The time and space of race: reflections on David Theo Goldberg's interrelational and comparative methodology

ABSTRACT

Maldonado-Torres identifies and analyses key elements in the methodology of David Theo Goldberg's The Threat of Race, highlighting its relevance for ethnic studies, area studies and postcolonial studies generally, and for the study of race and ethnicity specifically. He focuses on Goldberg's conceptualization of the history or the time of race, as well as on the geopolitical and economic dimensions of race and racism. Goldberg's account of race as a ‘foundational code’ of modernity undergirds his perspective and the way in which these themes relate to each other, making his work relevant for the theorizing of race and racism at large, and not only for the theorization of race and neoliberalism today. To that extent, Maldonado-Torres interrogates Goldberg's view of the relation between racial naturalism and racial historicism, and his resistance to the concept of racialization. He also calls for a more detailed discussion of how racial historicism relates to ethnicity vis-á-vis race. As for the space of race, Goldberg makes substantial contributions to an interrelational understanding of contemporary racisms, going beyond typical divides between US ethnic studies and areas studies. Yet there is also work in these and other disciplines that can make further contributions to his thinking.

Keywords:

• antiracism
• critical regionalisms
• David Theo Goldberg
• place
• race
• racism
• space
• The Threat of Race

Notes

¹David Theo Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1990).

²David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009) (page references will appear parenthetically in the text).

³David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell 1993); David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).

⁴Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘A dialogue on global states, 6 May 2006’, Postmodern Culture (online journal), vol. 17, no. 1, 2006, at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/pmc/v017/17.1butler_spivak.html (viewed 11 November 2009).

⁵George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002).

⁶See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Karen S. Glover, “‘We are all Americans”: the Latin Americanization of race relations in the USA’, in Maria Krysan and Amanda E. Lewis (eds), The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity: Theory, Methods, and Public Policy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation 2004), 149–86.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is the author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke University Press 2008), and co-editor of Latin@s in the World System: Decolonization Struggles 21st Century in US Empire (Paradigm Press 2005)