Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism

by Jodi Melamed

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This is the story Jodi Melamed tells in Represent and Destroy , portraying the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference. Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference—to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race—Melamed focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. She examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country’s global ascendancy. She shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality. Yet Represent and Destroy also recovers an anticapitalist “race radical” tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States—a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.

Genres: Race, History, Nonfiction, Economics, Cultural Studies

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The analysis and arguments are amazing - Melamed critiques different mutations of US official antiracisms post-WWII, arguing that they aestheticise difference (ie. detach it from structural inequalities) and that they locate diversity as the essence of capitalism. Challenging a national (global imperialist) narrative of progress for race relations, Melamed looks at they ways processes of racialisation have shifted from racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism - articulating which subjects are ascribed privilege and power in each epoch, and which are pathologised as backward, monocultural, patriarchal, etc.
However I wasn't totally excited about the literary studies approach. Key texts are taken to symbolise and signify each manifestation of official antiracism, and examples of race radical literature is drawn upon to demonstrate resistance and counter-texts to these paradigms. Maybe I'm sceptical of the extent to which textual representations impact material conditions - after all the book's aim is to rematerialise antiracism. Also I wasn't familiar with the significance of much of the fiction, it was all, importantly to understand content and implications, read very specifically in the US context.

[Harris]

Excellent book that traces the genealogy of the different forms of state-sanctioned racisms that have grown out of the way people read and relate to fiction. Highly recommended.

Racial capitalism + canon wars. Might revisit after I finally read Cedric Robinson, but I think the book is pretty self-contained.

[giuseppe manley]

I’m not going to say this book took me two years to read but it is true that I read the introduction for the first time in 2016 and reread it multiple times before continuing. I generally understand the arguments for clear/opaque prose, and I stop short of wanting to say this is a difficult book, but I do think there is a clarity in the passages of close-reading / analysis that are missing in some of the surrounding and framing material, which admittedly has a bigger task. I guess I don’t have an opinion on it one way or the other, but I was really really pleased that Melamed identified her audience as “university-based knowledge producers.”

Another thing that really pleased me was that one paragraph toward the end of the book made something click and I realized Neal Stephenson’s Reamde is actually probably a really good book. Melamed, basically discussing the “the financialization of everything,” points out “[w]ithin this formation the idea of human capital seems almost quaint, because the human is not the locus of investment but rather a minimum referent--almost an empty signifier--in the rationalizing processes that enable the flow of capital.” She goes on, “[a]n obvious example is the cannibalizing of those most mainstream of antiracist goals, that everyone should be able to own a house and get an education, by financial capital, which uses these as occasions for credit baiting and asset leveraging, inventing new forms, from virtual colleges to balloon mortgages, that commit to the built forms of the concepts of education and home only enough to provide a transfer point for capital.”

For whatever reason, this made me think of Stephenson’s T’Rain which is pretty nakedly built and envisioned primarily as a transfer point for capital and more or less explicitly identified as such. At the same time, the self-conscious attention brought to that game’s function within the world Stephenson envisions (and honestly, it’s not far off from the real world and the current operation of the games industry) alongside the focus on what the fans actually construct of its playgrounds, makes it easy it miss how thoroughly concerned the novel is with global capitalism and neoliberal globalization, especially once things start blowing up and people start dying. The book is very literally named for a way that players of the game have come up with in order to extract even more capital from others in a globalized economy that otherwise is pretty keen on exploiting them without end.

In a lot of respects, it is a very nakedly political book that in some ways disguises itself by being so transparent. I mean that in the sense that everything is political, even and especially video games, but video games tend to be an entertainment medium / art form whose biggest fans routinely insist on their apolitical nature, and which tend to get overtly political by giving players a limited set of tools for interacting with the world (shooting things or blowing them up) and then chastising them for trying to solve the problems of the game’s world using those methods (a routine theme in the Far Cry series, major idea behind Spec Ops: The Line, common to Metro 2033 and the novel it is based on, etc). By focusing on the guns and violences, exploring the fantasy world of T’Rain, and so on, Stephenson draws attention away from the comparatively boring world of global capital (I definitely noticed a few passages concerned with the effect reamde could have on global currency markets, but I’m wondering now if more similar material was cut or if Stephenson was just being subtle / speculative about it).

