Speaking Race: The Political Economy of Racialized Visual-Aural Encounters

In his essay ‘The conservation of Races’, W.E.B Du Bois writes that race is “a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses’ (Du Bois [1897] 2012: 285). Interestingly, this formulation of race encapsulates the nature/culture connotations underpinning current theorizations of race and ethnicity. At a general level, the notion of race is often associated with systems of human classification foregrounded in biological features that are ‘present in every human being at birth and in virtue of which groups of humans are distinguishable from one another’ (Spelman 1999: 202). Moreover, racial identifications are said to determine ‘the expectations of fixed social roles’ (Osborne and Sandford 2002: 3) as well as racialized subject positions. By comparison, the notion of ethnicity underscores the socially and culturally constructed nature of race. As Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford (2002:5) note, ‘the contemporary articulation of ethnicity – or ethnicities – is coincident with a shift in attention from the ‘in-itself’ of the object of study to the domain of representation, such that the construction of ethnicities is encountered as an epistemological, rather than an anthropological problem’. Conceived of as ‘broadly cultural (historical-political) and existential determinants of identities and subjectivities’ (Obsborne and Sandford 2002: 5), the concept of ethnicity has been used as a means to avoid the risk of ‘replicating the residue biologism’ by placing the interrogation squarely ‘within culture and representation’ (Chow 2002: 24). Nevertheless, the distinction between race and ethnicity is not as straightforward as it seems. As Étienne Balibar (1991: 96) points out, though appears ‘as the most natural of origins’, ethnicity is just as fictive as the notion of race. For Balibar, ethnicity is produced or made possible through ‘two great competing routes’, that being ‘language acquisition (an open, inclusive process) and racial grouping (a closed, exclusive process)’ (Chow 2002: 24). The thesis begins by investigating the problematic of race and ethnicity, not simply in terms terminological appropriateness, but to rethink the nature/culture question through an exploration of the process of host  country language acquisition among adult immigrants in Finland. Joining forces the post-colonial critiques of identity/difference with new materialist onto-epistemological accounts of matter, this thesis closely engages with the political economy of racialized visual-aural encounters instantiated in the process of Finnish language learning. In refusing to simply negate the questions of biology, nature, essence found in the notion of race, this study asks how race arrives and what race can be.

References:
Balibar, É (1991) “The Nation Form”, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso.
Chow, R (2002) The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Coloumbia University Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B (2012) “The Conservation of Races” in Ronald J. Leach (ed.) A W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. Aftermath.
Osborne, P and Sandford, S (2002) Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity. London, New York: Continuum.
Spelman, E. V. (1999) ‘ “Race” and the Labor of Identity’ in Susan E. Babbitt and Sue Campbell (eds.) Racism and Philosophy. New York: Cornell University.