Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how race exploits bodily and (...) enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human. (shrink)

In recent decades, group autonomy approaches to have gained kgitimacy within both academic and policy circles. This article examines the centrality of group autonomy in the multiculturalism debate, particuhrly in the highly influential approach of Will Kymlicka. I argue that his response to the dilemmas of liberd-democratic multiculturalism relies on an underdeveloped conceptualization of group autonomy. Despite presumably good intentions, his narrow notion of cultural group autonomy obscures the requirements of minority group members' democratic capabilities and thereby works against the (...) kind of transformative change that "accommodated" groups are seeking from the state. Although some critics (Young 1990; Benhabh 2002) have gone so far as to reject autonomy-based approaches to accommodation altogether (Young 1990,251) I suggest that this position goes too far. In response, I offer an intermediary position between those that defend and those that reject an autonomy-based approach. Instead of fully rejecting autonomy as a guiàng principle for multiculturalism, I devebp an ethics of care approach to group autonomy based on relationality, which addresses the inadequacies of the dominant approach to multiculturalism. Such an account of group autonomy is a vital step toward recondling multiculturalism with the necessary components of Uberd-democratic citizenship. (shrink)

A paper about cross-cultural and cross-racial loving that emphasizes the need to understand and affirm the plurality in and among women as central to feminist ontology and epistemology. Love is seen not as fusion and erasure of difference but as incompatible with them. Love reveals plurality. Unity–not to be confused with solidarity–is understood as conceptually tied to domination.

The paper suggests that we can usefully approach whiteness through the lens of phenomenology. Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they `take up' space, and what they `can do'. The paper considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit, which becomes a background to social action. The paper draws on experiences of inhabiting a white world as a non-white body, and explores how whiteness becomes worldly (...) through the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies more than others. A phenomenology of whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is behind to the surface in a certain way. (shrink)

No piece of the present conjuncture is more alarming than the explosive growth of the American prison population since the late 1970s. The prison has been a critical element of American government since the early 19th century, but the mentalities of rule and the technologies of power linked to the prison, have changed several times during that history. Building more prison cells, therefore, does not have the same constancy of meaning that building more tanks or more strategic bombers does. While (...) the prison has played a crucial role in construction of successful political orders since the American Revolution, its role at present is unprecedented. In the current era of the neo_liberal, neo_conservative, post_New Deal state, which we can call for shorthand, the "Carceral State," the prison has become the very meaning of sovereignty: a steel leviathan in which an increasingly hollowed out version of the state comes to rest with brutal force on selected parts of the population. (shrink)

No piece of the present conjuncture is more alarming than the explosive growth of the American prison population since the late 1970s. The prison has been a critical element of American government since the early 19th century, but the mentalities of rule and the technologies of power linked to the prison, have changed several times during that history. Building more prison cells, therefore, does not have the same constancy of meaning that building more tanks or more strategic bombers does. While (...) the prison has played a crucial role in construction of successful political orders since the American Revolution, its role at present is unprecedented. In the current era of the neo_liberal, neo_conservative, post_New Deal state, which we can call for shorthand, the "Carceral State," the prison has become the very meaning of sovereignty: a steel leviathan in which an increasingly hollowed out version of the state comes to rest with brutal force on selected parts of the population. (shrink)