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

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

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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.

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