The Remainders of Race - Ash Amin

http://tcs.sagepub.com/Theory, Culture & Society

http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/1/1The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0263276409350361

2010 27: 1Theory Culture SocietyAsh Amin

The Remainders of Race

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Theory, Culture and Society

can be found at:Theory, Culture & SocietyAdditional services and information for

http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/1/1.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Mar 5, 2010Version of Record >>

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

The Remainders of Race

Ash Amin

AbstractPrompted by the speed with which, in certain historical moments, the hard-won achievements of anti-racism can be comprehensively undone, thisarticle reflects on the mechanisms that keep racial coding and judgementclose to the surface, ready to spring into action. It reads the intensity of racein a given present in terms of the play between vernacular legacies of race-coded reception of visible difference and the conjunctural mobilizations ofrace by biopolitical regimes – state-regulated systems of governing popula-tions – to maintain collective order. The article explains the contemporarytrend in the West towards the ‘racialization of everything’ as the productof mutually reinforcing mischief between vernacular and biopolitical racism.It closes with a discussion of the implications of such conjunctural tightness,one which questions the effectiveness of humanist arguments that havecome to the fore in recent years focusing on practices of recognition andreconciliation.

Key wordsanti-racism ■ biopolitics ■ phenotype ■ race ■ racial legacies

The formula of revolutionary solidarity is not ‘let us tolerate our differences’,it is not a pact of civilisations, but a pact of struggles which cut across civil-isations, a pact between what, in each civilisation, undermines its identityfrom within, fights against its oppressive kernel. What unites us is the samestruggle. (Žižek, 2008: 133)

THIS ARTICLE reflects on the historical phenomenology of race andracism, sparked by an extraordinary exhibition on apartheid in 2007at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. The exhibition

spanned a 200-year history of racial violence perfected by the apartheidsystem in South Africa. Using a rich mixture of text, film, photography,installations, paintings and sculpture, the exhibition told three stories. The

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),Vol. 27(1): 1–23DOI: 10.1177/0263276409350361

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:34 Page 1

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

first was that of classification: how racial differentiation and racist violencerelied on an elaborate machinery of eugenic science, scripture, traveljournals, museum displays, measuring instruments, photographs and laws.The exhibition laid bare the architecture of racial formation and the heinouswork done by it. Second, it told the story of opposition – the inventions ofcounter-classification, art, music, faith, organization and resistance thateventually dismantled apartheid. It showed that even a machinic architec-ture of race could eventually be shaken through steadfast subversion. Third,the exhibition told the story of persistence, of how the optimism and hopeunleashed when the apartheid state collapsed have given way to new formsof racialized poverty and oppression linked to economic liberalism andracist legacy.

The exhibition forced me to think about why racism persists and quicklyresurfaces even when thought to be thoroughly dismantled, about the playbetween endurance and change. It made me want to dig into the archaeologyof a racial present, to know more about the historical dynamic of race in orderto think anew the hopes and possibilities of anti-racist thought and practice.For, while the exhibition acknowledged the possibility of change (radicaland incremental), it also revealed the inflections of racist legacy, institu-tionalized and popular, acting like a call to order. It confirmed the all toofamiliar echo of persistence heard in historical novels on the experience ofrace in Africa, Europe, India and America, and which has troubled geneal-ogists of race such Du Bois, Fanon, Said, Baldwin, Hall, Gilroy, Bernasconi,West, Pred and, most recently, Winant (2006: 987) when he states:

the age of empire is over; apartheid and Jim Crow have been ended; and asignificant consensus exists among scientists (natural and social), andhumanists as well, that the concept of race lacks an objective basis. Yet theconcept persists, as idea, as practice, as identity, and as social structure.Racism perseveres in these same ways.1

Even the most discredited concepts of race seem to return, albeit indifferent guises. Biological racism is a case in point. Today, most justifica-tions of race rely on cultural, not biological arguments, playing on the claimthat the beliefs, values and practices of different ethnic communities areboth distinctive and irreconcilable. The science of race read from pigment,cranial feature or hair quality, or culture read from biogeography or genehas been exposed as false, no longer able to justify violence against peopledemarcated as inferior or dangerous races. The discoveries of geneticscience are widely disseminated in public culture, showing that some 98percent of the human genetic pool is shared with chimpanzees and that variations in DNA sequence are greater within, than between, humangroups, with the residual distributed in no consistent or meaningful way tojustify racial classification.

Yet, the very science that questions the validity of race as a reliablemarker of human difference is now being used in some quarters to look for

2 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:34 Page 2

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

genetically validated differences between socially defined ethnic and racialgroups, instead of questioning the given racial and ethnic categories in thefirst place.2 Though a new molecular biology might have arisen – one thatis ‘probabilistic not deterministic, open not closed, not identifying an essential racial truth that determines individuals to different fates’ (Rose,2007: 161) – it has not prevented some scientific, medical and insurancecircles speculating on the socio-biological pathologies of taken-for-grantedethnic groups. This imprecision, inadvertently or otherwise, is supporting anew politics of race linking particular forms of ill-being and vulnerabilityto particular ethnic groups (e.g. obesity, social deviance and heart failure toAfrican-Caribbeans or South Asians) (Carter, 2007; Duster, 2003; Fullwiley,2007). The very rebuttal of race rooted in biology is returning as its justification, open to new forms of biological racism.

At one level, this particular example of return is relatively easy toexplain, as a new classificatory (mal)practice that is naturalized throughprofessional, institutional and discursive repetition. But the rapidity ofreturn and its widespread diffusion – the open social receptivity to narrations of race – is perhaps less easy to explain, and certainly an under-explored topic in the literature on race and racism. Is there a temporal logicto race, an evolutionary dynamic that maintains racial legacies close enoughto the surface to spring back with force? If so, what is its nature and how isit sustained? In turn, what regulates the intensity of harm caused by theperseverance or eruption of race in a specific present? Under what condi-tions do mixes of past and present racial practices become especiallyvengeful towards the racialized other?

These are the questions tackled in this article, prompted by a need tomake sense of the current racial present in the West, a time of comprehen-sive suspicion and punitive orientation among states and majority publicstowards Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11. The article seeks to understandwhy the steady achievements of multiculturalism and the politics of diver-sity in general in the last decades of the 20th century have melted away sofast, and to look for anti-racist possibilities cognizant of the burdensimposed by the past. These are large and difficult questions to which onlypartial and sometimes incomplete answers are provided, but in the spirit ofsoliciting a much-needed debate on the play between past and present inthe regulation of race.

The article opens with a genealogical argument, claiming that inmatters of race, where forces of duration are strongly etched into the socialunconscious and institutional legacy, disruptions to settlements of race (e.g.multiculturalism, apartheid, assimilationism) are more open to the rush ofpast racial ‘debris’ than to new progressive developments. The second partof the article, however, also argues that the harms of what does get throughof legacies of institutional and vernacular racism are regulated by the mobilizations of race by given biopolitical regimes – by the specifics of thesystems of state governance of populations. The claim, therefore, is that itis the interplay between vernacular habits with long historical roots of

Amin – The Remainders of Race 3

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:34 Page 3

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

reading racial and social worth from surface bodily differences and racialbiopolitics that makes the critical difference to the real experience of race,arbitrating the choice between accommodation and discipline of the racial-ized other. This is the proposition used to explain the intensely racial presentin the West. The final part discusses the implications of this reading for anti-racist practice. Given the obduracy of phenotypical legacies and the powerof racial biopolitics, the discussion addresses the limitations of ‘humanist’proposals that have come to the fore in recent years, recommending inter-ethnic/racial recognition and reconciliation.

