What Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor has called a ‘politics of recognition’ (1994: 70) continues to shape our understanding of contemporary social movements organized around race, indigeneity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Offering an interpretive framework for understanding political demands for group-differentiated rights, protections, and political representation, the ‘politics of recognition’ is increasingly as contested as it is influential. A theory of both social justice and social harm elaborated by avowed inheritors of Frankfurt School critical theory, this theory long ago gave rise to a portable ‘recognition paradigm’ (Fraser, 2003: 13), in feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser’s words, that cuts across disciplines. From the US civil rights movement to campaigns for indigenous sovereignty, this paradigm understands these movements as seeking public recognition of identity-based oppression, historical injustice, and group cultural particularity.
This chapter will provide an overview of key debates in the reception history of contemporary theories of recognition when applied to questions of racial politics. In doing so it argues that those theories were marked as much by a ‘cultural turn’ (Chaney, 1994) in humanities and social science scholarship from the 1970s onward as by the institutionalization of postwar US and Canadian social movements that underwrote that turn. One consequence of those joint theoretical and activist origins is that the emergence of the recognition paradigm in the 1990s has come to frame racial injustice primarily in terms of cultural misrecognition. This move, which has drawn ongoing criticism from across the political spectrum, has fundamentally helped to redefine race as group culture. Subsequent critiques of the recognition paradigm reveal an underlying conceptual tension between antiracist political strategies premised upon the affirmation of racial identity on the one hand, or upon what could be described as the abolition of the racial order on the other.
Recent scholarship on antiblack racism, settler colonialism, and what critic Jodi Melamed and others have called ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ (Melamed, 2006) has mounted powerful critiques of some of the key premises of the politics of recognition. Critics of the recognition paradigm contend that it is not merely a neutral description of contemporary social movements. Instead, they argue, the paradigm also functions as a normative framework that can be both internally and externally imposed upon social movements in order to dismiss anti-systemic demands, legitimize institutional and state authority, and narrow the terrain of political contestation.
These emergent critiques have tended to avoid a generalizable conception of either race or racism (Paul Taylor, 2013). For some black studies scholars, race is too broad a concept to capture the specificity of antiblack racism (Sexton, 2008; Wilderson, 2010). For others, race is inappropriate for understanding indigenous groups who are not racially excluded national minorities but sovereign nations forcibly subjugated by settler states (Simpson, 2014). Against this turn away from race as a comparative concept, this chapter will nevertheless retain a more expansive understanding of racial injustice and oppression as integral components of a European colonial enterprise that invented both black and indigenous racial categories as part of an evolving system of social classification, coercion, dispossession, and population management.
Afropessimist, Indigenous Studies, and Marxist theorists’ subsequent attempts to move beyond recognitive politics reveal an underlying conceptual tension between antiracist political strategies premised upon the affirmation of racial identity on the one hand, or upon what could be characterized as the abolition of the racial order on the other. This affirmation/abolition bind is subsequently narrated through a Fanonian deformed dialectic of racial nonrecognition, indigenous refusals of settler state authority, or the racially differentiating effects of maldistribution and state-sanctioned expropriation.
For Charles Taylor, one of the most distinctive features of recent social movements in the United States and Canada is their demand for the affirmation of marginalized group identities subject to pervasive misrepresentation and devaluation:
[O]ur identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. (1994: 25)
Driven by a need for psychological self-realization that Taylor calls an ‘ethics of authenticity’ (2008), subjects seeking recognition wish to have deep psychic features of their lived experience affirmed. At the same, third generation Frankfurt School theorist Axel Honneth has emphasized that the lived experience of misrecognition represents a basic form of moral injury (Honneth, 1995). For Taylor, the expression or realization of a sense of authentic selfhood is not a fundamentally isolated process. It is an inevitably dialogical moral ideal, one formed in the context of communal bonds and identity-based social marginalization. Recognition, in Taylor’s eyes, names the interplay between psychological self-definition and political demands for institutional and electoral representation. Thus the concept of recognition is, for Taylor, not premised upon models of individual self-interested rational actors that remain the normative subjects of contemporary liberal political theory.
For Taylor, Honneth, and Fraser, a political theory of recognition offered a conceptual vocabulary to register contemporary social movements’ turn away from an older political idiom of class struggle and economic exploitation and toward a concern for identity, difference, and cultural misrepresentation. Grounded in intersubjective theories of identity formation and institutionalized political rights in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, specifically the ‘Lord and Bondsman’ chapter in the The Phenomenology of Spirit and the later Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Taylor’s and Honneth’s theorization of recognition understand political conflict fundamentally in terms of how individuals and groups are accorded or denied respect, esteem, and civic representation (Thompson, 2006). This initial Hegelian elaboration of a politics of recognition as a dialogical process was balanced against a neo-Kantian intellectual tradition organized around cultivation and protection of individual autonomy.
Fraser’s writing, in particular, has maintained a distance from the Hegelian tradition that Taylor and Honneth draw upon, and has subjected the recognition paradigm to significant ongoing reconfiguration. Because the initial framing of recognition largely excluded questions of political economy, Fraser has suggested that attention to relations of recognition must always also involve attention to a variety of economic demands that she broadly labels as ‘redistributive’ (Fraser, 1995; Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Though the distinction is de-emphasized in later work, Fraser has further distinguished between ‘affirmative’ and ‘transformative’ remedies for cultural misrecognition and the maldistribution of material resources:
By affirmative remedies for injustice I mean remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them. By transformative remedies, in contrast, I mean remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework. The nub of the contrast is end-state outcomes versus the processes that produce them. It is not gradual versus apocalyptic change. (Fraser, 1995: 82)
Fraser associates ‘affirmative’ measures to rectify misrecognition with mainstream multiculturalism and a politics of identity grounded in the celebration and preservation of group culture, traditions, and heritage. For Fraser, ‘transformative’ approaches to the problem of misrecognition on the other hand tend to destabilize group boundaries and alter the entire distribution of identities within a social field – a process the theorist characterizes as deconstructive in this 1995 article: ‘Whereas affirmative recognition remedies tend to promote existing group differentiations’, she argues, ‘transformative recognition remedies tend, in the long run, to destabilize them so as to make room for future regroupments’ (1995: 84).
