ABSTRACT
We argue, firstly, for an embodied understanding of racism rather than the dominant intellectualist account of race which posits an objective racial knowing, and which privileges race as a discursive formation. An outcome of this privileging of objective racial knowledge is to marginalize any subjective experience of race as always leaning towards an essentialist understanding. Since the linguistic turn in Continental and Anglo-American thought, the trend has been to disassociate power from the body, but this has only been made possible by an Enlightenment universal humanism that indemnified European man’s humanity against all others. The linguistic turn thus jettisons the notion of the human, declaring it, in a move of staggering hubris, non-operative, even as it rests assured that the human status of its own leading practitioners (typically privileged, white scholars and critics) can be taken for granted. As such, this European universal subject’s humanity is normatively guaranteed while those whose possibility of a subject position is not a given, those with Black and brown bodies, have to contend with their humanity dead on arrival.
