Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity

A dazzling critical project on the core of anti-Blackness in contemporary society.

In this dazzling critical project, Rei Terada brings the theoretical and practical together as she takes aim at the “metaracial logic” that operates within the politics of today’s radical left. She insists that this logic, rooted in a distinction between relation and nonrelation in Hegelian philosophy, creates political projects that are, paradoxically, both anti-racist and anti-Black. Terada begins by considering how liberal strands of Enlightenment philosophy use the notion of “relation” to express a kind of racism that fits into progressive political identity. Moving through Kant, Hegel, and others, Terada shows how this line of thought terminates in the political superiority of the metaracial, a problematic legacy we live with today. For Terada, only by uncovering the notion of “relation” across radical enlightenment philosophy can we address the persistence of anti-Blackness.

About the Author :
Rei Terada is professor of comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine. She is the author of Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject and Looking Away: Dissatisfaction and Phenomenality, Kant to Adorno.

Review :
“Behind the ‘subject slave,’ universally human by virtue of the dialectic, there is a second slave hiding, the Black slave. Deconstructing this trope in Hegel, Terada reveals the philosophical sources of an embarrassing paradox—antiblack antiracism—which continuously affects political radicalism. An elucidation which is demanding but also fascinating and hugely clarifying!” “Metaracial offers a counterintuitive claim: antiracism is antiblack. Terada teaches us to look for Hegel, Kant, and Rousseau where we least expect to find them—even in the most radical iterations of Black thought. Her philosophical readings are invigorating, careful, and insightful—laboring in the interstice between Black thought and continental philosophy. A substantial contribution to philosophies of race and contemporary debates about Black subjectivity.” "An undertaking to provide a critical philosophical grounding to the claim of racial pessimism. Key to her argument is that core enlightenment and postenlightenment commitments to equality, anti-essentialism, openness, and relationality is a constitutive antiblackness." "The extreme finesse of these analyses comes to deeply disturb the satisfied certainty of radical thought in its emancipatory scope, by underlining the intrinsic violence that it contains."