, 2006),
187203, 199 for the quotation.
22 Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Milton Keynes,
UK: Open University Press, 2005), 76.
23 Ibid.
24 Oscar Lewis, The Culture of Poverty, in On Understanding Poverty: Per-
spectives from the Social Sciences, ed. Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Basic
Books, 1969), 187220.
25 Malik, The Meaning of Race, 198200.
26 Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self and Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 91.
27 Beverley Skeggs, The Re-Branding of Class: Propertising Culture, in
Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities, Lifestyles, ed. Fiona Devine et al. (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4668, 67 for the quotation.
28 Skeggs, Class, Self and Culture, 117.
29 Skeggs, The Re-Branding of Class, 50.
30 Ibid., 49.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 62.
33 Skeggs, Class, Self and Culture, 118.
34 Skeggs, The Re-Branding of Class, 63.
35 Chris Haylett, Illegitimate Subjects? Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modern-
ization, and Middle-class Multiculturalism, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 19, no. 3 (2001): 35170, 352 for the quotation.
36 Ibid., 364.
37 Ibid., 365.
38 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics
in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 132.
39 Ibid., 1312.
40 Ibid., 143.
41 Hatice Kurtulus , Istanbulda Kapal Yerles meler: Beykoz Konaklar
rneg i, in Istanbulda Kentsel Ayrs ma, ed. Hatice Kurtulus (Istanbul:
Baglam, 2005), 16186, esp. 164.
42 Leela Fernandez, The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power
and the Restructuring of Urban Space in India, Urban Studies 41, no. 12
(November 2004), 241530, 2424 for the quotation (emphases added).
334 Sedef Arat-Ko
43 Ibid., 2416 (emphases added).

44 Anthony King, Speaking from the Margins: Postmodernism, Transna-
tionalism, and the Imagining of Contemporary Indian Urbanity, in Global-
ization and the Margins, ed. Richard Grant and John Rennie Short (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002), 7290, 87 for the quotation.
45 Ibid., 83.
46 Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers Genocide, Denial and
Celebration, Countercurrents.org (January 26, 2008). http://www.
countercurrents.org/roy260108.htm.
47 Fernandez, The Politics of Forgetting, 24201.
48 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrink-
ing Society (Sydney, AU: Merlin and Pluto Press, 2003), 1920.
49 Oya Baydar, tekine Yenik Ds en Istanbul (Istanbul as Defeated by the
Other), Istanbul Dergisi, no. 23 (1997): 749. Ironically, Oya Baydar is oth-
erwise known as a left-wing intellectual who had to live in exile in Europe
following the Turkish military coup of 1980.
50 Ibid., 78.
51 Ays e nc, Istanbullular ve tekiler: Kreselcilik agnda Orta Snf
Olmann Kresel Kozmolojisi (Istanbulites and the Others: The Global
Cosmology of Middle Classness in an Age of Globalism), in Istanbul:
Kresel ve Yerel Arasnda (Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local), ed.
aglar Keyder (Istanbul: Iletis im, 2000), 11744; Ays e nc, Global
Consumerism, Sexuality as Public Spectacle, and the Cultural Remapping
of Istanbul in the 1990s, in Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern
Turkey, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti and Ays e Saktanber (London and New York:
I.B. Tauris, 2002), 17190.
52 Ali S imsek, Yeni Orta Snf (Istanbul: L&M (Leyla ile Mecnun) Yaynlar, 2005).
53 nc, Istanbullular ve tekiler, 1356. Like the term varos , the term
maganda has no meaning in the Turkish language. Whereas varos is pos-
sibly adopted from Hungarian, maganda is part of a made-up vocabulary
created in popular culture in this period.
54 It should be noted that with the changes in the political and social c limate
in Turkey in recent years, there have been some changes in notions of
who fits in in Istanbul or Turkeys other major cities. Even though
people with less European and more visibly Muslim appearances
have become part of the recent notions of who fits in to the city, class
exclusions still apply.
55 Anand Teltumbde, Hindu Fundamentalist Politics in India, in Empire
and Neoliberalism in Asia, ed. Vedi R. Hadiz (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2006), 24761.
56 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A Peoples History of the Third World
(Amherst, MA: The New Press, 2007), 217.
57 Michal Buchowski, The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic
Other to Stigmatized Brother, Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (Summer
2006): 46382, 466 for the quotation.
58 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), 7.
59 Buchowski, The Specter of Orientalism in Europe, 465.
60 Ibid., 466, 470.
61 Ibid., 466.
62 Ibid., 468.
63 Elizabeth Dunn, Slick Salesmen and Simple People: Negotiated Capitalism
in a Privatized Polish Firm, in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change
in the Postsocialist World, ed. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery (Lan-
ham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 12550, esp. 1345.
64 Alison Stenning, Where is the Post-Socialist Working Class? Working-
Class Lives in the Spaces of (Post-) Socialism. Sociology 39, no. 5 (2005):
98399, esp. 9834.
65 Ibid., 990.
66 David Kideckel, The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working
Class, in Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, ed. Chris
Hann (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 112132.
67 Ibid., 114.
68 Ibid.
69 Kideckel, The Unmaking; Kideckel, Getting by in Postsocialist Romania:
Labor, the Body and Working Class Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008).
70 Michal Buchowski, Rethinking Transformation: An Anthropological Perspective
on Post-Socialism (Poznan: Humaniora, 2001), 16.
71 Buchowski, The Specter of Orientalism in Europe, 474.
72 Haylett, Working-Class Subjects, 189.
73 Annex(ing) the language of social class has been used by Thomas Frank,
in Lets Talk Class Again, London Review of Books 24, No. 6 (21 March
2002). Frank argues that through their populist discourse, the conserva-
tives in the United States have talked more on class than the liberals have.
The treatment of class in their discourse, however, has been one where
class has become a matter of culture (that of ordinary people versus big
city sophisticates).
74 The terms are Susan J. Smiths in her article Residential Segregation and
the Politics of Racialization, in Racism, the City and the State, ed. Malcolm
Cross and Michael Keith (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 12843.
336 Sedef Arat-Ko
75 Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism:

Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 66.
76 Aziz Al-Azmeh, Postmodern Obscurantism and The Muslim Question,
Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies (JSRI), no. 5 (2003): 2147, 41
for the quotation.
77 Dirlik, Interview, 378.
78 Robert Cox, Critical Political Economy, in International Political Economy:
Understanding Global Disorder, ed. Bjorn Hettne (Halifax: Fernwood and
Zed, 1995), 3145, 41 for the quotation.
79 Ibid., 40.
80 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, 18.
81 Prashad, The Darker Nations, 21718.
82 James Ferguson, Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after
Development, in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Dur-
ham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 16681, 175 for the quotation.
83 Ibid., 175.
84 Ibid., 177.
85 Ibid., 176, 179.
86 Brown, Edgework, 43.
87 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 47.
88 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 7.
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13Race and the Management of Labour
in United States History
elizabeth e s ch an d david ro e d i g e r
An industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requires,

like a real army, officers [managers], and sergeants [foremen, overlookers],
who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. The
work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function.
Karl Marx1
John R. Commons, the staid liberal reformer who founded academic

labour history in the United States, and Ernest Riebe, the funny, fight-
ing cartoonist of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), doubtless
had very little in common politically. Commons supported American
Federation of Laborstyle unionism, worrying when its limited social
goals strayed beyond collective bargaining. Riebe offered IWW publi-
cations the adventures of Mr. Block, the clueless, conformist anti-hero
whose misadventures showed just how much misplaced faith in the
beneficence of capitalists, politicians, and police that workers would
have to shed to make a revolution. And yet Riebe and Commons shared
an understanding of the relationship between race and the manage-
ment of labour, one that seemed crystal clear to them as early twenti-
eth century observers of American workplaces, but that is quite lost to
historians today. In 1907, Commonss Races and Immigrants in America
argued, well after Frederick Winslow Taylor had marketed scientific
management, that US management had shown just one symptom of
originality, namely playing one race against the other.2 Six years
later Louisiana lumberjacks struggling for a union would laugh bit-
terly over a Mr. Block comic wonderfully named He Meets Others
(see Figure 13.1).
Figure 13.1 Mr. Block: He Meets Others. Cartoon from 1913, by Ernest
Riebe, the funny, fighting cartoonist of the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), depicting Mr. Block. (Ernest Riebe, Twenty-Four Cartoons of Mr. Block
[Minneapolis: Block Supply Company, 1913], n.p.)
342 Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger
In the strip, a well-dressed manager circulates from one racialized

group of workers to another Anglo Saxon, Irish, German, Italian, Chi-
nese, Polish, and Black. Drawn to resemble Mr. Block these various oth-
ers are played against one another by the manager. Threatening and
cajoling them to greater competition and productivity through appeals
to masculinity, to fear, and to racial and national divisions, by the last
frame the manager is reclining peacefully, having succeeded in getting
the various workers to work frantically while swapping racial slurs.3
Managers, so central to the racial functioning of the workplace in the
narratives offered by Commons and Riebe, scarcely appear in accounts
of the history of white supremacy and class in US history. Yet manag-
ers, we argue, were never outside of the US racial system. Further, the
degree to which management understood itself as possessing scientific
knowledge links it to, rather than distinguishes it from, the organiza-
tion of work under slavery. For us, the separation of slavery from the
mainstream of both labour and economic history leads to impover-
ished accounts that suppose there was no sustained literature on the
management of labour until the 1880s. Yet the outpouring of studies
on managing slaves, and even on managing slaves scientifically in the
antebellum years, reveals how deeply entwined racial and managerial
knowledge had already become. However unexplored, links between
race and management are profound. Commonss striking connection of
the cutting edge of management with the bloody history of race con-
trasts sharply with the bloodless efficiency of stop watches and assem-
bly lines that prevail and that often focused the hopes of progressive
reformers like Commons himself.4
Labour historians have participated in the failure to see the ways race
shaped the managerial personality, which functioned in the workplace
as the daily representative of capital. In perhaps the two most influen-
tial studies of the innovations and peculiarities of US management by
Marxists, race is either little present, in the case of Harry Bravermans
important work, Labour and Monopoly Capital (1975), or transcended
by capital, in that of Antonio Gramsci (1971). The provocative and
neglected sections on management in C.L.R. Jamess American Civili-
zation are silent regarding race. The most searching critique building
on Marxism, but seeking to transcend the tendency of Marxist scholars
to divorce labour from the specific bodies and histories of those per-
forming it, remains the opening chapter of Lisa Lowes Immigrant Acts
(1996). Lowe shows the stakes involved in a theoretical challenge to
abstractions practiced in the name of materialism and even at times
Race and Management of Labour in United States History 343
of interracialism. She powerfully demonstrates why Marxism is indis-

pensable, and why too much of Marxist scholarship is slow to appre-
hend the specific history of the United States where race, capital, and
class are concerned.5
Lowe argues that Marxism has too often stopped at allowing for race-
making processes like the slave trade and the seizing of native lands
only in an early period of primitive accumulation, though race-making
continued to matter greatly in the history of capitalism. She insists that in
the worlds most developed capitalist nation the connection of race and
exploitation persisted and ramified, driving the accumulation of capital
and shaping subsequent strategies of rule. In the history of the United
States, Lowe writes, capital has maximized its profits not through ren-
dering labor abstract but precisely through the social productions of
difference, ... marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gen-
der.6 It will not do, of course, to simply turn things over and make
management all about race. But Commons was right that race hovered
over and permeated the processes through which US labour was chosen
and bossed. Race management came into being far before scientific
management, and the two for a time coexisted as complementary rather
than alternative strategies to extract production and profit.
Indeed, if anything, Commonss formulation underplays the broad
connections between racial knowledge and management. While racial
competition functioned as one important moment and motive in link-
ing management and race, the idea of a hierarchically understood pro-
cess of racial development undergirded slavery, settler expansion,
and industrial capitalist growth, making the ability to manage other
races a distinctly white contribution to civilization.7 This article offers
modest suggestions for how the project of considering such a large and
understudied topic might be undertaken.
We begin with the relationships of settler colonialism and especially
slavery to the management of work. A second section details the ways
late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialism sent into the
world not only capital and soldiers, but also American mining engi-
neers and other managers whose claims to expertise turned on their
supposed knowledge of race and racial development and their experi-
ence with exploiting racial divisions among workers. Finally, we return
to Commons, considering how race management and scientific man-
agement coexisted well into the twentieth century domestically, with
the most enlightened managers countenancing and furthering the
playing of races against each other.
Settlement, Slavery, and the White Managerial Impulse
In connecting management and race, Commons bespoke longstand-

ing, even foundational, American traditions. As members of both a
white settler and a slaveholding society, Americans developed a sense
of themselves as white by casting their race as uniquely fit to manage
land and labour, and by judging how other races might come and go in
the service of that project. Dispossession of Indians, and the changes
in the land that it entailed and celebrated, found much justification in
the supposed inability of indigenous people to manage the resources
at their command.8 Early American management decisions centred on
what sort (and quickly on what race) of coerced labour was most
economical, skilled, durable, efficient, and tractable. After a period in
which Indian slavery seemed a possibility, the last century of the colo-
nial period featured cycles of favouring white indentured servants or
African slaves. Management-by-ethnicity led slave traders and own-
ers to attempt to discern in Africans putative propensities to survive
and to resist, making such matters measurable and marketable accord-
ing to the tribe of those imported. Similarly, in the fur trade, judging
the abilities and fostering the willingness of specific Indian tribes and
individuals to organize and defend the gathering and transport of vast
quantities of furs defined management.9
It was clearly in the nineteenth century when race management
became formalized into the thoroughly modern practices and discourses
that Commons had in mind. The factory and plantation coexisted as
the most spectacular sites for management of labour in the Americas
with, if anything, the latter providing models for the former. As Robin
Blackburn has written, By gathering the workers under one roof, and
subordinating them to one discipline, the new industrial employers
were ... adapting the plantation model.10 The words overseer, nam-
ing the manager who surveilled and sped up the labour of slaves, and
supervisor, naming the manager performing just the same roles in
industry, have the same literal meaning. Similarly, the word factories
had named the West African staging areas gathering labouring bod-
ies for the slave trade and then for the production of cotton, making
possible the textile factories of England and New England.11
Antebellum US politics, as well as economics, turned on the rela-
tive merits of free versus slave labour. Such discussions easily devolved
into considerations of the (dis)abilities of African American labour, in
the fields and especially in manufacturing, as against those of white
labour or of the Irish race. Far from simply arraying the industrial
North versus the agrarian South, the debates on these matters saw cap-
italists in the two regions study and debate not only the relative merits
of slavery and free labour, but also the productivity of black versus
white workers. In the 1850s, 20 per cent of all manufacturing capital
was invested in the South, and the slaveholders most inclined towards
pro-slavery Southern nationalism often led the highly theorized and
quantified charge for more such investments. When white skilled
workers protested to the federal government over their replacement
by slaves in the Norfolk Dry Dock in 1830, managements response
showed how thoroughly difference could be quantified and how easily
distinctions between slave and free slipped to become those between
black and white. Stones hammered by White Men cost precisely
$4.05 more than those hammered by blacks in one sample. Ironmas-
ters calculated and reached similar conclusions, despite worries that
slaves perhaps wasted more pig iron and charcoal in the production
process. Even as the Civil War raged, the Richmond Examiner found
time for disquisitions on race management, broaching the possibility
that the South could rectify its mistake in employing black labour too
overwhelmingly in agriculture. It argued that a refurbished system of
bondage based on an elaborate ... subdivision of labor could respond
to both the advanced intelligence and the thievish propensities
of slaves, and therefore constituted the key to the management of
therace.12
Calculations leading to the replacement of free Black workers in ser-
vice and seaports in the North by desperately poor Irish immigrants
hinged on the extent that such desperation made the Irish willing to
underbid African Americans in terms of wages. But the transition
from one group to the other, and the threat that other reversals could
occur, also featured broad discussions of whether the African or the
Irish race was more tractable and efficient. When, for example, the
wealthy New York City hater of Irish Americans, George Templeton
Strong, maintained that the Irish had prehensile paws, not hands,
his judgment came in the context of extracting labour from immi-
grant workers at his home and quickly led to comparisons: Southern
Cuffee seems of a higher social grade than Northern Paddy.13 The
antebellum replacement of white American-born helps in domestic
labour with servants of the Irish race likewise involved scrutiny
and comparison, as did the turn from native-born to Irish women in
Northern textile mills.14
The potential for the so-called development of Africans as workers

