Much contemporary antiracist and African Americanist scholarship – especially since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama – has assumed a decidedly cynical orientation toward ideas of “post-racialism.” Scholars, journalists, and activists have rightly detected, in numerous deployments of the term, a kind of bad faith utopianism espoused as a cover for political retreat from progressive, race-conscious policies. This chapter recognizes the merits of such anti-post-racial critiques, but also argues against the summary dismissal of the term. More pointedly, the chapter argues for a rethinking of post-racialism that acknowledges and grapples with a long, ideologically heterogeneous history of African American investments in and ambivalence toward the race concept. The upshot of this rethinking is not a defense of post-racialism as such, but a richer and more dynamic portrait of post-racialism’s historical force, social currency, and inner workings. The chapter takes inspiration from, and proceeds through close readings and intertextual analyses of, Danzy Senna’s 2017 novel, New People.

This essay ponders how scholars can both pay attention to the specificities of racial formation in any period of what is sometimes called “American” history and also think about race at any time of that history as of our own contemporary moment. It begins by analyzing how the idea of transformable race informs late eighteenth-century American literature and how scholars have expanded our study of natural historical discourses in early America. After outlining drawbacks to this kind of tight historical focus, the essay engages how we might think about race in the antebellum United States more diachronically, as more of a piece with our own present moment. Highlighting the work of writers, artists, and scholars who are thinking about the moment of slavery and settler colonialism as our own moment, the essay turns to considering the work of William Apess alongside contemporary work of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to enact sovereignty and to protect their land and, thus, to conjecture about what we might learn when we read what we generally call “early American literature” as literature both of its own time and our own.

“Climate and Race” begins with a scene from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), considered in the context of scholarship on urban heat islands, to make evident one crucial mode in which anthropogenic climate and racial grouping intersect now and will do so going forward. That established, the chapter then jumps backward in time, to the early modern period, and works gradually forward, to witness the long history of how people in Europe and America theorized the intersection of climatic and human variety. In distinction from what geneticists now contend about the ways that racial categories fail to correlate with miniscule genetic variations between human groups, and in distinction from ancient and early modern theorists who believed that bodies were so porous as to be composed differently by different environments and changed as they relocated, the most consequential modern race theorists gained traction by attending to bodily surfaces, and defining them as indexes of invisible and immutable features underneath. The chapter traces the ways in which this modern concept developed and how climate featured as an aspect of, and at times as a counterpoint to, this history of thinking.

Linking the royal Tudor archive to the Tudor/Stuart stage, this article discloses the ways the stage constructs race in the service of nation and empire. From Elizabeth I’s proclamations calling for the expulsion of ‘blackamoors’ to George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, English conceptions of blackness expose the multifaceted nature of racial formation in the early modern period. The construction of race in early modern England is intimately linked to nascent and emergent English imperial ambitions and dependent upon trade, traffic, and enslavement, particularly in Africa. While previous scholarship on The Battle of Alcazar has focused on the Mediterranean milieu and the seemingly elastic racial signification of the identity marker, Moor, this study shifts both the geographical and racial focus to argue that the Atlantic and Africa are significant sites of imperial interest for the English and that blackness is being discursively produced in order to signal race.

Since its first publication in 1986, Racial Formation in the United States by Michael Omi and Howard Winant has been arguably the most important theoretical text on race in sociology. In some real sense, the three decades between the first and the third editions were the age of racial formation theory. Over 12,000 citations ago, however, the book’s initial reception in the discipline was less than auspicious. Reviews in sociology journals were few and mixed (Driver 1988; Gordon 1989; Nagel 1988), but more than anything, disinterest prevailed.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.