Oswald de Andrade’s « Cannnibal Manifesto » was anticipative in its apprehension of the Brazilian dynamic as it emerged from its European colonial heritage projecting itself towards the future. As Brasil entered modernity, what Oswald observed was « a country of the future », not from the perspective of the dynamic of a construction of a national trajectory of development, but from the perspective of the development of the indigenous Brazilian relation to colonial alterity. The anthropophagic revolution, as it projected (...) the Indians into the world, rested on a theory of multiplicity and not of « diversity ». Anti-colonialism was not a form of nationalism, but a war machine which served to take what we wanted in the rich Europe. (shrink)

Résumé L’anticipation du Manifeste anthropophage (1950) d’Oswald de Andrade a consisté à saisir la dynamique brésilienne, à cheval entre l’héritage de la colonisation européenne et sa projection dans l’avenir. Oswald a vu dans le Brésil qui entrait dans la modernité un « pays du futur », non pas du point de vue de la dynamique de construction d’une trajectoire nationale de développement, mais dans la perspective du développement du rapport brésilien (indigène) à l’altérité coloniale. La révolution anthropophagique, au fur et (...) à mesure qu’elle projetait les Indiens dans le monde, se fondait sur une théorie de la multiplicité et non de la « diversité ». L’anti-colonialisme n’était pas un nationalisme et moins encore un isolationnisme, mais une machine de guerre pour prendre à l’Europe des riches « ce qui nous intéressait ». (shrink)

Racism has been the subject of considerable attention in recent years, and although many varieties of it have been identified and discussed, most of the discussions take insufficient account of the differences between the racial, ethnic, and national elements that play roles in it. Nonetheless, the talk of racism against members of ethnic and national groups is quite common and gives rise to misunderstandings and confusions about what racism is and the various forms it can take when these differences are (...) not explored. In this article, I explore racism in the contexts of race, ethnicity, and nationality in order to determine whether it makes sense in those contexts and, if it does, the differences and similarities between them. I argue that understandings of racism that pay insufficient attention to the differences that characterize racism arising from considerations of race, ethnicity, and nationality stand on the way of its eradication and prevention. I further argue that conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationality that attempt to integrate them into mixed notions can make matters worse. (shrink)

European elites are racist, and have been racist for a long time. Their racism is not limited to « words » and « ideas », but constitutes an pervasive and influent social practice which generates, towards the minorities, concrete forms of ethnic inequality and subordination in everyday life.

Aux États-Unis, une structure appelée Love Makes a Family [C’est l’amour qui fait une famille] fut créée en 1999 pour soutenir le droit à l’adoption des couples homosexuels. Elle a également joué un rôle central dans le développement des unions civiles. Dix ans plus tard, sa directrice, Ann Stanback, annonçait qu’ayant atteint ses objectifs Love Makes a Family arrêterait son activité à la fin de l’année, et qu’elle-même en profiterait pour passer plus de temps avec sa femme Charlotte: «L’esse..

The author, President of the Corsican antiracist collective Avà Basta, presents the specific forms taken by immigration and by its integration in a Corsican society deeply marked by its insularity and its unique history. She describes an immigrant population mostly of Moroccan origins, and analyses the role played by the identitary-nationalist Corsican reference in the racist discourse as well as in the anti-immigrant violence of the last months. She stresses the necessity, for Avà Basta, beyond its struggle against injustice and (...) discrimination on a universal basis, to demand that the nationalist movement position itself in favor of a definition of the Corsican nation based on a « community of fate s, ruling out any ethnicist temptation. (shrink)

Le racisme a été un instrument essentiel du colonialisme européen. La prétention européenne à la supériorité – fondée en partie sur la perception des rôles de genre à la fois dans les sociétés européennes et dans les sociétés colonisées – a été nécessaire pour justifier l’exploitation coloniale. Des liaisons sexuelles entre des femmes colonisées et des Européens ont été utilisées à la fois pour le profit commercial et pour exercer un contrôle social. De manières variées, on a considéré les (...) enfants issus de ces liaisons comme des problèmes que les différentes puissances coloniales ont essayé de résoudre par des moyens différents. (shrink)