and as a race was a central preoccupation of slaveholders, as a volumi-
nous managerial literature made clear. In the major journals, published
work at least as frequently focused on the management of [N]egroes
as on the management of slaves. When the title referred to slaves,
the practical issues like housing rations, supervision, discipline, and
diet, bulked larger. When the subject was proclaimed to be managing
[N]egroes, broad pronouncements on racial difference more consis-
tently appeared as part of the calculus of how to run an efficient, pro-
ductive plantation or farm. But the differences were far from absolute as
business knowledge and racial knowledge were thoroughly mixed, and
the major plantation management journals often took the makeup of
Africans into account. Masters even imagined a serendipitous innate
characteristic of Africans that utterly deflected abolitionist charges
regarding mistreatment of slaves. They were a people, so this theory
argued, whose ethnical element, like the mule, restricts the limits of
arbitrary power over [them]. Thus, the Southern Cultivator praised the
new owner of a failing plantation for one day shooting many sickly
cattle and horses to set an example of his ruthlessness in front of his
labour force, while promising to kill 150 underperforming slaves the
next. The journal reported that the master then staged a consultation
with an overseer who persuaded him to spare the slaves, agreeing to
let them live for an eighteen-month probationary period. The South-
ern Cultivator reassured its readers that even using such a feigned stay
of execution to produce a new spirit of industry among the slaves
did not constitute brutality since the Creator seems to have planted
in the negro an innate principle of protection against the abuse of
arbitrary power.15
The assumption that a race, as well as a group of individuals, was
being managed sometimes shaped the very ways that productivity was
organized and measured among slaves. A lively recent debate among
historians of accountancy presses this set of issues usefully. Richard
Fleishman and Thomas Tyson argue that racism at times contributed
to the decision of plantation managers to eschew compiling individ-
ual production data, concentrating instead on gangs, in a discussion
focusing on Hawaiian sugar production but also discussing sugar in
antebellum Louisiana. The crude distinction between full hands and
half hands by Louisiana masters suggests some attempt to balance
individual and group productivity, though in parts of the South the
ideal was to manage individual slaves in a quantifiable system of tasks.
In any case, the formation of workers into a gang that, as many planter-
managers boasted, could be driven, was explicitly seen in racial
terms. You could never depend on white men, the refrain went, and
you couldnt drive them any; they wouldnt stand it.16 Walter Johnson
has shown that race management reached even into the understanding
of the value of so-called mixed-race slaves. Lighter-skinned women,
for reasons situated at the intersection of European standards of beauty
and the practice of sexual exploitation by masters, were more highly
priced than darker-skinned African women. But among slaves who
were men, a light skin generally decreased value as managerial com-
mon sense dictated that mixed-race slaves could withstand hot and
backbreaking labour in sugar production less well and that they were
more likely to be unmanageable workers prone to running away.17
The most celebrated scientific pro-slavery thought to emerge
from the Deep South came squarely out of the imperatives of manage-
ment and for the justification of the system in the face of abolitionist
attacks. On the latter score, the idea that Southern masters believed that
they knew, and therefore could develop, the Negro, loomed large. In
describing his own system of management and what he did for slaves,
one planter-expert wrote of acting on the conviction that man is as
much duty bound to improve and cultivate his fellow-men as he is to
cultivate and improve the ground. Paternalism and Christianity fig-
ured in his arguments, but so too did claims to a managerial knowledge
serving racial development. Since race management in the antebellum
plantation South was often about this promise of racial development, it
meshed perfectly with the reality that planters profited from growth in
the value of their slaves, not just in the value of crops. Managing in ways
designed to produce unscarred slaves developed these people both as
the assets of owners and as the race of Africans. The claim to superior
knowledge of Africans seen as necessary for plantation management
and race development based itself on mastering slaves in production.18
The practice of race management linked race and work early and
powerfully. By the 1830s, the kinds of danger, filth, overwork, and sub-
servience that could be particularly demanded of African American
workers, free and slave, had spawned a racist linguistic Americanism,
the concept of nigger work enduringly entering the language. Simi-
larly, to work hard came to be termed niggering it alongside usages
like slave like a nigger. Others derided whites who worked in cotton
and sugar cultivation as those who make [N]egroes of themselves.
Specific jobs were connected to the race management practices directed
against the vulnerable workers doing them. When poor, often immi-
grant, whites so needed those jobs that they displaced or joined black
workers in doing them, they heard the term white (or, increasingly
Irish) nigger. Occupational dangers were also managed around race
and slave status, though in contradictory ways. Frederick Law Olmsted
famously recorded an instance in which Irish workers were preferred
on a very dangerous draining job even though the Virginia planter
employing them thought a [N]egro could do twice as much work, in a
day, as an Irishman. The planter reasoned that an Irish workers death,
unlike a slaves, did not cost capital. However, Illinois excluded the
Shawneetown salt mines from its ban on slavery because slave miners
were seen as more racially suited for the perilous work in them. Race
management was deadly business.19
The physician, slaveholder, and University of Louisiana professor,
Dr. Samuel Cartwright, famously identified two major African patholo-
gies while writing in the Southern regional, agricultural, and manage-
ment journal, De Bows Review, in 1851. The first condition, the disease
causing absconding from service by slaves was termed drapetomania
by Cartwright, who called the second dysaesthesia Aethiopica, an illness
diagnosed by observing an inefficient, seemingly half asleep perfor-
mance on the job. These symptoms and their cures preventively ...
whipping the devil out of potential drapetomaniacs and avoiding any
possibility of negro liberty to avoid dysaesthesia make it impos-
sible for us to take Cartwrights science seriously, but antebellum
experts suffered few such qualms. His seemingly bizarre combination
of emphases on the status of the conditions he invented as individual
maladies, if socially produced, and as parts of a complex of inherited
racial inferiorities, capture a pattern that runs through race manage-
ment. At bottom, the enterprise hinged on both a firm sense of biologi-
cally determined white supremacy and on the malleability that made
managing possible, and in Cartwrights view, necessary. He argued,
from the Bible and from science, that Africans literally possessed an
inherited racial instinct, housed in the feet and knees, to genuflect
before whites. Without productive management the loss of this instinct
produced disease and disaster. Also innate was a love to act as body
servant or lacquey, a tendency to glory in a close, hot atmosphere, a
proclivity to desire being punished by whips rather than other devices,
and an ethnological peculiarity ensuring that any deserved punish-
ment, inflicted with a switch, cowhide or whip, puts them into a good
humor. Cartwright slid from seeing the conditions he described as
curable, preventable diseases afflicting only a minority of slaves to sug-

gesting a more constitutional and obdurate problem.20
Cartwright specified two distinct ways his supposed knowledge
was a race managers wisdom. He first chided Northern scientists for
being blind to matters so clear to masters and overseers who were in
daily contact with slaves, claiming that free Blacks in the North dis-
played dysaesthesic symptoms almost universally, but that the absence
of masters made both diagnosis and cure impossible outside the South.
However, he then confined real knowledge to the slaveholding class,
underlining the conclusions drawn by some advice literature on slave
management that insisted that the masters racial knowledge excelled
that of overseers. The latter, he complained, wrongly dismissed slave
misbehaviour as rascality rather than scientifically seeing it as disease
and inferiority.21
Such claims, as W.E.B. Du Bois long ago observed, had far-reaching
impact on the development of white supremacist thought far beyond
the South. To the watching world, a racism designed to manage
what Du Bois called slave industry seemed the carefully thought-
out result of experience and reason. Indeed in other, and even more
unlikely, areas as well, the seminal, if controversial, intellectual work
of Professor Cartwright grew out of race management. In his tortured
foray into theology in order to develop the minority pro-slavery posi-
tion that Africans were a pre-Adamic separate race who profited by
enslavement under superior Caucasians, Cartwright read plantation
management back into the Bibles earliest pages. He hinged a circu-
itous argument on the retranslation of words that had made Ham the
father of Cush and others as making him a head man, manager, or
overseer of the nacash [Negro] race. Thus, only those mastering and
managing slaves could fully appreciate the ethnology and theology of
the early Old Testament. Here Cartwright showed more respect for the
wisdom of overseers. As Cartwright wrote in 1860, The Bible tells us
certain facts about negroes which none but the best informed planters
and overseers know at the present day. Similarly, Cartwright premised
his scholarship in ethnology squarely on the perceived need those who
managed slaves had for racial knowledge. Those lacking such ethno-
logical knowledge, he maintained, have great trouble in managing
[N]egroes. He continued, If their ethnology were better understood,
their value would be greatly increased.22
Cartwrights work is widely cited as foundational in scientific racism,
though its place as a central text in the history of American management
is seldom assayed. Indeed, his simple treatment for the slow-working

hebetude accompanying dysaesthesia Aethiopica was to make slaves
work harder, therefore sending more oxygen to their brains. Manage-
ment compelled the African labourer to work, to inhale vital air, and
to be transformed from the bipedum nequissimus or arrant rascal that he
was supposed to be to a healthy good negro that can handle hoe or
plow. Such pseudo-quantified science of work captured much of the
sense, nonsense, and circularity of race managements to come.23
Transnationalizing Race Management: From Confidence

Men to Mining Engineers
For all of the attention paid by antebellum political economists and

slave-drivers to race and productivity, Herman Melvilles novel, The
Confidence Man, remains the best source on the far-flung sources and
implications of preCivil War race management. The ship on which the
story is set crosses the confluence with the Ohio River as it proceeds
down the Mississippi, leaving behind a stretch in which the water
divides free and slave states. It enters as the nation seemed about
to do itself in 1857 when the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision and the
novel both appeared a place where all territory is slave territory. As
the transition takes place at the novels very centre and after a playful
and masterful section touching on race and mining, characters debate
not only abolition and bondage but labour generally. A contractor of
unfree labour parading as a sentimental reformer (critics have generally
taken him to be the shifty title character in disguise) offers to provide
a good boy to a misanthrope soured on believing that any young
worker would ever be able to satisfy his need for steady and honest
help. In answer to the self-interested reformers pieties regarding the
essential goodness of all boys, the misanthrope lists a racialized litany
of the young workers he has tried, I speak from fifteen years experi-
ence; five and thirty boys; American, Irish, English, German, African,
Mulatto; not to speak of that China boy sent me by one who well knew
my perplexities, from California; and that Lascar boy from Bombay.
Thug! I found him sucking the embryo life from my spring eggs. All
rascals, sir, every soul of them; Caucasian or Mongol.24
The multiplicity of types suggests the ways that a world labour mar-
ket enlivened debates on race management. During a decade when calls
to re-open the African slave trade became insistent, the emergent coo-
lie trade from Asia to the Caribbean and elsewhere already framed, as
Moon-Ho Jung demonstrates, discussions of slavery and labour and the

ways workers might be pitted against each other in the United States.
By Reconstruction, pro-coolie planters and supporters, betraying
what Jung calls an unyielding fascination with race, saw importation
of Chinese labour as a way to break Sambo from the sense that he
was master of the southern situation.25 One newspaper editorialized
that most planters sought Chinese labour because they believed it to
be more easily managed, and do better work, although much slower.
The paper praised racial competition as much as the virtues of any indi-
vidual race, promising that entry of 100,000 Chinese workers would
make the negro a much more reliable laborer.26 Former slave-trader
and slave-master, and literally murderous Confederate general, Nathan
Bedford Forrest, became an entrepreneur in new arenas and a railway
manager after the war, even as he became the leader of the terrorist
Ku Klux Klan. He alternated between proclaiming African labour the
worlds best, and therefore seeking new importations of African guest-
workers, and encouraging schemes to import Chinese labour, in both
cases to compete with existing local labour supplies.27
Race management also opened the West, with gang labour in the
unprecedented 1860s construction of the transcontinental railroad
frankly structured by competition that sometimes spilled over into vio-
lence of Irish versus Chinese gangs on unspeakably dangerous jobs.
The relatively cheap labour, and vulnerability, of the former group
influenced even how the road was engineered, with inexpensive,
imperiled labour substituting for wooden support structures. As with
racialized gang labour elsewhere, the whole gang was paid, with man-
agement in one instance declaring that because Chinese workers were
indistinguishable from each other, individual wage payments would
have opened the possibility of the same worker drawing double pay.28
Indeed while most such discourse was seemingly domestically pro-
duced, tied to North/South sectional conflict rooted in slavery, Melville
rightly insisted on a context of trade and empire in framing all discus-
sion of race and management. In his short story The Gees, he offers
a short, enigmatic and rollicking sketch of how whites, and particularly
white managers of maritime work, claimed racial knowledge of the
Afro-Portuguese from the island Fogo. Melville locates the production
of racial knowledge that he ridicules within an Atlantic system of trade,
folklore, and, above all, management. As Carolyn Karcher shows, the
broader target of Melvilles merciless satire is US ethnological writing
on race, particularly that of Cartwright. Melvilles over-the-top account
undermines all expert claims to scientific and managerial rigour, per-

fectly capturing its offhandedness, circularity, and selfishness without
losing sight of its import. Ethnology regularly collapses in Melvilles
sketch into a ridiculous managerial how-to, advising captains on meth-
ods to capture the beam of evil in eyes of experienced Gee sailors
attempting to pose as innocent and tractable green Gees in order
to be hired. The most important judgments regarding Gees hinged
on which ones to hire. Such decisions are best left to Gee jockeys,
men well-versed in Gees, that is, management experts who then
proved to know nothing either.29
Nonetheless, the claim to possess such expert knowledge, as Melville
spelled out again in his even more bitter Benito Cereno, enabled US
race managers to proceed across the continent and in the wider world
(in Benito Cereno the sea captain spouting elaborate US pretenses
to racial knowledge manages to fully miss seeing the occurrence of a
slave revolt).30 Well before the Philippine war, a striking number of for-
mer slave-owning or slave-trading Southerners found work and wealth
by claiming expertise in the capture and management of Pacific Island
forced labour being brought into Fiji and Queensland.31 Race was ulti-
mately central to both industrial management at home and to impe-
rial capitalist expansion. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo added
much of Mexico to the United States, one US editor summed up what
Ron Takaki has called the metaphysics of Mexican-hating as the tri-
umph of the managerial: The nation that makes no outward progress ...
that wastes its treasures wantonly that cherishes not its resources
such a nation will burn out [and] become the prey of the more
adventurous enemy.32 The old argument that the English-speaking
race embodied wise management continued to add its part to empire
building. In 1896, Andrew Carnegie, commenting on British actions in
Venezuela, would write of the dubious ways that indigenous land
had been seized, but conclude that nonetheless upon the whole the
management of the land acquired by our race has been for the higher
interests of humanity. Indeed civilization made the acquisition of
the land necessary; it was well that the Maori should fade away, and
give way to the intelligent, industrious citizen, a member of our race.33
In large measure, the cohabitation of race management and manage-
ment science matured among US managers outside the country before
it became so highly noticed at home. Arguably the greatest US export
in the quarter century after 1890 was the mining engineer, and with him
US capital goods. Technically well-trained, such engineers replaced
European experts in Asian, Mexican, South American, Australian, and

African mines in significant measure because they could so loudly pro-
claim a knowledge gained at the intersection of race and management.
Such engineers often gained experience in western US mines, where
decisions regarding which races (the term then marked differences of
European nationality as well as broad colour divisions) could live in
the white mans camp were central to all management. In Columbia
Universitys ambitious 1950s interviews of mining engineers with far-
flung careers, Ira Joralemon was one interviewee who learned race (and
gender) management in the Southwest and took it into wider worlds.
In Arizonas Ajo mine, he recalled, a lot of Papago Indians did the
dangerous and hard work of sinking the pit. Swedes from Minnesota,
typed as jackpine savages when they mined in proximity to Indi-
ans in that state, quickly joined the ranks of the mines drill men. The
Swedes, according to Joralemon, were so tough that the squaw men
around Ajo, who lived with their families out in the desert, called the
new drillers the savages.34
Men like Joralemen claimed an ability to know and to boss native
and racially divided labour worldwide. South African mines became
the site of the most spectacular influx of US management. There fully
half of new gold mines had US managers by 1895; William Honnold
was among the most powerful of the Yankee engineers. Insisting that
some employers are unqualified or temperamentally unfit to manage
crude labor, Honnold held in 1908 that to recall American experi-
ence with the efficiency of negroes could clarify much in South Afri-
can mines, where he resisted proposals to bring in African American
miners based on the judgment that American niggers ... would be the
very worst thing that could be introduced.35
As central figures in the cult of the Yankee mining engineer, Herbert
and Lou Hoover began to be celebrated after 1900 as the nations most
modern transnational couple. Herbert gave the name Golden Age
to the triumph of US engineers in the worlds mines. Though press-
agented as the Doctor of Sick Mines and the nations highest-salaried
man for his work as a transnational engineer whose most spectacular
adventure-capitalist exploits brought efficiency to Africa, China, and
isolated areas of Australia, Hoover might as easily deserve the simpler
title of race manager. In Australia, he thought that the saucy inde-
pendence and loafing proclivities of local white miners required
a counter-weight. Hoover ranked groups of indigenous Australians
eagerly but called all of them niggers and judged even superior
ones as having too little intelligence to work very much. He there-

fore pitted the races against each other by importing crews of Ital-
ian immigrants and keeping them in reserve in order to hold the
property against the possibility of a general strike. In the context of an
Australian Labor Partybacked inquiry into the use of Italian labour,
Hoovers associate gave the fuller logic of the choice. Italians, he reck-
oned, were more servile and peaceable Hoover himself put the
advantage of Italian labour at a ratio of 26:15 on one work gang but
the real benefit lay in the racial competition itself. Management would
be in a mess if they had all aliens or all British. It was mixed labour
that provided the real payoffs.36
An eager consumer and producer of reports that judged the relative
efficiency of African, Chinese, and white miners on the Rand in South
Africa, Hoover was accustomed to calculating productivity by weigh-
ing coloured shifts and coloured wages against those of whites.
His own most extensive calculations on race and management involved
Chinese workers. Hoover, who once extravagantly wrote that he had
strongly supported restriction of Asiatic immigration to the United
States from the moment that he could think and talk, made much
of his early career as an engineer in North China. He continually com-
mented on race and productivity there. At times he conveyed that data
to attract investment in China, and at other times to explain why more
dramatic gains in efficiency had not been made under his watch. In
a prominent appearance before an international congress of engineers
in London in 1902, for example, Hoover wrote of the mulishness
of Chinese miners and of a capacity for thieving [that] permits the
abstraction of nails, screws, nuts and even coal. However, he cheer-
ily concluded, money could be saved on timbers supporting mines
because the resulting tragedies only had to be compensated at thirty
dollars per death, given what he perversely saw as the disregard for
human life among the Chinese.37
Hoover mixed impressions and calculations in his varied pronounce-
ments on the Chinese worker, always claiming knowledge if not consis-
tency. Chinese thieving was epidemic, but at other junctures judged
as no worse than the worlds norm. He credited arguments that it was
premodern Chinese cultural practices regarding mining that interfered
with operations, and then turned on a dime to offer the more rational
view that dwelling on superstition was a great mistake. Hoover then
added, The Chinese mine as fast as anyone if they believe that there
is anything in it for them. The main reason for the riots against our
mines and miners was the Chinese dislike of seeing foreigners make
capital out of their soil.38 The ratios of race and productivity that
Hoover fabricated, to the delight of commentators at international con-
ferences, similarly varied wildly. In 1900, he supposed that Chinese
miners produced a fifth of what white workers did, since for the former
group to work, in the sense of Western miners, is an unheard-of exac-
tion. Two years later, the Chinese worker had no equal in the world
for crude labour, though an accompanying chart counted him only a
quarter as productive as the American in such work, and for one-
twelfth the pay. For miners, the newly calculated ratio was 1:8, with
Chinese miners paid a sixth as much and therefore less profitable than
whites.39
When he published Principles of Mining in 1909, Hoover produced a
chart on South African mines, amalgamating data on African and Chi-
nese workers there. He also purportedly reflected on data from the Chi-
nese in China to conclude that in simple tasks like shoveling one white
man equals from two to three of the colored races. In more highly
skilled work, the average ratio is ... one to seven, or ... even eleven.
Hoovers memoirs explained the productivity differences as racial,
though all of his writings offer the possibility, common in progressive
thought, that longstanding cultural habits mattered as much as biology
in making race. Our inventions and machinery came out of our racial
instincts and qualities, he held. Our people learn easily how to make
them work efficiently. The Chinese, a less mechanical-minded people
than the European-descended races ... require many times more men to
operate our intricate machines.40
Groping towards an ersatz uniting of the interests of capital and
labour around race, Hoover departed substantially from the editorial
view of the influential Engineering and Mining Journal, which maintained
that mine operators find it economical to make the best of whatever
native labor may be available, arguing that it could be trained up to
American or European standards, rather than deal with sickly and
entitled imported white miners.41 However, he never argued that non-
white labour must be barred from unskilled work, only that wages,
opportunities, expectations, and conditions of competition be adjusted
by knowledgeable race managers, whose ability to calculate advantages
aggrandized their roles. In South Africa, Hoover closely associated with
Honnold, a pair John Higginson has wonderfully termed formidable
enemies of South Africas black and white workers. Indeed for all of
his doubts as to their efficiency, Hoover played an active role with the
Chinese Engineering and Mining Company in recruiting over 60,000

indentured Chinese to work in South African mines. At a time when
African miners were massively withdrawing their labour from jobs in
which wages had decreased and dangerous accidents were increas-
ing, and when organized skilled white miners commanded great social
power in the industry, importing Chinese workers seemed to offer a
great opportunity to play races against each other. The particular task
of sinking ever deeper mines rested on new technologies for recovery
of less rich ore, but, as Higginson shows, it also hinged on the con-
cealment of death and of managements role in producing it. Chinese
and African miners were made to drill perilously into walls in shafts
insufficiently supported by timbering; Chinese miners were especially
blamed for the resulting cave-ins, from which neither skill nor white-
ness offered protection.42
When employing non-white labour, Hoover also indulged in pater-
nal fantasies of generalized racial uplift, balancing racial competition
with what was called race development in the early twentieth century.
Such alternating currents of race management and race development
helped give rise to a thoroughly modern US imperialism. Perhaps the
firm who most practised race management in part via race develop-
ment was the Ford Motor Company. Hoovers actions in the world
were mirrored by Henry Ford at home, whose foremen and managers
set immigrant races against each other even as company-paid social
workers claimed to be developing people as a whole through educa-
tion in Americanism and intrusive home visits from company sociolo-
gists.43 African American workers at Ford outnumbered those in all
other auto plants combined, yet rather than suggesting a lack of con-
cern with racial justice in its plants, Fords hiring of African Americans
reveals a sophisticated if contradictory approach to management
via race. That the flagship journal of modern US empire, Foreign Affairs,
evolved from the tellingly titled Journal of Race Development, sug-
gests that few architects of US empire did their work outside a racial
framework.44
Scientific Management, Racist Science, and the Studied

