Racialized modernity: An analytics of white mythologies

Abstract This article is located in parentheses between two quotations from Derrida's reflections on white mythologies, defined here as the 'rhetoric of modernity'. It re-conceptualizes race by interrogating its elision in contemporary social and political thought where discussions of modernity routinely ignore colonial and racial formations. It discusses a commentary by Jurgen Habermas on Hegel's discourse of modernity, which is used heuristically to illustrate the systematic elisions of race in contemporary theoretical discussions of modernity. Reading various juxtapositions between the two, it argues Habermas's erasure of distinctly colonial/racial themes in Hegel's concept of modernity, can be used to develop an analytics of racialized modernity, against white mythologies, which understands race beyond corporeality as signifying colonial distinctions between assemblages of 'Europeanness' and 'non-Europeanness'. Building on developments in race/modernity studies it argues for the importance of conceptualizing race without any residual reliance on a biological referent to guarantee the object of critique. Keywords: ModernityracializationEuropeHabermasHegelcoloniality Acknowledgements Many thanks to my interlocutors S. Sayyid, Richard Iton, Michael Hanchard, Lisa Lowe, Robert Gooding-Williams and David Goldberg. Notes 1. Derrida 1982, p. 213. 2. An analytics describes an approach to study, research, reading or writing. It is a mode of analysis (inspecting and questioning phenomena, (e.g. white mythologies) that is concerned with the examination of the specific conditions (.e.g. European coloniality) under which particular phenomena (e.g. race/modernity) emerge, persist, change and are contested. In short an analytics is a way of analyzing the how (the arising and deployment) and why (the rationale and logic) of particular phenomena (e.g. racialized modernity). cf. Dean Citation1999, pp. 20–27. 3. It should be noted that Habermas's commentary on Hegel draws upon a range of Hegel's writings, particularly though not exclusively, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, The Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the History of Philosophy. This is contained in the first two chapters of Habermas 1987. For reasons of space my own reading of Hegel is based on his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. 4. A 'chronotope' describes terms or ideas that combine references to particular times and spaces in a discourse. In referring to 'time-space', it signifies the 'intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships', see Bhaktin Citation1991: 84. 5. We should note the root sense of 'imperium' is 'order' or 'command'. In its semantic history from Antiquity to the late 18th century and beyond, this Latin term acquired three distinct senses as: 'limited and independent or "perfect" rule, as a territory embracing more than one political community, and as the absolute sovereignty of a single individual'; see Pagden Citation1995, p.17. 6. It is within the context of the European logos as a foundation of the modernity discourse, driven by coloniality that 'undecidability' arises as the irrepressibility of unfixity, uncertainty, incoherence, discrepancy in the meanings instituted in the 'European' /'non-European' demarcations that supply the categories of race. Contrary to the appearances given by the closed, reiterable, foundational logic of the tabulated racial categories, 'undecidability' is found in those spaces and instances where an innovative or legislative decision has been or needs to be taken to define what the 'European'/'non-European' distinctions can or should mean. 7. There continues to be much contemporary discussion of 'race' as a social construction, but beyond tautology (i.e. 'race is a social construction of race') and without essentialism (i.e. 'race refers to visible, physical, bodily attributes') it is not clear what gets socially constructed as 'race'; or what gets biologized or ethnicized as 'race'. If as I have argued, 'race' invokes the historically instituted colonial relation 'European'/'non-European', then racialization describes its sustained configuration in discrete markings of various assemblages of social entities (e.g. polities, corporealities, histories, knowledges, communities). Consequently, categories of 'race' whether historically based on the one drop rule in the United States (see Lopez Citation1996), or the Latin American systems of racial gradation along a continuum (see Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt Citation2003), all occur within the parameters set by the colonial polarization of people, places and things ascribed as 'European' and 'non-European' assemblages. 8. This second quotation from Derrida's discussion of the organizing and erasing power of metaphor in philosophy follows six lines after the quotation that begins this article. My article can therefore be read as written in a parenthesis between these two quotations. See Derrida 1982, p. 213. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBarnor Hesse BARNOR HESSE is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies, Northwestern University