Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:48:41.343Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Against “Transracialism”: Revisiting the Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2019, Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange encounters: Embodied others in post‐coloniality. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda M. 1995. Mestizo identity. In American mixed race: The culture of microdiversity, ed. Zack, N. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda M. 2000. Habits of hostility: On seeing race. Philosophy Today 44 (Supp.): 3040.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alcoff, Linda M. 2006. Visible identities: Race, gender and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alcoff, Linda M. 2015. The future of whiteness. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Botts, Tina. 2018a. In black and white: A hermeneutic argument against transracialism. Res Philosophica 95 (2): 303–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Botts, Tina. 2018b. Race and method: The Tuvel affair. Philosophy Today 62 (1): 5172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chow, Rey. 2002. The protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
El‐Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European others: Queering ethnicity in postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After empire: Melancholia or convivial culture? London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Lewis R. 2018. Thinking through rejections and defenses of transracialism. Philosophy Today 62 (1): 1119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunnarsson, Lena. 2017. Why we keep separating the “inseparable”: Dialecticizing intersectionality. European Journal of Women's Studies 24 (2): 114–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haritaworn, Jin. 2012. The biopolitics of mixing: Thai multiracialities and haunted ascendancies. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing.Google Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2012a. You mixed?: Racial identity without racial biology. In Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2012b. Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? In Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2012c. Future genders? Future races? In Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2012d. Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hom, Rebecca. 2018. (Dis)engaging with race theory: Feminist philosophy's debate on “transracialism” as a case study. Philosophy Today 62 (1): 3150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lugones, María. 2010. Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia 25 (4): 742–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mikkola, Mari. 2017. On the apparent antagonism between feminist and mainstream metaphysics. Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2435–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2000. Feeling brown: Ethnicity and affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs). Theatre Journal 52 (1): 6779.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sealey, Kris. 2018. Transracialism and white allyship: A response to Rebecca Tuvel. Philosophy Today 62 (1): 2129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shohat, Ella, and Stam, Robert. 2012. Race in translation. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Teng, Emma Jinhua. 2013. Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuvel, Rebecca. 2017. In defense of transracialism. Hypatia 32 (2): 263–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ware, Vron. 2015. Beyond the pale: White women, racism and history. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar