The People Yet To Come: ‘People of Color’ Reconsidered
Abstract
This paper looks at how racialized subjectivity is produced by examining the notion of ‘people’ as a political category. I consider the strategic importance of the term ‘people of color’ for multi-racial coalition building as well as possible hesitancy and reluctance toward such categorization. I discuss how the term could become a merely negative delimitation when white normativity as the organizing principle of ‘the people’ is reproduced within communities of color as a hierarchizing principle. I claim that in order to abolish its conceptual dependency of upon whiteness, the notion of ‘people of color’ should be construed in affirmative terms that point beyond their negative, oppositional identity as non-white. It is my contention that the notion is best understood through its implicated absence – the absence of belongingness, and of self-determination. Thus I explore the idea of ‘belonging’ as a temporal experience and show in which sense people of color do not belong in the present, using Frantz Fanon’s description of racialization process as ‘arriving too late’ in the world. Then I turn to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “a people to come (un peuple à venir)” to articulate what this absence of the people entails. I conclude by arguing that the notion of ‘people of color’ understood as “a people to come” is an assertion of the right to belong and a call for a new form of subjectivity.
Bio
Boram Jeong is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of the political formation of subjectivity and theories of temporality. Currently she is working on an article about the ‘New Women’s Movement’ in colonial Korea and a book project Capitalism and Melancholia that examines the temporality of debt and the production of subjectivity in capitalism.
Boram Jeong March 13, 2018 "The People Yet to Come" philosophy quotes | |
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