For all three theorists, institutionalized patterns of misrecognition or, in Fraser’s case, the lack of participatory parity in decision-making processes, come to define the specificity of racial injustice. For both supporters and critics of this theoretical framework, institutionalized ‘rules of recognition’, in James Tully’s trenchant formulation (2000: 472), refer to an overarching deliberative process of negotiated inclusion within culturally diverse democratic societies. Such remedial action goes beyond enforcement of antidiscrimination measures to include group-differentiated positive accommodations for Sikh police officers wishing to wear turbans for example, or for indigenous self-government and power-sharing arrangements. For Taylor, the often unacknowledged ethnocentric character of appeals to common humanity and a homogeneous national culture overwrite the cultural particularity of subordinated populations and call for the acknowledgment of cultural difference as a political corrective.
As a theory of justice deeply informed by the impact and history of multicultural policies, the recognition paradigm has faced criticism for its rejection of ‘common humanity’ (Rorty, 2000: 8); for its laundering or dissimulation of histories of racial domination through a depoliticized rhetoric of cultural diversity (San Juan Jr., 2002, 2007; Lentin and Titley, 2011); and for its relative neglect of the role of capitalist market dynamics in both sustaining racist ideology and reproducing racial inequality over time (Bannerji, 2000; Darder and Torres, 2004). Finally, critics of the recognition paradigm have also persistently warned of the disciplinary function of institutional recognition which, like liberal rights discourse (Brown, 1995), could be said to construct manageable political subjects, rather than simply affirming or protecting preexisting ones (Markell, 2003; McNay, 2008). As a result, some theorists of recognition have argued for more sharply distinguishing between the politics of identity and the politics of recognition (Thompson and Yar, 2011).
The recognition paradigm identifies core features of what has come to be known as contemporary ‘identity politics’ (Alcoff, 2006). Yet the widespread association of theories of political recognition with politicized identities illuminates the ambiguous nature of identity itself as an object of recognition and misrecognition (Gleason, 1983; Bernstein, 2005; Brubaker, 2006; Jenkins 2014). The term ‘identity politics’ emerged from black socialist feminist critiques of the patriarchal character of black nationalism and the white middle-class norms structuring second-wave feminism (Springer, 2005). Today, however, ‘identity politics’ is typically contrasted with a politics of class. As such, it typically doubles as a normative judgment of a range of new social movements organized around racial, sexual, and gender oppression. Todd Gitlin (1996) and Arthur Schlesinger (1998), in particular, have offered influential declensionist narratives of how identity-based political movements contributed to the fragmentation of the US ‘New Left’ beginning in the 1960s (Gosse, 2007).
The theorists who populate this chapter read the politics of recognition as symptomatic of both the theoretical and historical limits of dominant conceptions of racial justice as form of so-called ‘identity politics’. Taking identity as a basic unit of analysis for contemporary antiracist political movements has often obscured as much as it has brought to light. Doing so often conceals an underlying conceptual tension between political demands for the assertion of racial identity, on the one hand, and for the denaturalization or dismantling of these identities on the other. As Nancy Fraser reminds us, calls to either affirm racial difference or eliminate racial inequality are political ideals, premised upon visions of group differentiation or de-differentiation, that can often come into conflict with each other (Fraser, 1997b).
Critics typically trace the genealogy of the term ‘identity politics’ back to a 1977 statement by the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based black feminist group (Springer, 2005). The meaning of identity advanced in the Combahee statement is embedded, however, within a simultaneously socialist, feminist, and antiracist politics that can be read as a precursor to later theories of intersectionality (Hancock, 2016). In contemporary scholarship and popular usage, ‘identity politics’ is typically a pejorative term distinguished from an ‘Old Left’ socialist or social democratic labor politics (Gitlin, 1997; Kelley, 1997; Bernstein, 2005). Assessing the historical limits of the affirmation of working class identity as anticapitalist political strategy has led some contemporary Marxist theorists to characterize this older labor movement politics as itself structured and constrained by a peculiar logic of identity, however (Postone, 1996; Tamas, 2005, Endnotes, 2015). As Moishe Postone has argued in terms that paradoxically echo Marxist critiques of contemporary identity-based social movements, attempts to define the systemic features of capitalist societies are not reducible to a ‘social critique from the standpoint of “labor”, … a critique from a quasi-natural point of view, that of a social ontology’ (Postone, 1996: 65).
Like the concept of racial difference (Gates, 1999) with which it is often paired, racial identity invokes a range of sometimes contradictory meanings in scholarly and popular discourse. These range from cultural heritage and epistemic standpoint to systems of biological classification and histories of resistance to racism and racial inequality. Race has come to signify both the existential particularity of lived experience and social boundaries that vary considerably over space and time (Goldberg, 2009; Wimmer, 2013; Wolfe, 2016). Political theorists like Barbara and Karen Fields (2012), along with Robert Miles (Miles and Brown, 2003), have noted how the concept of race is the consequence rather than cause of racism. ‘Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once’, the Fields contend:
Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race, as just defined, so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss. (Fields and Fields, 2012: 17)
The Fields have controversially argued for the abandonment of race as an explanatory category for political analysis and embraced what can be characterized as racial eliminativism (Appiah, 1985; Zack, 2002). We need not follow them down that path, however, to note how their work draws attention to the ways characteristics imputed to racialized populations, whether positive or negative, come to justify racism and racial inequality. Despite the conclusions the Fields draw from this latter insight, the slipperiness of race as a political signifier means that populations have invoked racial identity precisely in order to challenge racism and indicate interpellation by ‘something an aggressor does’ (Fields and Fields, 2012: 17). Nevertheless, in arguing that racial difference does not explain social phenomena but is itself in need of explanation, the Fields have helped to initiate a crucial Copernican turn from race to racism as the object of analysis for antiracist critique.
