Introduction: Race, gender, and culture in IR

International relations theory has broadened out considerably since the end of the Cold War. Topics and issues once deemed irrelevant to the discipline have been systematically drawn into the debate and great strides have been made in the areas of culture/identity, race, and gender in the discipline. However, despite these major developments over the last two decades, currently there are no comprehensive textbooks that deal with race, gender, and culture in IR from a postcolonial perspective. This textbook fills this important gap. Persaud and Sajed have drawn together an outstanding lineup of scholars, with each chapter illustrating the ways these specific lenses (race, gender, culture) condition or alter our assumptions about world politics. Drawing together prominent scholars in critical International Relations, this work shows why and how race, gender and culture matter and will be essential reading for all students of global politics and International Relations theory.

Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2004

2010

[Draft] A theoretical discussion about the development and operation of postcolonial discourses and the challenges it faces from the mainstream and from itself.

Race, Ethnicity and Education, 2009

Theories in International Relations, edited by Richard Devetak and Jacqui True; Edition: 6th; Chapter: 4; Bloomsbury, 2022

Can we understand International Relations without colonialism and race? This chapter argues that we cannot examine the domain of the ‘international’ without a meaningful engagement with the crucial role that colonialism and processes of racialization and capitalist expansion have played in the very constitution of our current international system. Postcolonial theory grapples with the history and legacies of colonialism, and of race and racial hierarchies, and examines the ways in which they have shaped global politics and contemporary racial hierarchies. IR theory has failed to analyze these power structures and dynamics, and postcolonial theories have aimed to ignite debate and reflection in the discipline about its own foundations, and about its contemporary colonial and racist dynamics. The first section of this chapter outlines the history of postcolonialism as a theoretical perspective by discussing both a few major historical landmarks associated with the rise of postcolonial thought (e.g. Bandung Conference; Non-Aligned Movement; Suez Crisis; Tricontinental Conference), and a number of prominent theoretical contributions by intellectuals who are now seen as “foundational” of postcolonial theory (e.g. Aimée Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said). The second section then examines postcolonialism’s entry into International Relations by focusing on a number of key concepts which are central to postcolonial interventions in IR: colonialism, race, and epistemic justice. The last section engages the interactions and debates between postcolonial perspectives in IR and other critical approaches in IR (e.g. poststructuralism, Marxism and feminism). The concluding section highlights the continued relevance of postcolonial perspectives in a global world.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013

This chapter investigates the persistence of racism in the production and maintenance of postcolonial cultural identity through an examination of the major critical frameworks that have informed the analysis, over the past several decades, of theorizing in postcolonial studies: the anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmit; the poststructuralist turn in race theory marked by the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and, most recently, the move towards questions of biopolitics, ethnicity and neo-racism as mobilized in the work of Michel Foucault and Etienne Balibar. The chapter evaluates the significance of positing race as a negative and repressive structure while also emphasizing race's generative function as a technology of government within modern society.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2015

The menace of racism and gender discrimination is almost prevalent everywhere in the world, and the writers, particularly the novelists have highlighted these issues of hot-button nature in their novels. An ugly and hot-potato problematic of racism and gender disparity like many debatable issues has attracted much critical focus and debate from every intellectual, social, and critical quarter. The issues of racism and gender discrimination have been the subtext of many postcolonial narratives. Many famous postcolonial writers like Chinua Achebe, J.M Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Wole Soyinka, Zohra Neal Hurston, Nuruddin Farah, and Michael Ondaatje have overtly dealt with the subjects of racism and gender disparity side by side in their respective works. Racism and gender disparity among humans has a very old and horrible history. The paper attempts to provide the historical overview of racial and gender discrimination. Further, the paper attempts to mention the writers who have contested these issues in their works. Class, race, sexuality and all other categories by which we categorise and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. [ 1 ] Before giving the historical background and overview of the two much conflictive issues, it would be wise and pertinent to define the two terms separately in order to simplify them and also to show how the two terms are ideologically interrelated. " Racism " in common parlance is defined as a haughty, disdainful, and prejudiced attitude and criminalising [ 1 ] Dorthy Allison in Screening Genders.Eds.Krin Gabbard and William Luhr.P.37.

2010

Aamir Mufti I Ella Shohat Was there ever such a place? Home and the loss of home constitute a recurring motif of modernity. The post-world war era has seen it return, nourished on fresh historical experiences, imbued with new meanings. In the last decade, specifically, rearticulated notions of exile and diaspora have played an important role in a cultural critique that not only charted the history of communities displaced in the postindependence era but also employed that history as a condition and a trope for cultural criticism itself. 4 In the repeated mutual impacting of divergent trajectories, claims, and memories that constitute the cultural landscape of late capitalism, the loss of home and the struggle to reclaim and reimagine it are experiences fraught with tension. But whereas in the era of Third Worldist euphoria the limitation and repressions of the nation were often hushed, today they have been brought center stage within critical and cultural practices. Nation, community, race, class, religion, gender, sexuality-each names a site for the enactment of the great drama of origins, loyalty, belonging, betrayal; in short, of identity and identification. The gradual eclipse of the revolutionary anticolonial era has been accompanied by the emergence of new forms of selfhood, political allegiance, capital accumulation, imperial power, and mass migration, forms whose contours are perhaps still only half-visible. Postcolonial criticism is now a familiar mode of cultural practice in the Anglo-American academy. The perspectives on imperialism produced within this new intellectual formation represent a perceptible shift relative to the critical positions that had developed out of and alongside anticolonial revolutionary movements for national liberation in the postwar era both in the Third and First Worlds. The anticolonial struggles have had their repercussions in the academy, seen in the efforts to decolonize Eurocentric culture. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives brings together a set of essays on currently debated Third World and postcolonial issues within cultural studies. Located within a transitional moment in the history of "center-periphery" relations, they seek to address, from a wide range of perspectives and positions, the structure of inequalities inherent in the present moment. They also examine the dilemmas and contradictions of the ongoing critique of racism and imperialism at a moment when such politically mobiliZing categories as "Third World" and even "nation" have lost their earlier liberationist clarity and thrust. But, above all, they represent an attempt at grappling with the meaning of location and belonging, of communities of interpretation and praxis, of home, in the increasingly diasporic panoramas of the contemporary world. Some of the recently published collections on cultural studies do not give sufficiently complex attention to these debates. Furthermore, while multicultural volumes tend to focus on the U.S. context and postcolonial anthologies tend to ignore it, Dangerous Liaisons insists upon precisely the contrapuntal juxtaposition of these diverse yet related debates. Our editorial process was guided by a conceptual framework that refuses to separate the linked histories of race as well as the contemporary coimplication of communities within and across the borders of nation-states. In a world where Third World immigrants to the United States can participate in racist discourses and practices toward U.S. Native American and African-American communities, where U.S. racial "minorities" might join U.S. imperial wars, and where Third World national elites become complicit with the new world order being created by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, it is impossible to discuss