Unstudiedness of Race Management
The ways in which race management coexisted with scientific manage-

ment in the United States deserve our attention, as they are the clearest
examples of how fully compatible with the innovations of capitalism
were the atavisms of race. The come-and-go hopes of Melvilles mis-

anthrope as he sought the perfect racial and national types to produce
the ideal worker seem utterly at odds with the science of management
that Frederick Winslow Taylor is credited with inventing in the late
nineteenth century. Yet Commons was able to maintain otherwise, in
part because Taylors ideas existed alongside crude practices of race
management. More importantly, the famous example that Taylor him-
self used to educate the public regarding his systems ability to cre-
ate high-priced men, by selecting them studiously and regimenting
their motions scientifically, suggests overlap between managerial sci-
ence and race management. In the example, even as he insisted that
the key to effective management was to re-make individuals, Taylor
chose Schmidt as the first worker to re-train into a new regimen, in
moving an abandoned stock of pig-iron suddenly made valuable by
the Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippines War. He did so with racial
attributes much in mind. Schmidts name, and Taylors description,
emphasized that Schmidts agreement to submit to the new system,
and his ability to produce, flowed in part from his membership in
the German race. Schmidt embodied the strength, doggedness, and
love of savings thought by Taylor to be peculiarly concentrated in the
Pennsylvania Dutch, as Germans in the area were called.45
Taylors racial logic in the Schmidt example did not run through the
whole of his writing. His desire to uproot the arbitrary power of fore-
men and other petty bosses placed Taylor among those management
experts whose formal system left the least room for day-to-day uses of
stormy racial competition to extract production. But more broadly, the
race-thinking that informed Taylors presentation of his new system, by
introducing listeners and readers to Schmidt, did comport with larger
patterns that saw race management survive, and even expand, in the
early years of the era of scientific management. As David Montgom-
ery has written of the period in which scientific management flowered,
all managers seem[ed] to agree with International Harvesters H.A.
Worman, who held that each race has aptitude for certain kinds of
work. However, Montgomery slyly and as we shall see, weightily
adds that they could disagree utterly about which race was best for
what. Montgomery further observed that the trend towards person-
nel management as a complement to Taylorism specifically extended
the purview of scientific management from the factory itself to the sur-
rounding community, a development that flowed directly from the
concern with recruiting from specific ethnic groups.46
Montgomery was right about both the ubiquity and durability of race
management on the one hand, and its haphazardness regarding which
races performed best in what jobs on the other. In 1915, an iron industry
journal went so far as to challenge the adequacy of the very term com-
mon labor on the grounds that such labor is racial, so that iron and
steel actually did not compete in recruiting employees with other lines of
work. Immigrants of some races, it held, turn chiefly to agriculture,
some to the vending of fruit, others to the making of clothing, and others
seek the coke works, blast furnaces and steel mills. At times, manage-
ment literature recorded how races should be slotted into jobs. John
Williams, who presided over the Philadelphia Association for the Dis-
cussion of Labor Problems, wrote during World War I that in fabricating
steel, grinders ought to be Polish, Lithuanians or Americans. Finish-
ers were to be Italian or American girls (and, or perhaps therefore, not
flirty) and forgers either Americans or American Poles. The elaborate
chart ranking three dozen immigrant races according to their fitness
for three dozen job types and conditions, posted at Pittsburgh Central
Tube in 1925 (see Figure 13.2), assembled a much more impressive num-
ber of opinions systematizing a huge factory and the peoples in it in
upwards of a thousand multicoloured squares.
But in all of these cases, judgments were extremely crude, gather-
ing up managerial and professional folklore and summing up exist-
ing prejudices and practices. Italians, according to the Pittsburgh chart,
allegedly excelled with pick and shovel but could not handle serving
as helpers for engineers. Armenians ranked good in none of the
twenty-two job categories listed, and rose to fair only once: wheel-
barrow. Americans, White could do any job at least at a fair level
and excelled in most. Jews supposedly fit well into no industrial jobs.
Portuguese workers rated as poor in seven of eight atmospheric con-
ditions and joined Mexicans and Filipinos lacking capacity to work on
the night shift, or the day one.47
Montgomerys second point is perhaps more interesting: the con-
stant but superficial attention to race in management literature did not
require close empirical investigation of which races produced best in
what jobs. The Immigration Commission report of 1911 posited virtual
unanimity among employers about the idea that South Italians were
the most inefficient race or nationality. This coexisted with Pittsburgh
Steel placing Italians in the most efficient third, above Canadians, of
all racial groups shortly thereafter, revealing how even attempts at
Figure 13.2 Untitled chart from Pittsburgh Central Tube, 1925, in the Urban
League Archive. Reprinted from John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael
Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 19001960
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 240.
pragmatic application of such knowledge were contradictory. Not only

the basic question of who was white, but even that of who was Black,
remained unanswered by managers fixated on race. The black races
cannot do the work in three days that a white man can do in one, an
Iron Range mine superintendent told a government investigator, using
the former term to connote Montenegrins, Serbs, South Italians, Greeks,
and Croats. When rankings were hazarded, they reflected collections of
existing prejudices, not investigation.48
The Schmidt and Hoover examples, with Montgomerys commentary,
remind us that scientific management and race management coexisted
because they were not so utterly different after all. Scientific manage-
ment, like Hoovers race management in the mines, was, as Bernard
Doray wrote long ago, a science that could not escape bear[ing] the
scars of the social violence that characterized the society that gave birth
to it.49 Replete with pro-management assumptions, it selectively drew
on folk knowledge and crude observations of existing work patterns in
ways mercilessly unearthed in Harry Bravermans dissection of Tay-
lors methods.50 Scientific management was therefore broadly compat-
ible with that other great scar-bearing, scar-causing science of the early
twentieth century: the elaboration of racial hierarchies.
Thus, even at their most ambitious pitch purportedly scientific con-
nections of race and productivity remained crude in the extreme. This
crudeness turns out to be vital for understanding how race manage-
ment worked. The most solid studies of immigrant workers surveyed
their conditions off the job, teaching readers in 1921, for example, that
only one Greek male immigrant in five, and one Spanish immigrant in
seven, brought family members to the United States. The weightiest
research on productivity and race tended to be assembled by inves-
tigators writing in the government journal Monthly Labor Review, and
it often focused on demonstrating the falsity of negative stereotypes
regarding Black workers. This data seems to have made scant impact
against such stereotypes, while the repetition of anti-black and xeno-
phobic folklore took scholars to great academic heights. When the
towering figure in American sociology, E.A. Ross, for example, urged
slotting the Slavic race into filthy and unhealthy jobs because they
were immune to dirt, he offered an opinion, not a study. Just the
same should be said of Commonss own assessments, such as The
Negro ... works three days and loafs three [while the] Chinaman,
Italian, or Jewish immigrant works six days and saves the wages of
three.51
As early as 1913, Hugo Mnsterbergs classic Psychology and Industrial

Efficiency identified the discontinuity between precise studies of work-
ers motions and seat-of-the-pants assumptions on race and produc-
tivity. Mnsterberg set out to assess how far scientific management had
gone, and could go, and staked out a place for scientific psychology
as congruent with the revolutionary, but incomplete, innovations of
Taylor. Race initially seemed to Mnsterberg to present little difficulty
in achieving such a synthesis. If a man applies for a position, he wrote,
he is considered [for] the totality of his qualities, and at first nobody
cares whether the particular feature is inherited or acquired, whether
it is an individual chance variation or ... common ... to all members of a
certain nationality or race. Crude reliance on race in the search for the
best possible man for the job would be checked because even when
the required combination of mental traits occurred in specific races,
it was because psychical qualities may vary strongly in the midst of
the group.52
But in further developing his analysis, Mnsterberg acknowledged
that the search for the best man for the job did often devolve into unex-
amined racial assumptions. That management at the plant level cared
about race was not necessarily bad in his view, but that it cared so unsys-
tematically and unscientifically clearly did bother him. At one factory
with twenty different nationalities, the employment officers might
declare the Italians best for one job, the Irish for another, and the Hun-
garians for a third. At the next factory, he added, completely different
conclusions would be reached. In one workplace, managerial race lore
had the hasty and careless Italians and Greeks as undesirable in risky
jobs, which were to go to the Irish. In the next, it was the Irish who were
too prone to court danger to do risky work. Mnsterberg himself was
no critic of race-thinking he tended to credit the stereotype of careless-
ness as applying to Italians, Greeks, and Irishmen. But he abhorred the
lack of system in studying race and management. American industrial
centres, he argued, presented extremely favorable conditions for the
comparative study of nationality, but the opportunity was not being
seized. Much more thorough statistical inquiries, especially into
nationality and responses to piece rates, were needed to ground race
psychological statements.53
Ford English Schools graduation ceremony paraded evidence of the
ease of race development imagined in managements hopeful moments
before World War I and the strike wave that followed. The ceremony
saw immigrant workers in shabby rags walk down a gang plank
connected to the image of an ocean liner and into a huge cauldron.

The script labelled them with the racial slur hunkie as they entered
the cauldron to, as a 1916 account in Ford Times put it, see what the
melting pot will do for them. After teachers from the school ladled
vigourously, race development occurred and graduates emerged in
neat suits as Americans. Workers entered the melting pot as Irish-
Americans or German-Americans but, according to the company,
they emerged as just Americans, having learned to view the hyphen
as a minus sign.54
At its almost providential extremes, even after the race-based immi-
gration restrictions of 1924, faith in the fit of immigrant traits and
American workplaces was one factor obviating any need for close
investigation of immigrants in production. Thus in a 1930 article, the
steel industry became The Beast That Nurtures Children, pushing up
successive waves of Irishmen, Sicilians, and Slavs, supposedly quickly
freeing them from hard mill work as it promised to do for Mexicans and
African Americans. In an industry like steel, managements institution
of what Katherine Stone calls minutely graded job ladders enabled
experts to point to acquisition of skills albeit skills easily learned in
a few weeks to make a case for the racial development of white new
immigrants. One industry leader connected the rise of the semi-skilled
machine tender to the development of white independence, using the
language of an older labour system. Writing in Iron Age, the rubber
manufacturing executive Charles R. Flint held that [t]he American
wage earner is raised to the dignity of an overseer, not over degraded
humanity, but over a more reliable and effective slave machinery.
Since African Americans, immigrants of colour, and Jews were often
excluded from operating machines, their slavishness was reiterated.55
Ordway Tead, the co-author in 1920 of the first textbook in the new field
of personnel management, introduced his Instincts in Industry (1918)
with the remark that differences in race, climate and civilization ...
may so modify human organisms as to cause radical differences in
what is the substance of our ... human nature. Tead wrote of employ-
ers who have a definite policy of hiring several different nationalities
in one department of a factory in order that workers may be less able
to communicate effectively and therefore less able to cause trouble.
For Tead, that deliberate divisiveness focused, as in the Mr. Block car-
toon, on keeping out unions. But he offered neither an investigation
of how or whether such a strategy worked, nor of his contention that
the southern and eastern European immigrants commonly exhibited an
instinct to be submissive, albeit punctuated by the occasional brave

frenzy of self-assertion.56 In 1920, when the Social Science Research
Council (SSRC) mapped industrial relations, enumerating well over
a hundred disciplines poised to contribute to the new field, it set for
anthropologists the task of investigating inherited racial characteris-
tics (not including nationality) capable of effecting work, offering
the alleged laziness of the negro as an example. But the SSRC did not
set out to solve the problem of, to use Montgomerys phrasing, which
race was best for what.57
After the start of immigration restriction, more social scientists joined
Mnsterberg in ridiculing the lack of coherence in investigations of the
productivity of various races. They saw such imprecision as the irra-
tional underside of an avowedly rational industrial society. As the old
opportunities to manage by race and nationality gave way in the face
of a world war and the immigration restriction legislation of 1921 and
1924, retaining immigrant workers came to be seen as more critical
than dividing them. Commonss remark that when immigration sud-
denly stops we see a human being in those who are here and begin to
ask them what they want overstated the change grossly. To the extent
that the unevenly developing trend towards personnel management
identified the problem of labour turnover with what Sanford Jacoby
calls the foremens hire and fire approach, it undermined the most
potent material way in which the races were set against each other in
daily managerial practice. Since, as Jacoby adds, the vast majority
of workplaces retained the foremens drive system throughout the
1920s, the extent and pace of change should not be exaggerated. How-
ever, the decline of immigration certainly did open further space for
questioning race managements basis in science and its staying power in
a post-immigration restriction economy. By 1926, questions of race and
management were already being cast by the pioneering personnel man-
agement textbook as likely to devolve in future into a focus on African
American and Mexican workers. Commenting on the 1920s and 30s,
the management expert T.J. Woofter rued the fact that manufacturers,
so scrupulously careful in choosing raw materials, rely on hearsay and
rumor as to the grades of labor hired. Everett C. Hughes and Helen
M. Hughes observed that off-the-cuff opinions on racial difference so
pervaded managerial choices and language, while hard data compar-
ing racial performance remained so rare, that it was worth questioning
whether modern society is really guided by the impersonal concepts
of the market and efficiency in choosing ... its labor force. Where race
was concerned, the fetishizing of data that Taylorism prized did not
give rise to empirical investigation.58
Even attempts like those of Woofter to cast race management as the
exception to the general rationality of industry underlined the staying
power of supposedly unscientific systems. Critics vacillated between
ridiculing race management and calling for making its invidious dis-
tinctions more scientifically systematic. The deep roots of the practice
of race management, as detailed above, go some distance to explaining
its impressive durability. But to emphasize only such history leaves us
in danger of seeing management by race as residual, even pre-modern,
and therefore at odds with the longer rational logic of capitalism.
Rather, it has been central to such logic.
The staying power of what has been called the foremens empire
in the face of scientific management might be considered as a triumph
of one form of capitalist rationality intimately linked to race manage-
ment. It is in this specific realm that Commonss remarks again become
critical. As early as 1904, Commons heard from an employment agent
at Swift and Company that the playing of races against each other
had been systematized in his factory, which rotated favoured groups
week by week. Commons worried that such competition of races,
especially when it included workers from the non-industrial Negro
race and too many immigrants from the backwards, shiftless and unin-
telligent races of southern and eastern Europe and elsewhere, would
lead to catastrophe. But he recognized that competition extracted pro-
ductivity as well as exerted a downward pressure on wages. Commons
regarded these same packing houses as also among the most system-
atized workplaces extant where the labour process was concerned.
Even the animal was laid off and surveyed like a map, he wrote,
with (dis)assembly line innovations engineering efficiency and speed-
ups. Systems of modern management and race management coexisted
cheek by jowl in the most advanced factories.59
Such a system of racial competition did not rest on the creation and
maintenance of a scientific chart of hierarchy, but on the production,
mostly by first-line management, of a series of contradictory and vola-
tile, hierarchical managerial opinions. The sociologist Niles Carpenter
found workers thinking that lower managements racial prejudices and
slights often weighed heaviest, and Feldmans research suggested that
they were exactly right. Since foremen tended to retain the ability to hire
and fire in the 1920s in the face of challenges from personnel managers,
great weight lay behind their prejudices, which could keep racialized
workers productively on edge. Indeed on the rare occasion when the

adequacy of the racial knowledge possessed by foremen was directly
questioned by management experts, the framing of the issue was likely
to be around the concern that the races were being too much pitted
against each other with the fear, especially after the wave of racial terror
during and after World War I, that lower management would appear
unsympathetic and foster racial hatreds.60
If, as Doray has written, scientific management involved at times a
rational madness, management also long deployed the seeming irra-
tionalities of race in a calculating manner. Sometimes it did so by fix-
ing categories and hierarchies, more often by leaving races not fixed
in rankings and permanently in competition.61 A brutally logical sys-
tem kept their positions in play and in the cases of African Ameri-
cans, often keeping them out of jobs via colour bars and judging their
fitness as a reserve army of labour. Historians have long known that
Taylorisms revolutionary changes often supplemented, rather than
supplanted, the hurry and push tactics in which lower management
bullied and threatened workers. But we have too often forgotten Com-
monss suggestion that the hurrying and pushing could be chronically
inflected by playing races against each other.
NOTES
1 The epigraph is from Marxs Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3v. (Chi-
cago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), I: 364.
2 John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: The Mac-
Millan Co., 1907), 150. In Taylorism, John R. Commons, and the Hoxie
Report, Journal of Economic Issues 30 (December 1996): 9851016, Chris
Nyland provides an account of Commonss relations to scientific manage-
ment and to Frederick Winslow Taylor himself around the issues of trade
unionism and restriction of output. See also, Yngve Ramstad and James L.
Starkey, The Racial Theories of John R. Commons, Research in the History
of Economic Thought and Methodology 13 (1195): 175.
3 The cartoon is included in Ernest Riebe, Twenty-Four Cartoons of Mr. Block
(Minneapolis: Block Supply Company, 1913), unpaginated. For the context
of the cartoon, see David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays
on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London and New York: Verso,
1994), esp. 1435; and Michael Cohen, Cartooning Capitalism: Radical
Cartooning and the Making of American Popular Radicalism in the Early
Twentieth Century, International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 3558.

