TONI MORRISON
‘Home’, 1997
... the grammatical form of the human is not that of the subject, whether nominal or pronominal, but that of the verb.
TIM INGOLD
The Life of Lines, 2015
RACE MATTERS. IT MATTERS because of the meanings we give to it. How and why race has come to matter, and how and why we continue to make race matter, has to do with ways in which history, power and politics shape the frames within which meaning is made, contested and renegotiated.
The foundation of the enduring effects of race lies in the racialisation of what it means to be human. The human is not ontologically given in a way that is independent of the mind. We create our human-ness as we open ourselves up in the interactive presence of other sentient and non-sentient beings. We forge our human-ness in the midst of changing social forces and power relations (historical, cultural, political, psycho-social, scientific and economic) and over the duration of our lives. These constellations of social forces produce particular interpretive frames and practices with which we make meaning of the human. If becoming human is something we do with other humans and with other sentient and non-sentient beings, then, in the words of Tim Ingold, ‘to human is a verb’. Where there are humans, ‘what goes on is humaning’ (Ingold 2015: 115-20).
Humaning is a different activity from humanising. To human is a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others. To humanise is to impose upon the world a preconceived meaning of the human (Ingold 2015: 115-20). There is no one way of humaning. There is no perfect way of going about it. Humaning is a social and cultural practice which we constantly hone. Humaning as praxis is historically and contextually specific.
Pre-modern European ways of seeing continue to shape conceptions of human difference in the West and in worlds formerly colonised by Europe. The manner in which these ways of seeing linked cultural practices to genealogy can be understood as antecedents to conceptions of race – or protoracial conceptions – that were recrafted over time. The use of skin colour and ancestry to make social distinctions among humans circulated prior to the onset of modernity. However, the violence of the first colonial conquest of the Americas in 1492 ushered in a long history of turning these pre-modern ways of making social distinctions into technologies of disciplinary power that permeate European constructions of the Other and Eurocentric ways of knowing. The modern idea of race – a composite of skin colour, ancestry, culture and geography – is key to these technologies of power. From the nineteenth century racialised hierarchies of the human were naturalised by Western science and reinscribed into the juridical, economic, administrative, knowledge and symbolic realms of societies structured in terms of colonial dominance (S. Hall 1980). In the Western imagination, European Man came to personify the human. European modes of humanising – by way of its civilising mission – came to dominate the world. Thus, the relationship between processes of racialisation and the emergence of dominant conceptions of what it means to be human is constitutive. As from the nineteenth century race is the code through which one knows what it means to be human, and through which one experiences the effects of this meaning (see David Scott’s interview with Sylvia Wynter, Scott 2000: 183).
This book is less about racism as a structure of power and more about specific processes of racialisation, namely, processes of making meaning that are framed by the history and the politics from which this structure of power emerges. In this book I challenge three normative ways of knowing integral to practices of racialisation: the look, the category and the gene. I grapple with ways one might think about the inside of racialised social life as a space from which new arts of coming to know and new arts of making meaning can emerge. All of us live in amongst racialised structures of social meaning. We cannot be outside, above, or beyond the past and the present. Nor can we be outside, above, or beyond race. Because we are embedded in a racialised world, its ways of seeing and its injustices can be apparent to us, and we can be inspired to change it.
I take up a challenge offered by the writer Toni Morrison. For her, the racial house we live in does not have to be ‘a windowless prison’. Nor should we wait for the perfect liberation theory to do the work of ‘un-mattering race’ (Morrison 1997: 3-4). In the ongoing process of our liberation we must create openings in the racial house. We must refuse to live by its rules of dominance and its significations. We must refuse to ‘bleed the raced house for the gains it provides in authenticity and insiderdom’ (1997: 11). This demands that we figure out ways to make definitive statements about why race matters ‘while depriving it of its lethal cling’. My book is born of this struggle for ‘race-specificity without race prerogative’ (1997: 5).
I hold four productive tensions in this book: first, a tension between the assumed visibility of race, and ways of coming to know and engaging with meanings of race that challenge this assumption; second, a tension between the rigidity of race categories and the possibilities open for new ways of seeing Self and Other; third, a tension between the use of genetic ancestry tests to confirm racialised identities, and ongoing processes of making anew the Self and the social; and fourth, a tension between narratives understood as ‘merely stories’, and the narrative form as a mode of coming to know and an analytical and conceptual tool that is integral to understanding processes of racialisation (Kreiswirth 2000). These tensions demand a double politics: to acknowledge the ways in which race continues to matter, while working towards its undoing. I use the protocols of academic writing and bend these to my purpose: to produce a located understanding (and an equally located disruption) of normative ways of knowing race, and to reveal the ways in which race is both constructed and ‘real’, in the sense that it means something to social subjects, and that this meaning is valid not because it is the only or final meaning, but because it is a way of making sense of the world. In the words of Toni Morrison, this means ‘to be both free and situated’ (1997: 5).
Each tension permits a way of coming to know otherwise – an epistemic shift or movement. Adversarial manoeuvres open the cracks in taken-for-granted ideas about race, reveal and attempt to address its unjust effects, and disrupt repeated reliance on the prism of race. Creolisation transforms identifications congealed in contexts of dominance and loosens up new possibilities of seeing Self and Other. Sociogenesis reveals that race is neither on nor in the body, but lives in the words and meanings that surround it. My writing strategy in this book is best described as writer-telling: the use of narrative to illuminate the practice and effects of making racial meaning and to invite the epistemic work required to live with racialised difference otherwisely, that is, to think in ways that take into account the wisdom of Others in the search for ways of making meaning that do not revert to race by default.
The first three arts of coming to know otherwise shatter the long-established and reiterated connection between race and the human in Western notions of human difference. My conception of the human is located in words and meanings that emerge from tangled, circuitous relations, not through sequential lines of ancestral, cultural, genetic or bureaucratic transmission. These words and meanings are born of beginnings, not of origins that bestow properties and dispositions on human beings in advance of living. These words and meanings turn towards the future while accounting for the past. Writer-telling, the fourth art of coming to know otherwise, elucidates my academic argument with narrative and reconfigures conventional ways (that rely on hierarchical and compartmentalised conceptions of knowledge) of producing, disseminating and recognising the meaning and significance of knowledge in the human sciences. The division between fact and fiction is the most rudimentary form of such conceptions. I introduce aimance – political love – as a fifth art of coming to know that enables what it means to be human, to unfold in the presence of others.
There are four reasons why this book is perhaps best seen as a contribution to the human, more than the social sciences, a distinction made by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, the editors of the journal History of the Human Sciences (see Kreiswirth 2000). It is informed by a critical and historical approach. It attempts to move beyond critique towards making new knowledge. It defies disciplinary boundaries. And, it attends to (at least some) philosophical, literary,