Introduction: Between Recognition and Revolution

Abstract

Debates concerning the importance and role of racial identity in American politics and culture have taken on a renewed significance in the past decade. Whether it is the “Arabization” of terrorism, Hispanics and undocumented immigration, or reverse discrimination claims against affirmative action policies, race and racial identity have reemerged as central topics of national concern. This centrality became apparent in the presidential race of 2008, when the two strongest democratic candidates represented marginal identities within the history and culture of the U.S. presidency. Discussions surrounding the relevance of racial and gender identity abounded in both the national media and in academic circles. In February of 2008, for example, historian David Hollinger published an article entitled “Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America” in which he stated that the “Obama candidacy [had] already developed into a far-reaching challenge to identity politics” and that at “the center of that challenge [was] a gradually spreading uncertainty about the significance of blackness itself.”¹ Hollinger interprets Obama’s nonracialized presidential campaign strategy—which focused on policy issues that transcended the particularities of his racial identity—as undermining the relevance of identity politics.

Materialist thinking… ought to have had enough practice of heterogeneity and discontinuity to entertain the possibility that human reality is fundamentally alienated in more than one way.

Fredric Jameson, “The Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan”