Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua, eds., Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories.

Coburn, Elaine

ABIGAIL B. BAKAN and ENAKSHI DUA, eds., Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4426-2670-6, 407 p.

This edited collection makes an important contribution to historical materialism and critical race theory. Across 13 chapters, 12 scholars draw from both paradigms to offer new insights into the reproduction of race inequalities within world capitalism and empire. In addition, they describe and analyze how race inequalities are challenged by subaltern actors worldwide, although these struggles are often underappreciated within social sciences emphasizing (white) European histories.

The participating authors are not sociologists, instead working across disciplines from political science to women's studies and philosophy. Nonetheless, their insights are valuable to sociologists because they help unpack the ways that race inequalities are reproduced materially and ideologically, often through mundane administrative and managerial tasks.

Overall, the book's argument is that race inequalities are not fatalities. Instead, these are social realities that may be challenged through political action. In support of that aim, the editors hope that the new theoretical "synergies" they develop across historical materialism and critical race approaches will inform "effective anti-racist praxis" (p. 11).

MARX OR FOUCAULT: YES, PLEASE!

Historical materialism and critical race theory are often, even usually, interpreted as fundamentally antagonistic. Historical materialists argue that critical race theorists fail to appreciate the social context of the world capitalist political economy. They underestimate the ways that capitalist class relationships of exploitation shape everyday life. In return, critical race theorists charge Marxism with economic reductionism. They fail to consider the political and cultural implications of race inequalities as durable, if shape-shifting, social facts (p. 5). In the opening six chapters, this assumption that the two approaches are irreconcilable is challenged through critical re-appraisals of the work of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, respectively, key intellectuals for historical materialists and critical race theorists.

To that end, co-editor Abigail Bakan argues for a renewed historical materialist vocabulary. Such renewal makes clear the ways that Marxism can, in fact, be useful for describing and analyzing race inequalities. This requires attentiveness to the social and economic concept of exploitation of one class by another. At the same time, it demands appreciation for other important Marxist concepts, such as alienation. For Marx, alienation is about the ways that human beings are systematically distanced from each other. Understood this way, race inequalities may be described as a particular form of alienation, an "institutionally enforced system of 'us' and 'them'" (p. 105). Although race inequalities are based on arbitrary differences across human beings, they feel meaningful. Moreover, they are socially consequential, dividing human beings against each other who might otherwise act in solidarity (p. 106).

Thus, a reconceptualized historical materialism might observe that the social construction of racial difference is a form of separation. This alienates "white" human beings from dehumanized, racialized "others" who are then subject to particularly brutal forms of exploitation (pp. 106-107). Through such analyses, Bakan seeks to demonstrate that a reconsidered historical materialism need not be hostile to critical studies of race and may even helpfully inform such research.

In a complementary analytical movement, co-editor Enakshi Dua argues that many theorists, including Edward Said, have drawn usefully on both Marx and Foucault. Among other observations, she argues that a "rereading of Orientalism points to a deliberate conflation of discourse, culture and material relations" (p. 76). In other words, Said refuses to choose between a Marxist emphasis on material relations and Foucauldian emphasis on discourse and culture.

In keeping with the historical materialist tradition, Said recognizes the brute and often brutal material structures of power. This includes military occupation, dispossession, and economic exploitation that maintain the East as subordinate to West (p. 75). At the same time, in a Foucauldian vein, he emphasizes that Western discursive formations produce the "Orient" as a space propitious for conquest (p. 76). (1) In other words, metropolitan representations of Oriental culture circulate in the West, "encouraging ... intervention in the conquered territories" (p. 76). Material relations and discursive formations, which have an ideological function in legitimating conquest, are "mutually constitutive" (p. 76). That is, material relations of capitalist class power and cultural "knowledge" of the Orient are both essential--they both matter in the formation and practice of empire. Theorizing Orientalism, as Said did, meant drawing on Marx and Foucault, not choosing between them.

THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF RACE INEQUALITIES

These are illustrative of the kind of theoretical reinterpretations the book aims to produce and encourage. New insights created through "synergies" across historical materialism and critical race theory are then brought to bear on the changing social realities of race inequalities.

