Then and Now: Reading the Texts of Race

Abstract

Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2003. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. $55.00 hc. $24.95 sc. 397 pp. Kosek, Jake, Donald S. Moore, and Anand Pandian, eds. 2002. Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference. Durham: Duke University Press. $84.95 hc. $24.95 sc.475 pp. Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $75.00 hc. $27.50 sc. 552 pp. Though W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 declaration that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line" proved to be prophetically correct, more than prophecy informed this unequivocal statement (1996, 3). Du Bois substantiated his prescient vision of the twentieth century with an [End Page 217] archive of historical investigation and personal reflection that became a theoretical apparatus capable of exposing the reciprocal constructions of race and racisms. Though the publication of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) inaugurated new possibilities for critical questioning, race was still a nineteenth-century certainty, and Du Bois's knowledge of how fundamental race had become to mapping and organizing the world informs this declaration. For his reconfiguration of race as a spatial concept, for his attention to literature's role in the construction and deconstruction of race, for his commitment to the national, international, and global manifestations of racism, and for his suggestion that race should perhaps be defined as "a group of contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies," Du Bois's work is the intellectual predecessor of the texts I review here (1986, 651). Then as now, there is no border race has not crossed, no conceptual or lived space unmarked by its divisions. Together these studies reveal the wide range of approaches contemporary scholarship now harnesses to analyze the discursive monumentality and infinite reproducibility of race. Since it often defines what is natural and irrefutable, science haunts the study of race. Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference charts the growing contributions of science studies to anti-racist projects. In his well-known essay "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" (1985) Anthony Appiah delineates Du Bois's struggle with race as a biological entity. While Du Bois argued against scientific notions of race, he continued to rely on it as a site of geographical, cultural, and even physical belonging. What exactly constitutes race is left incomplete, and Appiah argues that Du Bois was "unable to escape" biological definitions (2002, 36). The "Uncompleted Argument" appeared in "Race," Writing, and Difference (1985), a well-known and often cited collection that highlighted the productive intersections between literary theory and critical race studies. While the collection Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference emerges from research in geography, anthropology, and sociology, not philosophical or literary studies, it does engage with the earlier volume's conversations. By analyzing the roles race plays in the construction of nature and the work nature performs in the reproduction of racial differences, the volume argues that "nature" bonds race to old and stubborn assumptions and therefore allows race to unpredictably proliferate into the future. "Working together," the editors argue, "race and nature legitimate particular forms of political representation" (3). In order to expose the political consequences of the race/nature bind, Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference maps a broad and shifting terrain of theory, history, and materiality. Posing the question—How do race and nature "claim authority as foundational truths"?—the editors remark upon both the breadth and specificity of their effects: "[T]hese very ideas traverse vast scales—indeed [End Page 218] participate in the production of those scales—moving fluidly across radically different historical and geographic contexts: from blood to soil, from courtrooms to laboratories, from national parks to toxic neighborhoods" (4). Because of the swift fluidity of race and nature's discursive movements, interdisciplinarity has contributed significantly to analyzing the multiplicity of their...