Portions of this article appeared as One Symptom of Originality: Race
and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States, His-
torical Materialism 17 (2009): 343. Research assistance from Martin Smith
and Zach Sell was indispensable in completing this article. In this para-
graph and below we use Black and African American interchangeably
and Negro as it is used in the primary sources.
4 On the dating of the origins of management discourse, see Daniel Nel-
son, Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System
in the United States, 18801920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1996), 50. Cf. James O. Breeden, ed., Advice among Masters: The Ideal in
Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), 44 for
scientifically and passim; R. Keith Aufhauser, Slavery and Scientific
Management, Journal of Economic History 33 (December 1973): 81124.
5 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
20th Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Antonio Gramsci,
Americanism and Fordism, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans.
and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: Interna-
tional, 1971), 279318; C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grim-
shaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993),
1739 (on Ford) and 1815; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1996), 25 for quotation.
The interesting Australian revisionist defenses of Taylorism as radical and
as cooperating with unions in a challenge to capitalist property rights in
ways allegedly compatible with Marxism also ignore questions of race and
management. See Nyland, Taylorism, John R. Commons and the Hoxie
Report, 986 and 1013; and D.J. Kelly, Marxist Manager amidst the Pro-
gressives: Walter N. Polakov and the Taylor Society, Faculty Papers, Uni-
versity of Wollongong, 2004. Ironically, Marxs own remarks on capital as a
personality opposing and extracting labour point in a direction similar to
the one charted by Lowe in that such capitalist and managerial personalities
clearly embodied and perceived race. See Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic
Formations (New York: International Publishers, 2000), 118.
6 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 278 for quotation. Nylands article describes
incompatibilities of approaches between Commons and the Taylorists that
contextualize the formers minimizing of scientific managements place as
an important US intervention, but the important direct clashes of Com-
mons with Taylor came during and after 1914.
7 Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8
(1993): 170791.
8 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of
New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
9 Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack, eds., Native Americans and Wage
Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1996); John Morris, Capitalism into the Wilderness: Mountain Men and
the Expansion of Capitalism into the Northern Rockies, 18071843 (PhD
diss., University of Missouri, 1993).
10 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the
Modern, 14921800 (London: Verso Books, 1998), 565 for quotation.
11 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: How-
ard University Press, 1981).
12 Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1971), 11 (on manufacturing capital) and 1214; Linda
Upham-Bornstein, Men of Families: The Intersection of Labor Conflict
and Race in the Norfolk Dry Dock Affair, 18291831, Labor 4 (Spring
2007): 65 (hammered); for the iron industry, see Charles Dew, Bond of
Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: Norton, 1994), esp. 107;
Scientific American, New Series, 9, no. 25 (December 19, 1863): 386 contains
the Richmond quotation in an unsigned note.
13 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York and London, Rout-
ledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991);
Jonathan Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New
Haven:Yale University Press, 1991); and Starobin, Industrial Slavery. For
Strong, see Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality
in Antebellum America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986),
8299 and George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong:
The Civil War, 18601865, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 342 and 345 for the Strong
quotations.
14 Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community
in Lowell, Massachusetts, 18261860 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981); Mary Cain, Race, Republicanism and Domestic Service in the Ante-
bellum United States, Left History 12 (FallWinter 2007): 64 and 68 for the
quoted words and 6483; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 24.
15 Samuel Cartwright, Dr. Cartwright on the Caucasians and the Africans,
De Bows Review and Industrial Resources, Statistics, etc., Devoted to Commerce
[hereafter DR] 1 (July 1858): 467 and 52 (like the mule); Dr. Samuel
Cartwright, How to Save the Republic, De Bows Review of the Southern
and Western States 11 (August 1851): 1867 (a female or a baby). [Note

that De Bows Review slightly changed titles over the years but we cite all
as DR below.] Cf. Robert Collins, Essay on the Management of Slaves,
Southern Cultivator [hereafter SC] 12 (July 1854): 20506; Agricola, Manage-
ment of Slaves, SC 13 (June 1855): 1714; John A. Calhoun, Management
of Slaves, DR 18 (June 1855): 713; Collins, Management of Slaves, DR
17 (October 1854): 4213 (innate principle of protection); A Small Farmer,
Management of Negroes, DR 11 (October 1851): 36972; A.T. Goodloe,
Management of Negroes, SC 18 (April 1860): 1301; A.T. Goodloe, Man-
agement of Negroes Again, SC 18 (August 1860): 27980; A.T. Goodloe,
Management of Negroes Caution! SC 18 (October 1860): 305; N.D.
Guerry, Management of Negroes Duties of Masters, SC 28 (June 1860):
1767; Robert Collins, Essay on the Management of Slaves, DR 7 (January
February 1862): 1547; James M. Towns, Management of Negroes, SC
9 (June 1851): 878; Arkansas River, Dicksons Planting Overseers
Negroes Etc., SC 18 (October 1860): 3045; Jno. W. Pitts, Best Method of
Managing Negroes, SC 18 (October 1860): 3256; Hurricane, The Negro
and His Management, SC 17 (September 1860): 2767; A Tennesseean,
Management of Negroes Bathing Feet, SC 11 (October 1853): 302. See
Unsigned, Revolutionizing a Plantation, SC 16 (November 1858): 346 for
the enthusing over management via the threat of mass murder.
16 On accountancy, see Geoff Burrows, The Interface of Race and Account-
ing: A Comment and an Extension, Accounting History 7 (May 2002):
10113 and Richard K. Fleishman and Thomas N. Tyson, Interface of
Race and Accounting: A Reply to Burrows, Accounting History 7 (May
2002): 11522; Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in
North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 33744 on half
hands and full hands; Breeden, ed., Advice among Masters, 6974. See also
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 61, 310, 361, and 371; Ira Berlin, Generations of
Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
2004), 132, 149, 178, and 212; Joseph P. Reidy, Obligation and Right: Pat-
terns of Labor, Subsistence, and Exchange in the Cotton Belt of Georgia
and Steven F. Miller, Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the
Cotton Frontier: The Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 18151840, both in
Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas,
ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1993), 1401 and 1645, as well as 15 of the editors introduction to
the volume. On race and driving, see Robert William Fogel and Stanley
Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (New York:
Norton, 1989 [1974]), 2045 for the quotations on race and the driving of
slaves; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States: With
Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), 2046; and
Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Travellers Observations on Cotton and Slav-
ery in the American Slave States, 18531861 ( New York: Da Capo Press, 1996
[1861]), 153 and 452. See also Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time,
Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 13350 for dramas eventuating when masters
attempted to uses clock time to impose work discipline on slaves holding
to African conceptions of time.
17 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 14262.
18 Unsigned, Laborers for the South, SC 16 (August 1858): 235 (duty
bound); Samuel Cartwright, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro
Race, DR 1 (September 1851): 3315. See also Dr. Cartwright on the Ser-
pent, the Ape and the Negro, DR 31 (December 1861): 50716 and Dr. S.
Cartwright, Negro Freedom an Impossibility under Natures Laws, DR
30 (MayJune 1861): 64859.
19 On the various uses of nigger see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 1445
and 180; Bernard Mandel, Labor: Free and Slave (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2007), 63; Cartwright as quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, The
Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave
South (New York: Vintage, 1967), 47 (make [N]egroes); Starobin, Indus-
trial Slavery in the Old South, 215 (on Shawneetown, where the mechanism
involved a wage, paid to slaves from other states, who, with their masters
permission hired themselves out for a term and then returned to slavery,
with the bulk of the wage going to the master); Olmsted, Journey in the
Seaboard Slave States, 90 (as an Irishman) and 91; See also Ulrich Bonnell
Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and
Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York:
D.Appleton and Company, 1940 [1918]), 3013 and Phillips, Life and Labor
in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 1867.
20 Cartwright, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, 3312
(absconding), 332 (whipping the devil), 333 (half asleep, negro
liberty, and instinct to genuflect); and 3315; Cartwright, Ethnol-
ogy of the Negro or Prognathous Race: A Lecture Given November 30,
1857, Before the New Orleans Academy of Science (n.p., n.d.), Samuel
A. Cartwright and Family Papers, Printed Pamphlets, Special Collections,
Louisiana State University Library, 6, 9, and 14. For a sharp awareness
that crops, plantation order, slaves as assets, and race development were
all being produced by plantation management, see Guerry, Management
of Negroes Duties of Masters, 1767. See also Dr. S. Cartwright, The

Diseases of Negroes Pulmonary Congestions, Pneumonia, &c., DR 11
(August 1851): 212.
21 Cartwright, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, 334 (rascal-
ity) and 3316; William E. Wiehoff, Enslaved Africans Rivalry with
White Overseers in Plantation Culture, Journal of Black Studies 36 (2006):
42955; Breeden, ed., Advice among Masters, esp. 816, 1708, and 291304;
William Van Deburg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors
in the Antebellum South (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), esp. 3; Geno-
vese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3667; Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South,
16873.
22 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 18601880 (New York: Free
Press, 1988), 39. Cartwrights views on race and the Bible are laid out in
Unity of the Human Race Disproved by the Hebrew Bible, DR 4 (August
1860): 131 (for the quotations) and 12936. For the long, rollicking critique
of his views on Ham, see Unsigned, Dr. Cartwright on the Negro
Reviewed, DR 8 (MayAugust 1862), esp. 667; George Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind (Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 1987), 878.
23 On Cartwrights use of work as a cure and on his managerial impulses
for ethnology, see his Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, 333
(hebetude), 335 (vital air and rascal), and 3336 passim. For an
important account of the disappearing of US slavery from the history of
management, see Bill Cooke, The Denial of Slavery in Management Stud-
ies, Journal of Management Studies 40 (December 2003): 18951918.
24 Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (London: Long-
man, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857), 157 (good boy),
182 (misanthrope), 1612 (Lascar), 11528. On Melville and race, see
Carolyn Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence
in Melvilles America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1979).
25 Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emanci-
pation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 2023.
26 Ibid.
27 Unsigned, A Picture of the West Indies, DR 3 (June 1860): 72938. Cf.
Lucy M. Cohen, The Chinese in the Post-Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Loui-
siana State University Press, 1984), 534. See also Matthew Pratt Guterl,
After Slavery: Asian Labor, the American South, and the Age of Emanci-
pation, Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 20941, esp. 22141 and,
for the varied ways experiences of white Southerners with Chinese work-
ers in Cuba influenced the debates, 21121. On Forrest and the KKK in the
Piedmont, see Paul Ashdown and Edward Gaudill, The Myth of Nathan
Bedford Forrest (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), esp. 623;
and Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan
Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999), 1357.
28 Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Trans-
continental Railroad (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 153, 327, and
passim. On race, immigration, and the toleration of industrial accidents,
see Michael K. Rosenow, Injuries to All: The Rituals of Dying and the
Politics of Death among United States Workers, 18771910 (Unpublished
PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2008), 323 and 81.
29 Herman Melville, The Gees, in Great Short Works of Herman Melville,
ed. Warner Berthoff (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004),
35561, 358 for the quotations; Carolyn L. Karcher, Melvilles The Gees:
A Forgotten Satire on Scientific Racism, American Quarterly 27 (October
1975): 4212.
30 Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, in Great Short Works of Herman Melville,
238315.
31 Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the
South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).
32 Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 161.
33 Andrew Carnegie, The Venezuelan Question, North American Review
CCCCLXXI (February 1896), 129144, esp. 133. Cf. Lo, the Poor Indian,
Barrons 4 (November 10, 1924): 9 for an even more extreme sense that
whether in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or the United States, unless
an aboriginal race is exterminated it is hard to see more than a senti-
mental reason for deploring its extinction. People die anyway.
34 Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers & the American West: The Lace-Boot
Brigade, 18491933 (New Haven and London, 1970), 16587 and 278317;
Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, Lord Milner and the South African
State, History Workshop Journal 8 (Spring 1979): 61; Yvette Huginnie, A
New Hero Comes to Town: The Anglo Mining Engineer and Mexican
Labor as Contested Terrain in Southeastern Arizona, 18801920, New
Mexico Historical Review (1994); Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 45
(white mans camp) and 745. On Joralemon, and for all quotations from
him, see his interview with Henry Carlisle, Arizona Characters and the
Ajo Mine, from November 1959 and included in the Mining Engineer
Project, Volume 1, Part 1, in the Columbia University Oral History Project,
Butler Library, Columbia University, dated November 1959, unpaginated.
See also Steven G. Vick, Degrees of Belief: Subjective Probability and Engineer-
ing Judgment (Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 2002), 342.
35 Honnold as quoted in John Higginson, Privileging the Machine: Ameri-
can Engineers, Indentured Chinese and White Workers in South Africas
Deep-Level Mines, 19021907, International Review of Social History 52
(2007): 10 and 15.
36 Spence, Mining Engineers, 278; George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover:
The Engineer, 18741914 (New York, 1983), 723 and 3303; Joan Hoff Wil-
son, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland
Press, 1992 [1975]), 337; Herbert Hoover Scrapbooks (Hoover Presidential
Library, hereafter HL, West Branch, IA); Extracts from Letters Home
(Western Australia 1897?), in HL, Box 50, Pre-Commerce Papers, includes
all of the Australia quotations.
37 See, for example, Rand Native Labor Committee (1903), in HL, Box 56,
Pre-Commerce Papers; Notes on Stopping on the Rand During 1907, in
HL, Box 55, Pre-Commerce Papers (for the comparison of shifts); Her-
bert Hoover, Principles of Mining: Valuation, Organization and Administration
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1909), 1615; Hoover to Dear Mr. Congressman
[John Baker] (February 19, 1924), in HL, Box 289, Commerce Papers; and
the draft dated February 13, 1924, in the same box (on Asiatic immigra-
tion); Herbert Hoover, The Kaiping Coal Mines and Coal Field, Chihle
Province, North China, in Eighth Ordinary Meeting, proceedings of the
Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (London 1902), 419 and 4267, in HL,
Box 50, Pre-Commerce Papers (for the 1902 quotations).
38 See also the 1902 paper in n. 27 above and Hoover, Metal Mining in the
Provinces of Chi-li and Shantung, China, printed in the proceedings of
the Sixth Ordinary Meeting of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy
(London 1900), in HL, Box 50, Pre-Commerce Papers; and the clipping in
Box 56 of the same collection defending Chinese miners.
39 Cf. the Hoover papers given in 1900 and 1902 and cited in n. 27 and 28
above and the comment appended to the 1902 paper at p. 427.
40 Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874
1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 6971 and Hoover, Principles of Mining,
1615. For a provocative exploration of the relationship of the use of race
in management to more contemporary concerns about technology and the
control of workers, see Michael Perelman, Preliminary Notes on Technol-
ogy and Class Struggle, Labor Tech: Bringing Technology to Serve the Labor
Movement, http://www.labortech.net/Papers.htm.
41 Thomas Arthur Rickard, ed., The Economics of Mining (New York: Engineer-
ing and Mining Journal, 1905), 388.
42 Higginson, Privileging the Machines, 16 and 1226.

43 Wilson, Hoover, 323; Hoover, Memoirs of Hoover, 71; on Ford, see Stephen
Meyer III, The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the
Ford Motor Company, 19081921 (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1981), esp. 15692. See also Elizabeth Esch, Shades of Tarzan! Ford
on the Amazon, Cabinet: A Quarterly Journal of Art and Culture 7 (Summer
2002): 769.
44 Jessica Blatt, To Bring Out the Best That Is in Their Blood: Race, Reform,
and Civilization in the Journal of Race Development, 19101919, Ethnic and
Racial Studies 27, no. 5 (September 2004): 691708 and Thomas Bender, A
Nation among Nations: Americas Place in World History (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2006), 210. The publication became the Journal of International Rela-
tions in 1919 and Foreign Affairs three years after that. On Ford and Hoover,
see David Lanier Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1987), 222.
45 Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York:
Norton, 1967 [1911]), 44 (for the quotations) and 417.
46 David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State,
and American Labor Activism, 18651925 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1987), 242 (for all quotations, including Worman) and 43. See
also Sanford M. Jacoby, A Century of Human Resource Management, in
Industrial Relations to Human Resources and Beyond: The Evolving Process of
Employee Relations Management, ed. Bruce E. Kaufman, Richard A. Beau-
mont, and Roy B. Helfgott (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 14850.
47 Unsigned,The Iron Industrys Labor Supply, Iron Age 96 (July 8 1915): 91
(such labor); John M. Williams, An Actual Account of What We Have
Done to Reduce Our Labor Turnover, The Annals of the American Academy
71 (May 1917): 64 (quotations on grinders, finishers, and forgers); John
Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Ital-
ians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 19001960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1983), 240 reprints the chart.
48 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 757; for the Iron Range, Industrial
Progress and Efficiency, in Volume 16, Part 18, Iron Ore Mining, in
Reports of the Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Industries, Sen-
ate Documents, 61st Congress, 2nd Session 19091910, Volume 78, Wash-
ington, Government Printing Office, 1911, 33941, with thanks to Thomas
Mackaman; Lauck, Recent Immigration, 899.
49 Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free
Association Books, 1988), 834.
50 Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 10423.
51 Hugh Reid, Why Bar the Door to Labor? Nations Business 9 (January
1921): 31; Luther D. Burlingame, Americanizing a Thousand Men, Indus-
trial Management 53 (June 1917): 38592; The Southern Negro in Cleveland
Industries, Monthly Labor Review (MLR) 19 (July 1924): 414; Negro Labor
During and After the War, MLR 12 (April 1921): 8538; Working and Liv-
ing Conditions of Negroes in West Virginia, MLR 21 (August 1925): 2569;
and esp. Industrial Employment of the Negro in Pennsylvania, MLR
22 (June 1926): 12247; Ross as quoted in Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the
Pie: Black and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1980), 25; Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 54. Commons
is quoted from his Social and Industrial Problems, The Chautauquan
39 (March 1904): 18 (for the quotation) and 1322; Ramstad and Starkey,
Racial Theories of John R. Commons, esp. 1617 and 634 and, for the
context, Bari Jane Watkins, The Professors and the Unions: Academic
Social Thought and Labor Reform, 18831915 (Unpublished PhD diss.,
Yale University, 1976).
52 Hugo Mnsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 50, 278, and 69.
53 Ibid., 12931.
54 On Ford English School, see Daniel M.G. Graff, Ford Welfare Capitalism
in Its Economic Context, in Sanford G. Jacoby, ed., Masters to Managers:
Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 98 and (for the quote) 99. For hunkie
(or hunky), see Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 3745. On melting
pot and Ford, see Elizabeth Esch, Fordtown: Managing Race and Nation
in the American Empire, 19251945 (Unpublished PhD diss., New York
University, 2004).
55 Frank Julian Warne and J.R. Commons, Slavs in Coal Mining, in John
R. Commons, ed., Trade Unionism and Labor Problems (Boston: Ginn and
Company, 1905), 46; David Colcord, A Beast That Nurtures Children,
Nations Business 18 (November 1930), 324 and 1701. Cf. Mark Pittenger,
Whats on the Workers Mind: Class Passing and the Study of the
Industrial Workplace in the 1920s, Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences 39 (Spring 2003): 153. On steel, see Katherine Stone, The Origins
of Job Structures in the Steel Industry, in Labor Market Segmentation, ed.
Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and David M. Gordon (Lexington,
MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1975), 49 (job ladders). Flints quote is
from Conference on Labor and Capital, Iron Age (May 16, 1901): 323
as quoted in Michael K. Rosenow, Injuries to All, 26; On occupational
colour bars and machinery, see David Roediger, Gaining a Hearing for
Black-White Unity: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Race, Gender,