Archaeology of the PresentA valuable opening into the temporal logic of race is offered by ElizabethGrosz in her book The Nick of Time (2004). Grosz turns to three important19th- or early 20th-century thinkers on time to single out three evolution-ary tendencies. The first is the tendency of unpredictable change, takenfrom Darwin’s insistence that the processes of natural and sexual selectionyield more rather than less variety and categorical disturbance – includ-ing among humans – because past causal connections combine in novelways. Accordingly, evolution – cultural and biological – must not be seenas the finalization of an inherently incomplete nature, but as a dynamicthat yields variation for no reason: excess rather than fitness, continualchange rather than fixity. The implication for racial evolution is that nologic of destiny, worth or self-preservation is at work or to be assumed assuch.

Second, from Nietzsche, who criticized Darwin for reading too muchnovelty and variety into the free play of nature, Grosz recovers an ‘untimely’force, a ‘will to power’ or active force of preservation and expansion builtinto all forms of life as part of an efficacy to conserve energy. While Nietzsche imagined this force to be as ‘natural’ as any other, he saw its continuity and release as dependent upon a conscious and supreme effortto commit the future to repetition. In the modern history of race, the conse-quences are well known of grossly distorted applications of Nietzsche’s ideaof the ‘Overman’ – the force of eternal return, which Nietzsche saw as quitedifferent from any will to preserve/expand nation or race.

Third, in the gap opened between Darwinian proliferation and Nietzschian eternal return, Grosz turns to Bergson’s idea of the past asimmanence, conceived as a duration of the more than necessary into thepresent, a vital energy close to the surface of things, becoming manifestonly when actualized. Bergson described this force as the élan vital, whichhe saw less as a generic life force than as an ‘initial impetus’, somethingof the past acting to delay, prolong, redirect the energies of the present –a spark for ‘novelty, invention into what is otherwise predictable’ (Grosz,2004: 201). Thus, from a Bergsonian perspective, if race is duration, it isso as a latent force, bursting through ‘a nick in time’ – an opening insettled evolutionary trajectory – but with always emergent and unexpectedoutcomes.

4 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:34 Page 4

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

This reading of time as the play between newness, repetition andimmanence suggests the possibility of three dynamics of race: first, a restlessimpulse of variety and novelty, always disrupting and challenging settledpatterns of racial formation and behaviour; second, the potential to returnsameness if the forces of repetition are strong, perhaps organized and channelled; and, third, the potentiality of accumulated racial debris, varie-gated and dormant from different eras, ready to be instantiated in unknownways. It helps to explain both the surprises and constancies of race and alsowhy newness comes temporally freighted. To be alerted to the remaindersof race in this way is to be drawn to the possibility that a given race ‘event’contains more than what is disclosed, poised between gathered momentumand disruption, between the singularity of the will to power and the plural-ism of the élan vital, between immanence and actualization.

How, then, might the balance between racial duration and disruptionbe regulated? Could it be that when the forces of repetition are as strongand purposeful as they have been at least in the modern history of racewithin or led by the West – a history in which racial categorization and evaluation has been both pervasive and deeply etched into institutionaland popular practice – the Bergsonian temporal logic of disruption/anotherlatency and that of Darwinian proliferation are somehow stifled? Mightsuch an account help to explain why every act of categorical subversionor anti-racist progress is so often folded back into stacked legacies ofracism, if not in form then in intent, keeping more or less the same bodiesin place?

Grosz in her book turns to Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson to outlinea positive politics of race (and gender), one that is respectful of the past,recognizes latencies yet to be actualized, finds hope in the unpredictabilityof the evolutionary process. She looks for openings and lessons from thepast to strengthen anti-racist thought and practice in the present. I sharethis historicity, which is all too readily forgotten in the heat of struggle in agiven time and place, but remain wary of the possibility of Time’s arrowthrowing up latent non-racialized or pre-racialized tendencies of humanbeing, due to the sheer force of racist legacy in imperial and post-imperialWestern history.3

I am suggesting that in such a temporal context, the relationshipbetween the evolutionary tendencies identified by Grosz may be a hierar-chical one, with entrenched accumulations and repetitions of race actinglike a call to order with machinic force upon the surplus latencies andunforeseen novelties released through the nicks in time when settledpatterns of race are disturbed. To propose this is not to read the future ofrace as more of the same or to throw a veil of doom around anti-racistpolitics; inaction in the face of new inventions to maintain and makemischief out of racial hierarchy (as described in the next section) is not anoption. Instead, it is to recognize the weight of racial legacy, to ask why, inour times, progressive openings such as hope for a non-racial society inSouth Africa after apartheid remain so fragile and vulnerable, why the

Amin – The Remainders of Race 5

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 5

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

steady steps towards a multicultural West prior to 9/11 have come to be soquickly swept aside by new racisms building on old exclusions.

If a historical momentum behind an event pushes for more rather thanless race, how this works needs to be explained. There is a rich tradition ofacademic, documentary and fictional writing that speaks of racist continu-ity, if not in form then certainly in substance, but it tends to fall short ofgiving an adequate explanation of the sources of continuity. I do not pretendotherwise here, save to offer one possible explanation stressing the inter-play between institutional legacies and human sorting instincts in the faceof excess, variety and the unknown, to demarcate territory – an interplaythat keeps similarity and difference, inside and outside, safe and threaten-ing, as racially coded and, in turn, maintains racial hierarchy as the filterof social evaluation.

Codification and institutionalization are the staples of racial legacy,stretching their tentacles across time through visual and literary cultures,state practices of human categorization, pedagogical traditions, myths ofnation, community and belonging (and their opposites), inscriptions ineveryday technologies of social ordering (from measures of personhood andwell-being to housing and social mobility calculations), and the long sedimentations of public culture – always putting a face and particular attrib-utes to the racialized other at home or abroad, always concerned with thecartographic allocation of race. Continuity is secured through a machineryof human ordering in different domains of social life, maintained throughstate rules and regulations, social codes and conventions, myths of heritageand community, technologies of human governance (Rutherford, 2007). Thismachinery repeats the racial society by demarcating a weighted relationshipbetween the racially defined body and the collective social body, betweenbodily form and personhood or citizenship.

Michel Foucault touched on the continuities, complicities and para-doxes of racial ordering in Society Must Be Defended (2003). He claimedthat the rise of decentred and subjugated knowledges in Europe after thelate Middle Ages as a reaction against the Roman idea of history as sover-eign continuity yielded a discourse of history as a war between ‘races’, mobilized by both those seeking freedom from oppression and those lookingto rule in new ways. This discourse gradually became taken for granted asthe basis of human and social differentiation through diverse state andpopular classificatory practices (see also Mendieta, forthcoming). Such anunderstanding explains not only the most visible and brutal continuities ofracial biopower, as witnessed in South Africa, where the many material andsymbolic practices of apartheid ensured the reproduction of white power,but also the continuities of racial inequality in liberal societies based onthe colour-coding – in national myths, legal and constitutional interpreta-tion, cultural and institutional legacies – of liberal understandings ofpersonhood, citizenship and moral worth.

