The last word on Racism: New directions for a critical race theory

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 403-423

  Holland, Sharon P ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749411298     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-3-403     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Toni Morrison, "Home," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 6. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically by page number in the text
2. Derrida was not the last scholar to have at the end of racism. A full decade later, Dinesh D'Souza would publish The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995)
3. Jacques Derrida, "Racism's Last Word," trans. Peggy Kamuf, in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 331
4. In his essay "On 'Captive' 'Bodies,' Hidden 'Flesh,' and Colonization" (in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. Lewis R. Gordon [New York: Routledge, 1997])
5. G. M. James Gonzalez observes that "tongue (language, voice, rhetoric) and thought (ideology) have been among the deadliest instruments of colonialism-Tongue and thought are, therefore, infectious and untrustworthy within the colonizer and the colonized; for the colonized has also been infected" (127)
6. Derrida's essay was published with a lengthy critique by Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's 'Le dernier mot du racisme,'" to which Derrida also responded (all in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]). In essence, they remind Derrida, as one must rarely remind Morrison and Hurston, that a word's meaning is not separate from its history, and this relationship gives us a word's politics, forms the epicenter of its nervous system. For Derrida, it is precisely this logic of relation - the idea that history creates meaning rather than confounds it - that causes a word to adhere in one place and experience repudiation in another. I believe that McClintock and Nixon misunderstand Derrida's intent. Derrida doesn't necessarily repudiate racism's checkered history so much as he wants to isolate the word itself and deploy it as a floating signifier, or contaminant. What he finds is that so long as racism is perceived as someone else's problem by those who live in its midst, history cannot adequately account for it. His view is radical in that it emphasizes a lack of responsibility for racism that is epidemic in global cultures
7. Jacques Derrida, "Le toucher. Touch/to Touch Him," Paragraph: The Journal of the Modern Critical Theory Group 16.2 (1993): 136
8. This essay is indebted to the long history of ruminations on the touch in both philosophical and feminist traditions. For other explorations of "touch," see Carolyn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge, 1998)
9. and Elizabeth Grosz, "Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh," in MerleauPonty, Inferiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 145-66
10. Derrida wrote "Le toucher" as a tribute to the work of his friend and colleague Jean-Luc Nancy
11. Kimberlé Crenshaw first used the term intersectionality in 1992. Ann du Cille used intersection as a trope in her 1994 essay on black women in the academy, "The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies," Signs 19.3 (1994): 591-629
12. See Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
13. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990)
14. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992)
15. Anne C. Herrmann and Abigail J. Stewart, Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Boulder: Westview, 1994)
16. and Dana Heller, ed., Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), to mention only a few
17. Quoted in Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 99
18. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936; New York: Vintage International, 1990), 218
19. Similarly, N. Katherine Hayles explores the role of "virtual bodies" in cyberculture and asks: "What to make of this shift from the human to the posthuman, which both evokes terror and excites pleasure" (4)
20. See Lewis R. Gordon's introduction to Existence in Black
21. and Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
22. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1952), 212
23. See Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic," in Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 1985)
24. For the protracted discussion of presence/absence, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1974; first American edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)
25. Emily Harris, "Study Doubts Jefferson Fathered Hemings' Child," Morning Edition, National Public Radio, April 13, 2001
26. Rey Chow explores a parallel project on orientalism as fantasy in her English Institute piece, "The Dream of a Butterfly" (collected in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1996])
27. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (1785; New York: Penguin, 1999), 168
28. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 193
29. Alexander G. Weheliye has a brilliant reading of this reference in Hayles's work. See "'Feenin': Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music," Social Text 71, 20.2 (Summer 2002): 21-47