This raises the question, however, of whether the concept of racism itself adequately describes the sources of racial domination and structured inequality beyond seemingly arbitrary attitudinal prejudices and false beliefs akin to ‘witchcraft’ (Fields and Fields, 2012: 193). As the Fields themselves point out, racial categories reveal an ensemble of social processes that racially order and segment populations within emergent capitalist social relations (111–48). In this sense their scholarship pushes up against the methodological limits of the concept of racism as ultimately reducible to a form of ideological mystification ‘that disguised class inequality and, by the same stroke, impoverished Americans’ public language for addressing inequality’ (111). ‘Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations’, Barbara Fields famously points out, ‘as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco’ (Fields, 1990: 95–118). Here defining race and racism as ideological, and black chattel slavery through a language of business, positions racism and racial divisions as an epiphenomenal and highly contingent expression of a more historically durable underlying logic of capitalist exploitation. Configuring the relationship between race and capitalism in this manner echoes the opposition between culture and political economy that fundamentally structures the recognition paradigm (Butler, 1997; Fraser, 1997a). The epiphenomenalist account of race offered by the Fields has been a source of ongoing debate within Marxist theory (Reed, 2002; Wood, 2002) as well as contemporary scholarship on what Cedric Robinson has called ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson, 1983) and the political economy of racial domination (Davis, 1983; James, 1992; Du Bois, 2007; Boyce Davies, 2008; Gore et al., 2009; Boggs, 2011; Gore, 2011; Rodney, 2012; Williams, 2014).
Anthropologist Franz Boas’s critique of nineteenth-century scientific racism and turn to group culture (Kuper, 2003; Baker, 2010) has continued to inform contemporary definitional debates over the theoretical status of the concept of race, and the relationship between race and ethnicity (Appiah, 1985; Outlaw, 1992; Gooding-Williams, 1996; Hannaford, 1996; Gracia, 2007; Wimmer, 2013; Chandler, 2014; Omi and Winant, 2015). The language of group culture was offered as an alternative to discredited though nevertheless persistent beliefs in inherent racial differences in intelligence, ability, and civilizational achievement. Philosopher Horace Kallen and Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park were instrumental in subsequently developing influential early-20th century accounts of ethnic assimilation and cultural pluralism that took European immigrants to the United States as a primary point of reference. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant have argued that the work of Kallen and Park consolidated an ‘ethnicity paradigm’ (Omi and Winant 2015, 21–52)that, despite being taken up by subsequent midcentury scholars like Gunnar Myrdal as the general framework for understanding US racial politics, ignored the specificity of racial group formation. For Omi and Winant, race is irreducible to these early and mid-20th century theories of ethnicity.
Despite slippages in the popular usage of these terms, contemporary critics have generally distinguished between the ascriptive, imposed character of racial difference and the comparatively more voluntary forms of cultural assertion and belonging associated with ethnicity (Cornell and Hartmann, 2007; Gracia, 2007). Debates continue over whether race can be considered a subcategory of ethnicity or whether these terms represent fundamentally distinct forms of social categorization and political group formation (Bonilla-Silva, 1999; Banton, 2002; Cornell and Hartmann, 2007; Baker, 2010; Wimmer, 2013; Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015; Omi and Winant, 2015). For Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, for example, race is an intrinsically hierarchical concept, while ethnicity may or may not be (Cornell and Hartmann, 2007). The fundamental distinction between imposed and asserted forms of collective belonging that marks the difference between race and ethnic identity for many theorists is not absolute, however – as racial categories can become ethnicized over time, and ethnic groups can become biologized through shifting theories of racial bloodlines (Kauanui, 2008).
As the title of Taylor’s influential 1992 essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’ makes clear, the rise of liberal and literary multiculturalism remains a crucial inspiration for theorizing recognition as a key component of racial injustice and its potential remedies in specifically cultural terms. Taylor’s essay developed that theory within the context of Canadian multiculturalism as state policy and offered a broad comparative framework for understanding the emergence of multicultural societies across the Global North.
For Taylor, institutions and states need not choose between acknowledging group cultural differences and upholding commitments to difference-blind formal equality. Taylor calls these two primary aims of recognition a ‘politics of difference’ (1994: 38) and a ‘politics of equal dignity’ (1994: 38) respectively. Taylor’s initial distinction between equal protection and group-differentiated rights immediately provoked debates over whether these rights are fundamentally compatible with liberal principles designed to protect individual autonomy (Taylor, 1994; Benhabib, 2002).
As perhaps one of the most influential theorists of multicultural state policy, Will Kymlicka has pointed out that multicultural state policies are ultimately rooted in ‘the increasing recognition of minority rights whether in the form of land claims and treaty rights for indigenous peoples; strengthened language rights and regional autonomy for substate national minorities; and accommodation rights for immigrant-origin ethnic groups’:
[T]hese ‘multiculturalism policies’…go beyond the protection of the basic civil and political rights guaranteed to all individuals in a liberal-democratic state to also extend some level of public recognition and support for minorities to express their distinct identities and practices. The rise of MCPs therefore goes beyond the broader politics of civil rights and nondiscrimination. 2013: (101)
This combination of political representation and accommodation ‘gave organized ethnic groups a seat at the table of public decision making while also giving states a means to shape and discipline those groups to ensure their compliance with overarching state needs for social peace and effective state regulation of economic and political life’ (Kymlicka, 2013: 102). For both Kymlicka and Taylor, in short, recognition provides a means by which to harmonize basic individual citizenship rights with demands to protect group sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and political self-determination (Kymlicka, 1996: 2013).
Tracing the origins of US multicultural policy initiatives to educational reform efforts in the 1970s and 1990s, Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield have noted a similar moderation of earlier antiracist political demands through the institutional translation of race into culture. ‘[M]ulticulturalism often avoided race’, Newfield and Gordon contend, ‘It designated cultures. It didn’t talk up racism’:
It didn’t seem very antiracist, and often left the impression that any discussion of cultural diversity would render racism insignificant. It was ambiguous about the inheritance and the ongoing presence of histories of oppression. It had the air of pleading for a clean start. It allowed ‘culture’s’ aura of free play to attribute a creative power to racial groups that lacked political and economic power. (1997: 3)
A small body of secondary literature has also emerged to situate this turn to culture in educational policy within an era of deepening austerity and state withdrawal from public services, and in particular within a history of the institutionalization of earlier civil rights and black power movement demands (Reed, 1999; Roelofs, 2003; Johnson, 2007; Karen Ferguson, 2013; Dawson, 2015; INCITE!, 2017).
For Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, multicultural state policies across Europe (Gunew, 2010) have similarly reconstituted race as cultural difference. They, too, view culture as ‘a site in which the politics of race can be legitimized and laundered’ (2011: 24). For Lentin and Titley, limiting the political demands of racially marginalized populations to the preservation and toleration of group cultural difference has blunted the force of antiracist critique:
For anti-racist critiques of racialized structures and patterns of power and privilege; for ‘critical multiculturalist’ takes on the patrician Eurocentrism of relations of recognition and tolerance; for activists protesting against the depoliticizing and culturalizing of racial injustice and inequality; for feminists, LGBT activists, youth workers and the secular left protesting against the ‘micro-colonialism’ of essentialized community leaders and structures of patronage: multiculturalism has, at best, provided attenuated pathways for organization and mobilization, provided the ambivalent political capital of ‘recognition’, and directed sporadic attention to the historical and political-economic conditions of social inequality. More often it has been seen as a mode of management and control, securing the legitimacy of the status quo through a deflection of questions of power and inequality into the relatively more malleable economy of cultural recognition. (2011: 14–15)
Contra the Fields, however, in light of the failure of multiculturalism to deliver racial justice in Europe and the UK, Lentin and Titley propose that we recover ‘the analytical and oppositional possibilities of race as a political category in the contemporary moment’ (24).
Political theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva has similarly argued that the contemporary catachrestic substitution of culture for race, part of the legacy of Boasian cultural anthropology, offers a form of ‘moral relief’ (Da Silva, 2007: xxxii) that has allowed critics to avoid confronting global histories of racial domination. ‘[W]riting of racial difference as a signifier of cultural difference’, Da Silva contends, ‘hampers our understanding of how the racial operates as a modern political-symbolic weapon’ (133) while at the same time rendering culture ‘the obvious basis for framing demands for global justice and for punishing the global subaltern as well’ (xix). For Da Silva, the transformation of an earlier specifically national antiracist political subject into a subject of cultural difference constitutes a ‘doomed strategy of emancipation’ (xxxiii). While proper subjects of recognition are produced, the turn to culture continues to represent non-Europeans as ethnographic objects entirely governed by external natural laws ‘in a global space and under an epistemological arrangement already mapped by the racial’ (139). ‘[T]he cultural still authorizes (re)writings of the others of Europe’, Da Silva continues, ‘but now as incarcerated subjects of cultural difference’ (xxxv).
The politics of recognition has often short-changed such oppositional possibilities, however. A number of contemporary critics have registered how the neoliberal, workfare-warfare state has become increasingly unresponsive to reformation through a liberal politics of recognition (Melamed, 2011; Reddy, 2011; Roderick Ferguson, 2012). For these theorists and their cohort, limited postwar reforms and a series of regimes of ‘official antiracism’ (Melamed, 2006: 2) in the United States have emerged to redirect the anti-systemic demands of 60s-era antiracist movements from liberal ideals of formal equality to a rhetoric of neoliberal cultural development, representation, and uplift (Yúdice, 2003; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Other scholars have situated the rise of liberal multicultural policy in the United States within an overarching narrative of the institutionalization and depoliticization of 60s-era ethnic nationalist, antiracist, women of color feminist, and queer of color social movements (Roderick Ferguson, 2004, 2012; Melamed, 2011).
Jodi Melamed offers one of the most persuasive accounts of how these developments are best seen in terms of what the critic calls ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ (Melamed, 2006: 2). For Melamed, ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ represents the culmination of a decades-long project of domesticating the contentious politics of postwar social movements by displacing antiracist political action onto the terrain of elite electoral and cultural representation. This redirection of the energies of postwar social movements represents a concerted counterinsurgency strategy that, in her view, has abandoned progressive redistributive or transformative economic measures. Representing market freedoms as the key to racial progress and a condition of continued political representation, Melamed argues, has subsequently made the simultaneity of anticapitalist and antiracist politics unthinkable.
Melamed’s analysis of neoliberal multiculturalism explicitly counters this disarticulation of racial and economic injustice. Instead, she rethinks US state formation in relation to successive regimes of ‘official antiracism’ in the postwar era that supplied moral justifications for US global hegemony. Building on Omi and Winant’s influential thesis of a post-World War II ‘racial break’ (Winant, 2001) that marked the formal end of explicit de jure white supremacist state policy across much of the globe, Melamed’s analysis moves through three successive periods of official antiracism: racial liberalism; liberal multiculturalism; and neoliberal multiculturalism.
