The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment

(Hardback)

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The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo draws on the resources of Merleau-Ponty to show how the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the subtle but more fundamental workings of racism--to catch its insidious, gestural expressions, as well as its habitual modes of racialized perception. Racism, as Ngo argues, is equally expressed through bodily habits, which, once reformulated, raises important ethical questions regarding the responsibility for ones racist habits. Ngo then/also considers what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches us about the nature of embodied and socially-situated being, arguing that racialized embodiment problematizes and extends existing accounts of embodied experience, and calls into question dominant philosophical paradigms of the self as coherent, fluid, and synchronous. Drawing on thinkers such as Fanon, she argues that the racialized body is in front of itself and uncanny (in the Heideggerian senses of strange and not-at-home), while exploring the phenomenological and existential implications of this disorientation and displacement. Finally, she returns to the visual register to take up the question of objectification in the racist gaze, critically examining the subject-object ontology presupposed by Sartres account of the gaze (le regard). Recalling that all embodied being is always already relational and co-constituting, Ngo draws on Merleau-Pontys concept of the intertwining to argue that a phenomenology of racialized embodiment reveals to us the ontological violence of racismnot a merely violation of ones subjectivity as commonly claimed, but also a violation of ones intersubjectivity. The original arguments in The Habits of Racism will be of particular value to students and scholars interested in critical philosophy of race, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, and may also be of interest to those working in feminist philosophy, queer studies, and disability studies.

Reviews

Helen Ngo has written a thought-provoking and highly engaging book. She weaves together, in careful and astute readings, the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger with recent phenomenologically-oriented work in philosophy of race, in particular Linda Martn Alcoff's, George Yancy's, and my own work. Her account of habit as holding and held, her critical reformulation of 'sedimentation' as active receptivity, and her theorization of the bodily work, stress and affectivity of managing and anticipating racialization are keen analyses that take phenomenology of raceand phenomenology more generallyfurther and open up new and exciting spaces for thinking. -- Alia Al-Saji, McGill University

Author Bio

Helen Ngo is lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University.