As Robin D.G. Kelley puts it, ’anti-wokeness is the perfect example of the functioning of the racial regime.’ Taking the reader beyond the distracting framings of culture wars and moral panics, Alana Lentin shows how the attacks on Black, Indigenous and anticolonial thought and praxis reveal the processes through which racial colonial rule is ideologically resecured.
Throughout the book, the often chaotic and contradictory recalibration of the racial regime is traced through the counterinsurgent attacks on Critical Race Theory; the ’whitelash’ against the teaching of histories of slavery and colonialism; the counterinsurgent capture and institutionalisation of antiracism, Indigeneity and decoloniality in the interests of Zionism, settler colonialism, and imperialism; and the nexus of antisemitism and fascism against the backdrop of genocide.
While the racial regime is constantly being remade, its inherent instability is the consequence of constant resistance from below. The book concludes that political education—especially that taking place outside of the co-optable institution of the university—is essential for maintaining and deepening that resistance at a time of rapidly mounting fascism.
Innehållsförteckning
Introduction: The racial regime methodology
1. ’A drop of poison’: what the war on CRT tells us about the new racial regime
2. On history and the technologies of white forgetting
3. Institutionalising dissent in a time of genocide
4. Capturing Indigeneity, colonising decolonisation
5. Anti-antisemitism, white supremacy and fascism in our times
Conclusion: On the imperative of political education
Om författaren
Alana Lentin is a teacher and scholar working on the critical theorisation of race, racism and anti-racism. She is a Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University and the author of Why Race Still Matters. She is currently editing the section on Antiracism Mobilisations and Resistance of the Routledge Encylopaedia of Race and Racism with Maria Elena Indelicato. She lives on Gadigal-Wangal land (Sydney, Australia).