In Melamed’s account, the phase of racial liberalism (mid 1940s–1960s) sought to create full integration of African Americans. The economic success of African Americans would, per the logic of this official antiracism, offer proof of US exceptionalism. It would do so, moreover, while naturalizing equal opportunity within capitalist markets as the horizon of civil rights movement demands in order to consolidate the capitalist state. Liberal multiculturalism (1960s–90s), in contrast, turned to culture in order to aestheticize the legacy of earlier antiracist movements and offer up a weak cultural pluralism as evidence of the perfectibility and exceptionalism of US national identity. As Melamed trenchantly puts it:
Pluralism as the horizon for thinking on race matters restricted permissible antiracism to forms that assented to US nationalism and normal politics and prioritized individual and property rights over collective social goals. It reduced culture to aesthetics and then overvalorized aesthetic culture all by itself, apart from social and material forces. Thus liberal multiculturalism’s stress on representation and cultural recognition screened off differential power, dematerialized conceptions of race, and marginalized antiracisms that addressed material disparities in racial outcomes. (Melamed, 2011: 34)
Finally, neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s to present) brings the cultural logic of group particularity to bear not only upon state-making practices but upon the protection of property rights and the generalization of market principles as an antiracist political project. ‘In neoliberal multiculturalism matters of the economy themselves express what is meant by freedom from the unfair restraint of racism’ (Melamed, 2011: 148), the critic concludes.
Both Melamed and sociologist Roderick Ferguson (2012) have called attention to the significant role that universities in particular have played in simultaneously affirming and regulating racial representation in ways that increasingly conform to market imperatives and that often justify deepening economic inequality within and between racial groups. Unlike some contemporary Marxist theorists, however (Žižek, 1997), Melamed and Ferguson are not interested in returning to an analytically purified conception of class conflict so much as holding open a space for the elaboration of materialist antiracisms, feminisms, and queer politics.
Contemporary black studies scholars have increasingly challenged the pluralist, coalitional logic at the core of liberal multicultural state and institutional policy. Offering a comprehensive theory of antiblack racism dubbed ‘Afropessimism’, scholars such as Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton have rejected a liberal multicultural imaginary ‘wherein cultural diversity is managed as a depoliticized term of experience’ (Sexton, 2008: 247). Both theorists also argue for the structural impossibility of attaining of recognition for black subjects. This cohort returns to the concept of race contra culture as a set of what Wilderson calls ontological positions: whiteness, blackness, and the indigenous ‘Savage’ (Wilderson, 2010: 23). For Wilderson, Sexton, and other Afropessimist critics, blackness is less as an affirmative ethnocultural identity than a negative social category. On this view, the sacrificial expulsion and subordination of blackness guarantees the coherence of civil society and its subjects. Framing blackness as existential abjection, non-relationality, and non-communicability has led critic Fred Moten to offer a sympathetic though critical interrogation of Afropessimism’s capacity to think the relation between antiblack racism and black subjectivity and political agency (Moten, 2013). For both Wilderson and Sexton, the severity and historical durability of antiblack racism is ultimately grounded, not in colonial domination or capitalist exploitation, but in the psychic pathology of nonblack subjects structured by what Wilderson calls the ‘libidinal economy of civil society’ (2010: 15). That psychic economy simultaneously conditions a history of nonblack enjoyment of and empathy toward black suffering (Hartman, 1997).
These theorists thus elaborate blackness as a structural category defined primarily through historically durable forms of antiblack racism: gratuitous violence, non-sovereignty, existential abjection, literal and metaphorical fungibility, and what sociologist Orlando Patterson has called the ‘social death’ (Patterson, 1985) of the slave condition. For Afropessimist theorists, the politics of nonwhite interracial coalition encoded in multicultural ideals fundamentally depend upon a form of permanent structural misrecognition of the singularity of antiblack racism. That misrecognition is enforced through spurious racial analogies that render ‘equivalent slavery and other forms of oppression’ (Sexton, 2008: 293). Afropessimism’s critiques of indigenous studies has occasioned ongoing debates over the historical relationship between black chattel slavery and US settler colonialism (Sexton, 2014; Day, 2015; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). At the same time, Afropessimism’s ontological turn, grounded in a conception of an unchanging and originary libidinal economy of black suffering, has been the target of criticism for its anti-materialist, radically dehistoricized conception of black racialization (Dawson, 2016).
Despite breaking from a prior multicultural logic of coalition, therefore, Afropessimism’s ontologization of blackness as a racial position, or perhaps the singular racial position, raises the question of the historicity and internal homogeneity of the category of blackness itself. Considering blackness as a unitary ontological condition of permanent civic nonrecognition faces three broad theoretical challenges. First, the ontological turn raises the question of the relationship between antiblackness and blackness, or between an ascriptive condition and the affirmative heterogeneity of black life (Moten, 2009; Shelby, 2009). Second, accounts of the psychopathological roots of antiblackness have been challenged by scholarship on the changing articulation of black subordination within capitalist social relations (Hall, 1996) from the political economy of black chattel slavery (Oakes, 2016) to the racialization of wagelessness and contemporary surplus populations (Johnson, 2011). This scholarship has often attempted to register the impact of deepening internal economic divisions within black populations on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century black political movements (Reed, 1999; Dawson, 2001; Johnson, 2007; Dawson and Francis, 2015). Finally, treating blackness as an ontological category raises the question of racial unity, and the subsumption of other cross-cutting axes of social differentiation, that has been a persistent object of critique for contemporary black feminist critiques of black nationalism (Collins, 1998; Lubiano, 1998) and theories of intersectionality (Hancock, 2016).