The historical repetition in this way of race as a mode of social cate-gorization and evaluation is its naturalization. Race and its mobilizations

6 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 6

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

become a social given until unmasked and challenged (but even then, hardto shift, as suggested), steering everyday human practice by making avail-able so many sorting filters that bodily and cultural differences are sensedas racial differences, in the flicker of an eyelid, the hint of a smell, the traceof an utterance. This is automaticity not only of coding bodies and culturesbut also of affective and evaluative response (Ahmed, 2004). If there isanything like a sorting instinct among humans triggered by sensory data todistinguish foe from friend, threat from safety, the familiar from the strange,in order to help them make their way through the world without having totest the ground at every step, racial legacies, by encrypting such data asstrongly meaningful, tap into this instinct, activating diverse affects of ‘terri-torial’ demarcation. Accordingly, racial practice becomes an everyday‘doing’, well before thought, effortlessly weaving together historically honedfolk summaries of others that people carry in their heads and a phenome-nology of bodily response that also recurs with uncanny consistency(Brubaker et al., 2004).

Following Saldanha (2006), we might describe such everyday doingsof race as ‘phenotypical’ racism, working with handed down folk summariesof ‘racial’ grouping based on essentialized biological and cultural markings(and therefore liberated from the ‘truths’ of genetic and biological scienceon race), and reliant on the sensory-affective sorting of surface phenomenathrough these summaries. Two examples of recent writing illustrate theworkings of phenotypical racism. One comes from Arun Saldanha’s (2007)book Psychedelic Whiteness, which is about white superiority on the beachesof Goa asserted through the emanations of biography, skin tan, posture, dresscode, bodily marking, accent, style, consumption habits and territorial occupancy of certain parts of the beach. Saldanha shows how particularbodily performances, signalling racial and affective location, tacitly sort outseasoned whites from Britain and Northern Europe and aspirants fromSouthern Europe, from Goans and other Asians who, despite every attemptto appear and act ‘cool’, always remain uneasy, second-best, beachcombers.It is through these body rituals tapping into long histories of racial position-ing – performative, discursive and symbolic – that the beach becomes awhite space, displacing the settlements of postcolonial Goa, making thebeach habits of natives and white pretenders seem out of place.

The second illustration is provided by ethnographies of embodiedracism in the run-down mill towns of northern England, which witnessedintense rioting by young South Asian men in the summer of 2001 (Alexander, 2004; Swanton, 2007). For the briefest of moments during andafter the unrest in places such as Burnley, Bradford and Oldham, whenpublic and policy commentary was caught off-guard, unsure if these werecivic, religious, youth or race riots, and anxious to understand motive,analysis focused on the role played by local histories of segregation,economic and social deprivation, cultural and religious isolation, racism andpaternalist leadership. Along with an interest in the daily lives of whitesand Asians, and especially contact between communities, there was a desire

Amin – The Remainders of Race 7

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 7

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

to get behind the facts by understanding underlying causes, so that appro-priate policy responses could be formulated to tackle disadvantage, disaffection, racism and cultural isolation. These concerns temporarily over-shadowed the stereotypes of phenotypical racism based on bodily summa-tions. Not for long, though. As time wore on, and as the scrutiny of Muslimbodies intensified after 9/11 and 7/7 in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, the‘phenotypical’ evaluations – new upon old – returned to typecast the Asiansin these towns, along with Muslims elsewhere in Britain, as cultural aliensand national threats. Pinning new aversions such as anxiety, suspicion, fearand hate to local Muslims has relied, as Alexander and Swanton show, onlinking vicariously constructed phenotypes (including prayer caps, beards,baggy trousers, rucksacks, Yorkshire accents, loud music, shiny cars andshabby dwellings) to terrorism, radical Islam, sexual slavery, drug traffick-ing and cultural backwardness.

What is clear from these examples is that phenotypical racism relieson sensory – especially visual – signals which, when indexed as proxies ofrace, spark distinctive judgements of people whose differences are consid-ered essential to their identity (Hacking, 2005: 111). The damningpredictability here resides in the connection between a vernacular of humandifference read as racial difference and particular instincts of aversionsparked as a result, between practised histories of racism and humancompulsions to categorize. This I do not see as the predictability of an inbornracism, traceable to particular racial instincts or genetic forcings,4 since itis the repetition of a race-inflected sensory/affective culture – the relation-ship between physiology and histories of inter-human evaluation – thatneeds explaining, and not some logic of biological determinism.

The beginnings of an answer may be found in the power of bioscopicregimes, linking normality and abnormality, beauty and ugliness, civiliza-tion and barbarism, strength and weakness, health and disease, to particu-lar bodies and bodily states. The details of colour, shape, smell, behaviour,disposition, intent, picked out by racial scopic regimes as tellers of humangrouping and social standing – etched over a long historical period acrossa spectrum of communication media – come to frame the thoughts, actionsand feelings of the condemning and the condemned, as Fanon (1967) soacutely observed, through their progressive naturalization and internaliza-tion. In weaving together phenomenological and affective states, the regimessimultaneously structure popular judgement and feeling, they assume ‘racialinstincts’ to be inherent and ‘natural’, and such ‘instincts’ become the toolsof everyday practice. Thinking along such lines invites consideration of thehistory of certain senses coming to the fore, in the way Cornel West (2003)has attempted by arguing that the rise of modernity privileged the eye,through its emphasis on epistemology and the knowing subject, whichallowed Western racism to emerge once this ocular sensibility came toimpose Hellenic standards of beauty and humanity. A visual scopic regime,once in place, could invent and sustain new racial hierarchies such as theassociation between blackness and servitude, which arises only after the

8 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 8

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

17th century but remains intact thereafter, as the indexing of human worthto visual traits becomes standard practice (Alcoff, 2006; Martinot, 2002)and open to new indices in the course of time.

Duration and BiopoliticsThe above two examples illustrate the power of phenotypical racism,working alongside biological and cultural scripts of race, and drawing onlong-standing vernacular practices of bodily summation (naturalized byhegemonies such as bioscopic regimes). But they also reveal very differentharms. The Goan example is grist to the Western mill of racial humiliation,balanced between tolerance and disapproval of the racialized stranger. TheEnglish example is freighted with menace. Its racial coding is intent oncondemning, crushing the body that offends. It is anything but tacit, impre-cise or tolerant. These differences are important, for they not only shapehuman experience in a given time and place, but they also hint at otherforces mediating the intensity of race. The durations of race – howeverconstant, as I have tried to argue above – are not uniform. The differencebetween phenotypical racism being a weapon of avoidance and one ofcondemnation needs to be explained.

