Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism

(Paperback)

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In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This is the story Jodi Melamed tells in Represent and Destroy, portraying the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference.

Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know differenceto describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to raceMelamed focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. She examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the countrys global ascendancy. She shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality.

Yet Represent and Destroy also recovers an anticapitalist race radical tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United Statesa literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.

Reviews

"A brilliant correction to both Weber and Winant, Represent and Destroy demonstrates how the control over the means of rationality characterizes post-World War II US liberal racial orders. Working against the grain of change-as-progress, Jodi Melamed painstakingly demonstrates how official anti-racism has steadied, rather than dissolved, race as a structuring force of capitalism." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California

Author Bio

Jodi Melamed is assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University.