The Afropessimist critique of coalition is premised upon what could be called a politics of structural nonrecognition modeled in the work of Martinican political philosopher Frantz Fanon, who in describing an encounter with a white child offers perhaps one of the most famous scenes of racial misrecognition in contemporary theory (Fanon, 2008b, 89–119). Contrary to Taylor’s pastoral view (Charles Taylor, 1994: 65) of the possibility for mutual recognition in Fanon’s reading of Hegel, Fanon asserts of the impossibility of mutual recognition under conditions of racial domination. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon seeks to clarify that in the master/slave dialectic for Hegel ‘there is reciprocity’ (Fanon, 2008b: 195), but in the context of racial slavery the master does not seek recognition from the slave but rather labor:
The master scorns the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. Likewise, the slave here can in no way be equated with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds the source of his liberation in his work. The black slave wants to like his master. Therefore, he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. For Hegel, the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object. (195)
For Fanon, the slave is imprisoned in a kind of existential inferiority complex and is either resigned to domination or wishes to take the place of the master. Race skews the intersubjective dynamics of the Hegelian encounter between master and slave in a manner that is not simply reducible to a psychological account of misrecognition. Entombed in a predialectical ‘zone of nonbeing’ (Fanon, 2008b: xii) or ‘crushing objecthood’ (Fanon, 2008a: 82), blackness for Fanon is simultaneously a form of invisibility and hypervisibility that forecloses the possibility of mutual recognition or dialectical sublation (Gordon, 2007; Ciccariello-Maher, 2017).
Fanon’s ‘deformed dialectic’ (Sekyi-Otu, 1997: 61) disdains forms of freedom simply granted by the master rather than obtained through struggle and conflict. This process of producing self-consciousness in struggle interrupts the politics of recognition in which the black subject wants to be recognized not as black but rather as white. Fanon historicizes this desire for recognition as itself preemptively structured by racial interpellation. Through his analysis, Fanon implicates the role of colonial education in particular as producing black subjects who desire recognition as whites (Fanon, 2008b: 191–6). ‘Whereas Fanon’s work is often pigeonholed within recognition studies’, George Ciccariello-Maher observes, ‘his emphasis on the zone of nonbeing shows him instead to have been a pioneering contributor to a powerfully different approach that might be better understood as “nonrecognition studies”’ (Ciccariello-Maher, 2017: 57).
As a core feature of what we might call a racial politics of nonrecognition, Fanon invokes the principle of ‘sociogeny’ (2008b: xv) in order to situate the subjective features of misrecognition within a matrix of social relations structured by colonial violence. Sociogeny, for Fanon, is a principle of material determination that alerts readers to the fact that the psychology of racial objectification he describes cannot be overcome without a transformation of the colonial and capitalist social conditions that ceaselessly reproduce ‘L’expérience vécue du Noir’ (Fanon, 2008a). It is here that Fanon links the disalienation of the black subject’s internalized images of inferiority to political struggles that might radically transform the social structures that serially reproduce the lived experience of race. The absence of reciprocity that defines the racial encounter thus drives the black subject away from the dialectical possibility of mutual recognition. Instead, the black subject is impelled toward a situation in which a racially disalienated self-certainty merges with political self-assertion. For Fanon, the possibility of individual self-determination will become increasingly inseparable from the dynamics of anticolonial movements of national self-determination in which racial, ethnic, and tribal conflict can sometimes play a counterrevolutionary role. ‘Indeed, if the social struggle does not become a national endeavor’, Nigel Gibson observes of Fanon’s later arguments in the 1961 Les Damnés de la Terre, ‘it will inevitably degenerate along the retrograde, geographic, ethnic, and racial lines refashioned or simply created under colonial rule’ (Gibson, 2003: 178).
Fanon’s later work offers an ambivalent reading of the role of culture in anticolonial movements. He warns of the colonized intellectual’s fetishistic retreat into the ‘mummified fragments’ (Fanon, 2005: 160) of static traditions, particularly where those fragments are separated from the continual transformation of cultural tradition through active political struggles. Instead of a nostalgic politics of culture – exemplified, for Fanon, in the specific version of Negritude imagined by the poet and politician Leopold Senghor, who would support the French Union against the Algerian independence movement – Fanon imagines a culture of politics. Crucially, a Fanonian culture of politics is centered on and continually remade by anticolonial movements in the present. ‘The liberation struggle does not restore to national culture its former values and configurations. This struggle, which aims at a fundamental redistribution of relations between men, cannot leave intact either the form or substance of the people’s culture’ (Fanon, 2005: 178). Here Fanon suggests that dynamics of political contention transform both the racial form and content of culture beyond imposed colonial divisions and visions of returning to precolonial traditions. In the course of decolonization, the very centrality of culture as a terrain of political contestation is relativized:
Sooner or later, the colonized intellectual realizes that the existence of a nation is not proved by culture, but in the people’s struggle against the forces of occupation. No colonialism draws its justification from the fact that the territories it occupies are culturally nonexistent. Colonialism will never be put to shame by exhibiting unknown cultural treasures under its nose. (Fanon, 2005: 159)
In spite of a recurring opposition between blackness and indigeneity in Afropessimist readings of Fanon (Sexton, 2014), some of the sharpest contemporary criticism of what Glen Coulthard has called a ‘colonial politics of recognition’ (2014: 156) have been formulated by contemporary indigenous studies scholarship that has itself drawn on Fanon’s anticolonial analysis. Coulthard (2014), Audra Simpson (2014), Joanne Barker (2011), and Patrick Wolfe (2016) all argue against the widespread assumption that dynamics of settler colonial dispossession in places such as the United States, Canada, and Australia can be safely consigned to the past.
From a Marxian perspective, political theorist Robert Nichols has emphasized how theories of primitive accumulation need to be revised in the case of indigenous territorial dispossession because settler colonialism does not inevitably lead to the proletarianization of displaced native populations (Nichols, 2015). Within settler colonial contexts, Patrick Wolfe and others have argued that the dynamics of indigenous dispossession are not structured around the need to create a dispossessed class of wage laborers but instead a genocidal ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006: 388):
[A] logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. (388)
Coulthard similarly points out that the axis of political contestation for indigenous populations is not centered on wage labor. It is instead situated on struggles over land, natural resources, and the ecological requirements of capitalist development.