Similarly, the turn in the second half of the book to fixate on the “GWOJ” or Global War On Jones, mirrors some of the ways Melamed describes the global war on terror being yet another way for neoliberal ideology to further engrain itself within society, not simply by asking people to give up rights but also by doing the work of employing “neoliberal multi-culturalism to ascribe racism and authoritarianism to economic and political movements opposed to neoliberal measures.” It’s impressive the sheer scale of forces opposed to Jones that materialize as the book goes on, generally for no reason other than that he kidnapped Zula (who had already been kidnapped before that) for most of our main cast. The quest to track down and stop Jones becomes almost all-consuming for most characters--notably not Marvin, who is intensely committed to his reamde gambit not just for himself but out of duty and responsibility to all of the others who invested time and effort (acting as his literal serfs) in helping pull it off.

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more impressed I am with with what Stephenson manages to sneak into Reamde by, if not positioning it as a mindless, hyper violent thriller, positioning it as something that can very easily be misrecognized as one, and it’s a little funny that Melamed has got me revising so heavily my thoughts on an entirely different book, though I guess it speaks in some way to the strength of her argument and the power of the form of reading/perspective she advocates.

[Lawrence Grandpre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to like here. Very prescient in its analysis of state/ official anti-racist concepts serving as a mechanism of solidifying liberal/neoliberal racial/political violence. The author attempts to construct a "race radical" tradition, but her methodology feels a bit scattered. Mostly the author's consistent denigration of the possibility of a redeemable concept of pluralism seems to de facto exclude a large chunk of people in the "race radical" tradition the author attempts to frame as an expansive category. If the progression of state anti-racist has traditions to racial liberalism to liberal multiculturalism to multicultural/racial neoliberalism where are we now? The tools are presented here for a taxonomy of state/officially sanctioned anti-racisms, but the author seems to cut herself off from fundamental critiques of the academy that would be needed to refine this analysis.

[Diana Filar · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I originally read this book, it was my first year in my doctoral program. 2.5 years later, I understand it much more deeply. Originally gave it 3 stars, saying I would have given it 4 stars for its ideas and content, but the repetition in the intro and its reiteration throughout each chapter really got to me on a style level. Is still repetitive, but based on ideas and critical attention alone, this is a 5.

[Mike Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible scholarship. Provides a clear genealogical survey of antiracist movements in the US and highlights the complicity of universities in the creation of "American" (whatever that means) governable subjects under contemporary neoliberal conditions. Just an excellent book. Top-notch.

[Kel · Rating 4 out of 5]

super dense. the chapter on indigenous Americans is a must-read.

[Leah Montange · Rating 4 out of 5]

-a different take on white supremacy and 20th century racisms
-trying to read stuff on racial capitalism
-multiculturalism is grim

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for all Americans. Her arguments bring a necessary corrective to the dominant discourse regarding race, which erases material conditions emanating from market forces from discussions race.

[Matthew Molinaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably have internally said "screams in Jodi Melamed" 100 times, so glad to properly have finished represent and destroy!

[Hollis]

Certainly one of the most well-executed contemporary works of cultural criticism in the field of literary studies I've had the pleasure to read. Melamed delivered a very accomplished reading of radical antiracism as juxtaposed from state-sanctioned antiracism programs, and part of the success extends from her monograph's covering of approximately 70 decades of U.S. history to do so. Her text is favorably structured, pairing the 'race novel' of the pre-Civil Rights era with racial liberalism before moving to institutional culture clashes of the liberal multiculturalist late 20th century, with attention paid to racialized debates on the literary canon. Later chapters examine neoliberal globalism as well as indigeniety and multiracial discourse in the 21st century. For each chapter, Melamed provides great swaths of historical context to ground her arguments, producing a reading experience that is always rewarding in terms of information delivery or argumentative complexity. Situating herself in a Grace Hong/Stuart Hall school of thought, Melamed makes a strong call for scholars to reconsider how materialist concerns inform their approach to literature and difference.

It is not enough to simply represent diverse literatures as if their mere presence will generate redistributed life prospects to dispossessed (non)citizens of the state. And for scholars of race and racism in the United States, she provokes additional consideration for the role critical ethnic studies scholars can play when considering globalized economies of difference, with their accompanied transformations of valued subjectivities. Donald Glover's Atlanta might be read as a project that pursued its own interrogation of radical antiracism, especially considering its season three opener, which asked how one 'becomes white' in America. Melamed's book was written during Obama's first term. Now, in our post-Obama years, I'm curious to see how discourses of radical antiracism might take new shapes, new proliferations.

[Sara]

I read a couple of chapters of this for a class. Excellent and interesting. Dense but has a lot of thought provoking ideas about antiracist education.