In an approach familiar to sociologists, for instance, Himani Bannerji (who contributes an interview) problematizes race inequalities as at once about biography and history. She offers the following example: "Let us take a common event: an incident at a bus stop where a stranger calls you a racist name ... how could (this) have happened as a practice as well as a concept?" (p. 133). To explain violent experiences like this, Bannerji suggests, requires an understanding of the colonial history and present of Canada.

This means recognizing that "Canada" is not an abstract entity but a place made up of specific, unequal social relations. Historically, this includes, "practices of slavery, indenture and conquest of the aboriginal (sic) peoples" (p. 134). Such historical race inequalities were justified by the idea that human beings are made up of inferior and superior races. Today, such racist ideas legitimate contemporary inequalities, including but not limited to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, the stranger who calls out a racist insult is not exhibiting a merely "personal" prejudice. This individual is reproducing ideologies of race and race inequality that have justified social domination for centuries across lands claimed by Canada.

In her chapter, Sunera Thobani makes a similar argument about the need to place "immeasurably damaging" (p. 302) personal experiences of racism in the context of global race inequalities, especially historical and ongoing colonialism. She begins by exploring Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's (2001) concept of "Empire." Hardt and Negri (2001) imagine unproblematic, mobile "hybrid identities" in a world of "deterritorialized and decentered" sovereignty (p. 294). In their view, contemporary "Empire" is made up of an "imperial global rainbow" of "flexible" national hierarchies (Hardt and Negri quoted by Thobani, p. 297).

Against such "postracial" understandings of Empire, Thobani argues that "sovereignty, citizenship, rights and entitlements" (p. 302) have never been universal. Rather, these have always been the special property of those whom she calls "exalted" white subjects (p. 302). These white actors are imagined as superior both to Indigenous peoples, supposedly "doomed to extinction," and to Third World peoples, including racialized immigrants, understood as "perpetual outsiders."

In short, racialized subaltern peoples are presumed to be civilizationally and/or culturally incompatible with historically inevitable Western liberal capitalist forms of sovereignty and modernity (p. 302). The ironic reality is that white, Western "sovereignties and subjectivities" (p. 302) are neither universal nor historically inevitable. Rather, their hegemony is achieved by force and coercion.

Third World peoples' must conform to Western political, economic and cultural forms, or face economic and military sanctions. This coercion is exercised by international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund. The sovereignty of mainly Third World debtor nations only extends as far as the Fund's loan conditionalities allow. Moreover, when Third World nations and Indigenous polities fail to align with Western political and economic interests and cultural values, they are subject to military threat and occupation, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kanehsatake. Empire, sovereignty, and rights are not the universal values that liberal philosophies pretend them to be. Instead, they are race-saturated concepts that apply only conditionally to most of the world's peoples.

In her chapter, Sedef Arat-Koc is concerned with the changing experiences of class and other social inequalities. Arat-Koc argues that in neoliberal Eastern Europe and worldwide, "Orientalism provides a 'mental map' through which growing social inequalities are interpreted" (p. 324). Inequalities are not understood as the outcome of capitalist class power and the exploitation of the working class. Instead, they are explained and experienced in cultural and racial terms.

On the one hand, there is a supposedly degenerate, "civilizationally incompetent" (p. 324) primitive working and underclass. On the other, there is a dynamic, culturally "apt" entreprenurial class. In cities, this cultural divide is sedimented through urban infrastructure. Pathologized working and underclasses are physically marginalized in ghettos (p. 326). The wealthy few live in gated communities, that is, "segregated and protected spaces for elite consumption, elite lifestyles and elite culture" (Partha Chatterjee quoted by Arat-Koc, p. 319).

Classes segregated this way often understand each other as simultaneously physically and culturally distant. Often, this cultural distance is experienced as a "natural" difference, in the same ways that the existence of race and supposedly superior and inferior races is naturalized in racist ideologies. In other words, differences between classes are understood as emanating from these classes fundamentally different cultural or racial natures. Inequalities are not understood as social and political realities, for instance, as resulting from the exploitation of one class by another. Instead, inequality appears to be an outcome of natural, innate cultural or racial differences between the wealthy and the poor.

