Raced Repetition: Perpetual Paralysis or Paradoxical Promise?

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.1.2.0042
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Pages: 42-57
• Author: Garth Stevens
• Subject Matter: race,racial formation,racism,populism,anti-racism,critical race scholarship,South Africa,post-race paradigm,affect,embodiment,human,decoloniality

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 1.2 December 2018

Raced Repetition:

Perpetual Paralysis or Paradoxical Promise?1

Garth Stevens2

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Garth Stevens is a professor and clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychology

in the School of Human and Community Development at the University of the

Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research interests include foci on race, racism

and related social asymmetries; racism and knowledge production; critical psy-

chology, ideology, power and discourse; violence and its prevention; historical/

collective trauma and memory; applied psychoanalytic theorising of contempo-

rary social issues; and masculinity, gender and violence. He has published widely

in these areas, both nationally and internationally, including co-editorships of

A “race” against time: Psychology and challenges to deracialisation in South

Africa (UNISA Press, 2006) and Race, memory and the apartheid archive:

Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He is

the co-lead researcher on the Apartheid Archive Project, which is an international

research initiative that aims to examine the nature of the experiences of racism

of South Africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on

individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa. He is also the

co-lead researcher on the Violent States, States of Violence Project, which aims

to re-engage a theorisation of violence in the contemporary world. At present,

he holds a B-rating from the National Research Foundation, is a member of the

Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), serves as the acting dean in the

Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand and is president-

elect of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).

ABSTRACT

This article engages with key contemporary questions about the extent to which the

obstinacy of racial formation processes, as well as the apparent global resurgence

of raced thinking, represent a paralysis of the global anti-racist project or signal

an important analytic opportunity for revitalising critical race scholarship and anti-

racist praxis. To this end, it is incumbent upon critical race scholars and practitioners

to take stock of their historical, current and future contributions to addressing the

vexing nature of race and racism. The article mobilises three main illustrative argu-

ments in this regard. First, we have to deploy our analytic tools more thoughtfully

and robustly in the service of understanding the current historical period in which

rAceD repetition 43

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 1.2 December 2018

race seems to have an innite elasticity globally as such analyses have a great deal

to offer us in thinking through the contemporary relationships between race, materi-

ality, histories, politics and populism. Second, writing from South Africa, the article

focuses on the historically racialised nature of the social formation as an exemplar

of how the deployment of race and resistance to it did not simply reect an unpro-

cessed repetition compulsion of the raced binary over time but actually represented

incremental gains for a productively antagonistic and adversarial anti-racist political

project. Third, the article also surfaces alternative ways of approaching the question

of race today, by examining elements of the post-race paradigm, raced embodiment

and affectivity, and more diverse conceptions of what it means to be human as part

of the anti-racist project. The article concludes that thoughtful analyses of the his-

tories of anti-racist praxis, contemporary manifestations of race and racism, and an

openness to new approaches to addressing the histories and continued legacies of

race are paradoxically promising and hopeful in a seemingly despairing time when

race thinking seems to be on the ascension once more.

KEYWORDS

race, racial formation, racism, populism, anti-racism, critical race scholarship, South

Africa, post-race paradigm, affect, embodiment, human, decoloniality

Introduction

One of the key characterisations of the current historical period is the continued impinge-

ment on human freedoms, despite popular dissenting voices articulating the need for

alternative forms of social life that are more democratic, just and equitable. Alongside the

dysfunctionality of neo-liberal economic policies and the impervious nature of political sys-

tems that continue to breach the intended reciprocal social compact between citizens and

political leadership are heightened forms of Othering that have returned. Here, modes of

alterity have not only been accepted but also been embraced and actively mobilised in the

service of political projects (Omi & Winant, 2015) that have as their outcomes forms of

marginality that recapitulate and extend upon previous systems of exploitation. Under these

circumstances, it would be unsurprising to think of the current juncture through the lens of

despair. However, Fine (2016) suggests that in this moment, it is important to rely on critical

analyses and forms of praxis to resurrect what Edward Said refers to as lost causes—causes

with a social justice inflexion that are now looked upon despairingly because we are uncon-

vinced about their future potential to yield some of the transformative outcomes that had

once been beacons of humanistic hope. One such terrain can be found in the apparent recal-

citrance of race as an organising social and political construct, its concomitant race thinking,

and questions about whether this represents a paralysis of the global anti-racist project or

signals an important analytic opportunity for revitalising critical race scholarship and anti-

racist praxis.

Fine’s (2016) injunction to resurrect lost causes is similar to Zizek’s (2002) request for

faith in a cause as an ethical act and is thus a call for all of us to constantly engage the past

and the present and to imagine futures that are yet to unfold, through lenses of critical