and Class, in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics,
and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994), 12780; see also Amy L.
Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping
of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), 191220, 219 for the role of Immigration Service
and the Public Health Service in firming up distinctions that tended to
draw a line around Europe as a whole, setting it apart from Asian and
Mexican (Chinese, Japanese, Hindoo, and Syrians).
56 Ordway Tead, Instincts in Industry: A Study in Working-Class Psychology
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), 13, 8990, and
143. The textbook is Ordway Tead and Henry C. Metcalf, Personnel Admin-
istration: Its Principles and Practice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1926 [1920]).
57 The map is reproduced in Bruce E. Kaufmans excellent The Origins &
Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States (Ithaca: ILR
Press, 1993), 1417. See also 1963 for an account of the early evolution of
industrial relations in which race and ethnicity are absent; Montgomery,
The Fall of the House of Labor, 242 (for what).
58 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 76; John R. Commons, Introduction
to the Edition of 1920, in his Races and Immigrants in America (New York:
Macmillan, 1920), xix; Jacoby, Century of Human Resource Manage-
ment, 149, 154, and 14855; Tead and Metcalf, Personnel Administration,
48; Everett Cherrington Hughes and Helen Macgill Hughes, Where Peoples
Meet: Ethnic and Racial Frontiers (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 67; T.J.
Woofter, Jr, Races and Ethnic Groups in American Life (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1933), 144; Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies
of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: Wiley, 1956), 273
and 278; Nyland, Taylorism, John R. Commons and the Hoxie Report,
986. See also Nelson, Managers and Workers, 803.
59 John R. Commons and others, History of Labor in the United States, 4v.
(New York: Macmillan, 19181935), 3: xxv and 32233, esp. 328 for Don
D. Lescohiers section on personnel management; Ramstad and Starkey,
The Racial Theories of John R. Commons, 1618, quote Commons on the
competition of races. Their study is as acute on his anti-black racism as
it is obtuse on his racial nativism. See also John R. Commons, Industry,
The Chautauquan 38 (February 1904): 53343 and Commons, Social and
Industrial Problems, 19 (physical exertion) and 1722; Harold M. Baron,
The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism
(Somerville, MA: New England Free Press, 1971). For the last Commons
quote, and a fine discussion of the labor process in packing, see James R.
Barrett, Immigrant Workers in Early Mass Production Industry: Work

Rationalization and Job Control Conflicts in Chicagos Packinghouses,
19001904, in German Workers in Industrial Chicago, ed. Hartmut Keil and
John B. Jentz (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), 1059.
60 Niles Carpenter, Nationality, Color, and Economic Opportunity in the City
of Buffalo (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 11830; Her-
man Feldman, Racial Factors in American Industry (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1931), 147; Fred H. Rindge, Jr, From Boss to Fore-Man, Indus-
trial Management 53 (July 1917): 51112; Kaufman, Origins & Evolution of
the Field of Industrial Relations, 15 and 17; and Tead and Metcalf, Personnel
Administration, 48.
61 Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism, 834.
Afterword
Our aim in the preceding chapters has been, as stated in the introduc-
tion, to revisit, reframe, and extend critical analysis of racism and anti-
racism, drawing on the most constructive elements of Marxist and
critical race/postcolonial theoretical tools. Central to this endeavour is
recognition of historic tensions between these major critical currents.
Notably, the purpose of the volume is not to address all the various
elements of these tensions, nor to provide a single overarching expla-
nation. In fact, our framework begins with the recognition of multiple
sites of contention some grounded in creative diversity and varying
points of emphasis, others unnecessarily exaggerated and unhelpful.
As co-editors, we have attempted to explain our own distinct under-
standings, as well as our commonalities, with a view specifically to
advancing constructive engagement in critical theorization regarding
anti-racism. Our aim has not been, therefore, to revisit or reignite nega-
tive tensions, nor do we wish to avoid them. Rather, we have strived
to open up a conversation that can overcome what we see are limit-
ing elements in these historic tensions, while attempting to explain and
contextualize challenges with a view to renewed creative and engaged
critical approaches. We have tried to keep in sight a focus on challenging
racism and its attendant relationships.
This overarching aim has shaped the various sections of the volume
and the specific chapters within each section. To this end, we have sug-
gested that new interpretations of the writings of Michel Foucault and
Karl Marx are particularly significant to overcoming these tensions.
Foucaults well-known critiques of Marx, and in turn, Marxist critiques
of Foucault, have contributed to the polarization of theorizations in
multiple areas, not least regarding race and racism. Without suggesting
378Afterword
either a dismissive or laudatory approach, the first section of this col-

lection critically assesses the strengths, weaknesses, conceptions, and
misconceptions associated with Foucaults emphasis on discourse and
decentralized power.
The chapters in this section make important arguments for rethink-
ing the significance of Foucault in theorizing race and racism. First,
Enakshi Dua revisits the theoretical impasse in theorizing anti-racism,
illustrating the process by which key theorists began to locate race and
racism within a framework of power as decentralized. This chapter
places the shift to Foucault not only within the perceived limitations
of Marxs writings, or the history of post-war Marxism, but, as im-
portantly, within the imperatives of theorizing race and racism. Next,
Robert Young, in a pathbreaking reading of Foucault, suggests that
rather than seeing Foucault as devoid of materiality a point that is
commonly used to distinguish his work from that of Marx a close
reading of Foucaults writings suggests convergence with this key as-
pect of Marxs epistemology and methodology. Finally, Enakshi Dua
returns to reinterpreting the place of Foucaults theoretical framework
in the works of key postcolonial anti-racist theorists, notably Edward
Said and Stuart Hall. Through a careful reading of Saids and Halls
writings, she outlines their substantial uneasiness with key elements of
Foucaults epistemology, suggesting that these theorists offer a unique
synthesis of elements of Marxs and Foucaults epistemologies. Col-
lectively, this section revisits Foucault and postcolonialism by offering
readings of Foucault that challenge the polarization between the two
theoretical frameworks.
The volume then moves to revisit the contributions and relevance of
Karl Marx in relationship to discussions of racism and anti-racism. The
authors in this section offer new readings of Marx that challenge the
characterization of Marxs theory as devoid of tools that can explain
race and racism, or that view historical materialism as irrelevant to the-
orizing race and racism. Abigail B. Bakan attempts to engage the notion
of difference without abandoning or minimizing Marxs pivotal
contribution on totality, originally drawn from Hegel and the German
idealist philosophical tradition. Within this frame, Marxs work can be
understood as being not only about exploitation, class, or economic dif-
ference, but also about alienation, privilege, and oppression. Concepts
such as privilege can be explained in relationship to specific histori-
cal circumstances, reliant on a historical materialist method, without
minimizing or reducing matters of racialization or consciousness.
Afterword379
A rereading of Marxs epistemology is also offered by Himani Ban-

nerji. Bannerji is uniquely placed to address the interface between
Marxism and critical race theory, as she is, unusually, a senior scholar
whose body of work rests unstrained at the interface of these per-
spectives. Bannerji, in tracing her own intellectual development from
Marxs work, notes pointedly that the central significant issue is not
Marxs own tendencies to Eurocentrism, which she clearly recognizes,
but the utility of the method Marx advanced as a means to understand,
critique, and overcome systems of domination that rely systemically on
exploitation, racism, and patriarchy. In pointing to the utility of Marxs
method, Bannerji points particularly to the concept of ideology. No-
tably, her method of deploying ideology places it in a context of the
advances made by Dorothy Smith, with an emphasis on everyday life
and the social. Racism is understood to be embedded in capitalist rela-
tions, and Bannerji suggests examples that range from everyday life
in Canada and India.
One of the negative impacts of the historic tensions between Marx-
ism and critical race theory is the marginalization of contributions by
radical theorists of colour and the minimalization of various relation-
ships that involve such theorists. This collection illustrates the ways
in which revisiting these writers can suggest creative and synergistic
contributions to a unitary theory of capitalism and racism. The chap-
ters in the next section of the volume highlight the writings of critically
important, but often neglected or marginalized, theorists, documenting
their contributions to both Marxism and anti-racism. These chapters
address a wide range of theorists, including C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du
Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, and Fatima Meer.
Anthony Bogues suggests a highly original and important reading
of James and Du Bois, and takes the debate forward by illustrating the
ways in which, for these two authors, Marxism and anti-racism are so
deeply entwined that a separation of the two strands seems artificial.
Bogues, however, invites us to shift the frame. He suggests that black
radical thinkers need to be understood in the context of heresy, where
ideas are advanced that are considered unthinkable, beyond the realm
of the exclusionary paradigm of Western intellectual discourse that is
inscribed in patterns, historic and present, of colonialism and racism.
By focusing on two texts associated with James and Du Bois respec-
tively, The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction, which are contextu-
alized in the histories of racialization in Haiti and the United States,
Bogues presents a reading of these writers that illustrates theorists who
380Afterword
bring intersections of Marxism and critical race theory into sharp relief.
This reading is presented through the history and contemporary lega-
cies of slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and resistance.
The contributions of Frantz Fanon are being increasingly revisited in
current discussions of racism and colonization, but rarely are Fanons
works placed in a close dialogue with Marxism. Audrey Kobayashi
and Mark Boyle address this lacuna. As Kobayashi and Boyle suggest,
the subject of the relationship between Marxism and anti-racism was
passionately explored in the exchanges between Fanon and Jean-Paul
Sartre. First, in describing the specific nature of the interaction and the
context of the development of this relationship in the postWorld War II
period, Kobayashi and Boyle highlight the central role of positional-
ity and place in a dialogue between colonized and colonizer. However,
beyond effective description, this chapter goes further to consider the
FanonSartre encounter under the scrutiny of informed analysis. No-
tably, informed by discussions in contemporary Marxism and critical
race theory, the authors shed new light on the remarkable relationship
between Fanon and Sartre, and invite us to consider the importance
of each theorist in light of contemporary dialogues. As Kobayashi
and Boyle point out, Sartre was one of the first white Western think-
ers to advance post-racialism as a political goal. They also indicate
Sartres influence on Fanons classic work, The Wretched of the Earth,
pointing to his use of Sartrean insights on the relationship between
self and other.
The next chapter in this section of the volume further advances
discussions of the formative influence of radical intellectuals. Here,
Eunice N. Sahle invites us to consider closely the contemporary case
study of racism, anti-racism, and Marxist-inspired resistance that is
South Africa. Echoing Said and Hall, Sahle takes the discussion further
by illustrating the connections between a Gramscian notion of hege-
monic forms of knowledge production and dissemination, and Fanons
commitment to the central role of intellectuals in resistance to colonial
oppression. We are reminded of the critical role of Steve Biko in the
South African resistance movement, who, in life and since his untimely
death seventeen years before the transition from apartheid in 1994,
serves as a model of an organic intellectual in advancing anti-racism
and anti-capitalism. Sahle further advances our understanding by also
placing a synthesis between Gramscis and Fanons work regarding the
organic intellectual within the context of an intersectional attention to
gender as well as race and class. We are thus introduced, significantly,
Afterword381
to Fatima Meer, who, like many women intellectuals and activists, is far
less known in international anti-racist and Marxist scholarship. Meer
(who died in 2010) was no less an organic intellectual than Biko, deeply
rooted in and advancing the movement, grounded simultaneously
in a struggle to challenge oppression and exploitation. The massive,
transformative resistance to capitalism and apartheid in South Africa,
attended to by Sahle, offers a rich experiential moment in the advance
of both Marxist and critical race theoretical schools.
In the closing section of the volume, we consider new departures,
with interventions addressing race, class, and the state in various con-
texts. The issue of the relationship of class to race has been, in various
iterations, central to debates between Marxism and critical race theory.
Some critical race and postcolonialist theorists have been unimpressed
with reductionist approaches to class that minimize or erase realities
of racism; and some Marxist theorists have either rejected, or refused
to engage with, perspectives which centre race and racism as central
and defining elements of power and empire. In the chapters in this sec-
tion, however, the divide is superceded as specific contexts of contem-
porary or historical race, class, and state formations are brought into
analytical view.
Abigail B. Bakan revisits an old question with a new lens, addressing
the Jewish Question. Basing her analysis on an approach grounded
in the contributions of Karl Marx and Edward Said, Bakans chapter
frames the complexities of Jewish identity and racialization in the
changing contexts of pre and postWorld War II realities. Specifically,
the chapter invites us to consider the movement of Jewishness from a
position of less than whiteness to whiteness, articulated not only
through changing social positioning in the West, but also through the
construction of the rise of Zionism to a position of global hegemony.
The discussion then moves to consider race, class, and state from the
perspective of sovereignty. Sunera Thobani positions her analysis spe-
cifically in the current global context, which has been shaped by the
US-led military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan associated with the
War on Terror. State sovereignty is therefore, and clearly, not only
a question of historic forms of colonialism, but a recurring question
of geopolitics. State sovereignty has been understood as a predicated
certainty of nationhood associated with Euro-American state forma-
tion; however, it has been and continues to be, at best, an unstable prin-
ciple, or, at worst, an irrelevant afterthought, when considered in the
context of the global South. Enter, again, the issue of the relationship
382Afterword
of race and class, now on the stage of international realpolitik. Thobani

begins with a consideration of the post-9/11 realities, but moves to a
close reading of diverse meanings of sovereignty in the works of Gior-
gio Agamben (Homo Sacer) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Em-
pire). Thobani maintains that neither the post-structuralist Agamben
nor the neo-Marxists Hardt and Negri engage meaningfully with the
question of sovereignty in the global order, and argues that the failings
of both contributions rest on problematic or absent attentions to race
and racialization.
In the next chapter of this section, Sedef Arat-Ko alerts us to a new
visioning of whiteness in the contemporary period of neoliberalism.
She illustrates the ways in which the language of culture blurs not
only race, but, centrally, class, in our understanding of neoliberalism on
a global scale. She demonstrates a new language of culturalism, discur-
sively deployed to simultaneously reinscribe meanings that advance
racialized hegemonic states and classes. Importantly, Arat-Kos chap-
ter suggests the connections between the social construction of white-
ness and class formation. Futhermore, she brings a transnational focus
to understanding whiteness, by illustrating how projects of whiteness
circulate in contexts such as Turkey, spaces often defined within the
binaries of Orientalism.
The final chapter in this section moves us to the centre of Western
power, the United States. Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger turn the
focus on race and class from the traditional concern with working class
consciousness to the issue of capital accumulation and management.
Through a careful historical description, Esch and Roediger indicate
how racialized difference is consciously generated, literally produced,
to ensure that the material capacity for accumulation is maximized,
supported by social and ideological tools in the hands of capital. The
authors demonstrate that managerial techniques and practices com-
monly associated with class are also, and at the same time, about race.
Moreover, following the context of the previous chapters, the ongoing
social construction of whiteness is demonstrated in the context of the
making of the American ruling class project.
Overall, the volume walks the reader through a period of tension be-
tween Marxist and critical race theoretical schools, addressing the core
concerns and identifying key issues, and then moves forward to exam-
ine old and new questions of power and resistance with fresh eyes. We
hope the volume will serve to continue these and other conversations
that can educate, empower, and advance anti-racist theory and practice.
Contributors
Sedef Arat-Ko is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics

and Public Administration at Ryerson University. Arat-Kos research
interests include imperialism in the Middle East; Turkish society and
politics in a period of neoliberalism and postCold War geopolitics;
and immigration policy and citizenship, especially as they affect immi-
grant women. Her recent research has addressed whiteness in Turkey
as a cultural, political, and class identity in the context of neoliberal-
ism and postCold War geopolitics. She is presently working on neo-
Ottomanism in Turkish foreign policy and its relationship to the politics
of imperialism in the Middle East. Some of her recent publications
include Invisibilized, Individualized, and Culturalized: Paradoxical
Invisibility and Hyper-Visibility of Gender in Policy Making and Policy
Discourse in Neoliberal Canada, in Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de
la femme (CWS/cf) 29, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012); New Whiteness(es),
Beyond the Colour Line? Assessing the Contradictions and Complexi-
ties of Whiteness in the (Geo)Political Economy of Capitalist Global-
ism, in States of Race, edited by Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and
Sunera Thobani (2010); Contesting or Affirming Europe? European
Enlargement, Aspirations for Europeanness and New Identities in the
Margins of Europe, Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2010).
Abigail B. Bakan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social

Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
(OISE), University of Toronto. Her research addresses anti-oppression
politics and Marxist theory, with a focus on intersections of gender,
race, class, political economy, and citizenship. Her books include Nego-
tiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (with
384Contributors
Daiva K. Stasiulis), winner of the 2007 Canadian Womens Studies

Association annual book award; and Critical Political Studies: Debates
and Dialogues from the Left (co-editor with Eleanor MacDonald). Her
articles have appeared in numerous international and Canadian jour-
nals including Rethinking Marxism, Social Identities, Atlantis, Socialist
Studies, and Studies in Political Economy. Her current research (with Yas-
meen Abu-Laban) is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and addresses the United Nations World
Conferences against Racism.
Himani Bannerji is a BengaliCanadian writer and academic, teaching

in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Ontario.
She is also known for her activist work and poetry. She received her
BA and MA in Kolkata, and her PhD from the University of Toronto.
Bannerji works in the areas of Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist theory.
She is especially focused on reading colonial discourse through Karl
Marxs concept of ideology and putting together a reflexive analysis of
gender, race, and class. Bannerji has also written about the processes
through which the Gaze others and silences women who are racialized
as marginal. Her publications include Dark Side of the Nation: Essays
on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism; Thinking Through: Essays
in Marxism, Feminism and Anti-Racism; and Returning the Gaze: Essays on
Gender, Race and Class by Non-White Women.
Anthony Bogues is a writer, curator, and the Lyn Crost Professor of