GRAMMARS OF RACISM

In these chapters and others, contributors suggest that historical racial inequalities persist in the present, albeit in new forms. They make possible readily available "grammars" of racism. (2) These saturate geopolitical strategy, including the War on Terror, political economy, including the role of international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, and everyday relationships of inequality, including the "possibility" of being subject to a racist insult in nations such as Canada.

At the same time, grammars of racism are not inevitable but must be produced and reproduced. In his chapter, Robert J.C. Young argues "from" Foucault for new understandings of the ways that ordinary colonial administrative documents produce and reproduce the racialized subject. In particular, Young argues for attentiveness to

   parliamentary speeches, notices, legislation, acts, statutes,
   orders in council, treaties, documents, directives, dispatches,
   instructions, resolutions, trade agreements, correspondence,
   papers, memoranda, minutes, memorials, resolutions, petitions,
   addresses, accounts, reports and official diaries... (P. 58)

These colonial documents are not merely texts but discursive practices. A colonial court decides, for instance, that a slave may not bear witness against a white slave-owner. This helps to produce the slave as a less-than-human person in relationship to another ontological category of human, the white person.

This methodological emphasis on "ordinary" administrative documents contrasts with what Young sees as a regrettable tendency for postcolonial studies to focus (too exclusively) on literary narratives as sources of Orientalizing modes of thought (pp. 59-60). In fact, he argues, it is "ordinary" administrative texts like those listed above that exercise a characteristically Foucauldian disciplining power, creating the white sovereign subject in relation to the racialized Other. (3)

The state does not, however, hold a monopoly on such productive, disciplining, and racializing power. In the final chapter, Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger describe explicitly racist labor management practices of the early 1900s. These were initially developed in the United States on slave plantations and early factories and then exported worldwide as cutting-edge management expertise. A 1925 factory in Pittsburgh, for instance, formally schematized "racial adaptability to various types of plant work." The schema suggested that the Welsh are suited to both day and night shifts, in any temperature, while Filipinos are poor at any shift and only weakly productive in most work environments (p. 359).

Esch and Roediger emphasize that, in practice, management "pragmatically," adapted racially prescriptive management tools to local contexts. Moreover, supposedly "scientific" racial management typologies varied wildly from one locale to another and even from one plant to another. Despite such inconsistencies, labor management categories produced ontological possibilities, to use philosopher Ian Hacking's (2005) vocabulary. Human beings become racial "kinds" to be exploited in particular ways by "racially savvy" management partly in and through those same labor management practices.

It is worth briefly observing here that Young defends a characteristically Foucauldian approach. He emphasizes the productive, disciplining nature of discourse, where discourse is literally understood as colonial administrative texts. In contrast, Esch and Roediger offer a political economic focus on labor management theory and practices, closer to historical materialist traditions. Yet both recognize the ways that human beings with supposedly distinct ontological "racial" statuses are produced through state and management discourses. Through such juxtapositions, the possibilities of writing from Foucault and Marx are emphasized across the book.

THE SOCIAL ACT OF LIBERATION

Historical racisms weigh like a nightmare on contemporary social relationships. If the present is haunted by the past, this is, however, never totalizing. On the contrary, several contributions emphasize the importance of antiracist movements in bringing about socially just social change. In an apparent paradox, these struggles are often led by the most dominated actors.

In his chapter, Anthony Bogues critically analyzes the contributions of Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois. Both emphasize the vital role of black revolutionaries to world history in their literary, scholarly, and political work. For his part, C.L.R. James wrote about the Haitian Revolution, "the only successful black slave revolt in modernity" (p. 155). As a powerful example of how black men (sic) "mould(ed)... society and politics" (p. 154), James' description and analysis of the Haitian Revolution deliberately countered the erasure of black history and agency in colonial political theories, including Marxism. At the center of History, James revealed the revolutionary black subject. (4) This had immediate political implications, since this history was specifically intended to inspire African anticolonial movements. Past and present struggles were linked through revolutionary black and African agency.

