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'Race' in post-universalist perspectiveCentre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia, k.anderson{at}uws.edu.au This article takes the subject of the rise of racial discourse in the 19th century as a focus for extending critical race theory (CRT) in Cultural and Historical Geography. It pursues a critique beyond the familiar claim of race's legitimatory function to elicit the fundamentally unstable and crisis-ridden origins of innatist thought. Crucially, this requires a situated account —one that emphasizes the singular challenge that Australian colonial encounters aroused in Enlightenment notions of human unity and development. Far from confirming European views of `savage' others, it argues that nature/native encounters on that continent precipitated a crisis in existing ideas — all the more contentious to today —of what it meant to be human. And, in emphasizing the palpably material sense in which Australia problematized European classificatory schema, the article opens one pathway from representational to `more than representational' accounts in Cultural Geography. It also offers a potentially transformative understanding of the violence of humanism, in relation to both human and nonhuman.
Key Words: Chinatown • critical race theory • culture/nature/colonialism • humanism • race historiography • theorizing from the periphery
Cultural Geographies, Vol. 15, No. 2,
155-171 (2008) |
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