Race after information-value

Reivew of Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed
Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2021). 254pp., £86.00 hb., £19.00 pb., 978 1 51790 714 3 hb., 978 1 51790 715 0 pb. As our tech overlords flee a blighted planet, a scholarly consensus is taking shape around the fallout of unchecked innovation and […]

Neoliberal antiracism and the British university

Dossier: Decolonising the University

While debates over race and higher education in the UK have long focused on questions of access, in recent years a host of campaigns have drawn attention to the alienation of students and staff of colour who succeed in entering white-dominated institutions. Their claims, often articulated on social media with the pithiness that hashtags require, […]

Agents of change

Reivew of Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity
Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity (New York: Peter Lang, 2019). 290pp., £95.59 hb., £36.74 pb., 978 1 43313 407 4 hb., 978 1 43313 406 7 pb. History is usually taught through a white, Eurocentric, male lens, erasing the contributions of women. Women of Colour and Indigenous […]

Discriminatory data

Reivew of Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). 172pp., £60.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 978 1 50952 639 0 hb., 978 1 50952 640 4 pb. If you’ve ever listened to Pod Save America, the voice of centrist Democratic politics presented by a crew of former Obama staff, […]

Racial properties of colonial appropriation

Reivew of Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property
Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 272pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82237 139 7 hb., 978 0 82237 146 5 pb. Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property is a significant intervention into contemporary debates on empire, the property relation, imperial […]

The racial regime of aesthetics: On David Lloyd’s Under Representation

One of the persistent difficulties of attending to race in the history of philosophy is the equivocal nature of this object. Long ignored by philosophers, ‘race’ has no clear status or obvious place in the history of philosophy, cutting across different areas of philosophical inquiry. Although in recent years historians of philosophy have been increasingly […]

Insurgent universality

Reivew of Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump
Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London and New York: Verso, 2018). 144pp., £10.99 pb., 978 1 78663 376 In an editorial in the New York Times written ten days after the 2016 presidential election, Mark Lilla (Professor of Humanities at Columbia University) challenged the so-called ‘Whitelash’ thesis, arguing […]

Left-wing populism: A legacy of defeat: Interview with Éric Fassin

Martina Tazzioli [MT] Your latest book, published in 2017, Populisme: le grand ressentiment [‘Populism and deep resentment’], develops a critical reading of the concept and political role of populism today. 1 You offer an explanation for the apparent appeal of populist options in recent elections in Europe and the US, and you distance yourself from […]

The society of enmity

Perhaps it has always been this way. [1] Perhaps democracies have always constituted communities of kindred folk, societies of separation based on identity and on an exclusion of difference. It could be that they have always had slaves, a set of people who, for whatever reason, are regarded as foreigners, members of a surplus population, […]

Philosophy and racial identity

Philosophy and racial identity Linda Martin Alcoll In the 1993 film Map of the Human Heart an Inuit man asks a white engineer who has come to northern Canada to map the region, ‘Why are you making maps?’ Without hesitating, the white man responds ‘They will be very accurate.’ Map-making and race-making have a strong […]

Cornel West: American Radicalism

INTERVIEW Cornel West American radicalism RP: Perhaps we could begin by asking you about the role of religion in your intellectual and political development. How important was the Church to you in becoming an intellectual, becoming a radical? West: For me, the issues on which religious discourse has traditionally focused, such as death and dread […]

Empiricism and Racism

Empiricism and Racism Martin Barker A story has been told about the first case when slavery was tested in a law court. It happened in New Amsterdam, one of the Dutch colonies in America, in the seventeenth century. An indentured servant at the end of his period of indenture was kept as a slave by […]

Out of Africa: Philosophy, ‘race’ and agency

Social scientists have long grappled with ideas about race. In recent years, discussion on the significance of these ideas – particularly in exploring notions of identity, and the cultural and political options these appear to make available – have penetrated other areas of the humanities. A spate of recent publications signals that it is philosophyʼs […]

Globalization is ordinary: The transnationalization of cultural studies

The institutionalization and codification of Cultural Studies continue apace. This is evident, for example, in the recurring debates and anxieties about disciplinary boundaries, artistic and ethical values, and the de-radicalization of Cultural Studies itself. Meanwhile, an apparently endless stream of publications – readers, textbooks and collections of (more or less) concrete analyses – feeds the […]

Blindspot on race

Letter Blindspot on raceJohn Macmurray 6–9 April 1998, Aberdeen This, the first conference to be held on John Macmurrayʼs philosophy in his native Scotland, reflects a revival of interest in his work on both sides of the Atlantic – an interest which predates the publicity given to him as Tony Blairʼs favourite philosopher. Indeed the […]

Philosophy and race

Editorial Philosophy and race This special issue of Radical Philosophy presents five papers from the recent Radical Philosophy Conference, ʻPhilosophy and Raceʼ, held in London, 6–7 November 1998. The conference was a response to concern about the lack of discussion of race and ethnicity within both mainstream and alternative, more progressive, philosophical discourses in Britain. […]

Fanon, phenomenology, race

Fanon, phenomenology, race David macey ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of […]