I wish to suggest that the balance is regulated by biopolitics, regimesput in place by states to govern populations (Rai, 2004). Clearly, debris fromthe past, everyday negotiations, orders of discipline and strategies of resist-ance and opposition are all entangled together in the experience of race.But the moderation of past ‘excess’ – latency becoming manifest, noveltybursting through, history repeating itself, race taking on new meanings andfeelings – seems to be strongly conditioned by the weight placed on race bygiven regimes of human governance. Phenotypical racism became deadlywhen it was harnessed to state mobilizations of biological racism underapartheid, other ethno-nationalisms, and colonial rule. Similarly, culturalracism, involving states and societies declaring that ethnic differences areirreconcilable on grounds of cultural incompatibility, shifts vernacularracism decidedly towards feelings and tactics of avoidance, ejection, separation.

The tools of racist biopolitics, which include racial science, visualeconomy, standards of classification, habits of public commentary, regimesof discipline and laws on race and migration, define the norms of person-hood, citizenship and integration, the demarcations of home, nation and theoutside, the contours of who counts for what. My claim is that biopoliticalregimes, with their explicit rules and practices of order based on bodilydifferentiation and discipline, regulate the state of alert towards the racedbody. The balance in a nick in time between charged and watchful racistrepetition, between tolerance and vilification of difference, is held in theintersection between biopolitics and practices of race shaped by a historyof bodies encountering each other, materially and symbolically.

A perfect illustration of how biopolitics and racial legacies feed offeach other is provided by the contemporary escalation of anxiety among

Amin – The Remainders of Race 9

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 9

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

majorities in many Western and non-Western societies towards the stranger.In the West, for example, asylum seekers, migrants, Muslims, militantyouths, pan-handlers, carriers of transmissible diseases are daily beingincorporated into old rituals of condemnation of non-whites, Jews andGypsies; such groups are no longer seen by majorities as victims of hazardand risk, but as unwanted and threatening strangers, the new black (Hughes,2007; Kundnani, 2007). This shift is closely linked to the sharp escalationof racial biopolitics after 9/11 as the staple of a politics of community andcommunity security. Bodily traits and ‘ethnic’ cultures are becoming thebasis upon which peoples are allocated rights, identities, a place in theworld (Bayart, 2005; Mamdani, 2004), at the expense of other modes ofmarking community and negotiating difference (e.g. doctrinaire principles,ideas of good citizenship, moral and ethical values). Most emblematic of thisdevelopment is the warning from intellectuals, publics and states of acalamitous war to come between the world of secular liberalism (conve-niently traced to the skins and traditions of Europe/North America) and theworld of religious society (conveniently traced to the skins and traditions ofIslam and rarely those of Christian fundamentalism).

It takes such reasoning to explain how quickly, on the back of theterrorist campaigns of the few, the lives of so many Muslims in the Westhave come under scrutiny and ultimately been condemned, in the name ofsafeguarding a population and a ‘historic’ way of life. This reduction of thechoice between the profane and the sacred, the safe and the hazardous, tothe traits and practices of particular humans rendered strange is the workof a biopolitics fanning a vernacular racism digging deep into old white anxieties regarding the Orient, and Muslims in particular. Past and newportrayals of threat and contamination are being given bite by states hastilycobbling together emergency powers permitting intrusive surveillance,arrest without warrant, illegal detention, foreign rendition, supported byhysterical media commentary calling for vigilance regarding veils, ruck-sacks, Urdu, gatherings in mosques, Islamic organizations, the behaviour ofMuslim-looking people in public and private.5

Through these shifts, a late 20th-century multicultural politics ofrecognition and co-habitation has been swept aside by a politics of assimi-lation, in which states and majorities feel morally unperturbed in demand-ing an end to veils, religious schools, linguistic and cultural isolation, andother traditional practices from Muslims. Linked to an alarmist discourse ofcollective preservation and national security, it is hardly surprising that thenew disciplinary developments are accompanied by the kind of pheno -typical racism emerging in places like Burnley, Oldham and Bradford.Under such a biopolitics, the taming of the errant body – in this case theMuslim body – is urged as a necessity, a matter of everyday vigilance fromthe responsible citizen, wronged for thinking and doing otherwise. The bio -politics of multiculturalism did not justify such action. It may have essen-tialized the identities of ethnic minorities, displayed a certain smugness oftolerating or bestowing rights on the racialized other without questioning

10 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 10

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

‘home’ myths, and failed to encourage engagement with minorities and theirmaterial needs in the name of recognizing their cultural autonomy (Ahmed,2007; Brown, 2006; Fortier, 2008; Hage, 1998), but it did not condone vigi-lantism leading to punishment.

The new biopolitics focusing on taming or punishing the body judgedto be errant provides an opening for past ethnic and racial hierarchies toreturn, wherever a politics of the social/communal is redefined as a politicsof disciplining minorities and strangers. Whether this is a general contem-porary trend, and one linked to the end of universalist political projects thatdealt with or ignored the problem of difference, is an important but un -resolved question. For example, Arjun Appadurai (2006: 7) argues that thekillings in Rwanda, Bosnia and Gujarat, along with the rage on all sideslinked to the current ‘War on Terror’, are evidence of such a turn – a turndriven by a consuming ‘fear of small numbers’ among national majoritiescatalysed by the cultural mixing and spatial rupture brought about by globalization and resulting in an ‘anxiety of incompleteness’, a ‘narcissismof minor differences’. Minorities have become ‘metaphors and reminders ofthe betrayal of the classical national project’ (2006: 43), easily trackedthrough various modes of ‘counting, classifying, and surveying populations’(2006: 47), so that when ‘specific situations become overcharged withanxiety . . . that body [can] be annihilated’ (2006: 47).

Slavoj Žižek (2008), in contrast, offers a different explanation for thereturn of racial biopolitics. He traces this to the supposed end of anideology-based politics worldwide that focused on value-based disputationsand aspirations. According to Žižek, a new politics of ‘efficient administra-tion of life’ has emerged, thriving on threats of total collapse if particularmodes of behaviour (from civic disloyalty to sexual freedom and deviancy)traced to particular bodies (from asylum seekers to immigrants and minorities) are not eliminated. Žižek explains:

Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – anawesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily beunpacked: ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and admin-istration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of the security andwelfare of human lives as its primary goal. It is clear how these two dimen-sions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains isonly the efficient administration of life . . . almost only that. That is to say,with the depoliticised, socially objective, expert administration and co -ordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to inducepassion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear, a basicconstituent of today’s subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimatelya politics of fear, it focuses on defence from potential victimisation or harassment. (2008: 34, emphasis in original)

Such a politics of fear, according to Žižek (see also Bauman, 2007), mustobsess about national identity, the duties of immigrants, declining moral

Amin – The Remainders of Race 11

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 11

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

standards, criminals on the loose, abuse of welfare systems, nationalsecurity, cherished freedoms and more. It must unambiguously name thethreatening body and prepare for its elimination with the help of tighterborder controls, sophisticated surveillance and strategies of encampment,or for its domestication through various state discourses of integration.

