Citizenship and Its Others by Bridget Anderson & Vanessa Hughes

Author:Bridget Anderson & Vanessa Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137435095
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Neo-racisms and the postcolonial new world order

The ascendency of the new post-WWII system of nation-states has been accompanied by a shift in racist discursive practices. As the ‘neat, symmetrical units’ of the nation-state have become co-terminus with ‘society’ (Gilroy, 1993), the idea that the institutional form of the nation-state perfectly reflects the truth of the existence of fixed, stable and, most importantly, incommensurable ‘cultures’ or ‘ethnicities’ and ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ identities has gained ascendency. The deep racism of such a structure is represented as just the ‘natural’ order determined by geography. The postcolonial new world order, thus, is very much dependent on the nationalization of people and place and the linking of the two into a new spatiality of power.

In the postcolonial new world order, especially as its neo-liberal turn came to dominate in the 1980s, what has been called a ‘differentialist racism’ (Taguieff, 1990) or simply ‘neo-racism’ (Balibar, 1991: 52) has taken hold. As compared to the ‘old racisms’ with their ideas of innate biological difference (and vertical hierarchy), neo-racisms rest on ideas of innate cultural differences (and horizontal hierarchies). While Robert Miles (1993) points out that the culturalist emphasis of much of today’s racisms may not, in fact, be so novel; today, racist practices are ‘largely based on the argument that it is futile, even dangerous, to allow cultures to mix or insist that they do so’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 192).

Neo-racisms were a response to the delegitimization of the ‘old’ racisms. As reports circulated of the WWII-era extermination of millions of Jewish and Romani people in Europe because of their categorization of ‘inferior races’ by fascists, racist arguments based on biological superiority/inferiority became much easier to challenge. The mainstreaming of this rejection was perhaps most notable in the 1950 UNESCO report confirming that there was no scientific basis for the claim that the idea of ‘race’ marked the boundaries between different ‘types’ of humans. Recognizing the social construction of ideas of ‘race’ was (and remains) an important victory for anti-racism. However, because the material basis for the usefulness of racist ideologies that separated people from one another remained, a discursive shift took place. The exclusions and forms of discrimination embedded in ideas of ‘race-as biology’ shifted to ideas of ‘race-as-culture’ or, more succinctly, as ‘ethnicity’.

The basis of neo-racism is what Mahmood Mamdani (2004) calls ‘culture talk’ which, with no trace of irony, asserts that each purportedly separate and distinct ‘culture’ has a tangible essence that defines it. The base assumption of neo-racism is that racialized (or ‘ethnic’) boundaries are ‘natural borders’ (Mamdani, 1998). The process of ethnicization asserts that each ‘nation’ is said to feel a strong need to maintain and protect its seemingly distinct and discrete identity. In this mixture of ‘race’ and ‘place’ each ethnicized group lays claim to ‘its own’ territorial space. In this sense, all ‘nations’ aim to be ‘ethnic groups’. Those people with another ‘culture’ – non-members of the ‘nation’ – are re-presented as a grave threat to the existence and viability of ‘national culture’.

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