Similarly, W.E.B. Du Bois sought to restore the liberated black slave to American history as the "real hero and center of human interest" (p. 157). He made visible unfree black workers as "prime agents for a new world order" (p. 158). As in C.L.R. James, the liberated black slave becomes the revolutionary agent of history. Du Bois suggests that it is precisely because African slaves were so violently dominated and oppressed that they were key historical actors. Since the liberated slave literally embodies political struggles for freedom, (s)he opens up new conceptions of "politics as a practice of freedom" (p. 176).

At the same time, these histories countered self-serving paternalistic colonial arguments about the incapacity of the colonized to govern themselves (pp. 154-155). The historical documentation of the (often heroic) agency of black and African men and women reveals such colonial arguments to be ideological fig leaves for unjustified and unjustifiable racial domination.

In a similar movement, Eunice N. Sahle reminds us in her chapter that in Steve Biko's "exploration of social oppression, the black man (sic) is not only the subject of racial oppression, he is also the social actor who will liberate his people" (p. 225). In other words, the black person is not only the colonized, dominated, enslaved, victim, but a critical actor with the capacity to change world history. If hegemonic racist ideologies associated blackness with the negative experience of oppression, black agency literally embodies a striking reversal, making blackness "synonymous with the word 'freedom'" (Morgane Wally Serote quoted in Sahle, p. 227).

In South Africa, for instance, the creation of the South African Student's Union with a specifically black--as opposed to multiracial--identity played a critical role in making visible an affirmative black agency. This challenged the invisibilization of black actorhood that was part of the colonial and apartheid projects of formal, politically institutionalized racial segregation and violence.

As Sahle explores, creating a sense of collective, positive black agency through shared struggle was an important aim of the antiapartheid and postapartheid social justice movements. For the late South African sociologist and activist Fatima Meer, the realities of racial inequality fostered feelings of alienation and hopelessness in racialized men and women. In Meer's view, such disempowerment could only be countered by shared struggle. Suggestive of this possibility, a participant at a meeting against the privatization of basic services in a ghettoized neighborhood, observed: "what came to my mind is that I am not alone in this thing" (Peter Dwyer quoted in Sahle, p. 236). Race inequality is never only a story of oppression, domination, and submission. Instead, there are struggles of resistance and liberation from such oppression.

Sometimes liberation struggles may take perverse forms. In one of her chapters, Bakan observes that Jews have suffered and continue to suffer from anti-Jewish racism. But she forcefully rejects the historical "solution" to this racism, at least for some Jews, which was to become "white by permission." In particular, she rejects Zionist identification of Jewishness with the state of Israel in an Orientalized Middle East (p. 270). She refuses a relationship of "particularized Zionist Jewish whiteness" against the "racialized Palestinian other" (p. 270).

Instead, she calls for recognition of the possibilities--and realities--of Jewish solidarity with Palestinian Arabs against Israeli apartheid. She suggests that, historically, the roots of this solidarity lie in now-marginalized but once popular universalist, socialist Jewish political traditions (p. 270). Racism and race inequalities are not fatalities. Ultimately, they depend upon political choices and making those political choices "heard" (p. 271) through collective action. In this case, this means the recovery of what Bakan terms "consistent" Jewish antiracism, which refuses both anti-Semitism and the colonization of the Orientalized Palestinian.

CHALLENGING KNOWLEDGE REGIMES

Finally, the book addresses the implications of race inequalities for the social sciences. Contributing author Bogues puts it this way: we cannot investigate "the nature of racism and the barbarities of colonialism" (p. 149) without asking what the consequences have been for "political and historical knowledge" (p. 149). Sociology is shaped by race inequalities and the book convincingly makes the case that "effective anti-racist praxis" (p. 11) will mean transformations to the social sciences.

In their chapter, Audrey Kobayashi and Mark Boyle consider how the theorist or researcher's social location has an impact on their scholarly work. Borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre, they argue that the researcher's "geography of situation" (5) matters to her theorizing and research (p. 196). With this phrase, they mean to invoke something like Sandra Harding's (2004) concept of "standpoint"--the idea that all knowledge emerges from "somewhere." Every researcher writes from a specific social location within unequal relationships.

