Metaracial - by Rei Terada (Paperback)

About the Book

"Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism"--

Book Synopsis

A formidable critical project on the limits of antiracist philosophy.

Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism.

Review Quotes

"The extreme finesse of these analyses comes to deeply disturb the satisfied certainty of radical thought in its emancipatory scope, by underlining the intrinsic violence that it contains."-- "Hegelian Bulletin"

"An undertaking to provide a critical philosophical grounding to the claim of racial pessimism. Key to her argument is that core enlightenment and postenlightenment commitments to equality, anti-essentialism, openness, and relationality is a constitutive antiblackness."-- "Ethnic and Racial Studies"

"Metaracial offers a counterintuitive claim: antiracism is antiblack. Terada teaches us to look for Hegel, Kant, and Rousseau where we least expect to find them--even in the most radical iterations of Black thought. Her philosophical readings are invigorating, careful, and insightful--laboring in the interstice between Black thought and continental philosophy. A substantial contribution to philosophies of race and contemporary debates about Black subjectivity."--Calvin Warren, author of 'Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation'

"Behind the 'subject slave, ' universally human by virtue of the dialectic, there is a second slave hiding, the Black slave. Deconstructing this trope in Hegel, Terada reveals the philosophical sources of an embarrassing paradox--antiblack antiracism--which continuously affects political radicalism. An elucidation which is demanding but also fascinating and hugely clarifying!"--Étienne Balibar, author of 'Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology'