Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection by Nadine Ehlers

Abstract

136 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection By Nadine Ehlers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, 200 pages, $70.00 Cloth. Reviewed by Christine Kelly, Fordham University According to Nadine Ehlers, although “acts might produce the effect of an essence,” in reality “there is no ‘essence,’ only fabrication” (89). This statement reaches into the heart of Ehlers’ claims regarding racialized subjectivity in Racial Imperatives. Ehlers, a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong in Australia, explores how power, in the form of legal discourse and cultural norms, renders individuals into racialized subjects in a process she terms “subjection” (3). She engages in a critical dialogue with Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to apply their insights on the making of sexualized subjects to the realm of race, work that scholars have previously pursued only partially and provisionally. Ehlers provides a systematic analysis of racial subjection through Foucault’s concept of discipline and Butler’s notions of performativity to explain the production of race at the level of the individual – individual will, action, and identity. For Ehlers, like many of the most influential scholars contributing to critical race theory in the last thirty years, race does not refer to “ontology ,” “fixity,” “internality,” or an “essence” – in other words, race does not constitute a transcendental truth about a particular state of being (8, 23, 77, 116). Rather, it is a fiction deployed by culture in the service of power to historically privilege whiteness over blackness. Ultimately, race is a doing, not a being, an act of compliance with cultural systems of domination (90). Ehlers demonstrates her claims using a legal case study, examining the battle that took place in a 1925 New York courtroom in Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander in which Leonard Rhinelander sought an annulment from marriage to his wife, Alice, on grounds that she “passed” as white while she was in fact “colored” (2). Ehlers argues that historically and today, it is not only Alice and exceptions like her who “pass” as a particular racial type. Since race-making involves action, racial passing is a collective, even universal activity – “all subjects are passing – for a racial identity which they are said to be” (7). Quoting from Butler, Ehlers maintains that “norms are Book Reviews 137 haunted by their own inefficacy,” requiring a system of diffuse, omnipresent justifications to anchor them in the real (6). But since race ultimately occupies spheres of discourse, representation, and regulation – since it is not real, but imagined – it is possible to conceive of alternatives to the coercions which have long accompanied racial meaning-making. Primarily a work of criticism and philosophy, the author organized her monograph around questions of how subjection occurs through discipline and performativity with a brief examination of the Rhinelander case to historically ground her claims. Divided into seven chapters, in chapters one through three Ehlers explains how racial discipline and performativity, through legal knowledge, create racialized subjects. The author suggests that discipline involves the response of the individual self to “panopticism ,” or the ubiquitous presence of power in the form of surveillance and behavioral regulations embedded within cultural norms (8, 56). Discipline enforces racial divisions despite their inherent arbitrariness through “recitation ,” or repeated meanings and actions ascribed to race in order to naturalize it (31). Discipline also functions through the law. Ehlers suggests that scholars typically study the law in relation to Foucauldian biopolitics, or technologies of power wielded on the population en masse instead of the individual. Discipline refers to the individual, however, and as an individual -based enterprise, the law produces racial discourse that transforms individual identities into racialized subjects (36-37). Performativity involves acting out supposed “racial truths” based on normative constraints surrounding the activities and expressions of specific racial types (54). In chapters four through six, Ehlers examines the Rhinelander case. According to Ehlers, the outcome of the case proved unfavorable for Leonard Rhinelander because the defense developed an argument that maintained, rather than disrupted, the day’s prevailing conceptual apparatus on race: Alice’s defense asserted that the issue was not whether she passed as white, but whether she was able to pass as white (77-78). The court ruled that Alice...