Raced Repetition: Perpetual Paralysis or Paradoxical Promise?

This article engages with key contemporary questions about the extent to whichthe obstinacy of racial formation processes, as well as the apparent globalresurgence of raced thinking, represent a paralysis of the global anti-racistproject or signal an important analytic opportunity for revitalising criticalrace scholarship and anti-racist praxis. To this end, it is incumbent uponcritical race scholars and practitioners to take stock of their historical,current and future contributions to addressing the vexing nature of race andracism. The article mobilises three main illustrative arguments in this regard.First, we have to deploy our analytic tools more thoughtfully and robustly inthe service of understanding the current historical period in which race seemsto have an infinite elasticity globally as such analyses have a great deal tooffer us in thinking through the contemporary relationships between race,materiality, histories, politics and populism. Second, writing from SouthAfrica, the article focuses on the historically racialised nature of the socialformation as an exemplar of how the deployment of race and resistance to it didnot simply reflect an unprocessed repetition compulsion of the raced binary overtime but actually represented incremental gains for a productively antagonisticand adversarial anti-racist political project. Third, the article also surfacesalternative ways of approaching the question of race today, by examiningelements of the post-race paradigm, raced embodiment and affectivity, and morediverse conceptions of what it means to be human as part of the anti-racistproject. The article concludes that thoughtful analyses of the histories ofanti-racist praxis, contemporary manifestations of race and racism, and anopenness to new approaches to addressing the histories and continued legacies ofrace are paradoxically promising and hopeful in a seemingly despairing time whenrace thinking seems to be on the ascension once more.