Toward a Political Philosophy of Race

Falguni A. Sheth is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College and the coeditor (with David Colander and Robert E. Prasch) of Race, Liberalism, and Economics.

• AcknowledgmentIntroduction: If You Don’t Do Theory, Theory Will Do You1. The Technology of Race and the Logics of Exclusion: The Unruly, Naturalization, and ViolenceFirst Dimension: Taming the UnrulySecond Dimension: Naturalizing the UnrulyRace as a Tool for Sovereign Power: Dividing PopulationsEnframing Race: Vulnerability and Violence2. The Violence of Law: Sovereign Power, Vulnerable Populations, and RaceLaw, Violence, and UndecidabilitySovereign PowerUnruly and Vulnerable PopulationsThe Racialization of a PopulationThe Unruly and the Vulnerable Manifested as Categories of Law: Immigrants, Aliens, Enemies3. The Unruly: Strangeness, Madness, and RaceStrangenessHuntington and Rawls: Islam, Madness, and the Menace to LiberalismDifference, Madness, and RaceLiberal Hegemony and Heterogeneous Populations4.The Newest Unruly Threat: Muslim Men and WomenThe Racializing and Outcasting of Muslims in the United StatesCulture, Heterogeneity, and the Foreigner: Unruly Women5. Producing Race: Naturalizing the Exception Through the Rule of LawExceptions and the Rule of LawConstitutional Rights: Political? Human?6. Border-Populations: Boundary, Memory, and Moral ConscienceThe Third Term: Pariah Populations as a Border-GuardPariahs, Border-Populations, and Moral Gauges: The Example of Black AmericansFurthering State Interests: Dividing Populations Against Each OtherConcealing and Unconcealing: Multiple Border-Guards and Outsiders7.Technologies of Race and the Racialization of Immigrants: The Case of EarlyTwentieth-Century Asian Indians in North AmericaThe Great "Hindu" MigrationPolitical Resistance or Insurgency?RacializationInvisibilityConclusion: Toward a Political Philosophy of RaceNotesWorks CitedIndex

"Falguni Sheth's Toward a Political Philosophy of Race is … not only ambitious and impressive, but illustrates the sort of intellectual courage that could benefit philosophy as a discipline … [it] offers us a way of understanding race that takes us beyond liberal political theory, race theory, and even Foucauldian discourse about the nature and workings of power in the political sphere." — Social Theory and Practice"The black experience has long been taken as paradigmatic for theorists of race across disciplines in the United States, and certainly in philosophy, where blacks constitute the largest racial minority. Thus Falguni Sheth's exploration of how this dominant paradigm may blind us to the multiple ways in which populations can be, and have been, racialized is a very valuable contribution. This is the first philosophy text on race to focus in detail on Arabs and Asians, and it is also one of the first to draw on continental theorists to examine the issue of race and political power." — Charles W. Mills, author of The Racial Contract