Social Sciences and Critical Theory at Brown University, where he is
the inaugural Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
and a Professor of Africana Studies. A founding associate director of the
Center for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona, he
is the author and editor of five books and over sixty articles. His latest
edited volume is The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decoloni-
zation (2011). He is working on a book about freedom and emancipa-
tion, tentatively titled And What about the Human, and a book on the
Haitian artist, Edouard Duval Carrie, From Revolution in the Tropics to
Imagined Landscapes: The Art of Edouard Duval Carrie (2014). As a curator
he sits on the scientific committee of the Grand Palias, Paris, working
on the planned exhibition Haiti. Bogues is a member of the editorial col-
lective of the journal Boundary 2.
Mark Boyle is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography at

the National University of Ireland Maynooth and County Kildare in the
Contributors385
Republic of Ireland. Boyle graduated with a first-class honours degree

in geography from Glasgow University in 1988 and a PhD in geogra-
phy from the University of Edinburgh in 1992. His core research inter-
ests have been in the area of urban geography and, more specifically,
the politics of urban development in older industrial cities. He is also
interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, and his recent work
(with Audrey Kobayashi) seeks to reintroduce Sartres theory of racism
and colonialism into postcolonial geography. His publications include
Metropolitan Anxieties: On the Meaning of the Irish Catholic Adventure in
Scotland (2011).
Enakshi Dua is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality

and Womens Studies at York University. She teaches critical race theory,
anti-racist feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory.
She has published extensively on theorizing racism and anti-racism,
the racialized and gendered histories of immigration processes, racism
in Canadian Universities, equity policies and anti-racism policies, and
the racialization of masculinity and femininity. She has also published
on women and health and globalization and biodiversity. Her notable
publications include Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist
Thought, The Hindu Womans Question, From Subjects to Aliens:
Indian Migrants and the Racialisation of Canadian Citizenship, and
Decolonising Anti-Racism. She has more than 30 years of experience
in anti-racist work in the community as well as within the academy.
Within the academy, she has held a number of administrative positions
that deal with gender, anti-racist, and equity issues. She has served as
Director of the Centre for Feminist Research, Chair of the CAUT Equity
Committee, the co-chair of the Sub-committee to the Joint Committee
of the Collective Agreement on Equity, at Queens University, as well as
the York University Faculty Associations Equity Officer.
Elizabeth Esch is Assistant Professor with Barnard College at Columbia

University, and specializes in twentieth-century US history and Ameri-
can studies. She received her PhD from New York University (2004)
with a dissertation entitled Fordtown: Managing Race and Nation
in the American Empire, 192545. Eschs research interests include
transnational histories, the critical study of race, and labour and work-
ing class history. She has been the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellowship in the Humanities and a Quinn Fellowship. Her publica-
tions include The Jobs Moved but the Unions Didnt: Working Class
Histories in the Era of Globalization, Labor (Fall, 2007).
386Contributors
Audrey Kobayashi (PhD, 1983, UCLA) is Professor and Queens

Research Chair in the Faculty of Geography at Queens University,
Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests revolve around the question
of how process of human differentiation race, class, gender, ability,
national identity emerges in a range of landscapes that include homes,
streets, and workplaces. She places strong emphasis on public policy,
on the legal and legislative frameworks that enable social change, and
on the cultural systems and practices through which normative frame-
works for human actions and human relations are developed. She has
been a Fulbright Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washing-
ton, DC; the President of the Canadian Association of Geographers
(19992001); and Editor of People, Place, and Region: Annals of the Asso-
ciation of American Geographers. In 2011 she was named a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada, and has received numerous other awards for
research, teaching, and service. Her publications include Rethinking the
Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of White-
ness in Canada (co-edited with Andrew Baldwin and Laura Cameron)
and A Companion to Gender Studies (co-edited with Philomena Essed
and David Goldberg).
David Roediger is Babcock Professor of History at the University of

Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where he teaches history and African
American studies. His research interests include the construction of
racial identity, class structures, labour studies, and the history of Amer-
ican radicalism. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Doug-
lass Papers at Yale University. He has written on US movements for a
shorter working day, on labour and poetry, on the history of radical-
ism, and on the racial identities of white workers and immigrants. His
books include Our Own Time, the Wages of Whiteness (1999); How Race
Survived US History (2008); and History against Misery (2005). His edited
books include an edition of Covington Halls Labor Struggles in the Deep
South (Kerr) and W.E.B. Du Boiss John Brown (Random House/Modern
Library), as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be
White (Schocken). The former chair of the editorial committee of the
Charles H. Kerr Company, the worlds oldest radical publisher, he has
been active in the surrealist movement, labour support, and anti-racist
organizing.
Eunice N. Sahle (PhD, Political Studies, Queens University, Ontario)

is Chair of the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora
Studies, and Associate Professor with the Department of African, Africa
Contributors387
American, and Diaspora Studies and Curriculum in Global Studies at

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her
teaching interests are development studies, international political econ-
omy, human rights, urbanization, gender and politics, ethics, and social
movements. Her current research focuses on urban governance and
citizenship, state formation in Kenya and Malawi, and human rights,
Canadian foreign policy, and globalization.
Sunera Thobani (PhD, Sociology, Simon Fraser University) is Associ-

ate Professor with the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social
Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her
research interests include race, gender, and nation-formation, migra-
tion and globalization, and media, violence, and the War on Terror.
Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Race
and Class and Feminist Theory. Her recent publications include Exalted
Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada and States of
Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (co-edited with Sherene
Razack and Malinda Smith). Dr. Thobani is also past-president of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), Canadas
largest feminist organization.
Robert Young was educated at Repton School and Exeter College,

Oxford, where he read for a BA and DPhil. Young is Julius Silver Pro-
fessor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University
and was formerly Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford
University. His research interests include postcolonial literatures and
cultures; the history of colonialism and anti-colonialism; cultural his-
tory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and literary and cultural
theory. He is the General Editor for Interventions: International Journal of
Postcolonial Studies. His publications include The Idea of English Ethnicity
(2008), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), Colonial Desire:
Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (1995), and White Mythologies: Writ-
ing History and the West (1990).
Index
Abu Ghraib, 288 African American women: exploi-

Achcar, Gilbert, 255, 266 tation and oppression in the US
Afghanistan, 299, 301; US-led inva- south, 1078; intersecting oppres-
sion and occupation of, 280, 2824, sions in the United States of, 217
3024, 381 agency, 86, 125, 200; Biko on black
Africa, 152, 154, 156, 353; epistemic people and political, 223, 226;
erasure of Africans and, by Bikos contribution to black
Western intellectual tradition, 149, womens political, 2245; Fou-
1612, 172, 175; Fanons critique of caults view of, 80, 85; Halls use of
middle class in (1940s and 1950s), Marxs, 80; marginalized commu-
21415; James on, 171; slavery and nities in South Africa and political,
development of slave labour in, 238; Marxist notion of revolution-
1603, 344, 34650. See also Sahle, ary, 146, 164; Marxs view of, 85;
Eunice; South Africa the organic intellectual and politi-
African Americans, 169, 345, 356, cal, 217; postcolonial theorists use
3623, 365; Du Bois on double of, 84; Said on conceptualization of
consciousness in intellectual power and, 70; Saids view of, 75;
and political practices of, 171; Sartre on race and, 190
NAACPs campaigns to fight Agamben, Giorgio, 261, 2712, 282;
racial oppression of, 157; and racial on the camp and the limit figure of
competition, 34450; and racial de- the Muselmann, 2903, 306n24;
velopment, 34450; traits imputed Homo Sacer, 250, 2801, 285, 303,
to, 34650, 360. See also African 382; Remnants of Auschwitz, 290,
American women; capitalism; Du 306n24; on sovereignty and the
Bois, W.E.B.; James, C.L.R.; planta- state of exception, 2859, 306, 382
tion; plantation system; race; race Agocs, Carol, 106, 116
development; racism; slaves and Ahmad, Aijaz, 301, 734
slavery; United States Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 326
390Index
Algeria, 7, 42, 195, 196, 200, 218; Ashe, Stephen, 101

Fanon in, 1867 Atlantic slavery, 108, 112, 256; and
Algerian War of Independence, 7, 42 ideology of scientific racism,
alienation, 978, 116; and hegemonic 1067
whiteness, 1069, 117; in Marx, Auschwitz: figure of the Musel-
1036 mann, 281, 2904, 306n24; as site
Allen, Theodore, 100, 1067 of the birth of Jewish whiteness,
al-Qaeda, 2835 293
Althusser, Louis, 24, 26, 42, 104
American Civilization. See James, Back, Les, 20, 24, 97
C.L.R. Bakan, Abigail B., 9, 11, 26, 95, 381,
American Federation of Labor, 340 3834; on Israels halting of Arab
Anderson, Kevin, 8, 97, 99, 101, 109, national sovereignty in the Middle
255 East, 262; on Marxism and anti-
Anghie, Antony: on colonialism racism, 97117; on the Jewish
as constitutive of sovereignty in question, 25274, 378, 381; on the
Europe, 2989; on the sovereignty ongoing economic and political
of the Third World, 2989 crisis in the Middle East, 253; on
anticolonialism, 40, 193, 197 the role of Zionism in post-World
anti-Jewish racism, 249, 255, 256, War II, Western geopolitical
2589, 262, 2656, 272, 274 context, 252, 254, 25861, 26370;
anti-Judaism, 255, 257 on the working class, 111, 11316;
anti-racism, 184, 186, 198200, pas- on Zionism as divisive force in
sim; definition of, 6; and feminism the anti-racist movement in the
and Marxism, 12731 Middle East, 266; on Zionisms
Anti-Semite and Jew. See Sartre, Jean- support of a Euro-American impe-
Paul rialist agenda in the Middle East,
anti-Semitism, 25461, 273; as anti- 2689. See also Marxism
Jewish racism, 255, 258 Balfour, Arthur J., 267
Arab Spring, 9, 2001 Balfour Declaration, 259, 2678
Arat-Ko, Sedef, 3823; on cultural- Balibar, tienne, 9, 24, 645, 823, 98,
ism and the bourgeoisie in the 1045
age of neoliberalism, 31131; on Banaji, Jairus, 1012
culturalism and pushing white- Bannerji, Himani, 9, 956, 101, 379,
ness beyond race, 31131; on 384; on colonialism, 1368; on
notions of culture as essentialized, consciousness, 12830, 132, 140;
313, 316, 32930 on creating systems of meaning
Archaeology of Knowledge, The. See through language, 129, 132, 1356,
Foucault, Michel 138; The Dark Side of the Nation, 123,
Arendt, Hannah, 252, 257, 285 125; on Dorothy Smiths analysis
Index391
of the concept woman, 132; on 229, 231; contribution to anti-racist

Dorothy Smiths contribution to struggles in South Africa, 22131;
understanding race and racism, contribution to black womens
1316; emphasis on intersection- political agency in South Africa,
ality in theorizing anti-racism, 2245; knowledge production,
1236; on essentialism, 136; on 22831; on need for development
Gramscis notion of hegemony, of liberatory consciousness, 223;
125; on Hindu nationalists and on the oppressed emerging as
essentialized cultural identity, 139; organic intellectuals, 229; as or-
on identity, 1289; Introducing ganic intellectual, 221, 2256, 238;
Racism, 1234; Inventing Subjects, psychological violence of racism,
123, 125; on Marxism and anti- 223, 2301
racism in theory and practice, bin Laden, Usama, 2834
127141; on Marxism, colonialism, Blackburn, Robin, 8, 26, 100, 106,
and nationalism, 13641; on Marx- 256, 344
ism, feminism, and anti-racism, Black Consciousness Movement
12731; on Marxs concept of ide- (BCM), 219, 2258, 238
ology, 1246; on Marxs concepts black intellectual practice: as subju-
of subjectivity and mediation, gated knowledge, 1512, 172
1245; on silencing of non-white black intellectual production, 145,
women, 124, 131; on slavery, 125, 14952, 1704. See also black radi-
134; Thinking Through, 1234; and cal tradition
use of Dorothy Smith, 1256; use black intellectuals, 1512, 173
of reflexive Marxism, 1245 black intellectual tradition: and
Bartolovich, Crystal, 22, 63, 249 Western epistemic erasure of
Baum, Bruce, 98, 1012, 1067, 252, Africa and Africans, 149, 1612,
256, 262 172, 175
Bauman, Zygmunt, 314, 316 Black Jacobins, The (James), 148,
Bedford Forrest, Nathan, 351 1505, 15963, 1678, 172, 175, 379;
Being and Nothingness. See Sartre, the heresy of, 15963
Jean-Paul blackness, 106, 115
Benito Cereno. See Melville, Her- Black Power, 100, 266
man black radical tradition, 14852,
Bernasconi, Robert, 1946 1712; heresy and, 151, 1589, 163,
Bhabha, Homi, 223, 34, 401, 43, 49, 1704, 379. See also black intellec-
60, 74, 199 tual production
Biko, Steve: on black people and Black Reconstruction (Du Bois), 1456,
political agency in South Africa, 148, 1501, 1579, 1623, 1668,
223, 226; on colonialism, 222; con- 172, 175, 379; rupture with Marx-
scientisation, 229; consciousness, ism in, 1637
392Index
black representation, 174; in South Brodkin, Karen: GI Bill of Rights,

Africa, 22930 253; How the Jews Became White
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 32, Folks, 253; on the impact of class
1867, 1923, 197, 200, 209 on race in the US, 2534
black women. See African American Brown, Wendy, 312, 330
women; Biko, Steve; Meer, Fatima; Buchowski, Michal, 3235
South Africa; women Bush administration, 2823, 285, 288,
black workers: and racial competi- 3001
tion, 34450; and racial develop- Butler, Judith, 196, 200, 258, 260
ment, 34450; traits imputed to,
34650, 360 Callinicos, Alex, 99, 11213
Blair, Tony, 284 Camus, Albert, 190
Bond, Patrick, 2323 Canada, 22, 100, 124, 258, 260, 2634,
Bogues Anthony: 37980, 384; on 288, 303
C.L.R. Jamess Black Jacobins and Capital. See Marx, Karl
W.E.B. Duboiss Black Reconstruc- capitalism, 140, 146, 198, 215, 250,
tion, 148176; on modernity, 2612, 364; Du Bois on American,
14950, 152 158, 169; in Eastern Europe, 257;
Boyarin, Daniel, 272 globalized, 311, 329; Hardt and
Boyarin, Jonathan, 272 Negri on modern, 295; in India,
boycott, divestment, and sanctions 1389; and management ideology
(BDS) campaign: Palestinian call in Poland, 3245; Marxs views
for, 272 on, 255; and modern racism,
Boyle, Mark, 380, 3845; and Audrey 2567; and oppression, 11016;
Kobayashi on Sartre and Fanons race-making in the US and the his-
exploration of the relationship tory of, 343, 356; role of slaves in
between Marxism and anti-racism, Western transition to, 1634; Sartre
184201 on oppression, colonialism, and,
Braverman, Harry, 360; Labour and 184, 1889; significance of slavery
Monopoly Capital, 342 in origins of, 1089; and the un-
Brennan, Timothy, 8, 22, 63 derclass in the US, 31516; and
Britain, 245, 220, 263, 283, 315; the white working class in Britain,
capitalism and the white work- 31718
ing class in, 31718; effects of capitalist hegemony, 105
culturalization of class in, 31718; capitalist system: and capitalist
and support of Zionism and the exploitation, 1023
Balfour Declaration (1917), Caribbean, 115, 152, 154, 170, 210,
2678 350; James on slavery in the, 1603
British cultural studies. See CCCS; Carnegie, Andrew, 352
Gilroy, Paul; Hall, Stuart Carter, Jimmy, 265
Index393
Cartwright, Samuel (Dr), 351; on America, 340; on racial competition

race management, 3489 in factories, 364
casino capitalism, 232 communism, 140, 187, 190
CCCS (Birmingham Centre for Con- concentration camp/the camp, 195,
temporary Cultural Studies) / 271, 281, 28694, 306; psychologi-
Birmingham Group, 234, 278, cal effects of, 2904; racial violence
30, 34n34 of, 291
Chatterjee, Partha, 319 Confidence Man, The. See Melville,
Cheney, Dick (US Vice President), Herman
284 consciousness, 52, 194, 378, 382;
Chinese workers: and mining, 3546; Bannerji on, 125, 12830, 132,
and racial competition in the US, 140; emergence of, in US work-
3501, 3546 ing class, 100. See also Biko, Steve;
citadelization, 318; in the (former) Black Consciousness Movement
Third World, 31823 (BCM); Fanon, Frantz
civil rights movement: United States, Cox, Judy, 104
100 Cox, Robert, 212, 327
Civil War. See United States critical race theorists: approaches
clash of civilizations, 112, 285 to race and racism, 1923; critical
class, 10117 evaluations of Marxist approaches
class ideology: and Zionism, 270 to race and racism, 238; use of
class oppression, 10916; definition Foucault in theorizing race and
of, 110; universalized, 111. See also racism, 1923
Marx, Karl critical race theory, 255, 3013; and
colonial discourse: Foucauldian bringing together Marxism and
model of, 5760 postcolonial/critical race,
colonialism, 23, 41, 43, 47, 169, 189, 6386
294300; Bannerji on, 1368; Biko critical theory: anti-racist, 99102;
on, 222; and the effects on the sub- anti-racist Marxists, 1002
altern, 45; Fanon on, 207, 20911, Critique of Dialectical Reason, The. See
21415, 231; the Jewish question Sartre, Jean-Paul
in the contexts of race, class, and, culturalism, 31115, 382; as a con-
25273; race and racism in relation temporary form of racism, 31617,
to, 20, 28, 85, 149, 160, 174, 176; 32231; erasure of working class
Said on importance of studying, through, 326; political implica-
2931; Sartre on, 189, 1969; Sartre tions of, 32531
on racism as product of European, cultural nationalism, 323
191; study of, 21 cultural studies, 6, 21, 31, 100; Hall
Commons, John R., 340, 3424, 357, as pioneer in the advancement of,
360, 3634; Races and Immigrants in 272
394Index
culture: Arat-Ko on notions of, as epistemic erasure of knowledge

