x Preface pt of race may have predated ‘book is in part about whether and how races form. Introduction: Racial Subjects “Individuals may well come and go; it seems that philosophy travels nowhere.’ ‘The subject of social analysis is increasingly being conceived in racial erms, The inhering here in the subject of address reflect both whi its primary subject matter, and what I principally set out ‘The book focuses on race, the variety of its social expressions and understanding of these expressions in hinking and racist articulation have become increasingly normalized and naturalized throughout modernity, but in ways not simply determined (as rans)formation(s) of racialized discourse irecting its discursive expressions and impli sweep of sociohis to modernity’s common moral and sociopolitical sense. Hence, acknowledge the role of philosophical2 Introduction: Racial Subjects discourse and the culture of racisms, as well asthe importance of philosophical ‘prompted or promoted by racial reference or racialized exclusions are actual or intended, effects or affects of /ecomprehend others and conceive tically to some sort of se mediated, if not quite cemented by the set of discursive pr ‘embedded in them. ‘Commentators usually identify a small discourse, of worldview and self-image, ‘considered ‘Western’: from classical to theory and the randomness of quantum. These more finite discursive expressions Introduction: Racial Subjects 3 ‘may themselves constitute smaller discursive fields, in much the way that a large transport sm is divided into zones. ese intradiscursive shifts could add up to or prompt ractices and expressions. These dangerous, for they hide their discriminator ‘more readily acceptable conceptual schem: aptures a central feature of the concept of race in modemity. To show just this underlies the general task T self-conscious in ‘maturity in the Enl ‘manifests itself in the fixing ofthe social in terms of bureaucracy, of the political4 Introduction: Racial Subjects in terms of the law, and of the economic in terms of the laws ofthe market, the f-)determination. Thus, the spirit of modemity is to be found most ‘centrally in its commitment to continuous progress: to material, moral, physical, and political improvement and to the promotion and development the general standards for which the West took to be its own values u ic to modemnity’s sef-conception, the that is abstract and atomistic, ge political relations andi only by Reason, precisely because ofits purported impart mediate the differences and tensions berwe specific identity to otherwise abstract and alienated subjectivities. Sufficiently broad, indeed, almost conceptually empty, rae offers itself as a category capable ‘of providing a semblance of social cohesion, of historical particular ‘meanings and motivations to agents otherwise mechani conduits for market forces and moral laws, Like the cor ‘emerges more oF less coterminous! social subjects with a cohesive ide an identity that proves capable of being stretched across time and spac If assumes transforming specificity and legitimacy by taking on as its own the connotations of prevailing scientific and social discourses, In colonizing these prevailing connotations, race in turn has been able to set scientific and political agendas, to contain the content and icabilty of Reason, to define who may be excluded and to confine the tems inception by arming I suggested at the outset, has become the defining doctrine of self and soci modernity. The way in which racial characterizations are articulated in and through, and so come in part to define liberalism, will thus serve to locate this | paradox at the center ofthe modem project. utilitarian and welfarist formulation in the nineteenth century work of Bentham, Introduction: Racial Subjects 5 James and John Stuart Mill, to its Von Hayek and Nozick, and its deontology and notwithstanding, tothese thinkers and others like them, whether more or less radical orconservative, ideological expressions were spawned by and matured with modernity. One thinks here of fascism, marxism, and anarchism, to name the most (potential) capacity to be moved by Reason. the force of reason, liberalism presupposes is to be brought about by and reflected mark of progress is measured. In keeping with these commitments, contemporary moral theorist i tradition traced back to Hobbes, Locke, and Kant have come to in6 Introduction: Racial Subjects ‘a morally irelevant category’. A morally irelevant difference between persons ‘and allow them to be guided by this commitment to the principle Introducti ial Subjects 7 of difference it becomes and the more closed it seeks to make the circle of ‘The first is to deny otherness, the otherness it has been instrumental in creating, to deny its relevance. The second seems less extreme, but the effect ing them, by bleaching them out through ral would assume away the difference in ‘be overcoming through the force of