It might be added that the redefinition of politics as a politics of thedeviant body, as suggested by Appadurai and Žižek, is being reinforced byanother general political development in response to a world perceived asincreasingly unstable and dangerous, one involving the displacement of agovernmentality of insurance/assurance by one of planning againstArmageddon. Governments, regulatory bodies, academic writing, the medianow continually warn of the threat of total destruction – by mutant germsor genes, super-intelligent machines, climate change, global terrorism,speculative capitalism gone mad, masses on the move. A new language ofmitigation has arisen, recommending constant alertness and preparednessin face of mounting hazard and risk, under the leadership of a ‘securitystate’, which accepts the inevitability of large-scale disaster but puts inplace anticipatory actions to mitigate the worst of, and recover quickly from, emergency situations (Dillon, 2008; Lakoff, 2007). Increasingly, this is howcostly efforts involving tidal barriers, military and civil catastrophe manage-ment exercises, forecasting scenarios, funds to bail out collapsing banks,technologies to track suspects, medical services to cope with large-scalecasualties are being understood: as efforts that remain one step behind thethreat, an anticipation in the dark, a reasonable guess.

There is little ambiguity, however, about the place of the errant bodyin the new politics of Armageddon. Being in a state of permanent alert –insist governments, opinion makers, the defence sectors, insurers and,increasingly, publics – demands naming, tracking and disarming the threat-ening body well before the act, even if this means suspending protocols ofproof, legal conduct, civil liberties and human rights. The balance betweenthe two historic forms of state response to disaster that Adie Ophir (2007)has identified – the ‘providential state’ striving for the welfare of all, includ-ing migrants and minorities, and the ‘catastrophic state’, ready to ‘wipe out,when it deems necessary, any particular individual, or a multitude of anony-mous ones’ (2007: 21) – seems to have tilted decidedly towards the secondform. ‘The administration of disaster’ as ‘a form of governance and a way ofruling’ involving the suspension of ‘citizenship, the system of law and theconstitution itself’ (2007: 21) is becoming taken for granted as states ofemergency cease to be seen as states of exception.

Whatever the causes of today’s highly punitive biopolitical circum-stances (from anxiety linked to globalization to the rise of a politics of lifeor of catastrophe management), the new state practices of order being putinto place – which both play on and manipulate popular sentiment towardspeople considered to be different or anomalous (Terranova, 2007) – areallowing all manner of vengeance to be thrown at the racialized stranger.Not all strangers, by any means. The cosmopolitan – when urbane, culturally

12 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 12

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

dextrous, articulate, light footed, well connected – is largely left alone tocontribute to the multicultural nation as doctor, nurse, engineer, teacher,waiter, cleaner, knowledge worker. He or she tends to be pursued only bythe nationalist perennially worrying about the decline of the ethnic nation,or by the security state when suspected of seditious intent. Instead, it is themost visible, vulnerable, needy, ill-equipped stranger who is most at risk.For this stranger – graded by colour and cultural affinity to the mythiccommunity – the linkage between heightened public anxiety and intrusivestate security can only mean endless surveillance, vilification, exclusion,pressure to conform: rule by state and popular vigilantism.

Negotiating RaceAlthough this article has placed its emphasis on the historical continuity ofrace, it has also argued that a given biopolitical present strongly shapes theactual intensity and experience of race. The difference between feelingawkward on a beach for not appearing hip and being removed for it is signifi-cant, as is the difference between neighbours from different ethnic back-grounds gossiping about each other and attacking each other, or thatbetween states demanding conformity from visible minorities and roundingthem up. These are differences of life and death, possibility and impossi-bility, inclusion and ejection, and they have a direct bearing on the aims,ambitions and prospects of anti-racist struggle in a given time and place.As already suggested, in recent Western history, the scope for progresswithin the multicultural polity, notwithstanding its racial hierarchies, hasbeen far greater than within the emergency polity that is coming into being,terrified by the errant body. The ontological pessimism of this article locatedin the consistency of race as a mode of responding to difference and uncer-tainty, therefore, is not an argument against anti-racism. If anything, it forcesus to think about the nature of possibility under conditions of racial persist-ence and changing biopolitics, which is what I attempt in this last section.

To begin, the potency of racial legacies ingrained as a kind of histor-ical force poses a challenge to suggestions for a future liberated from raceas a code of human categorization and evaluation (e.g. a ‘planetaryhumanism’ based on a consciousness of shared traits/values or non-racialdifferences, as proposed by Paul Gilroy, 2001). If race thinking and acting,depressingly, has become ingrained in vernacular and institutional practicedue to the force of stacked legacies of reading human difference and worthin racial terms, the journey to a non-racial future may prove to be one ofmisplaced hope and disappointment, and certainly a very long and arduousone in having to build a humanist or other type of non-racial counter-legacythat starts to become second nature in institutional and vernacular practice.To claim this is not to stop questioning the validity of racial thought andpractice, exposing the harms and injustices – past and present – of raciallegacies, learning from the legacies, looking into the past for conditions foran alternative temporality (as suggested by Grosz, 2004), building othermodes of human engagement in order to contain racial coding.

Amin – The Remainders of Race 13

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 13

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

I see these efforts, however, as part of a politics of neutralizing, ratherthan transcending, race, without assuming the need for humanity to riseabove itself in order to tackle racism. Such a politics is guided by a prag-matic interest in flattening and decentring racial hierarchy, possibly as anopening for non-racial modes of inter-human engagement. Two interven-tions, discussed in turn below, are suggested from the thinking developedin this article. The first is action to prevent phenotypical racism frombecoming harmful (something also recognized by Gilroy, 2004), and thesecond is action to expose and disarm the machinery of racial biopolitics.

As far as the performances of phenotype go, although everyday mixityof itself provides no guarantee of channelling vernacular practices bent onharm into forms that are watchful or tolerant of racial difference (as theexamples cited at the end of the first section show), the orchestration ofcollective or shared space as a commons in which majorities and minoritiesparticipate as equals can help to encourage a change in this direction.Phenotypical racism is perpetuated by embedded assumptions that certainmarked bodies are inferior, a threat, out of place, harbouring feelings ofsuperiority and righteousness on one side of the divide and feelings of inferiority and supplication or resentment and anger on the other side.Everyday mixity alone – in physical, virtual, cultural and symbolic space –does not necessarily alter these affects or dampen phenotypical coding forthe reasons articulated in this article, unless attempts to arrange for andpublicize hyperdiversity at all levels of the plural society become part andparcel of a constancy of equal subjectivity on the ground where all cometogether as equal claimants, despite their differences. This is one way ofreconciling difference and mutuality, phenotypical categorization and recognition.

Organizing for equal subjectivity in the field of race is a matter ofacting across a range of fairly familiar institutional, interpersonal andsymbolic interventions. These include building popular consensus behindstringent anti-racist laws, progressive immigration and integration policies,and race-sensitive regulations in such fields as education, employment,welfare and public culture. They involve studied attempts on the ground toencourage recognition of the shared commons and equal rights of access,as well as meaningful interaction between people from different back-grounds.6 The inventory of contemporary tools – and accompanying litera-ture – is large, and ranges from uses of public art to normalize differenceand celebrations of multiculturalism, to targeted policies to build inter actionand commonality in schools, public spaces, workplaces, leisure venues,neighbourhoods (Amin, 2002, 2008; Keith, 2005; Sandercock, 2003; Woodand Landry, 2007). They include developing a counter-culture that visual-izes the racial past and present in novel ways, exposing the harms and injus-tices as clear outrages (e.g. by photography during the American CivilRights and Black Power struggles), showing the absurdities of reducing theraced other to biology/culture/phenotype, tracing cross-racial connections,transgressions and commonalities (Berlant, 2008; Gandhi, 2006), and

14 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 14

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

working on public affects such as hope and compassion (Hariman, 2009),rather than envy or paranoia, as new ‘manners’ for negotiating difference(Wise, 2005).

