GRSS

Two questions frame this response to Amin's article 'The Remainders of Race'. It first introduces an epistemological question that recognizes the impossibility of separating ontology and epistemology in modern thought and asks why contemporary studies of racial subjugation so infrequently consider the concept of race's onto-epistemological function. The second, methodological, question necessarily follows. Acknowledging that 'the what of race' cannot be separated from the 'how of race' makes it crucial to ask why the former is no longer considered in most analyses of the latter. There follows a mapping of the context of emergence of political-symbolic strategies that carve out racial difference and cultural difference as human (moral) attributes. The article shows that, rather than an extraneous notion or a referent of a natural (god-given) human attribute, the concept of race is the modern ethico-political device that refigures the workings of scientific universality in political and ethical texts. What this does is to enable the argument that, instead of manifestations of human 'sorting' instincts, the operatives (juridical, economic and symbolic) of raciality proliferating in the global present consist of biopolitical architectures, mechanisms and procedures designed and assembled with the main tools of racial power/knowledge, namely racial and cultural difference.

À brasileira: racialidade e a escrita À brasileira: racialidade e a escrita À brasileira: racialidade e a escrita À brasileira: racialidade e a escrita À brasileira: racialidade e a escrita de um desejo destrutivo de um desejo destrutivo de um desejo destrutivo de um desejo destrutivo de um desejo destrutivo riting of a Destructive Desire Abstract Abstract Abstract Abstract Abstract: If eroticism, as Bataille states, distinguishes human sexuality -as it institutes the modern subject as the effect of desire -it belongs in critical analyses of the conditions of production of modern subjects. For this reason, in this paper, I revisit articulations of the erotic in Freyre's version of the Brazilian national subject. I trace how eroticism produces a racial figure, the mestiço, whose particularity resides in that it is an eschatological object, i.e. a historical figure destined to disappear. While this figure has been celebrated as the unifying, productive symbol of Brazilianness, it has opposite material effects. As a political/symbolic device, the mestiço institutes subaltern social subjects. This results from how miscegenation, as a historical signifier, anticipates the (physical and symbolic) obliteration of blacks and Indians. This, I show, results from the construction of the nonwhite female as an instrument (not as an object) of colonial desire. As such, it is also presupposed in the mechanisms of racial subject governing contemporary Brazil.

This article revisits the theme of representation by examining the relationship between difference and transparency. I argue that the current purchase of multiculturalism and diversity marks the 'officialization' of the 1980s politics of difference, which refashioned previous formulations of racial and cultural difference without challenging their ontological premises. Through a reading of the Bloco Olodum's 1988s carnival lyrics, I chart the articulation of signifiers of Africanity, as a marker of cultural difference, which writes the black Brazilian as subaltern subject without producing a particular version of a (self-)transparent (interior/temporal) African subject. Instead, in this emancipatory text, Africanity delimits a region of subalternity, one inhabited by Africans and economically dispossessed blacks in the diaspora, which is defined in terms of a political struggle that marks their existence in post-Enlightenment social configurations. Not only does the interpretive strategy I deploy show how an attention to social scientific knowledge's role in production of modern (post-Enlightenment) subject is crucial for a critique of the notion of difference informing the global principles of multiculturalism and diversity. More importantly, it also indicates why the logic of exclusion, the prevailing account of social subjection has been now added to the arsenal of racial subjection.

Truth' and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth-century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific 'truth' and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio-historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.

Resumo: Quando é que se tornou uma trivialidade -mais do que uma evidência, mas ainda não uma "verdade" óbvia -o fato de que um número considerável (cuja dimensão talvez nunca seja conhecida) de jovens do sexo masculino e do sexo feminino sucumbe como sujeitos da violência infringida para preservação da lei? Neste artigo, esse questionamento guia uma reflexão acerca de uma dimensão da existência global contemporânea que deveria se tornar tema da teoria política. Descreve-se, aqui, um cenário político no qual os braços do Estado -a polícia e o Exército -empregam total violência como tática de regulação. Mais especificamente, faz-se uma leitura das ocupações empreendidas pelo Estado nas regiões economicamente desfavorecidas -onde os traficantes de drogas competem para instituir a "lei do lugar" -como representações de um tipo diferente de contrato de fundação, significantes da violência racial. Nessa abordagem do cenário político (ético-jurídico), os corpos mortos dos adolescentes negros e mulatos contam não como baixas de guerras urbanas, mas como significantes do horizonte da morte, pois a existência . "Meus agradecimentos a Joseph Pugliese, Maria Giannacopoulos, Mark A. Harris e a meus alunos de pós-graduação Maile Arvin, Rashné Limki, Kit Myers e Angela (Angie) Morrill, pelos comentários, questionamentos e inspirações. Todos contribuíram enormemente para o que há de bom neste trabalho e não têm responsabilidade alguma pelo que não estiver bom".