Race under Representation

Abstract

Working from the aesthetic thought of Kant and Schiller, “Race under Representation” elaborates how metonymy and metaphor function in the formation of the stereotype. Racialization works through the organizing tropes of representation and those tropes embody an order of representation, framing a civilizational narrative for which inclusion always functions simultaneously as excision. The metaphorical place of whiteness, or the “Subject without properties,” is constitutively barred to the racialized subject, as the work of Tayeb Salih and Frantz Fanon illustrates. Inclusion always requires the effective but impossible erasure of race even as it repeatedly constitutes racial positions. The chapter critiques the notion of “under-representation” in its demographic usage, arguing that the goal of inclusion consolidates institutional claims to universality and reaffirms the violence of the racial regime of representation that relegates racial others to the exteriority of race “under representation.”