For Kobayashi and Boyle, differences across the political philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon are at least partly explicable by their respective "geography of situations," the social location in which they lived and from which they theorized. Specifically, they suggest that "Sartre gazed on the European colonial adventure from the vista of the white European metropolitan and privileged elite and Fanon experienced European colonialism brutally as a constituent member of the black, oppressed and subaltern class" (p. 198).

From his position of relative privilege, Sartre then consistently emphasized the universal, subordinating the "particular" to the liberatory potential of the existential subject. This universal subject was meant to enjoy an "open and unpredictable future" (p. 199). In contrast, Fanon emphasized the particular emancipatory capacity of the colonized. In his view, the colonized was uniquely historically positioned to violently shatter the bonds of colonialism (p. 198). The urgency of concrete struggle, for Fanon, manifests in his attachment to the historically specific figure of the colonized. In contrast, Sartre's (natural?) detachment from colonialism as a white actor in the French metropole explains his insistence on a more universal but also more abstract existential subject. (6)

Yet Kobayahi and Boyle observe that Sartre failed to be entirely captured by his privileged social position. Notably, he refused to ignore the racist and colonial relationships in which he was entangled (p. 198). Alongside his existential writings, he offered sustained political opposition to the "direct brutal treatment" (p. 197) of North African immigrants in Paris. He was concerned about anti-imperial struggles and the risks of them "lapsing into visceral ethno-religious nationalism" (p. 200). In short, he offered important critical analysis of the liberation struggles he supported. This means that Sartre's engagement with Fanon consequently cannot be reduced to the paternalistic relationship of the colonizer to the colonized, as it is too often. Instead, Kobayahi and Boye argue that his insights should be read alongside rather than against Fanon's "passionate commitment to self-realization of the oppressed" (p. 201).

Sartre's anticolonial solidarity with Fanon may be the exception that proves the rule. Often, intellectuals writing from the academy reproduce race inequalities in their own research, teaching and work environments. Historically, for instance, Bogues argues that "the exclusion" of "the African human" from Western intellectual traditions "was complete" (p. 149). Extrapolating from Bogues, it might be observed that today many social scientific canons continue to systematically write out African scholarship. Similar arguments can be made for other subaltern peoples, including Indigenous intellectuals, who are too often absent from "mainstream" sociology syllabi, journals, conferences, and classrooms.

This is partly an outcome of institutionalized mechanisms of race inequality that facilitate the marginalization of subaltern perspectives. For instance, there are departmental and disciplinary divisions between African and Native Studies, on the one hand, and sociology departments, journals, conferences, and seminars, on the other. This means that the "competent" sociologist does not feel any scholarly peer pressure to be engaged with these "other" disciplines. Hence, significant African and Indigenous scholarship may be ignored or marginalized as "secondary" literature.

Despite the challenges, African, Indigenous, and other subaltern scholars have made important contributions to the social sciences. These contributions are "heretical," Bogues suggests, countering many accepted scholarly beliefs. And like all heresies, these contributions have profound implications for "normal" and "normative" social scientific practices.

Taken seriously, they "reorder the narrative structures of Western radical historiography" (p. 150). As in this book, theorists and organic intellectuals usually marginalized in "mainstream" sociology become central. Scholars such as C.L.R. James, Biko, and Meer, whose work is examined in this collection, are repositioned within a literature that formerly excluded them.

At the same time, new light is shed on hitherto invisiblized black and other subaltern experiences. A paradigmatic example is historical work insisting upon the Haitian revolution as a major historical event, alongside the French, Russian, and American revolutions. Such shifts open up new intellectual territories. As Bogues describes, "(in) the process of overturning white normativity (the black radical intellectual) clears spaces, a terrain on which to accurately describe black or colonial life" (p. 151).

