Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua, eds., Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories.
Camfield, David
Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua, eds., Theorizing Anti-Racism:
Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press 2014)
PROTESTS ACROSS the US against the murders of Michael Brown in
Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City and the refusal to lay
criminal charges against the police officers responsible for the
killings of these (and other) African-Americans have made the slogans
"Hands up, Don't Shoot!" and "Black Lives
Matter" widely known. In Canada, efforts to draw attention to the
murders of indigenous women and media exposes of the Toronto police
practice of disproportionately "carding" people of colour have
insisted that racism needs to be taken much more seriously. Anti-Muslim
racism has flared up in the wake of the murderous shootings in Paris in
January 2015. Within the academic field, much work remains to be done to
integrate racism and anti-racism into research and teaching about the
working class, past and present. The publication of this collection
edited by Abigail Bakan and Enakshi Dua is thus particularly timely.
Theorizing Anti-Racism aims to "advance critical scholarship
in theorizing race, racism, and anti-racism by recognizing the pivotal
importance of both Marxist and critical race theoretical
contributions." (5) Both the editors have made noteworthy previous
contributions to this field, Bakan from a Marxist perspective and Dua
from the side of critical race theory. In this collaborative project,
they have sought to "mitigate the tensions between these
approaches," (6) treating postcolonial and critical race theory as
a single diverse approach. The book is organized into four sections.
Each is introduced by a short piece by the editors, who also provide
brief introductions to two of the thirteen chapters as well as a concise
afterword.
The first section, "Rethinking Foucault," opens with a
chapter in which Dua sketches the divide between Marxist and
postcolonial scholarship on racism and surveys the important
contributions of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Edward Said. She makes
the point that the development of critical race theory was shaped by how
"post-war Marxism was (and continues to be) stubbornly lodged in
... a commitment to 'class' that often led to a silence on the
specific processes of racism, as well as a hostile relationship towards
explicitly anti-racist organizing and politics." (25) This, Dua
notes, led some anti-racist researchers to look to Michel Foucault for
"a non-economistic framework." (33) The result, she suggests,
has often been fruitful but also often neglected the relationship of
racism to capitalism. This is followed by an extract from Robert J.C.
Young's Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001) on Foucault's "archaeological" approach
of the late 1960s and its application to colonial discourse. The other
chapter in this section, also by Dua, looks at the uses of Foucault by
Said and Hall and reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of
postcolonial theorists' efforts to combine Foucault and Marx. As
she notes, "for most of those who theorize racialized
subjectivities, the social constructions of subjectivities, identities,
agency, and resistance are not centrally tied to the processes of
labouring or exploitation" (86)--a point to which I will return.
The second section is "Revisiting Marx." Bakan's
chapter (based on a 2008 article) offers a historical materialist
approach that deploys Marx's concepts of exploitation, alienation,
and oppression to theorize racial oppression and privilege. This is
followed by an interview by the editors with Himani Bannerji, arguably
the foremost anti-racist feminist Marxist analyst of racism based in
Canada. Bannerji reflects on her theoretical framework, which treats the
social as a differentiated unity of social relations rather than a
terrain of intersecting identities, its debt to the sociology of Dorothy
Smith, and nationalism.
This is followed by three chapters on "key anti-racist
thinkers." Anthony Bogues writes on the major historical works of
C.L.R James and W.E.B. DuBois (this chapter is drawn from his Black
Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals [New York:
Routledge, 2003]). Audrey Kobayashi and Mark Boyle write on Jean-Paul
Sartre and Frantz Fanon. Eunice Sahle uses Fanon and Antonio Gramsci to
look at Steven Biko and, more briefly, Fatima Meer.
The final section offers four pieces of anti-racist analysis.
Bakan's chapter on the "Jewish question" argues that the
creation of Israel as a Zionist state was "a critical political
element in the advancement of Jewish whiteness" (259-260) within
the racial hierarchies of Western societies. The following piece is
Sunera Thobani's telling critique (previously published in 2012) of
the failure of influential works by Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and
Antonio Negri to scrutinize "the relationship of race to Western
sovereignty within the global order." (281) Thobani also touches on
the acceptance of Jews into whiteness, suggesting a psychological
explanation based on Jews' response to Nazi extermination camps.
The contrast between this and Bakan's account illuminates the
difference between Thobani's theoretical approach and historical
materialism, as does the absence of any consideration by Thobani of the
relationship between the global state system and capitalism. Sedef
Arat-Koc argues that under neoliberalism middle-class people are
conceiving of "themselves and their 'other' in
increasingly culturalized ways." This culturalism, she contends, is
"a form of 'race-thinking' or 'race-like
thinking'" (312) with implications for the meaning of race
today. The final chapter, Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger's
"Race and the Management of Labour in United States History,"
looks at the racial dimension of managerial theory and practice from the
1800s into the 1920s (drawing heavily from their 2009 article on the
subject).
Theorizing Anti-Racism succeeds in achieving its stated aim, though
not to the extent I had hoped it would. Like almost all edited
collections of this kind, it is an uneven work. Considered as wholes,
the fourth section is the strongest while the third is the least tied to
the book's central objective.
The editors do an excellent job of bringing together insightful
historical materialist and poststructuralist-influenced research in a
single volume. However, important theoretical questions to which the two
perspectives give different answers are not clarified, a necessary move
for people interested in deepening dialogue between critical race
theorists and anti-racist Marxists. One concerns social ontology: should
we agree with Hall that "the social operates like a language"?
(78) Others include what is the nature of racism itself (social
relation, ideology, or discourse?), what explains the perpetuation of
racism today and what are the relative merits of theories of ideology
and discourse (an issue discussed in Jan Rehmann's excellent recent
book Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection
[Leiden: Brill, 2013]).
Regrettably, both Foucault and Marx receive less critical attention
in the book than they deserve. Dua's perceptive observation about
the frequent neglect of "processes of labouring or
exploitation" is important. Does this not pose a more fundamental
challenge to the use of Foucault than she recognizes? This failing flows
logically from Foucault's idealist Nietzschean conception of
society and individuals, in which the body is much-discussed but human
corporeality is nevertheless erased, as Joy James and others have
argued. As for Marx, it is too generous to say, as Bakan does, that
"oppression is the least complete in its theorization of all the
forms of human relations" (109) he studies. It is fruitless to look
for adequate concepts of oppression, racism ,or race in Marx's work
(which does not mean that historical materialists cannot develop what
Marx did not).
In spite of these limitations, Theorizing Anti-Racism contains much
of value. Not all of its chapters are of equal interest to people who
study work, the working class, or workers' organizations. Still,
everyone in the field would benefit from reading at least some of the
contents of this collection.
DAVID CAMFIELD
University of Manitoba