essentialized, 313, 316, 32930; and the propaganda of history,
Bannerji on Hindu nationalists 1756; as heretic thinker, 1712;
and essentialized cultural identity, intellectual and political engage-
139 ment, 1559; and James guided by
vindicationism, 150; and Jamess
Dark Side of the Nation, The. See Ban- rewriting of history, 1509; and
nerji, Himani Marxism, 166; on Marxism, 158;
Davies, Carole Boyce, 100 on nature of labour in the West,
Davis, Angela, 19, 100, 315 16370; psychological wage,
Davis, Mike, 314 113; on race as invention in the
de Beauvoir, Simone, 188, 191 post-Enlightenment period, 169;
decolonization, 32, 139, 195, 260 on slavery in the US, 108, 16370;
Deleuze, Gilles, 60, 99, 197 on systems of labour in Europe
Derrida, Jacques, 56, 67, 69 and the US, 146; working within
Dhamoon, Rita, 99 vindicationism, 156
difference: cultural politics of, 100; in Dunayevskaya, Raya, 99
Marx, 1023; politics of, 97102 Dunn, Elizabeth, 3245
Dirlik, Arif, 8, 314, 327 Dussel, Enrique, 149
discourse: Foucauldian model of
colonial, 5760; Foucaults concept Eastern Europe: development of
of, 2932, 4560; Saids use of, capitalism in, 257; racialization
2932 and orientalization of working
diseases and race management, class in, 3235; working class
3489 (workers) in, 3235. See also Eu-
Doray, Bernard, 360, 365 rope
Dua, Enakshi, 378, 385; on rela- economism, 5, 24, 34n2, 35n6, 78
tionship between Marxism and Egypt, 200, 268, 292
postcolonial theory, 6386; on Empire (Hardt and Negri), 250, 281,
theorizing anti-racism, 1934 2812, 2947, 299, 299301, 303,
Du Bois, W.E.B., 148, 349, 379; on 307n36, 308n40, 308n43, 309n45,
American Communist movement, 309nn4950, 382
158; as black radical intellectual, empiricism, 12930
1559; Black Reconstruction, 1456, Engels, Frederick, 23, 104, 109, 140,
148, 1501, 1579, 1623, 1668, 145
172, 175, 379; Black Reconstruc- Enlightenment period: seculariza-
tions affect on vindicationism, tion in the, 168, 173
165; Black Reconstructions rupture epistemology, 128, 3789; Doro-
with Marxism, 1637; double- thy Smith, 136; Foucault, 645;
consciousness, 171, 173; on Marxist, 9, 17, 27, 123, 130; Saids
Index395
break from Foucault, 756; Saids vian conference, 264

critique and use of Foucault, 66, Exalted Subjects. See Thobani, Sunera
779; Saids synthesis of Marx existentialism, 186, 188
and Foucault, 7982; synthesizing Existential Marxism, 187, 189, 199
Marx and Foucault, 836 exploitation, 978, 116; and Marx,
Esch, Elizabeth, 382, 385; and David 1023
Roediger on race and the man-
agement of labour in US history, false ideology, 25, 28
34065 Fanon, Frantz, 222, 2256, 233, 237
essentialism, 29; Arat-Ko on notions 8, 37980; Bannerji on, 137, 139;
of culture and, 313, 316, 32930; and analysis of race and racism,
Bannerji on, 136; Bannerji on 27, 323; on black consciousness,
Hindu nationalists and essential- 1923, 198, 2078; Black Skin, White
ized cultural identity, 139; and Masks, 32, 1867, 197, 200, 209;
identities of East and West, 29 colonialism and dispossession of
ethnic nationalism, 146, 185; Sartre history and culture, 2301; critique
and Fanon on, 185 of Marxism towards analysing
ethno-religious nationalism: Sartre race and racism, 23; critique of
on, 200 middle class in Africa (1940s and
Europe, 31, 68, 83, 135, 1467, 164, 1950s), 21415; critique of Sartre,
210, 258, 261, 266, 2889, 290, 364, 1923; deep alienation of the colo-
passim; Anghie on colonialism nized, 108; on ethnic nationalism,
as constitutive of sovereignty 185; and Gramsci on oppression
in, 2989; Du Bois on systems of and gender, 21618; intellectuals
labour in the US and, 146; Hardt and anti-oppression, 20611; on
and Negri on development of mo- Marxism, 1845; as member of the
dernity and sovereignty in, 2947; subaltern class, 198; psychological
Jewish emigration to Western, violence of racism, 195, 20910; on
257; knowledge production in role of intellectuals in social strug-
sixteenth century in, 1723; treat- gles, 20711; and Sartre, 1848,
ment of workers during industrial 192201; on the white gaze, 32; The
expansion in North America and, Wretched of the Earth, 139, 1878,
111; whiteness as part of the ori- 1946, 198, 200, 207, 209, 380
gins of capitalist expansion in the fascism, 254, 2623, 2712
Americas and, 107. See also Eastern Federation of South African Women
Europe; Sartre, Jean-Paul (FSAW), 219, 239n10
European colonists: dispossession female organic intellectuals, 219,
of African histories and cultural 2256. See also Meer, Fatima
practices, 2301 feminism, 19; and Marxism and anti-
European Jews, 256 racism, 12731
396Index
Ferguson, James, 328 Galabuzi, Grace-Edward, 101, 106

Fernandes, Leela, 320 gang labour: railroad construction,
Finkelstein, Norman, 262, 265, 269 351. See also plantation system;
First Temple: destruction of, 267 slaves and slavery
Fleishman, Richard, 346 Gaza Strip, 265, 271
Ford, Henry, 257; and race manage- GI Bill of Rights, 253
ment and development, 356, 3612 Gilroy, Paul, 17, 64, 99, 124, 249;
Ford Motor Company. See Ford, critique of Marxist theory, 1921,
Henry 235, 278, 33
Foucault, Michel, 1720, 323, 83, globalization, 9, 20, 63, 85, 282, 294,
867n2, 99100, 173, 309n49, 377 303, 313, 31821, 327, 330
8; on agency, 80, 85; The Archaeol- Goldberg, David Theo, 20, 123, 269
ogy of Knowledge, 42, 4451, 55, 73; Goldstein, Eric, 260
the archive, 47, 54, 73; concept of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. See Mam-
discourse, 31, 4560, 65; con- dani, Mahmood
sciousness, 285; critique of Marxs Gordon, Neve, 265, 269
concept of ideology, 867n2; and Gramsci, Antonio, 100, 108, 135,
Deleuze, 99; discursive formation, 1467, 173, 2056, 220, 237; Ban-
469, 515, 579; on ethnology, nerjis use of, 125, 1401; and
424; event, 45, 4951, 545; Halls Fanon on oppression and gender,
critique of, 769; Halls synthesis 21618; Hall on, 77; historical bloc,
of Marx and, 7982; The History of 72, 21213; on organic intellectu-
Sexuality, 51, 557; and ideology, als and oppression, 151, 21118;
468; Madness and Civilization, Prison Notebooks, 212; on racism
44, 56; and Marxism, 42; model as common sense and capitalist
of colonial discourse, 5760; The hegemony, 105; ruling class hege-
Order of Things, 424; postcolonial mony, 103; Saids use of, 712; on
theorys synthesis of Marx and, social class oppression, 21213
826; Saids critique of, 6671; Grundrisse. See Marx, Karl
Saids synthesis of Marx and, 71 Guantanamo Bay, 288
6; and Saids turn to the concept
of discourse, 2931; the statement, Hage, Ghassan, 327
4951; theory of bio-power, 280, Haitian Revolution, 150, 153, 1603,
285, 287, 309; Young on, 3960 168, 1789n39, 180n53
French Existential Marxism, 187, Hall, Stuart, 8, 1921, 33, 646, 835,
199 249, 378; Bannerjis use of, 124;
French Revolution, 1613 critique of Marxism towards ana-
Front de Libration Nationale (FLN), lysing race and racism, 238; on
187 Fanon, 32; on Foucaults concept
Fryer, Peter, 107 of discourse, 312; on Gramsci,
Index397
35n6, 77; on importance of desire History of Sexuality, The. See Fou-

in knowledge construction, 32; cault, Michel
on limitations of Foucault, 769; Hitler, 258, 262; National Socialist
on limits of Foucault and impor- Party (the Nazis), 262
tance of ideology, 7681; Old holocaust. See Japan: holocaust; Nazi
and New Identities, Old and New holocaust
Ethnicities, 82; as pioneer in the Homo Sacer. See Agamben, Giorgio
advancement of cultural studies, hooks, bell, 19, 32
272; on social formations, 26; Hoover, Herbert, 3536, 360; Prin-
study of identity, 767, 812; ciples of Mining, 355
synthesis of Marx and Foucault, Hoover, Lou, 353
7982; and use of subjectivity, 32, Hussein, Saddam, 2834
77, 80, 82; on the working class,
28, 81 identity: Bannerji on, 123, 1289;
Hardt, Michael, 250, 2812, 303, 382; Halls study of, 767, 812; as
on consciousness, 308n40; on de- theoretical tool, 17, 1920, 23
velopment of modernity and sov- identity politics, 25, 128
ereignty in Europe, 2947; Empire, ideology, 252; Bannerjis use of,
250, 2812, 2947, 299301, 303, 1236; as concept, 31; Dorothy
307n36, 308n43, 309n45, 309n50; Smith on Marxs critique of, 131
on Empire and postmodern 6; of equality, 256; and Foucault,
sovereignty, 294301; imperialism 468; Hall on the limits of Fou-
and sovereignty, 308n43; and Ne- cault and importance of, 7681;
gri on modernity, 2945, 308n40, of management, 3245; Marx
309n49 and Foucault and, 85; Marxism
Haylett, Chris, 316, 318, 326 and, 6, 9, 17; Marxs critique of,
Hegel, G.W.F., 989, 1034, 1701, 1303; as a method of knowledge
197, 378 production, 1356; race as, 1336;
hegemonic state, 103 racism as, 1057, 11112; and
hegemonic whiteness, 1079 Saids critique of Foucault, 67;
hegemony: and Zionism, 254 Saids use of, 72, 756; Zionist,
Heli-Lucas, Marie-Aime, 218 254, 257, 259, 266, 269. See also
Henry, Frances, 100 false ideology
Herzl, Theodor, 260, 267, 270 ideology of privilege, 115
Hills Collins, Patricia, 217 Ignatiev, Noel: Irish-American work-
historical bloc, 213, 2324, 2378. See ing class, 11415
also Gramsci, Antonio imperialism, 98100
historical mission, 2089, 221, 233 indentured servants, 115, 344
historiography, 21, 106, 125, 150, 155, India, 58, 323, 379; Marxs writing
1589, 166 on, 137; nationalism and ideology
398Index
in, 1389; and the new middle James, C.L.R., 1456, 1667, 379;
class in, 31921 on Africa, 171; American Civiliza-
Industrial Workers of the World tion, 342; The Black Jacobins, 148,
(IWW), 3401 1505, 15963, 1678, 172, 175, 379;
intersectional approach to oppres- The Black Jacobins as vindication,
sion, 21620 1545; and Du Bois guided by
Introducing Racism. See Bannerji, vindicationism, 150; and Du Boiss
Himani rewriting of history, 1509; and
Inventing Subjects. See Bannerji, the heresy of The Black Jacobins,
Himani 15963; as heretic thinker, 1702;
Iraq, 200, 285, 299, 301; US-led inva- and Marxism, 1701; on Marxism,
sion and occupation of, 280, 2824, 154; and Marxism in The Black
297, 3023, 381; women in, 283 Jacobins, 159, 163; political practice
Irish-American working class: and intellectual production, 1525;
Ignatiev on, 11415. See also Irish on slavery in the Caribbean,
workers 1603; working within vindica-
Irish workers, 103, 11315, 345, 348; tionism, 161, 167
Frederick Law Olmsted on, 348; Japan: Hiroshima, 263; holocaust,
and Marx, 98; and Marx on anti- 263; Nagasaki, 263
Irish racism, 113. See also Irish- Jarah, Nouri, 100
American working class Jerusalem, 265, 2678
Islam: Taliban regimes affiliation Jewish Law of Return, 260
with, 2824; United States and the Jewish lobby: United States, 271
War on Terror, 303; and the War on Jewishness: Jewish spiritualism, 257
Terror as state of exception, 2878 Jewish question, 109, 249, 381; in the
Israel, 139, 2524, 258, 25966, contexts of race, class, and colo-
26873, 2835, 303; Jewish iden- nialism, 25273
tity, 252; occupation of Palestine, Jewish race: one drop rule, 262
259, 265, 270, 274; Six-Day War, Jewish whiteness, 2526, 25864,
262, 2656 270, 272, 293, 381
Israeli apartheid, 269271, 273. See Johnson, Walter: on race manage-
also Palestine ment, 347
Israeli state, construction of: and Joralemon, Ira: on race management,
construction of Jewish whiteness, 353
259 Joseph, Helen, 219
Israel lobby, 271 Judaken, Jonathan, 190, 195
Israel/Palestine, 253, 272
Karcher, Carolyn, 3512
Jabotinsky, Zeev, 268 Katznelson, Ira: When Affirmative Ac-
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 254, 2656 tion Was White, 254
James, Carl E., 98 Kideckel, David, 325
Index399
King, Anthony, 320 Mandel, Michael: on UN Charter

knowledge production, 206, 380; and the US war in Afghanistan,
Bannerji on, 101, 136; Bikos 3045n2; on UN Charters Article
contribution to emancipatory, 206, 51, 305n3
2214, 22831; and black radical Mandela, Winnie, 226, 2356
intellectuals, 172; Meers contri- marginalization, 206, 327
bution to emancipatory, 219, 235; Marx, Karl, 95, 189, 340, 3789,
on race and racism, 24, 312; in 381; on alienation, 1036, 116; on
sixteenth century Europe, anti-Irish racism, 113; Bannerjis
1723 use of, 1245; Capital, 102, 104,
Kobayashi, Audrey, 380, 3856; and 11112; on capitalism, 255; critique
Mark Boyle on Sartre and Fanons of ideology, 1303; on difference,
exploration of the relationship 1023; Dorothy Smith on, 1316;
between Marxism and anti-racism, epistemology, 9, 17, 27, 123, 130;
184201 on exploitation, 978, 1023, 116;
Ku Klux Klan, 351 Foucault and, 42; Grundrisse, 104;
on Irish workers and anti-Irish
Labour and Monopoly Capital. See racism, 113; On the Jewish Ques-
Braverman, Harry tion, 254; on nationalism and
language: of class, 312, 326, 330; cre- racist oppression in the capitalist
ating systems of meaning through, system, 113; on oppression, 10911,
129, 132, 1356, 138; of culture, 11617; on politics of difference,
330, 382; and Foucaults concept of 97; postcolonial theorys synthesis
discourse, 31, 4552 of Foucault and, 826; Poverty of
Lazarus, Neil, 22, 63 Philosophy, 11011; on racism, class
Lefebvre, Henri, 187, 18990 oppression, and special oppres-
Leiman, Melvin M., 106 sion, 11114; Saids synthesis of
liberal thought, 12930, 136 Foucault and, 7182; on slavery in
Liebman, Marcel, 266 the US, 11112; on social emanci-
Loomba, Ania, 100 pation, 255; on species being, 104;
Lowe, Lisa, 3423; Immigrant Acts, synthesizing Foucault and, 836;
342 on wage labour, 164; on the work-
Lukcs, Georg (Gyrgy), 25, 69, 100, ing class, 11011. See also agency;
104, 114 Bannerji, Himani; Marxism
Marxism, 511, 18, 3940, 97, 24950,
Madness and Civilization. See Fou- 37881; Bakan on anti-racism
cault, Michel and, 97117; in The Black Jacobins
Mamdani, Mahmood, 2623, 31213; (James), 159, 163; critical evalua-
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 31213 tions of its approach to race and
management of labour: and racial racism, 238; and Du Bois, 166;
competition, 34450 Du Bois on, 158; Fanon on, 23,
400Index
1845; and feminism and anti- Middle East, 200, 210, 254, 25963,
racism, 12731; Foucault and, 285; Israels halting of Arab
42; French Existential, 187, 199; national sovereignty in, 262; ongo-
Gilroys critique of, 1921, 235, ing economic and political crisis,
278, 33; Halls critique of, 238, 253; Zionism as divisive force on
and ideology, 6, 9, 17; importance the anti-racist movement in, 266;
to theorizing race and racism, Zionisms support of a Euro-
6386; James on, 154; Jamess con- American imperialist agenda in,
nections to, 1701; Lisa Lowe on 2689. See also Iraq
importance of, to understanding Mignolo, Walter, 209, 222
capitalism in the US, 3423; and Miles, Robert, 101
postcolonial/critical race theory, Miliband, Ralph, 266
6386; racism and economic Mills, Charles, 9, 100, 206, 255
reductionism, 101; relevance to co- mining, 3506; dangerous working
lonialism and nationalism, 13641; conditions, 354; and racial com-
Sartre and, 1845, 18890, 1989; petition, 348, 3536; in US West,
Sartre and Existential Marxism, 350, 3523, 356. See also Hoover,
187; Sartre and Fanon on, 1845; Herbert
Third World, 9, 20, 22. See also mining engineers, 350, 3524
Bannerji, Himani; Du Bois, W.E.B.; modernity, 6, 8, 176, 256, 264, 267,
Marx, Karl 289; biopower as central to,
masculinity, 82, 260, 322, 342 309n49; Bogues on, 14950, 152;
Massad, Joseph, 2601, 267 capitalist, 64, 311, 326, 3289, 331;
Mbeki, Thabo, 233 Foucault on, 83; Hardt and Negri
McGeever, Brendan F., 101 on, 2945, 308n40; race and racism
Meer, Fatima, 1467, 2056, 226; in relation to, 20, 23, 323, 85; the
contribution to anti-racist move- rise of, as told in Jamess Black
ments in South Africa, 21819, Jacobins, 15963; working class as
2346; contribution to emancipa- hazard to, 317
tory knowledge production, 206, Monk, Daniel Bertrand, 314
221; as female organic intellectual, Montgomery, David: on scientific
21819, 234, 238, 281 management, 3578, 360, 363
Meer, Shamin, 233 Mr. Block (cartoon), 3402, 362
Melville, Herman, 357; Benito Muselmann, the: Jewish inmates at
Cereno, 352; The Confidence Man, Auschwitz as, 2904
350; and the construction of the Muslim (the Muselmann): Jewish
US transcontinental railroad, 351; inmates at Auschwitz as, 2904
The Gees, 3512 Muslim body: constituted as bare
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 190 life, 288; as designated enemy,
Meszaros, Istvan, 104 2878; racialization of, 288
Index401
Muslim bourgeoisie: in Turkey, 323 Empire, 250, 2812, 2947, 299301,

