It strikes me that as an academic I have a choice. Either I attempt to fit the human world into the constraints of my discipline or I admit myself into the undisciplined world in which I live, make 'mistakes' and do some decent work.
Christopher Kyriakides
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
RACE DEFACED
Paradigms of Pessimism,
Politics of Possibility
From Manifest Destiny to the White Man's Burden, Harold Macmillan to Tony Blair, and John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama—the historical development of racial doctrine has been closely connected to the relationship between radical and conservative politics. This book compares different forms of racism and anti-racism in the United States and Great Britain from the 19th century to today, situating the development of racial doctrine within the political movements of the modern capitalist world order.
In conversation with current debates, this work places the treatment of racialized human beings within a wider dynamic of capitalist exploitation. It unpacks the influence of anti-emancipatory thought on "race relations," and argues that there is a consensus of thought across the political spectrum underpinned by the contemporary acceptance of the impossibility of human emancipation. Ultimately, Race Defaced is a heretical intervention into questions of race and racism that challenges both conservative and radical orthodoxies.
REVIEWS OF RACE DEFACED
Race Defaced shakes up the status quo in the field of race—and social theory more broadly—delivering an exciting, forceful challenge to prominent thought. A major contribution.
—Alana Lentin, University of Western Sydney
It's refreshing to see an ambitious work that steps back from the immediate cauldron of race and places it in a broader political, historical, and theoretical framework. Kyriakides and Torres offer a compelling challenge to the current orthodoxies in this bold, wide-ranging critical analysis.
—Stephen Small, University of California, Berkeley
Race Defaced is an exceptional contribution to the debate about race because it does so much more than most writing on the subject. In a field where moral stances usually get in the way of thinking things through more deeply, Kyriakides and Torres have pulled together a pointedly philosophical reflection on the meaning of race.
—James Heartfield, Spiked
Kyriakides and Torres urge us to dream of a different world and take a collective leap into the future. If this sounds hopelessly utopian you should read Race Defaced, because there is ample material here to give you pause for thought.
—Chris Gilligen, Ethnopolitics
Race Defaced takes to the next level the critique of the system of white supremacy offered by Charles Mills in The Racial Contract, a classic of the genre. Ever a ‘hopeful subject’, one can anticipate this volume producing a new critical turn, a critical return to the classical role of philosophers, which is not simply to outline the problems of the present order, but also to provide a feasible means by which we – all of us, together – might achieve the good life.
—Guy Lancaster, Plurilogue
Read parts of Race Defaced at Stanford University Press online. Here