Beyond ‘race’?: a rejoinder

Comparative Migration Studies

Commentary

Sawitri Saharso¹  Tabea Scharrer² 

[1] Department of Sociology, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands;Institute of Anthropology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany;MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany;

关键词: Race;    Mixed race;    Identity politics;    Gender;    Transracialism;    Critical post-racialism;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s40878-023-00330-7

 received in 2023-02-24, accepted in 2023-03-13,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

In this rejoinder we argue, based on the papers of this commentary series, that ‘race’ is such a tricky notion because it can be used in (at least) two very different and contradictory ways—as a concept to disentangle racism and racialisation (what M’charek calls the ‘work race actually does’) and as a way of categorization and social classification, in which case it might create the very essentialised hierarchies ‘race’ as a critical concept tries to disentangle. We wonder if it is indeed possible to use ‘race’ as a concept without evoking ‘race’ as a social classification. At first, we give a short summary of the four discussion papers and then delve into two aspects the papers share, namely the need for spatial and temporal contextualization and comparison, as well as their choice not to take up our invitation to compare race as a category with gender. In a second step we will discuss two points arising from the papers, (1) ‘race’ as category, not as lens, often resulting in essentialism and (2) ‘race’ as potentially obscuring racism and racialisation. We conclude by proposing to give more space to complexity.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2023