Le racisme a été un instrument essentiel du colonialisme européen. La prétention européenne à la supériorité – fondée en partie sur la perception des rôles de genre à la fois dans les sociétés européennes et dans les sociétés colonisées – a été nécessaire pour justifier l’exploitation coloniale. Des liaisons sexuelles entre des femmes colonisées et des Européens ont été utilisées à la fois pour le profit commercial et pour exercer un contrôle social. De manières variées, on a considéré les (...) enfants issus de ces liaisons comme des problèmes que les différentes puissances coloniales ont essayé de résoudre par des moyens différents. (shrink)

Racism and Preference for Sameness : About Cultural Cloning in Everyday Life. Over the past two decades we have come to the understanding that different forms of discrimination merge and reinforce each other. But (converging) discriminations are also indicative of normative preferences for imagined perfections consisting of a combination of such characteristics as : masculinities, whiteness, Europeanness, physical abilities, high intelligence. The concept of cultural cloning is useful to analyze and explain the taken-for-granted desirability of certain types, the oftenunconscious tendency (...) to comply with normative standards, the fear to deviate from peers. In focusing on normative preferences for sameness as instruments of cultural cloning the paper shifts the emphasis away from an exclusive differentialist approach – where difference and how to incorporate diversity are the focus of attention – towards the deeper, less articulated, problem of only scarcely contested sameness. (shrink)

We observe many signs of the fact that the category « racism » not only has profoundly changed its meaning, but could also have reached the limits of its historical validity, both as an instrument of theoretical analysis, and as an instrument of progressive politics. The failed World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance in Durban (2002) was a striking indication in this respect. As a consequence, we can no longer proceed in our struggle against extreme discriminations (...) and violence without critically revisiting the origins and meaning of our notion of « racism ». The term was coined in the 30’s in its current use, but it was not before the 1950 and 1951 Declarations on race and racism, issued under the aegis of UNESCO and the UN, that it named a scientific paradigm. The article examines its logical function (to give a unitary description of the phenomena of anti-Semitism, colonialist subjection, and colour segregation), its ethical prerequisites (the « humanist » principle of the indivisibility of the Human Species), its epistemological consequences (a Copernican Revolution in the field of anthropology, and finally the alternative conceptualizations that – right from the beginning – confronted its research program with a different problematic of the community, notably in Antelme, Primo Levi, Fanon and Arendt. (shrink)

We observe many signs of the fact that the category « racism » not only has profoundly changed its meaning, but could also have reached the limits of its historical validity, both as an instrument of theoretical analysis, and as an instrument of progressive politics. The failed World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance in Durban (2002) was a striking indication in this respect. As a consequence, we can no longer proceed in our struggle against extreme discriminations (...) and violence without critically revisiting the origins and meaning of our notion of « racism ». The term was coined in the 30’s in its current use, but it was not before the 1950 and 1951 Declarations on race and racism, issued under the aegis of UNESCO and the UN, that it named a scientific paradigm. The article examines its logical function (to give a unitary description of the phenomena of anti-Semitism, colonialist subjection, and colour segregation), its ethical prerequisites (the « humanist » principle of the indivisibility of the Human Species), its epistemological consequences (a Copernican Revolution in the field of anthropology, and finally the alternative conceptualizations that – right from the beginning – confronted its research program with a different problematic of the community, notably in Antelme, Primo Levi, Fanon and Arendt. (shrink)

In 1976, in “Society Must be Defended,” Foucault did more than offer an alternative genealogy of his own genealogical perspective to the one he is sometimes taken to have provided in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” He also, by implication, located Nietzsche within that genealogy, one result of which is that he gave what amounts to a new perspective on how Nietzsche might be placed within the history of racisms.