"CLEARING SPACE" FOR MARGINALIZED VOICES IN THE ACADEMY

This book does important work in "clearing spaces" for scholarly voices that are too often at the margins of mainstream social science. Nonetheless, the book does have some weaknesses. The introduction, which is quite short, is followed by separate, individual introductions for each section. In some cases, there are introductions to individual chapters. This contributes to the impression that the collection is a series of independent essays. Each author is concerned with race inequalities and how these may be challenged, but the relationship of each chapter to the others is implied rather than explicit.

Likewise, I regret the decision, in the introduction, to "affirm the absence" of reflections on gender, Indigenous struggles, and sexuality (p. 11). This no doubt reflects a desire to avoid superficially addressing complex, interrelated inequalities. Yet a longer introduction might have gestured toward gender, indigeneity, sexuality--and disability, which is another important absence across the book--for suggesting "synergies" outside of the scope of this particular edited collection. This is especially true since several authors, including Bannerji, Sahle, and Thobani, specifically address feminism and Indigenous struggles.

Overall, however, this is an ambitious and path-breaking book. Bakan, Dua, and the contributing authors together make a vital contribution. They illuminate race inequalities and analyze how these may be challenged in struggles toward a more socially just world. I feel confident that the collection will be taken up by scholars from socialist traditions and in critical race studies. I would urge sociologists outside these traditions to read, enjoy, and be challenged by this rich, if eclectic, book.

References

Hacking, I. 2005. Historical Ontology. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harding, S. 2004. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. London: Routledge.

Hardt, M. and A. Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Smith, D. 2002. Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge Press.

Smith, D. 2004. Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Elaine Coburn, American University of Paris and Centre d'analyse et d'intervention sociologiques (CADIS-EHESS)

(1.) I follow both Said and Dua in capitalizing "the Orient." The purpose is to draw attention to the socially constructed nature of East Asia as the exotic--and inferior--"Other" within Western discourses.

(2.) Rannerji argues that "discourses, texts and social relations"... together operate "as a kind of grammar of thought involving practice" (Smith 2004: 132). In hegemonic discourses, race inequality is "desocializ(ed), de-historiciz(ed), and de-politiciz(ed)" (Smith 2004: 133), an insight Banneiji attributes to Smith. "Race" then becomes an ontological category--a way of being--that can be mobilized to organize real-world social relationships.

(3.) Although Young does not invoke sociologist Dorothy Smith's (2002, 2004), these insights recall Smith's (2004) work into the ways that texts organize what she calls the "relations of ruling" (see chapter 5: The Ruling Relations). As she puts it, Smith writes "from Marx" so that this is suggestive of the ways Foucault and Marx may be mobilized in complementary, not antagonistic ways. Here, there is a shared methodological emphasis on texts as critical to the production and reproduction of relations of (race) inequality.

(4.) I capitalize History, because James understands History in the Hegelian-inspired sense as being the unfolding of human destiny and not merely a series of events.

(5.) Put yet another way: for positivist and post-positivist sociologists, whether a theorist is writing from the centre of the French empire, as a French citizen, or from a French colony, as a colonized subject, is of no importance to the theories she develops. This is because theory is ideally constructed through the rigorous empirical testing of carefully specified hypotheses. Theory it is built up from knowledge about the world, not from the researcher's own experiences and perspectives.

In contrast, in "standpoint" theory, the "geography of situation" that the theorist writes from does matter. This is because the French citizen located in the metropole, as opposed to the colony, is less likely to "see" colonization and associated racisms, much less understand them as problematic, because she benefits from them. She is likely to take for granted social relations of colonialism and racism that do not trouble her daily existence.

On the other hand, the colonized, racialized subject is more likely both to "see" and condemn colonialism and associated racisms, because she suffers from the political disempowerment and violence of both. In other words, the theorist does not just absorb knowledge about the world; she develops her theory--notices certain social relations and problematizes them--from her "standpoint" within the social world she seeks to study.

For Kobayashi and Boyle, Sartre and Fanon's respective situation or social location in the French empire matters to their different theories. Ultimately, however, they argue that Sartre partially "escaped" his "standpoint," since he critiqued both colonialism and racism in his work.

(6.) The term "metropole" is used to distinguish between the "mother city" of an empire and the periphery. Paris was the metropole of the French empire; Canada was the periphery to London metropole.