The significance of these interventions is that they work tactfully withphenotypical racism, by restricting its harms, empowering the condemned,acknowledging the anxieties and fears that it feeds on, cultivating othermodes of phenotypical judgement, building cultures of co-habitation, sharedconcern and joint practice, changing the register of public culture andpublic affect, channelling race in new directions or placing it among othermodes of human evaluation. They can all be seen as acts in the present –fragile, temporary, constantly in need of renewal – closing down on, butnever eliminating, the rushes of racial legacy.

In the current ‘emergency’ conditions maturing in the West, nothingis likely to be more effective in closing down on a politics of racial harmthan a change in the biopolitics of defining and dealing with the so-callederrant body. What this should involve is a much more difficult question,especially in light of the rise in recent years of a politics of progressprojected from or around the human body – a politics aware of the socialagency of the body, of the impact of genetic, neurological, psychological,physiological, sensory and emotional imprints on life chances, and aware ofpossibilities of human reconciliation through new empathies and ethicalpractices. The reply of such a politics to racial biopolitics is more bio -politics, but of an altogether different kind, based on human particularity,recognition and reconciliation. This seems to have been the direction oftravel of anti-racist politics in recent years (though rarely understood as acounter-biopolitics), and, in closing this article, I ask if such anti-racismprovides effective ballast against the violent incursions of the emergencystate outlined in the preceding section.

Anti-racist politics – in Western Europe at least – has switched froma mid-20th-century stance that sought to address the structural, institutionaland symbolic sources of racial discrimination and violence, to one increas-ingly concerned with cultural identities and practices. The former, typically,sought to strengthen anti-racist legislation, combat racial abuse anddiscrimination, ensure minority access to work, welfare and rights, andaddress the problems of race as part of a broader response to inequality andinjustice. The latter, typically, focuses on minority identities and rights,combating majority or national cultural exclusions, proposing new princi-ples of collective belonging. A struggle for sameness, pursued largelythrough the impersonal, has evolved into one attentive to difference and itsreconciliation, with ideas in recent years increasingly focusing on the ethicsof personhood and living together (Ahluwalia, 2007; Dalal, 2008; Naidoo,2008).7

Bhikhu Parekh (2008), for example, has suggested that living in adifferentiated and divided but also interdependent world requires activecultivation by states and societies of an ethos of common humanity, under-pinned by appropriate practical and symbolic actions. This includes

Amin – The Remainders of Race 15

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 15

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

sanctioning the pursuit of self-interest when it harms others (regardless ofterritorial and cultural location), acting ‘together in the spirit of human solidarity’ (2008: 226), accepting engagement as the ‘very condition of one’sgrowth’ (2008: 227). He echoes others who have turned to the basics ofhuman being or community to derive central political principles of the openand plural society, for example, subjectivity as the condition of being withthe other (Kristeva, 1993; Levinas, 1998; Nancy, 2000), demanding respon-sibility towards the stranger well before any form of social mediation (Amin,2004), or new emblems of collective being such as sympathy, unconditionalhospitality or fraternity in order to reposition the stranger (Derrida, 2002;Ricoeur, 1994; Rutherford, 2007; Smith, 1759). This new ‘ethicalhumanism’ does not take subjectivity, citizenship and community aspreformed, tied to primacies of race, ethnicity, tradition or nation. It rejectsethno-nationalism, the racial state, the world imagined as a clash of civi-lizations, allocation tied to blood, soil or culture. Instead, it makes member-ship a condition of ethical practice towards the other and the collective, aright to be earned by all who find themselves together in a society, not justminorities and assumed outsiders.

In the current climate of unashamed vengefulness towards certainhumans, it would be ill-judged and untimely to criticize a politics of belong-ing that emphasizes the rights of personhood, human fellowship, and anethic of care.8 The crucial question, however, is whether ethical humanismcan discursively and practically unsettle the elaborate machinery of fear,suspicion and discipline that is being put in place by the new biopolitics of emergency. The mischief of this machinery lies in the routinization of discipline through everyday watchfulness and typecasting, categorizingpractices, software-based sorting, bureaucratic procedures, taken-for-granted defence, immigration and welfare measures, unchallenged corpo-rate and business practices, public sentiments sustained by slogan cultures,and more (Graham, 2009). A politics of human fellowship can undoubtedlyput a face to the malpractices of this machinery, question its hidden ethicof human treatment, and lay down the guidelines for an alternative systemof human regulation, but it lacks the power and instruments to stop orsubvert the disciplinary routines.

Importantly, the biopolitics of emergency also defends itself on moralgrounds. It plays on the compulsion of ethical responsibility towards legacy,the community to be protected, the future to be defended. It too uses thelanguage of human being and becoming in order to select between the goodand the bad, building powerful moral and affective impetus behind thechoice to discipline particular human subjects (Brown, 2006; Žižek, 2008).It too justifies exclusion and violence in the name of defending the humancommons, universal values, liberty, reason and enlightenment, law andorder. This is exactly how the suspect ethics, doublespeak and drummed upsentiments of racialized biopower are repackaged and apprehended bymajorities as an ethics of peace, survival and responsibility towards both‘us’ and ‘them’. In these circumstances, wielding ethical humanism as a

16 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 16

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

weapon against the racism of emergency biopolitics can amount to ticklingan adversary in armour-plate with a feather, placing hope in human fellow-ship in the way of an instituted violence justifying itself as an act of humanfellowship.

Attempts to think beyond the ethical humanist turn in anti-racistpolitics are patchy and underdeveloped but are badly needed in order toconfront the escalations of race by a biopolitics of emergency. A priority isto expose the architecture and methods of overt and covert injury, to buildmoral outrage and political momentum around the injury, to insist onsubjecting state disciplinary practices to legal and democratic scrutiny, toimpose a thousand checks on inflammatory labelling, systemic discrimina-tion, excessive surveillance and draconian punishment, to outline a ‘provi-dential’ model of security, well-being and social integration relevant to timesof heightened risk, hazard and vulnerability. A new politics of ‘managing’the diverse and mobile population in an age of uncertainty and risk needsto be developed, one that rejects crude racializations of threat, stops profi-teering from the exaggeration of hazard, and dispenses with a model ofsecurity based on surveillance and rout.

Accordingly, at one end of a move to tackle racism by buildingmomentum behind a new kind of ‘providential’, rather than ‘cata-strophic’, model of governing populations (to borrow Ophir’s distinction),sustained political effort is required to expose the damage, dangers andabsurdity of the extensive machinery in place (and increasingly drawingon hidden software-based systems) to track, code and discipline bodiesby race and phenotype. The anti-racist struggle has to extend its remit,as well as see itself as part of a broader coalition opposed to other formsof discrimination and xenophobia, the erosion of civil and political liber-ties, and the incursions of the security state, in order to uncover theconnections that link census practices, labelling conventions, thesurveillance of people passing through borders, state welfare and publicculture, and the uses of personal information by commercial and non-commercial agencies.

