{"title":"The Impossibility of Multiracial Democracy","authors":"Christopher Chamberlin","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2021.0011","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Democracy becomes modern after it abolishes slavery and assumes its primary feature—race. Paradoxically, political theory cannot formalize a notion of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a post-slavery democracy that does not prescribe racial genocide. This essay shows that this paradox is structural, and tracks its transformation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s nineteenth-century meditations on the specter of abolition to UNESCO’s postwar statements on race, particularly through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s subsequent critiques of racial capitalism. It concludes by reflecting on the ethics of war as a materialization of the impossibility of multiracial democracy.","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2021.0011","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:Democracy becomes modern after it abolishes slavery and assumes its primary feature—race. Paradoxically, political theory cannot formalize a notion of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a post-slavery democracy that does not prescribe racial genocide. This essay shows that this paradox is structural, and tracks its transformation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s nineteenth-century meditations on the specter of abolition to UNESCO’s postwar statements on race, particularly through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s subsequent critiques of racial capitalism. It concludes by reflecting on the ethics of war as a materialization of the impossibility of multiracial democracy.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1990 as a groundbreaking experiment in scholarly publishing on the Internet, Postmodern Culture has become a leading electronic journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary culture. PMC offers a forum for commentary, criticism, and theory on subjects ranging from identity politics to the economics of information.