Pre-Race Post-Race: Climate Change and Planetary Humanism

Gunaratnam, Yasmin and Clark, Nigel. 2012. Pre-Race Post-Race: Climate Change and Planetary Humanism. Darkmatter, [Article]

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Abstract or Description

This article suggests that one way of leaving behind the gravitational pull of essential and hierarchical conceptualizations of race is to follow climate science in digging deeper into the prehistory of human evolution and physiological differentiation. We begin by outlining the value of Paul Gilroy’s post-racial imaginary, set out in Between Camps, as one that is future-oriented: a post-race that relies upon an after-race escape from biologism while assuming a given Homo sapien oneness. In distinction, our post-racial analytic is a move towards a deep time of ‘pre-race’ from which any subsequent human unity is conceived as precarious, contingent and achieved. This post-racial pre-race deploys the combined provocations of anti-racist scholarship, climate science and paleoanthropology to empty race of its violent hierarchies by going deeper into, rather than away from, biology and its attendant vital relations.

Item Type:

Article

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Sociology

Dates:

DateEvent
July 2012Published

Item ID:

7206

Date Deposited:

01 Oct 2012 12:51

Last Modified:

07 Jul 2017 09:21

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/7206

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