The article re-addresses the question of the relation between Darwinism and the biological sciences, taking as its starting-point the precise chronology of the successive inquiries carried out by Darwin into the question of races, in connection with the various aspects of his theory of natural selection. It argues that the writings of Darwin do not share any uniform aim, nor do they come under a single epistemological category. Darwin adopts a number of divergent approaches, as he addresses a series of (...) issues : the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis ; the characterisation of human races, as practised since Kant ; the question of craniometrics, so important in physical anthropology in his day ; the classification of mental faculties ; the role of selection for reproductive purposes in the differences between the sexes ; the universality of the expression of emotions, and so on. What emerges from the inquiry is a more complex portrait than is customary in the controversies about the scientist’s « social Darwinism », real or imaginary. Darwin is neither the purveyor of a Hitlerian racism nor the protagonist of a natural antiracism directly stemming from this theory. (shrink)

During the last decades there has been an upsurge in research on xenophobic populist parties, mirroring their political successes. In the Swedish context, characterised by neoliberal restructuring, issues of ‘race’, citizenship and belonging have been important elements of the public debate. These issues have unfolded in parallel with the presence of a neo-Nazi social movement and the emergence of two new parliamentary parties in which cultural racism has been central. Research has especially focused on the xenophobic content and how to (...) relate these parties to the wider research on party politics in western liberal democracies. While there have been some studies focusing on gendered differences in voting and activism highlighting the peripheral role of women, there are still very few studies analysing the worldview of women active in these parties, and the role of gender as metaphor, identity and policy within these parties. Inspired by feminist, postcolonial and Marxist research, the authors of this article are interested in analysing the worldview of women activists. The material is composed of 20 in-depth interviews with female Sweden Democrat politicians complemented by party texts and participant observation. The aim of the article is to explore how women within a Swedish version of these parties, the Sweden Democrats, name and reflect upon their experiences, especially focusing on how a care rhetoric is used in their narratives. These women have chosen to represent a racist party. What inspires them? What visions of gender evolve from their worldview? (shrink)

For a genealogical study of the value of human rights: an opposition to historicism and racism The purpose of this article is to focus on human rights as a value in itself that has to fight against other values. We would like to show that human rights have become an intrinsic value only by following a path in human history that distinguish them from historicism. Because human rights became a value through history, it is important to be able to show (...) the lay out of this history. We will illustrate it by means of diverse philosophical theories. We will begin with Leo Strauss' philosophy of natural rights which considers human rights in their opposition to historicism. Then, with the help of Michel Foucault's genealogy we will show how human rights develop themselves against the racist theory elaborated by a fraction of the French aristocracy in the 17th century. Consequently, a tension emerges inside those rights between their natural value and their historical one, which leads to the fundamental question: what is the essence of humankind involved in human rights? (shrink)

As it stands, Derrida’s protest is deficient in any sense of how the discourses of South African racism have been at once historically constituted and politically constitutive. For to begin to investigate how the representation of racial difference has functioned in South Africa’s political and economic life, it is necessary to recognize and track the shifting character of these discourses. Derrida, however, blurs historical differences by conferring on the single term apartheid a spurious autonomy and agency: “The word concentrates separation…. (...) By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation” . Is it indeed the word, apartheid, or is it Derrida himself, operating here in “another regime of abstraction” , removing the word from its place in the discourse of South African racism, raising it to another power, and setting separation itself apart? Derrida is repelled by the word, yet seduced by its divisiveness, the division in the inner structure of the term itself which he elevates to a state of being.The essay’s opening analysis of the word apartheid is, then, symptomatic of a severance of word from history. When Derrida asks, “Hasn’t apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable?” , the answer is a straightforward no. Despite its notoriety and currency overseas, the term apartheid has not always been the “watchword” of the Nationalist regime. . It has its own history, and that history is closely entwined with a developing ideology of race which has not only been created to deliberately rationalize and temper South Africa’s image at home and abroad, but can also be seen to be intimately allied to different stages of the country’s political and economic development. Because he views apartheid as a “unique appellation” , Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa. To face the challenge of investigating the strategic role of representation, one would have to part ways with him by releasing that pariah of a word, apartheid, from its quarantine from historical process, examining it instead in the context of developing discourses of racial difference. Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. She is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British imperial culture and is the author of a monograph on Simon de Beauvoir. Rob Nixon, in the same program at Columbia, is working on the topic of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate a largely untold chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern Europe and North America: the transition from the form of racism that was used to justify a race-based system of slavery to the medicalising racism which called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and, eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s account of biopower has received a great deal of attention recently, (...) but because what he actually has to say about race tends to be vague and radically incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of his contribution. However, even if the account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is still a great deal to be learned from Foucault’s identification of this biologizing, or medicalising racism. (shrink)