Culture against race: Reworking the basis for racial analysis

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 543-560

  Hartigan Jr , John ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950002173     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-3-543     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. Walter Benn Michaels, "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 655-85.
2. See Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
3. and Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
4. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 17.
5. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing against Culture," in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1991), 143-44.
6. Virginia Dominguez, "The Messy Side of 'Cultural Politics,'" South Atlantic Quarterly 91.1 (1992): 22.
7. Kamala Visweswaran, "Race and the Culture of Anthropology," American Anthropologist 100.1 (1998): 76.
8. George Marcus and Michael Fischer, eds., Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
9. and James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
10. Herbert Lewis, "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences," American Anthropologist 100.3 (1998): 716-33.
11. For additional criticisms of Visweswaran's position, see Elizabeth Stassinos, "Response to K. Visweswaran, 'Race and the Culture of Anthropology,'" American Anthropologist 100.4 (September 1998);
12. and Janet Bauer, "Genealogies of Race and Culture in Anthropology: The Marginalized Ethnographers," in Race and Racismin Theory and Practice, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 123-37..
13. For an example of this problem and a means to formulate an effective research strategy in response to it, see Gary Lee Downey and Juan Lucena, "Engineering Selves: Hiring In to a Contested Field of Education," in Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Engineering Sciences and Technologies, ed. Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997).
14. See Faye Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1991);
15. Harrison, "The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology," Critique of Anthropology 12 (1992): 239-60;
16. Harrison, "Introduction: An African Diaspora Perspective for Urban Anthropology," Urban Anthropology 17.2-3 (1988): 111-40.
17. Faye Harrison, "Expanding the Discourse on 'Race,'" American Anthropologist 100.3 (1998): 610.
18. On current forms of racist ideology being expressed through ostensibly nonracial discourses, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001).
19. For a critique of the view that "race is over," see David Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
20. Such political gestures open onto "the unstable location where white supremacists and black nationalists, Klansmen, Nazis, neo-Nazis and ethnic absolutists, Zionists and antisemites have been able to encounter each other as potential allies rather than sworn foes" (Gilroy, Against Race, 215).
21. See Robert Brightman, "Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification," Cultural Anthropology 10.4 (1995): 509-46;
22. William Sewell Jr., "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, 35-61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
23. and Cristoph Brumann, "Writing for Culture: Why a Successful Concept Should Not Be Discarded," Current Anthropology 40, supplement (1999): S1-S27.
24. Brightman, "Forget Culture," 510.
25. Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," 39.
26. See John Hartigan Jr., "Whiteness in the Field: Introduction to a Special Issue of Identities" Identities 7 (2000): 269-79;
27. Hartigan, "The Difference between Whiteness and Whites," Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 4 (2002): 59-63;
28. Hartigan, "Who Are These White People? 'White Trash,' 'Hillbillies,' and 'Rednecks' as Marked Racial Subjects," in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Ashley Doane, 95-111 (New York: Routledge, 2003).
29. See John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
30. See Pamela Perry, Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002);
31. Leland Saito, Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
32. Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in Neighborhood New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
33. Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
34. See also Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
35. Michael Moffat, "The Discourse of the Dorm," in Symbolizing America, ed. Herve Varenne (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
36. On this point, see Kyeyoung Park, "Use and Abuse of Race and Culture: Black-Korean Tensions in America," American Anthropologist 98 (1996): 492-505.
37. See Livio Sansone, Blackness without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
38. Peter Wade, Race, Nature, and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (London: Pluto, 2002);
39. Mary Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
40. Lorraine Kenney, Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle-Class, and Female (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
41. George Lipsitz, "The Progressive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White' Problem in American Studies," American Quarterly (1995): 372.
42. A number of cultural critics focus on liberalism, with its stress on individualism, as a cultural logic that undergirds racial exclusions. See David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993);
43. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
44. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
45. What I mean by a cultural perspective here can be usefully sketched in contrast to the centrality of identity in cultural studies. Stuart Hall explains, "I use 'identity' to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate,' speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be 'spoken'" (in Hall and Paul Du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity [London: Sage, 1996], 5-6). Without dismissing the importance of this perspective on subjects and discourse, culture posits social collectives broadly as objects of description and analysis.
46. John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of While People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).