Moreover, as Wolfe has argued, settler colonial ‘invasion is a structure not an event’ (Wolfe, 2006: 388) that signals the persistence and historical evolution of forms of extraeconomic coercion that come to define Marxist accounts of primitive accumulation. For this new generation of theorists of settler-colonialism, contemporary settler states have come to replace direct strategies of territorial expropriation, displacement, and forced assimilation with what could be described as governance through juridical recognition. Similarly, political ideals of cultural autonomy, self-determination, and territorial sovereignty are for these critics better realized through a range of alternative political strategies of refusal (Simpson, 2014), political confrontation, and practices of ‘cultural self-recognition’ (Coulthard, 2014: 23) beyond the reach of settler state regulation, though not necessarily beyond the reach of capital (Eisenberg and Kymlicka, 2011).
Recent books by Barker and Simpson focus on the impossibility of reciprocity that structures Native/settler relations of recognition. The impossibility of mutual recognition is acutely revealed in the construction of Native ancestry rules governing ‘blood-quantum’ as institutionalized criteria for tribal membership. Such rules make blood govern resource and land claims, and encase contested and changing Native lifeworlds in oppressive ‘racialized notions of biological-as-cultural authenticity’ (Barker, 2011: 20). For Barker, a politics of recognition within the United States imposes a normative, depoliticized vision of Native cultural identity, one both evacuated of political contestation and frozen in time. ‘[T]he discursive work of Native legal status and rights in US politics has made Native rights contingent on a particular kind of Native’, Barker observes, ‘a Native in or of an authentic culture and identity’ (Barker, 2011: 223).
Explaining why ‘“Recognition” in either a cognitive or juridical sense is impossible’ (Simpson, 2014: 23), Simpson instead elaborates a strategy of refusing state recognition of Native sovereignty and group culture. Instead, Simpson conceives of structurally antagonistic relations between sovereign indigenous nations and settler states. For Simpson this interruptive strategy of refusal, illuminated by her study of the practices of the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, is predicated upon the understanding of the ‘deep impossibility of representation and consent within governance systems that are predicated upon dispossession and disavowal of the political histories that govern the populations now found within state regimes’ (2014: 18).
Finally, for Coulthard, any possibility of indigenous self-determination emerges through ongoing struggles against settler colonialism rather than negotiated representation in state institutions. In Coulthard’s account, current Canadian recognition protocols are the outcome of the anticolonial struggles of the 1970s. Those protocols, however, merely enabled the state to change from an entity that reproduced itself primarily through the apparatus of ‘genocidal exclusion/assimilation’ to one of ‘recognition and accommodation’ (Coulthard, 2014: 6). In Coulthard’s analysis – as well as those of Nichols, Wolfe, Barker, and Simpson – the settler colonial state in critical indigeneity studies cannot function as the facilitator of multiculturalism imagined by Charles Taylor. Instead, the contemporary recognition paradigm, and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic which it utilizes, breaks down in the face of colonial domination in which ‘there is no mutual dependency in terms of a need or desire for recognition’ (Coulthard, 2014: 40):
In these contexts, the ‘master’ – that is, the colonial state and state society – does not require recognition from the previously self-determining communities upon which its territorial, economic, and social infrastructure is constituted. What it needs is land, labor, and resources. Thus, rather than leading to a condition of reciprocity, the dialectic breaks down either with the explicit non-recognition of the equal status of the colonized population; or with the strategic ‘domestication’ of the terms of recognition leaving the foundation of the colonial relationship relatively undisturbed. (Coulthard, 2014: 40)
While variously critiqued by theorists of settler-colonialism, Afropessimism, and multiculturalism, the turn to understanding racial injustice in primarily cultural terms nonetheless introduced a sharp division between race and political economy. Seemingly intractable since the 1960s, that division continues to structure debates over the opposition between ‘identity’ and class politics. Nancy Fraser herself has articulated a powerful challenge to the recognition paradigm’s inability to account for the relation between cultural misrecognition and economic inequality (Fraser, 2000, 2003). For Fraser, any normative theory of justice must attend not only to distorted relations of recognition, but also to the redistribution of material resources and opportunities.
Rather than arguing for either recognition or redistribution, Fraser instead advocates for what she calls a ‘perspectival dualism’ (2009: 84). Such a view equally attends to each dimension of social inequality while acknowledging the inseparability of axes of cultural, status, and class differentiation. For Fraser, the twin poles of recognition and redistribution are irreducible to one another. Instead, together they map a spectrum of social movement demands centered on economic inequality and exploitation, on the one hand, and what she calls ‘parity of participation’ on the other (Fraser, 2000: 115).
Fraser’s elaboration of a more expansive recognition/redistribution paradigm immediately highlights a contradiction for antiracist movements. The institutional affirmation of group difference, on this view, seem to be at odds with redistributive measures precisely aimed to reduce or eliminate group-differentiated inequality. Because there is no intrinsic or necessary relation between the former and the latter, as Fraser has noted, recognitive politics can come to supplant or be pitted against redistributive demands, and vice-versa. Further, antiracist redistributive demands aimed at eliminating racialized economic inequality confront two interrelated challenges. First, such demands may leave underlying ‘generative frameworks’ (Fraser, 1995: 82) intact that will simply reestablish that inequality over time. Second, demands for the elimination of racial inequality are theoretically compatible with generalized and even worsening economic inequality. As a result, some critics have argued that antiracist political demands are fundamentally constrained by a discourse of disparity and strict equality of opportunity that presupposes and naturalizes capitalist exploitation (Reed and Chowkwanyun, 2012).
