CALL FOR PAPERS

Race and State

Conference organised by
The MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology
University of Dublin, Trinity College;
in association with  the British Sociological Association's Race and
Ethnicity Study Group, and the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI)


EMMET LECTURE HALL, ARTS BUILDING
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
30-31 March 2005


Confirmed speakers:

"       Howard Winant, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa
Barbara, author of The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World
War II (2001); Poverty and Race (2002); Race in the New Millennium,
Colorlines: Race Culture, Action (2000).
"       Les Back, Goldsmiths College, co-editor of Theories of Race and Racism
(2000); co-author of Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture (2002)
"       Gargi Bhattacharyya, Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology,
University of Birmingham. Author of Tales of a Dark Skinned Woman: Race,
Gender and Global Culture (1998) and co-author of Race and Power: Global
Racism in the Twenty-First Century (2002).
"       Robbie McVeigh, Independent researcher, Derry, Northern Ireland. Author
of The Racialisation of Irishness (1996) and co-editor of Racism and
Antiracism in Ireland (2002) .
"       Piaras Mac Einri, Department of Geography, University College Cork, and
former director of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies.


Rationale:

With the coming of the Nazi party to power in 1933, the German philosopher
Eric Voegelin published his book Race and State. For Voegelin, the
political 'body idea' of 'race' was inherent in a theory of state. Voegelin
was concerned with 'race' not because he believed in its usefulness as a
scientific concept - he rejected this possibility outright - but because,
like Michel Foucault (2003), he believed that understanding it was integral
to the development of a complete understanding of the state. The
relationships between 'race' and state, and racism and nationalism refer to
the specific ways in which the latter two exist in what Etienne Balibar
(1991) calls a relationship of 'reciprocal determination'. Nationalism does
not bring about racism or vice versa, but by the mid-nineteenth century
within the modern, expansionist European nation-state, one could not reach
its full potential without the other. By examining the mechanisms through
which 'race' comes to politically serve state, these authors show how a
political theorisation of the state under the conditions of modernity is
unfeasible in the absence of an integrated analysis of the rise of the
'race' idea.
Despite the work of such authors, 'race' and racism in the post-War era
have been largely depoliticised. The state racism of Nazi Germany has been
largely presented as an aberration from the course of liberal democracy in
modern Europe. Colonialism too is portrayed as an excess or, at least, as
not universally murderous. The racism of populations is explained by
recourse to psychologising evocations of prejudice to be overcome through
greater intercultural knowledge. The official histories of the West at best
portrayed racism as a blot on the memory of the bloody twentieth century
rather than, as Zygmunt Bauman (1989) has shown, as inseparable from the
modern project. The work of the authors cited, along with others including
Frantz Fanon, Aim? C?saire, Hannah Arendt, George Mosse and, more recently,
David Theo Goldberg, Howard Winant, Enzo Traverso and Ivan Hannaford,
stands in stark contrast to the received tradition in thinking on the
history and sociology of modern racism. Today, the writings of David
Goldberg on the Racial State theorises the possibility of racism in the
absence of 'race' by tracing the development of the 'progressivist' racism
of the assimilationists from Empire to today's advocates of colour-blindness.
Despite this formidable corpus, and political concessions, such as the
recognition, in various Western societies, of institutional racism, the
analytical relationship of 'race' to state is still highly contested. In
today's atmosphere of the heightened repression of immigration, racist
policy-making masquerades as concern for social cohesion under threat from
too much diversity or is linked to the security agenda of the post-9/11
world. Under these conditions, we witness a return to the old patterns of
the 'social antisemitism' described by Arendt, this time targeting Muslims
and the 'brown' skinned. The racialisation of Islam and the criminalisation
of migration, controlled in detention centres and camps, finger printing,
electronic tagging, and ultimately expulsion exemplify the practical
implementation of the mechanisms of biopower in societies increasingly
governed by fear of the unknown, symbolised by the archetype of the
'stranger'.


Context:

The proposed conference intends to examine the connection between 'race'
and state from political, sociological and historical perspectives in
general and with particular reference to the United Kingdom and Irish
contexts. How do these two differing , yet historically interlinked,
polities fit into both European and more globalised discussions of the
linkages between 'race' and state? For example, does Britain's opposition
to Nazism endow it with a different history from that characterising the
racialisation of the nation-state in Western Europe? Or does Ireland's
position as the one of the only European countries to have been colonised
change the nature of the 'race'-state relationship in present-day politics
of immigration in Ireland? What role is played by the legacy of Empire in
shaping the specific construction of the relationship between 'race' and
state in both contexts; the one coloniser, the other colonised? How does
this legacy position these countries, at the westernmost frontier of
Europe, vis-?-vis both the European mainland and the North American context
by which they have often been more greatly influenced? In a time of
increased repression of immigration across the North, what is the place of
these histories and legacies within the contemporary global migration
regime, from which, despite the racism it engenders, discussions of the
link between 'race' and state have been all but banished?

Conference organisation:

The conference is organised by the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, TCD
in association with the Race and Ethnicity study group of the BSA, and the
SAI. The conference committee  includes: Max Farrar, School of Social
Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University; Alana Lentin, EC Fellow, Refugee
Studies Centre, Oxford University; Ronit Lentin, Director, MPhil in Ethnic
and Racial Studies, TCD; Elaine Moriarty, Department of Sociology TCD;
Karim Murji, Open University, UK.

Call for papers:
Papers may be theoretical and/or empirical but should engage with the
proposition, central to the conference aims, that 'race' as a political
idea and modern racism may not be fully conceptualised without
consideration of the nature of the modern, Western state.
In addition to the invited speakers identified above, we are calling for a
limited number of abstracts for :
"       Theoretical / empirical papers - 45 minutes
"       Empirical papers - 30 minutes
All papers will all be presented in plenary and organised so as to enable
ample debate.
It is hoped that the conference will result in an edited collection.

Please send 150 words abstracts by 1 November 2004,
to the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, email: [log in to unmask], or to
Alana Lentin, email: [log in to unmask]






        Dr Ronit Lentin
        Course coordinator,
        MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies,
        Department of Sociology, University of Dublin,
        Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland.
        Tel: 353 1 6082766. Fax: 353 1 6771300.
        Email: [log in to unmask]
        http://www.tcd.ie/Sociology/mphil/mphil.htm