This book presents a metacritique of racial formation theory. The essays within this volume explore the fault lines of the racial formation concept, identify the power relations to which it inheres, and resolve the ethical coordinates for alternative ways of conceiving of racism and its correlations with sexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, gender politics, empire, economic exploitation, and other valences of bodily construction, performance, and control in the twenty-first century. Collectively, the contributors advance the argument that contemporary racial theorizing remains mired in antiblackness. Across a diversity of approaches and objects of analysis, the contributors assess what we describe as the conceptual aphasia gripping racial theorizing in our multicultural moment: analyses of racism struck dumb when confronted with the insatiable specter of black historical struggle.

Drawing primarily on the US #blacklivesmatter movement, contributors to this issue come to terms with the crisis in the meaning of black politics during the post-civil rights era as evidenced in the unknown trajectories of black protests. The authors' timely essays frame black protests and the implications of contemporary police killings of black people as symptomatic of a crisis in black politics within the white limits of liberal democracy. Topics in this issue include the contemporary politics of black rage; the significance of the Ferguson and Baltimore black protests in circumventing formal electoral politics; the ways in which centering the dead black male body draws attention away from other daily forms of racial and gender violence that particularly affect black women; the problem of white nationalisms motivated by a sense of white grievance; the international and decolonial dimensions of black politics; and the relation between white sovereignty and black life politics. Contributors. Barnor Hesse, Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani, John Marquez, Junaid Rana, Deborah Thompson, Shatema Threadcraft

This anthology reconsiders the social, political and intellectual meanings of multiculturalism in the West, particularly Britain. In introducing a new conceptual language for thinking about it, the volume stresses the importance of distinguishing between the multicultural as a signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences, and multiculturalism as the signfied of attempts to 'fix' their meaning in national imaginaries. The book also casts the debates about multiculturalism in the contexts of globalization, post-colonialism and what Barnor Hesse calls 'multicultural transruptions' - which he sees as resurgent, irrepressible multicultural issues which unsettle the racialized meanings of social norms and the cultural habits of national politics. Divided into two parts, the first considers a variety of diaspora formations ranging from the Muslim Umma and Black Britain to the Chinese foodscape and Transatlantic Black sporting performances. It examines their transnational impact on how cultural differences are lived and poses questions for how we participate in and think about Western societies. The second part on cultural entanglements focuses on media constructions of the 'Asian Gang' in Britain, gender and sexuality in 'ragga music', and the ambivalences of Black/White identities in post-Apartheid South Africa. The contributors explore the consequences of understanding cultural identities as cross-cut by other identities and entangled with wider social issues, rather than simply existing as distinct, celebratory and free-standing. The conclusion by Stuart Hall makes a timely reassessment of the multicultural question for the social cohesiveness and political future of liberal democracies. Un/Settled Multiculturalisms offers a fresh and reinvigorated challenge to those who continue to ignore the complex political and theoretical implications of living in the contested post-colonial fall-out of Western 'multicultural-scapes'.

This book presents a metacritique of racial formation theory. The essays within this volume explore the fault lines of the racial formation concept, identify the power relations to which it inheres, and resolve the ethical coordinates for alternative ways of conceiving of racism and its correlations with sexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, gender politics, empire, economic exploitation, and other valences of bodily construction, performance, and control in the twenty-first century. Collectively, the contributors advance the argument that contemporary racial theorizing remains mired in antiblackness. Across a diversity of approaches and objects of analysis, the contributors assess what we describe as the conceptual aphasia gripping racial theorizing in our multicultural moment: analyses of racism struck dumb when confronted with the insatiable specter of black historical struggle.