scientists may thus admit race as a given, a natural social way into and between social ide1 gm reflected in the contemporary popula and academic reduction of racial concerns to the irrationsl prejudice ite rights’ and “fe jernity denies its racialized histo ‘and prompted thinkers silently to frame theit conceptions of ‘morality, polity, and legality in its terms. Liberal melirism takes it that we have8 Introduction: Racial Subjects exclude institutional and public id—for some, postmodern, postaparth transnational era It is contradictorly celebrated as multict it rationalizes hegemonic control of difference, access, and pi liberal meliorism—wi functions and outcomes. In contrast to the prevailing picture ofa singular and passing, developing a conception of transforming and sustained by an underlying culture, ce of any prevailing racist ex; ‘relations and institutions in a racialized formation mustbe read: commanding the cl assert power, Where the cult knowing and doing. It is made up case, concerning race(s)—and it involves a set of rules or convent vocabulary of expression and express tends over the various ways of acting in racial terms, over the shared meanings through which these actions are rendered more or less significant, and over the conditions of their perpetuation and transformation, ‘grammar oftheir relation, and a Introduction: Racial Subjects 9 Racist culture has been one of the central ways modern social subjects make thought in giving v discourses—those t Bourdieu refers to as the hegemony of sym ‘Conceptual hegemony turns not only upon the Discursive counteraction may assume various forms. In general, we can distinguish between changes within a discourse and changes ofa discourse, The10 Introduction: Racial Subjects {former involves more local changes in some constitutive feature or clement of the latter shifts from one discourse or discursive formation to another. ‘Countering elements within a discourse may involve substituting @ new term for ‘phonetic or conversational com fashion. One may choose to use ying in the face of communicative form of the verb with plural pronoun To change a discourse shift in whole ways of world ‘granted) will prompt both conceptual and material cha legal, and cultural level, just as changes in the ‘The combined effects of this nexus of alterations. tura upon transformations in the ways agents are na, So chapter 2 documents the racializing paradox at arety of racialized expressions and their attendant of the discourse, what holds it together and characterizes it as racialized, is @ set Iniroduction: Racial Subjects u ‘of conceptual primitives that began to be articulated inthe sixteenth century and became embedded since in and through popular social, sciemific, and political discourses. The account in chapter 3 offers a framework for elaborating these conceptual primitives, for revealing the historical transformations occuring identifications and those that are op a general, nonessential conception of race ‘meanings. The tension between ea ‘centered conceptions of race is traced ou2 Introduction: Racial Subjects values upon which this conception tums. This account thus highlights the ways ‘economics—are deeply their exclusionary implications. Chapter 7 accordingly demonstrates how 31 sciences in the prevailing liberal ily ry, political science and economy, sociology and urban 1 prism of racialized social orde shown to be deeply implicated in the and racisms a8 common sense, Though 10w in chapter 8 how the reconceived isms offered here may be applied to illuminate the racialized and racially exclusionary definition of spatial location throughout South Africa and “the West’. This spatial analysis turns on an extended demonstration of the histories. The central thesis here ‘marginalized throughout the West reflects the apartheid pois, s0 postapartheid space in South Africais being conclude in chapter: conditions of poss for resisting these socioconceptual configurations and for the emergence of effective antiracist practices. A conception of praxis as principled pragmatism is articulated, and the ‘commitment to pragmatic antiracisms is contrasted with liberalism’s policy of sm, This distinction between the ity of antiracisms and the markers to elucidate the argument and to establish where the arguments are Introduction: Racial Subjects 3 ‘coming from and taking us, o assure that the route at hand is one we woul or circuitous, speedy or scenic, rough or smooth, short or long. The destination to which all my maps’ routes wil are not so much final as they are plateaus of sorts, points or tersecting points from which to launch ‘more or less spatiotemporally specific and effective antiacist practices and interventions. In this sense, cartography is designed not simply to reflect, to represent by ‘capturing’ the geography of racialized powe respresent, to intervene in these racialized relations so as to iniite possibilities, of fesistance and response.