Muslims: in Canada, 302; and ideol- 303, 307n36, 308n43, 309n45,
ogy of the War on Terror, 284, 301; 309n50; on Empire and post-
racial profiling of, 282 modern sovereignty, 294301;
and Hardt on modernity, 2945,
Nasser, Abdul, 2689 308n40, 309n49; imperialism and
National Association for the Ad- sovereignty, 308n43; negritude
vancement of Colored People and negritude movement, 1856,
(NAACP), 157 1923, 195, 198
nationalism, 21, 24, 28, 30, 101, 254; neoliberal globalism: race-thinking
Bannerji on, 123; and cultural and culturalism in the age of, 250,
identity, 1389; in India, 1389; 31131
pro-slavery Southern, 345; and neoliberalism, 250, 31112, 315, 329,
racist oppression in the capital- 331, 382
ist system, 113. See also Bannerji, New Left, 100
Himani; cultural nationalism; eth- Ngoyi, Lillian, 219
nic nationalism; ethno-religious Nietsche, Friedrich, 99
nationalism; Fanon, Frantz; Sartre, Nimtz, August H., 22, 100
Jean-Paul nonessentialism, 84; Halls nones-
national liberation struggle: Algeria, sentialist theory of identity, 802
42, 187, 195, 218. See also Front de North America: treatment of work-
Libration Nationale ers during industrial expansion in
nation-state, 211, 263, 303, 307nn35 Europe and, 111
6; Euro-American, 280; Euro-
Canadian, 302; expansion of US Obama administration, 3001
Empire and Euro-American, Olmsted, Frederick Law: on Irish
299301; imperialism and the workers, 348
European, 308n43. See also nation- nc, Ays e, 322
state system On the Jewish Question. See Marx,
nation-state system, 281, 2947. See Karl
also nation-state oppression, 98, 11617; and capital-
Nazi camp. See concentration camp/ ism, 11016. See also Marx, Karl;
the camp special oppression
Nazi holocaust, 252, 254, 258, 2626, Order of Things, The. See Foucault,
271, 293 Michel
Nazi regime, 253, 262, 288, 290, 293 organic intellectuals, 213, 21719,
Negri, Antonio, 250, 2812, 303; 3801; in South Africa, 2256,
on consciousness, 308n40; on 229, 2324, 238. See also Biko,
development of modernity and Steve; black intellectuals; black
sovereignty in Europe, 2947; radical tradition; female organic
402Index
intellectuals; Gramsci, Antonio; postcolonialism, 255

Meer, Fatima postcolonial literature, 252, 267, 273
Orientalism (Said): critiques and postcolonial theory: synthesis of
reinterpretation of, 736 Marx and Foucault in, 826
Orientalism. See Said, Edward post-Enlightenment period: Du Bois
Orway Tead: on personnel manage- on race as invention in, 169; Said
ment, 3623 on European management of the
Ottoman Empire, 267 Orient in, 29
postmodernism, 97; and Marxism,
Palestine: occupation of, 260, 265, 97
267, 26870. See also Israeli apart- post-structuralism, 31, 197, 294
heid post-World War II: American Jews,
Palestinians: absenting of, 2634, 254; Zionism in context of, 252,
268; Israel states denial of rights 254
of, 259; as racialized other, 270; Poverty of Philosophy. See Marx, Karl
resistance, 271; right to self- power structures: and oppression,
determination, 273; in solidarity 2089, 21215, 221, 229
with, 273 Prashad, Vijay, 323, 3279
Parry, Benita, 8, 22, 63 Principles of Mining. See Hoover,
passive revolution, 21516 Herbert
Pateman, Carole, 9 Prison Notebooks. See Gramsci, An-
patriarchy, 1278, 1312, 139, 141 tonio
personnel management, 3624. See privilege, 1078, 11416; American
also Montgomery, David; scientific form of male supremacism, 1078;
management relationship to oppression, 11415
plantation: slavery, 111, 15960, 163, Protocols of the Elders of Zion/
168, 256, 289; slave system of pro- Protocols, 2567; republished by
duction, 106. See also plantation Henry Ford, 257
system; slaves and slavery psychological violence of racism. See
plantation system, 344; and gang Biko, Steve; Fanon, Frantz
labour, 3467; management of,
3467, 349; strike of black workers Quayson, Atu, 20, 334, 645, 83
in the US, 165. See also plantation; Quijano, Anibal, 206, 21011,
slaves and slavery 2389n2
pogroms, 257
Poland: characterization of working race, 1012, 1068, 12836, 2526,
class in, 3245 passim; in America, 1558, 1634,
Porter, Dennis, 30, 734 169; biological basis of, as ideolog-
post-9/11, 253; global imperialism, ical construct, 112; and cultural-
253 ism, 31112, 326; and the camp,
Index403
28994; definition of, 6; Fanon on, as framework, 1056; as ideology,

20910; as ideology, 1336; Sartre 1057, 11112; Sartre and, 18892;
on, 1902; Sartre and Fanon on, study of race and, 1934, 646,
1923. See also race development; 836. See also Bannerji, Himani;
race management Biko, Steve; critical race theorists;
race and racism: colonialism in race and racism
relation to, 20, 28, 85, 149, 160, Razack, Sherene, 9, 84, 100, 107, 256
174, 176; Dorothy Smiths con- Rein, Sandra, 99
tributions to understanding, Remnants of Auschwitz. See Agamben,
1316; Saids critique of Marxism Giorgio
towards analysing, 25, 32; Saids Resnick, Stephen, 1023
study of, 1920, 223; study of, Rhodes, Cecil, 267
1934, 646, 836 Riebe, Ernest, 3402
race development: and immigrants, Robinson, Cedric J., 99
356, 3589, 3612; and slavery, Rodney, Walter, 100
34251. See also plantation; planta- Roediger, David, 382, 386; and Eliza-
tion system; race management; beth Esch on race and the man-
scientific management; slaves and agement of labour in US history,
slavery 34065; on historical materialism,
race management, 250, 34265, 382; 100
altered focus after 1924, 3623; Romania: characterization of work-
and gang labour, 351, 354; and ing class in, 325
immigrants, 35764; Joralemon, Rosdolsky, Rudolf, 104
Ira on, 353; scientific management Roy, Arundhati, 3201
and, 340, 3423, 347, 34950, 352, rule of law, 281, 284, 286; suspension
35665; and US management over- of, in the context of the War on
seas, 3526; and women, 345, 347. Terror, 2878. See also sovereignty;
See also diseases and race man- state of exception
agement; scientific management; Russian Revolution, 166, 2567, 265
scientific racism
Races and Immigrants in America. See Sahle, Eunice, 3801, 3867; on
Commons, John R. intellectuals, oppression, and anti-
racial oppression, 112, 115 racist movements in South Africa,
racism, 5, 117, passim; anti-Jewish, 20538
249, 255, 256, 2589, 262, 2656, Said, Edward, 825, 255, 378,
272, 274; Atlantic slavery and 3801; critique of Foucault, 6573;
ideology of scientific, 1067; capi- critique of Marxism towards
talism and modern, 2567; cultur- analysing race and racism, 25,
alism as a contemporary form of, 32; on hegemony of the West, 29;
31617, 32231; definition of, 6; and ideology, 67; on importance
404Index
of studying colonialism, 2931; 34750, 352, 35665; and person-

Orientalism, 29, 45, 54, 6670, 713, nel management, 357. See also
137; on Orientalism, 100, 292, 324; Cartwright, Samuel (Dr); Mont-
on postcolonialism, 255; study of gomery, David; race management;
Orientalism, 2931, 448, 478, 51, scientific racism; Taylor, Frederick
66, 68, 716, 135, 324; and study Winslow
of race and racism, 1920, 223; scientific racism, 1067, 1345, 256,
on subjectivity, 656, 69, 73, 75; on 342, 34950, 360. See also race man-
synthesizing Marx and Foucault, agement; scientific management
7182; turn to Foucaults con- Scott, David, 33, 41, 65, 68, 83
cept of discourse, 2931; use of Scott, Helen, 256
Gramsci, 712; use of ideology, 72; Semite, 273
The World, the Text, and the Critic, sexuality, 11, 20, 45, 823, 216
713 Shohat, Ella, 98, 100
Sanbonmatsu, John, 100 imek, Ali, 322
Sand, Shlomo, 269 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 100, 106, 109
Sandel, Michael, 165 situation: concept of, 185, 191, 192,
San Juan Jr., E, 22, 634 1968
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 25, 42, 44, 1456; Skeggs, Beverly, 31718
on anti-racist racism, 191; Anti- slaves and slavery, 7, 20, 26, 115, 159,
Semite and Jew, 187, 1901; Being 175, 250, 380; Bannerji on, 125,
and Nothingness, 1878, 190, 1978; 134; construction of whiteness in
Black Orpheus, 1913; on co- US south, 1068; Du Bois on, in
lonialism, 189, 191, 1969; on the the US, 16370; and gang labour
concept of situation, 191; The in the Caribbean, 160; James on,
Critique of Dialectical Reason, 186, in the Caribbean, 1603; Marx
18990, 196; on ethnic nationalism, on, in the US, 11112; mercantile
185; on ethno-religious national- capitalism and, 1068; and origins
ism, 200; existentialism, 186, 188; of capitalism in the US, 108; and
Fanons critique of, 1923; and race development, 34251; racial,
Marxism, 1845, 187, 18890, 1989; 16370, 174; racialized, 101, 107,
and new racism (le nouveau 256; and racial mixture, 347; and
racism), 197; and racism, 18892; racist ideas, 34650; in the US,
on racism as product of European 1089. See also Atlantic slavery;
colonialism, 191; on resistance and plantation; plantation system
violence, 1956 Smith, Dorothy, 1316; contribution
Saul, John, 97 to understanding race and racism,
Schmitt, Carl, 285 1316; on social organization of
scientific management: coexistence knowledge, 131, 133. See also Ban-
with race management, 3423, nerji, Himani
Index405
social formations, 1278, 130; Stuart Stenning, Alison, 325

Hall on, 26 stereotype, 29, 1334, 190, 3601;
social relations, 1324, 136; as social anti-Jewish racialized, 258
formations, 12431 Stern Gang (Lehomai Herut Yis-
Solomos, John, 20, 24, 97 rael) (Fighters for the Freedom of
South Africa, 1467, 20538, 3801; Israel), 268
Asiatic Land Tenure Act, 218; Stoler, Ann Laura, 20, 42, 68, 834
formation schools, 225, 22930; In- Storrs, Sir Ronald, 2678
dian community in, 21819, 2278, subaltern: consent of, 72; discourse
232, 234; Indian Representation of, 57; history of the, 45; voice of; 56
Act, 218; institutionalized racism subjectivity, 52, 846, 312, 320; Ban-
in, 224; Marikana massacre in, 234; nerji on, 1245; Halls use of, 32,
mining and race and labour man- 77, 80, 82; neoliberal, 330; Said on,
agement in, 3536; participation 656, 69, 73, 75
of women in social movements Szymanski, Al, 115
in, 2256, 240n13; passive resis-
tance movement, 21820; Sahle on Takaki, Ron, 352
anti-oppression movements and Taliban regime, 2823
anti-racist struggles in, 20538; Tator, Carol, 100
Treatment Action Campaign, 232; Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 340; on
workers in, 3556. See also Biko, scientific management, 357. See
Steve; Meer, Fatima also Taylorism
sovereignty, 43, 24950, 2807, 289, Taylorism, 357, 3645. See also Taylor,
294304, 308n43, 3812; Arab Frederick Winslow
national, 262; impact of the War The Gees. See Melville, Herman
on Terror on the nature of, 2825; Thinking Through. See Bannerji,
relationship of race to Western, Himani
2812; of the Third World, 2989. Third World: gated communities
See also Agamben, Giorgio in, 314, 31820; neoliberal capital-
Soviet Union, 187 ist globalization and the urban
special oppression, 11016; defini- middle class in, 31823
tion of, 110; and women, 112. See Third World Marxism, 9, 20, 22
also Marx, Karl Thobani, Sunera, 3812, 387; Exalted
species being. See under Marx, Karl Subjects, 281, 3012; on theorizing
Stalinism, 1878, 2645 race, colonialism, and sovereignty
Stam, Robert, 98 in the context of the War on Terror,
Stasiulis, Daiva, 103 280304
state of exception, 253, 2801, Thompson, E.P., 104
28490, 296. See also Agamben, transnational bourgeois identity, 311,
Giorgio 320
406Index
transnational bourgeoisie, 311, 314, 2825, 297, 3013, 381; Lisa Lowe
320 on importance of Marxism to un-
transnationality, 250, 254, 311, 314, derstanding capitalism in, 3423;
3201; perspectives on whiteness, Marx on slavery in, 11112; plan-
325; and race management, 3506. tocracy, 115; race and management
See also transnational bourgeois of labour in, 34065; race-making
identity and the history of capitalism in,
transnational theory, 21, 30, 137 343, 356; Reconstruction and racial
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 352 oppression in, 150, 157, 1589,
Turkey, 382; cultural othering in, 16670, 351; ruling class, 11112;
3213; growth of conservative slavery in, 1089, 11112; use of
Muslim bourgeoisie in, 323; new critical race theory in, 22. See
middle class discourses in, 3213 also capitalism; Du Bois; Esch,
Tyson, Thomas, 346 Elizabeth; Roediger, David; slaves
and slavery
United Nations, 219, 236, 283, 295, universalism, 199, 297
297, 327
United States, 217, 2601, 263, vindication/vindicationism, 159; The
268, 271, 2967, 299; anti-Jewish Black Jacobins (James) as, 1545;
racialized stereotypes in, 2578; Black Reconstructions (Du Bois)
capitalism and the underclass affect on, 165; definition of, 156;
in, 31517; change in class posi- Du Bois working within, 156; his-
tion for American Jews in, 254; tory of, 176n6; James and Du Bois
civil rights movement, 100, 254, guided by, 150; James working
266; Civil War (186165), 106, 155, within, 161, 167
1656, 345; construction of white-
ness in the south, 1068; construc- War on Terror, 250, 2801, 294, 298,
tion of working class whiteness 301, 3035, 381; as globalized state
as privilege in, 11416; Du Bois of exception, 2878; impact on
on Communist movement in, 158; the nature of sovereignty, 2825;
Du Bois on systems of labour in represented as liberating women,
Europe and, 146; emergence of 2834. See also Afghanistan; Iraq;
neoliberal agendas in, 24; exploi- Islam
tation and oppression of African West, Cornell, 100
American women in the south West, 302, 75, 261, 263, 265, 284,
of, 1078; Hindu nationalists 2889; 298, 3023; Agamben on
association with, 139; invasion sovereignty defined as power over
and occupation of Afghanistan, life in, 2867; Du Bois on nature
280, 2824, 3023, 3045n2; inva- of labour in, 16370; Foucaults
sion and occupation of Iraq, 280, ethnology of, 434; Jewish
Index407
immigrant groups in, 2534; on the, 111, 11316; in Britain,

racialized peoples in, 260; re- 31718; in Eastern Europe, 3235;
evaluation of Marxism in, 24; Said erasure of, through culturaliza-
on hegemony of, 29; Thobani on tion, 326; in the (former) Third
redefinition of, as Judeo-Christian, World, 318, 3203; Hall on the,
2934; West Bank, 265 28, 81; Marx on the, 11011, 113;
Western colonial discourse, 135 in the US, 31516. See also United
Western Europe: Jewish emigration States
to, 257 World, the Text, and the Critic, The. See
Western intellectual tradition: Said, Edward
epistemic erasure of Africa and World War I, 358
Africans by, 149, 1612, 172, 175 World War II, 2634, 293; role of
Western sovereignty, 250, 2801, Zionism in post-, Western geopo-
2867, 289, 299303 litical context, 252, 254, 25861,
When Affirmative Action Was White. 26370. See also whiteness by
See Katznelson, Ira permission
whiteness, 114, 115; construction of, Wretched of the Earth, The. See Fanon,
in the US south, 1068; as feature Frantz
of transnational identities, 250,
311, 312, 314, 3256; as part of the Yiddish, 270
construction of difference, 256; Young, Robert, 1718, 74, 83, 378; on
as part of the origins of capitalist Foucault, 3960
expansion in the Americas and
Europe, 107; and race, 252 Zionism, 252, 25770, 2723, 381;
whiteness by permission, 252, 255, ascendance to a position of hege-
2589, 25861, 2612, 270 mony, 2545, 26271; in context
Williams, Eric, 100, 115 of post-World War II, 252, 254; as
Wolff, Richard, 1023 divisive force on the anti-racist
women: affect of colonial and social movement in the Middle East,
oppression on, 21618; Bannerji 266; as political ideology, 259; re-
on Dorothy Smiths analysis of the ally existing, 25861; and support
concept woman, 132; Bannerji of a Euro-American imperial-
on silencing of non-white, 124, ist agenda in the Middle East,
131; in Iraq, 283; and race manage- 2689. See also Bakan, Abigail B;
ment in the US, 345, 347. See also ideology
African American women; Biko, Zionist ideology as a mainstream
Steve; Meer, Fatima; South Africa perspective, 257
working class (workers), 245, 27, Zionist movement, 259, 261, 26670;
100, 164, 170, 233, 253, 261; Bakan in the US, 274n7

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THEORIZING ANTI-RACISM

Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories

Edited by Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua

abigail b. bakan is a professor and Chair in the Department of Social

enakshi dua is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality

EDITED BY ABIGAIL B. BAKAN

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

ISBN 978-1-4426-4935-4 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Theorizing anti-racism : linkages in Marxism and critical race theories /

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.Critical theory. 2.Anti-racism. 3.Racism. 4.Race. 5.Social

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support

1 Introducing the Questions, Reframing the Dialogue 5

Part I: Rethinking Foucault

Introduction to Part I: Foucault and Anti-Racism 17

2 Revisiting Genealogies: Theorizing Anti-Racism beyond

4 Not Quite a Case of the Disappearing Marx: Tracing the Place

Part II: Revisiting Marx

Introduction to Part II: Marx and Anti-Racism 95

5 Marxism and Anti-Racism: Rethinking

Introduction to Chapter 6 123

6 Marxism and Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice:

Part III: Legacies and Relationships

Introduction to Part III: Legacies of, and Relationships

7 C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Jacobins

8 Colonizing, Colonized: Sartre and Fanon 184

9 Intellectuals, Oppression, and Anti-Racist Movements

Part IV: Interventions in Race, Class, and State

Introduction to Part IV: New Interventions in Intersections

10Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering

11Race, Sovereignty, and Empire: Theorizing the Camp,

12Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism, and the Bourgeoisie

13Race and the Management of Labour

This book represents a truly collaborative effort, as it reflects both of

community of critical race scholars. Ena would also like to acknowl-

stuff of their being. Abbie is still learning to comprehend and appreci-

Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories

abi g ai l b . b akan an d e nak s h i dua

The aim of this collection is to advance critical scholarship in theorizing

cultural, transnational, feminist, and queer studies we anticipate that

tensions, we suggest, can be productively addressed and transcended

theorizations of power, identity, and discourse, while shedding light

Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, and Abigail B. Bakan. 2012. Contested Origin Stories

Anderson, Kevin B. 2010. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and

Hall, Stuart. 1980. Race Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.

abi g ai l b . b akan an d e nak s h i dua

formative, original, and nuanced reconsideration of Foucault. The

My chapter comes out of my intellectual and political history. As a

discourse, power, and identity to explore the complexities of race and

While Marxists and postcolonial theorists have offered important

deal of oversimplification, caricature, and trivialisation has crept into

Revisiting Early Writings: Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy,

10Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering

11Race, Sovereignty, and Empire: Theorizing the Camp,

12Rethinking Whiteness, Culturalism, and the Bourgeoisie

13Race and the Management of Labour