It is not new, or radical, to suggest that 'race' is a social construct. The idea has been prominent in social, political and philosophical discourse for decades. The bold challenge put forward by Jon Ivan Gill is that this idea is just a halfway house – questioning the fixity of race while doing nothing to lessen the trauma caused by its continued presence as a category of human identity. Can we truly end racism before we dissolve the notion of race itself, and if we do then what are we left with?
Showing the role that philosophy of religion has played in reifying ideas of race and racial categories, Gill looks beyond that legacy to a world after and beyond those ideas. With seemingly immutable notions of race still baked into our societies at the level of law and legislation, process philosophy can remind us that being, and how we define it, is dynamic and will change over time. If race as a category is impermanent, then it can be undone. Dispelling this 'powerful apparition' has deep-laced significance for contemporary society, from cancel culture and reparations to mixed race identity and the suppression of ethnicity and nationality. This is at once a keen dissection of colonial apparatus and a practical, creative vision for a new way of organizing ourselves.
A bold, fluent vision for moving beyond racial categories into a world free from the colonial structures that they reinforce.
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A bold, fluent vision for moving beyond racial categories into a world free from the colonial structures that they reinforce.
Acknowledgements
Prolegomenon to any Future Philosophy of Race
Introduction
1. Black is Dead: A Moorish Un-sure-ing of a Sure Thing"
2. Who Keeps the Gate?: Identity Politics and the Composition and Maintenance
of the Racial Us and Them
3. Alternate Race Theories in Motion: A Discussion with Dominic
Pettis-EI/I.B. Fokuz
4. Period, Full Stop: The Oversights of Cancel Culture(s)
5. The Lure of the Shroud: The Question of the Mattering of The Conceptual
Human Illusion
6. Multi/Race/Less/Ness: A New Name for Timeless Ways of Human Becoming
7. BioDigital Jazz: Reflections on Emergent Multi/Race/Less/Ness in Hip-Hop
and Belize
8. Self-Study: Scattered Thoughts on Genealogy as a Facet of
Multi/Race/Less/Ness
Breve Epilogo
Notes
Bibliography
Jon Ivan Gill is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College, USA.