That contradiction opens onto vexed questions concerning the relationships between culture, the economy, class, and social identity. In a recent exchange with political theorist Michael Dawson, Fraser has offered a materialist reformulation of the culture/class problematic at the heart of the recognition paradigm and to account for how racial differentiation is inscribed in capitalist production and social reproduction. Both thinkers have attempted to address the conceptual blindspot produced by associating racial domination with cultural misrecognition rather than for example the structural relationship between economic exploitation and state-sanctioned violence. For Dawson, that focus has displaced much needed attention to mechanisms of ‘racial expropriation’ (2016: 145) grounded in ‘the crucial role played in capital accumulation by unfree, dependent, and unwaged labor’. Reclaiming the concept of race not as a description of biology or group culture but of the entanglement of capitalist exploitation and racialized expropriation highlight the urgent need for contemporary scholars to more precisely delineate how US racial divisions have come to be embedded within a history of global capitalism (Ngai, 2004; Roediger and Esch, 2014; Beckert and Rockman, 2016; Oakes, 2016). For Dawson and Fraser, antiracist politics is thus keyed not only to a discourse of disparity but to sometimes anti-systemic ‘boundary struggles against expropriation’ (Dawson, 2016: 148) as a permanent feature of capitalist accumulation:
Expropriation in this sense covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression. The link is clear in practices widely associated with capitalism’s early history but still ongoing, such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child labor, child abduction, and rape. But expropriation also assumes more ‘modern’ forms – such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression – and, as we shall see, with contemporary imperialism. Finally, expropriation plays a role in the construction of distinctive, explicitly racialized forms of exploitation – as, for example, when a prior history of enslavement casts its shadow on the wage contract, segmenting labor markets and levying a confiscatory premium on exploited proletarians who carry the mark of ‘race’ long after their ‘emancipation’. In that last case, expropriation combines with exploitation, whereas in the others, it appears to stand alone. But in all these cases, it correlates with racial oppression – and for reasons that are nonaccidental. (Fraser, 2016: 167)
As this passage makes clear, what Fraser calls the non-accidental correlation between expropriation and racial oppression raises the question of the logical or historical necessity of this relationship, and how to periodize shifting racial regimes within capitalist history. Nevertheless, this emergent materialist account of race usefully broadens our understanding of racialization processes beyond wage and wealth differentials to include global histories of racialized unfree labor, disposability, and state violence organized by expulsion from or denial of entry into formal labor markets.
Imagining an antiracist politics beyond recognition and a politics of representation has led many scholars to offer sometimes radically divergent alternatives to conceiving of racial justice – from Afropessimist theorists’ characterization of antiblack racism as permanent ontological misrecognition (Wilderson, 2010), to Indigenous Studies scholars reimagining of Native sovereignty as a refusal of the terms of cultural authenticity established by settler states (Barker, 2011; Simpson, 2014). In each case, demands to recognize and affirm devalued racial identities risk simultaneously naturalizing and reinforcing state authority, existing institutional hierarchies of power, and constitutively unequal capitalist social relations.
What could be called an affirmation/abolition bind emerges within the history of contemporary antiracist movements contesting or acquiescing to the terms of political subjectivation imposed through relations of recognition and misrecognition. Response to challenges to the recognition paradigm has led one of its initial theorists, Nancy Fraser, to begin to account for how political economy is itself racially organized through what Michael Dawson has called ‘racial expropriation’ (Dawson, 2016: 145). Fraser joins a number of other Marxist theorists inside and outside of the black radical tradition interested in elaborating the historical relationship between racial domination and the political economy of colonialism, settler colonialism, slavery, and immigration.
The very category of culture has entered into a crisis that has continued to have profound consequences for how racial injustice is understood and addressed. Definitional debates over imposed and asserted identities, and the ascriptive and affirmative character of race and ethnicity, suggest two distinct varieties of antiracist politics organized around the affirmation of racial difference and the end of racial domination. These two historically interconnected visions of racial liberation can also work at cross-purposes and highlight what could be called an affirmation/abolition bind – a rift registered across much recent criticism of cultural pluralist ideals that structure the recognition paradigm. Despite sometimes contending political priorities, both Indigenous Studies (Coulthard, 2013) and Afropessimist theorists (Wilderson, 2010: 337–41) have each attempted to move beyond the politics of both recognition and redistribution by calling what Fanon, after Aimé Cesaire, called ‘The only thing in the world worth starting: the end of the world’ (2008b: 76). As Glen Coulthard has recently argued, ‘For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it’ (Coulthard, 2013). While Afropessimist and Indigenous Studies scholars imagine this end in radically different terms, it is revealing that these scholars shift the terrain of antiracist struggle from the civic affirmation of racial identity to an eschatological vision of the end of a social order fundamentally premised upon configuring racialized populations as disposable.
Recent calls to recognize racial privilege, positionality, or epistemic exteriority reveal the recognition paradigm’s continuing descriptive and diagnostic power. The politics of recognition can for example help to theorize the political fungibility of recent demands to recognize that ‘Black Lives Matter’ emerging from a 2013 US social movement. In particular, the recognition paradigm alerts us to how the demand has been articulated to a range of heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory movement strategies: from increasing racial representation within police departments to a long term vision of the abolition of the carceral state as a mechanism of racial domination (Gilmore, 2007; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, 2016). At the same time, critiques of the recognition paradigm as a form of state-sanctioned ‘official antiracism’ (Melamed, 2006: 2) illuminate the enormous pressures faced by this movement to appoint elite political representatives and scale back anti-systemic demands to inclusion within the same institutions and economic order that some activists wish to dismantle. The recognition paradigm remains a powerful conceptual tool for mapping heterogeneous strategic orientations within antiracist political movements, along with new techniques of state and institutional governance that have evolved in response to past movement challenges.
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