Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also have played out in relation to pre-existing social relations of inequality, poverty, and global exclusion. We are also interested in the ambiguities and challenges of racial meanings as they operate within multiple orders and different scales, especially in relation to contemporary intellectual silences.