At the other end, anti-racist action has to flow out of a wider attemptto re-fashion the politics of unity and public security in the risk-facingplural and divided society. This is partly a matter of demonstrating thatpreparedness for unforeseen emergencies and heightened risk and uncer-tainty is possible without demonizing particular sections of the populationor humanity elsewhere, or compromising commitment to the well-being ofall in a plural society. Such preparedness would focus on issue-specificoperations that can be scaled up or down, the forensic but non-clamorousisolation of those who really pose a threat, replacing a language of catastrophe with one of managing uncertainty through diverse knowledge,collective intelligence, and continual learning and adaptation, defusingdisaffection, anxiety and envy through dialogue, understanding and inclusion, showing that the principles of universal welfare and state securityare not in conflict.

Amin – The Remainders of Race 17

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 17

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

It is also partly a matter of building coalitions that cut across race (andother taken-for-granted human dividers), gathered around issues of commonconcern (Callon et al., 2009; Latour and Weibel, 2005) as well as desiresand developments affecting everybody, so that a new politics of the commonscan arise, offering breathing space beyond the injunctions of human prox-imity that have come to prevail. For Žižek (2008), this means making spacefor a politics of distance respectful of human difference, disagreement anddissent as the ground of peaceful coexistence. I am not convinced that apolitics of distance is the antidote for a politics obsessed with the habits ofthe errant (or ‘normal’) body. Through any new opening allowing people tocultivate the many affects and relationships they are capable of (Lim, 2008)will also seep the sentiments and practices of aversion and harm sustainedby racist legacy (legitimated as part of a politics of distance). This is whythe conjugations of a politics of the commons – dealing with matters suchas survival, settlement, mobility, security, provision, development, well-being, freedom, justice and ecological preservation, and releasing newaffects, mobilizations and coalitions – remain crucial neutralizers of thepolitics of race.

These are only intimations of possible redress in the arena of bio -politics to temper the divisions and harms of racist legacy so saturated byan ‘Overman’ will to power, but what seems clear is the imperative tocontinuously attend to the architecture of race and to commonalities ofconcern. This is what the exhibition in Barcelona seemed to confirm aboutthe long struggle against apartheid, showing that while no one knew whenthe monstrous regime would fall, its opponents gradually came to know itshistorical, systemic, visual, discursive and emotive structure, slowlypiecing together a counter-machinery to wear it down through many inven-tions of boycott, subversion, protest, strike, reform, ridicule and defiance.It also showed how, with equal steadfastness, the struggle looked beyondthe divisions of race to find common cause and a passion for a new kindof society (e.g. yearning for common human rights, the non-racial state,freedom of movement, shared prosperity, the right to well-being, activedemocracy and so on). Here was a politics of anti-race combined with apolitics of collective transformation, articulating shared problems, entan-gled futures, new principles and structures of feeling for a democraticsociety. It kept the politics of recognition close to the politics of structuraltransformation towards an equal and just society – a connection that seemsto have been forgotten in the new South Africa and by anti-racist move-ments in the West.

AcknowledgementsIt has taken several iterations to get the argument of this article to this point on thedifficult topic of racial legacy and biopolitics. A number of people have offered veryhelpful criticisms and comments. I am grateful to the editors and referees of Theory,Culture & Society, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jonathan Darling, Jonathan Rutherford andPep Subirós, and five Fellows of the Durham Institute of Advanced Study during

18 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 18

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

its 2008–9 annual programme on ‘Being Human’ – Christa Acampora, Sonia Kruks,Eduardo Mendieta, Arun Saldanha and Maren Stange.

Notes1. Winant’s argument is not that the forms of racism remain the same. Indeed, heis quick to acknowledge that new ideas and practices of race have arisen in the21st century, including: a postcolonial consciousness tangled up with continuedsocial differentiation on racial lines; the rise of a genomic science that questionsracial identity but still becomes mobilized for racial profiling and discrimination;a multicultural ethos that is accompanied by backlashes of an ethno-nationalnature; and a new Western imperialism that espouses tolerance for the domesti-cated other and vengeance towards the unassimilated other. See also Bernasconiand Lott (2000) for a helpful synthesis of how thinking in the West has developedsince Herder and Kant in the 18th century.2. This is happening, for example, through genetic profiling of given racial andethnic groups, to see if some of them are more open to heart disease, obesity, crime,educational under-achievement. Through such casual association between medicalcondition and race/ethnicity, the new science has become an unwitting ally in tracingmaladies to the genetic core of ‘African-Caribbeans’, ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Asians’, ascience called to action for race-inflected remedy – curative or punitive – and tocomment on the strength and evolutionary prospect of different types of ‘racial’ stock.3. My emphasis here on Western racism is not intended as a denial of social organ-ization by race or ethnicity in non-Western societies, but is a function of the focusof the article on Europe. There are far too many examples of such organization inthe course of African and Asian history to sustain a denial of this sort, although theextensive and deep ‘naturalization’ of white order through institutional and vernac-ular practices honed in long and far-reaching histories of Western cultural, politi-cal and economic imperialism is a distinction that lies at the heart of the historicalpessimism of this article.4. Contemporary developments in genomic science show clearly that it is possibil-ities and probabilities that are transmitted between generations, and always throughinflections of culture and praxis, so even those traits with relatively firm geneticassociations – and to list racial prejudice among these traits would require consid-erable proof – come with few guarantees of outcome (Rose, 2007).5. The message to Muslims in the West is that they can stay ‘once they havedivested themselves of what many of them regard as . . . essential to themselves’(Asad, 2003: 168). This concession too, however, is qualified. ‘Bad Muslims’ canonly become ‘good Muslims’ (Mamdani, 2004), and never fully of the West, as thosedoing the judging come to redefine the world – once again – as the battlegroundbetween a peaceful, progressive, rational and tolerant West and its opposite in theIslamic East (Gregory, 2004). Between the one and the other stereotype – bothcalled on to justify disciplinary action – there is no possibility of Muslims beingregarded as subjects with varying, complex and multiple identities, living in theWest to integrate, improve their lot and claim the public turf like other citizens,and being allowed to belong to communities of their choice, mixing the reverentand secular, traditional and modern in a quest for a richer and fuller life (Modood,2005; Nederveen Pieterse, 2007). That being Muslim in the West might amount tobeing quite ordinary, on the right side of civilization, has become a matter of provingit, and against the odds.

Amin – The Remainders of Race 19

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 19

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

6. This is not to deny the significance of other forces of human mediation in theeveryday urban: the indifference, envy and aversion among strangers sparked bythe bustle of urban life; the limits to direct engagement in the sprawling, segmented,depersonalized city; the mediation of human sentiments and attitudes in the cityby the object-world, the built environment, the technological infrastructure, andmore (Amin, 2008; Thrift, 2005). Their influence on human behaviour shows howthin is the line of separation between demotic and demonic cosmopolitanism.7. One reason for a turn to a politics of ethics – the desire to link moral and polit-ical philosophy – is the belief that rationalism, utilitarianism, consumerism andindividualism have diminished the role of ethics in social organization and humaninteraction, and that credos such as liberalism, socialism, religious society andnationalism have legitimated harm, including ethical harm, towards those believedto be on the outside (Appiah, 2006; Parekh, 2000).8. The affective potential of such a politics should not be underestimated, espe-cially when we consider how centrally biopolitics relies on the engineering ofpassions. Anne-Marie Fortier (2008) shows this in her account of how multiculturaland assimilationist policies in Britain have tapped into a structure of nationalfeelings of fear, anxiety, love and hope through which minorities and majoritiessense each other and their place in the nation. The policies, in actively definingcitizenship, community and national values, animate popular response to differenceand divergence. A politics of personhood filtered through state management offeelings has anything but a background regulatory influence. It determines whetherthe stranger is felt as friend or foe, outsider or insider, anomalous or ordinary.

ReferencesAhluwalia, P. (2007) ‘Afterlives of Post-colonialism: Reflections on Theory Post-9/11’, Postcolonial Studies 10(3): 257–70.Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge.Ahmed, S. (2007) ‘You End Up Doing the Document Rather than Doing the Doing:Diversity, Race Equality and the Politics of Documentation’, Ethnic and RacialStudies 30(4): 590–609.Alcoff, L. (2006) Invisible Identities. New York: Oxford University Press.Alexander, C. (2004) ‘Imagining the Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Youthafter “the Riots”’, Critical Social Policy 24(4): 526–49.Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the Multicultural City’, Environment and PlanningA 34(6): 959–80.Amin, A. (2004) ‘Multiethnicity and the Idea of Europe’, Theory, Culture & Society21(2): 1–24.Amin, A. (2008) ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’, City 12(1): 5–24.Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Appiah, A. (2006) Cosmopolitanism. London: Penguin.Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Bauman, Z. (2007) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity.Bayart, J.-F. (2005) The Illusion of Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Berlant, L. (2008) The Female Complaint. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Bernasconi, R. and T. Lott (2000) The Idea of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett.

20 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 20

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Brown, W. (2006) Regulating Aversion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Brubaker, R., M. Loveman and P. Stamatov (2004) ‘Ethnicity as Cognition’, Theory& Society 33: 31–64.Callon, M., P. Lascoumes and Y. Barthe (2009) Acting in an Uncertain World.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Carter, R. (2007) ‘Genes, Genomes and Genealogies: The Return of ScientificRacism?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(4): 546–56.Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona (CCCB) (2007) Apartheid. Barcelona:CCCB.Dalal, F. (2008) ‘Institutions and Racism: Equality in the Workplace’, pp. 123–40in S. Davison and J. Rutherford (eds) Race, Identity and Belonging. London:Lawrence and Wishart.Derrida, J. (2002) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge.Dillon, M. (2008) ‘Underwriting Security’, Security Dialogue 39(2–3): 309–32.Duster, T. (2003) Backdoor to Eugenics. London: Routledge.Fanon, F. (1967 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove.Fortier, A.-M. (2008) Multicultural Horizons. London: Routledge.Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must Be Defended. London: Allen Lane.Fullwiley, D. (2007) ‘The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing HumanDifference in Pharmacogenetics Practice’, Science as Culture 16(1): 1–30.Gandhi, L. (2006) Affective Communities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Gilroy, P. (2001) Against Race. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge.Graham, S. (2009) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell.Grosz, E. (2004) The Nick of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Hacking, I. (2005) ‘Why Race Still Matters’, Daedalus 134(1): 102–16.Hage, G. (1998) White Nation. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press.Hariman, R. (2009) ‘Democratic Stupidity’, Insights 4(14): 2–18.Hughes, G. (2007) ‘Community Cohesion, Asylum Seeking and the Question of the“Stranger”’, Cultural Studies 21(6): 931–51.Keith, M. (2005) After the Cosmopolitan. London: Routledge.Kristeva, J. (1993) Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.Kundnani, A. (2007) The End of Tolerance. London: Pluto Press.Lakoff, A. (2007) ‘Preparing for the Next Emergency’, Public Culture 12(2): 247–71.Latour, B. and P. Weibel (eds) (2005) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Levinas, E. (1998) Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.Lim, J. (2008) ‘Queer Critique and the Politics of Affect’, in K. Browne, J. Lim andG. Brown (eds) Geographies of Sexualities. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Amin – The Remainders of Race 21

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 21

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Mamdani, M. (2004) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. New York: Pantheon Books.Martinot, S. (2002) The Rule of Racialization. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UniversityPress.Mendieta, E. (ed.) (forthcoming) Biopolitics and Racism: Foucauldian Genealogies.New York: SUNY Press.Modood, T. (2005) Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Naidoo, R. (2008) ‘Fear of Difference/Fear of Sameness: The Road to Conviviality’,pp. 72–81 in S. Davison and J. Rutherford (eds) Race, Identity and Belonging.London: Lawrence and Wishart.Nancy, J.-L. (2000) Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2007) Ethnicities and Global Multiculture. Plymouth:Rowman and Littlefield.Ophir, A. (2007) ‘The Two-state Solution: Providence and Catastrophe’, Journal ofHomeland Security and Emergency Management 4(1): 1–44.Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Parekh, B. (2008) A New Politics of Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Rai, A. (2004) ‘Of Monsters: Biopower, Terrorism and Excess in Genealogies ofMonstrosity’, Cultural Studies 18(4): 688–70.Ricoeur, P. (1994) Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Unversity Press.Rutherford, J. (2007) After Identity. London: Lawrence and Wishart.Saldanha, A. (2006) ‘Re-ontologizing Race: The Machinic Geography of Pheno-type’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 9–24.Saldanha, A. (2007) Psychedelic Whiteness: Rave Tourism and the Viscosity of Racein Goa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Sandercock, L. (2003) Cosmopolis II. London: Continuum.Smith, A. (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edinburgh.Swanton, D. (2007) ‘Race and Becoming: The Emergent Materialities of Race inEveryday Multiculture’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Geography,University of Durham.Terranova, T. (2007) ‘Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism andHegemony as Noopolitics’, Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 125–45.Thrift, N. (2005) ‘But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History ofHatred’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(2): 133–50.West, C. (2003) Prophecy, Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity.Westminster/Louisville: John Knox Press.Winant, H. (2006) ‘Race and Racism: Towards a Global Future’, Ethnic and RacialStudies 29(5): 986–1003.Wise, A. (2005) ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 26(1–2): 171–86.Wood, P. and C. Landry (2007) Intercultural City. London: Earthscan.Žižek, S. (2008) Violence. London: Profile Books.

22 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1)

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 22

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography and Executive Director of the Insti-tute of Advanced Study at Durham University. His work focuses on the intersections of society and space relating to urban and regional develop-ment, the geographies of situated practice, and the challenges of race, multi-culture and politics in a post-territorial age. He is author, most recently, ofCities: Reimagining the Urban (with Nigel Thrift, Polity Press, 2002) andArchitectures of Knowledge (with Patrick Cohendet, Oxford University Press,2004), and editor of Community, Economic Creativity and Organisation(with Joanne Roberts, Oxford University Press, 2008), Thinking AboutAlmost Everything (with Michael O’Neill, Profile Books, 2009), and TheSocial Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity (ZedBooks, 2009). [email: [email protected]]

Amin – The Remainders of Race 23

001-023 TCS350361 Amin_Article 156 x 234mm 04/02/2010 11:35 Page 23

at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from