Summary
Feldman’s relational approach to race, following Lisa Cacho that “the production and ascription of human value are both violent and relational” and David Theo Goldberg that “a comparativist account contrasts and compares; a relational account connects” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 153-157).
Details
- Processes of racialisation are always already relational insofar as they convert difference into relational hierarchies of domination and value (line 153).
- The approach corrects scholarship that domesticated race into liberal nationalist ethnicity or static comparative ethno-racial groupings, above all declensionist “Black–Jewish relations” narratives that reproduce the absence of Arabs and Palestinians as agents (lines 159-163).
- Baldwin’s 1961 recognition of a transit between anti-Arab and anti-Black racisms is its early glimpse in the book’s conjuncture (lines 101-123).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, James Baldwin, U.S. imperial culture