“Race” and “post-colonialism”: should one come before the other?

ABSTRACT

One unsettled analytical question in race scholarship concerns the relationship between categories of race and categories of post-colonialism. These are often run together or are used interchangeably; sometimes an implicit hierarchy of one over the other is assumed without explicit discussion. In that activity, a great deal is enveloped, including a portrayal of race scholarship which can be at some variance from how race scholars conceive it. In this paper, it is argued that paying attention to a distinction between these two categories, and then trying to get them not only in the “right order”, but also on their own terms, is conceptually fruitful – however messy the outcome may be. What is advocated is an approach in which categories of race and post-colonialism are not subsumed into one another, but retain their distinctive and explanatory power.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• post-colonialism
• whiteness
• categories
• history
• society
• explanation

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to Claire Alexander, Alana Lentin, Karim Murji, John Solomos, Satnam Virdee, Aaron Winter and the Sociology Theory Group at Edinburgh University for helpful comments and conversations on an earlier version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a sustained elaboration of this see point Claire Alexander and Anoop Nayak’s (2016) plenary address to British Sociological Association Conference: https://vimeo.com/176452879

2 I suppose this is preferable to the strange statement from Howe (2002, 28) to introductory readers that: “Just as not all racism was colonial, not all colonialism [was] racially defined … ”.

3 Minute by the Honourable T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2 February 1835. Available here: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html Viewed 26 June 2014

4 On this point at least Gilroy (2006, 5) would agree with me when he elaborates that one of the functions of “postcolonial melancholia” is the way that it:

blinds us to the connections between race-thinking and the white supremacism that legitimized colonial endeavour, so much so that we fail to notice that racism is a problem until the next tragic death or inflammatory eruption shakes us temporarily out of our complacency.

5 Nayak illustrates this by describing three different sub-cultures of working-class young boys.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Royal Society of Edinburgh: [Personal Research Fellowship] and The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) award number ES/R00451X/1.