connect and overlap and are unequal in terms of their power. This is ‘multiracism’. I also argue that debate on racism needs to be conceptually and empirically expanded to engage essentializing forms of ethnic discrimination. These arguments are developed thematically across the following five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces and critiques existing explanations of global racism and then outlines the theoretical basis of this book, fleshing out what is meant by ‘modernities’ and explaining why an understanding of their pluralization helps us understand diverse racisms. This approach is not presented as an entirely satisfactory or complete solution but as a useful way forward. Chapter 2 examines the racist use of history by drawing on examples from Rwanda, Turkey, and China. It then looks at how nostalgias that were shaped in part by Western colonialism feed into racism, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Eritrea, and China. Across Asia and Africa religion is often central to practices and ideologies of ethnicized and racialized intolerance and exclusion. Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between religion and racism, first in radical Islamism, then in casteism in India and, finally, in anti-Muslim racism in India and China. Chapter 4 discusses politics, economics, and nationalism, exploring ‘red racism’ in the USSR, capitalist racism in Indonesia, racist nationalism in South Korea, and the intersection of capitalism, socialism, nationalism, and religion in South Africa. Chapter 5 uses Japanese examples to look at the interplay of whiteness and the globalization of consumer culture, before examining the changing nature of anti-Black racism in North Africa and, more specifically, in Morocco.
At first, I was tempted to organize the book by place: a chapter on India, one on Morocco, and so forth. However, it soon became clear that this would have given free rein to geographical reductionism and determinism. In other words, it would have made it appear that certain forms of racism are anchored in particular places. An uncritical reliance on geographical labels homogenizes and naturalizes nations and regions. If we are not wary of the generalizations and borderlines that spill from the world map, we not only misrepresent racism but, by reifying ethno-national units, reproduce ethno-racial narratives.
Good advice no doubt, but do I stick to it? Not really. After all, my chapters may be thematic but my examples are nationally labelled. Avoiding geocentrism is not easy. It may be useful to think of geocentrism as an inevitable problematic rather than as something that can ever be completely banished. The ‘where’ of racism draws inevitably on a variety of geographical essentialisms that may, as Diana Fuss says of essentialism more generally, be unavoidable and a risk ‘worth taking’.86 Whether we are discussing ‘racism in the West’ or ‘racism in Asia’, ‘China’, or ‘Xinjiang province’, we are dealing with questionable but necessary categories.
Notes
1 1 Cited by Barry Sautman, ‘Myths of Descent’, p. 75.
2 2 Ibid.
3 3 Barry Sautman, ‘Preferential Policies for Ethnic Minorities in China’, p. 87.
4 4 Frank Dikötter, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
5 5 Mari Marcel, ‘There’s No Escaping Racism in India’. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Modernity and Ethnicity in India’, p. 145.
6 6 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘4th Periodic Report of Pakistan Before the Committee’.
7 7 See Javaid Rehman, The Weaknesses in the International Protection of Minority Rights; also Anwar Ouassini and Nabil Ouassini, ‘“Kill 3 Million and the Rest Will Eat of Our Hands”’.
8 8 Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds, p. 304. Perinçek was charged in a Swiss court with genocide denial and incitement to hatred. He subsequently appealed to the European Court of Human Rights which in 2013 upheld his appeal.
9 9 Yasuko Takezawa, ‘Translating and Transforming “Race”’, p. 5.
10 10 Green Belt and Road Initiative Center, ‘Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative’.
11 11 World Population Review, ‘Middle Income Countries 2020’.
12 12 Peter Taylor, ‘Thesis on Labour Imperialism’, p. 176.
13 13 Examples of post-Western studies include Oliver Stuenkel, Post-Western World and Laurence Roulleau-Berger, Post-Western Revolution in Sociology.
14 14 John Friend and Bradley Thayer, How China Sees the World, p. 127.
15 15 Ibid.
16 16 Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race; John Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice. See also Edmund Soper, Racism: A World Issue.
17 17 Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism; Philip Mason, Patterns of Dominance; Guy Hunter, South-East Asia.
18 18 van den Berghe, Race and Racism, p. 5.
19 19 Kazuko Suzuki, ‘A Critical Assessment’, p. 287.
20 20 David Goldberg, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.
21 21 Teun van Dijk, ‘Interview with Teun van Dijk’, p. 74; Herbert Strauss, ‘“Hostages of ‘World Jewry’”’, p. 128.
22 22 John Solomos, ed. Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms.
23 23 Benjamin Bowser, ed. Racism and Anti-racism.
24 24 Grant Cornwell and Eve Stoddard, eds. Global Multiculturalism; John Stone and Rutledge Dennis, eds. Race and Ethnicity; John Winterdyk and Georgios Antonopoulos, eds. Racist Victimization. For more inclusive examples see Kevin Reilly et al., eds. Racism. See also Ian Law, Racism and Ethnicity.
25 25 Ian Law, Mediterranean Racisms, p. 3.
26 26 Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds. Racism in the Modern World, p. 2. Wilma Dunaway and Donald Clelland, ‘Moving Toward Theory for the 21st Century’, p. 399.
27 27 Frank Dikötter, ‘The Racialization of the Globe’, p. 1482.
28 28 Asia Research Institute, ‘New Racism and Migration’.
29 29 Paul Spickard, ‘Race and Nation’, p. 4.
30 30 Frank Dikötter, ed. The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, p. 11.
31 31 There are very many examples. Here are just four. Once his work on discrimination in Eritrea became politically impossible, Mohammed was forced into exile. See Abdulkader Saleh Mohammed, The Saho of Eritrea. In 2017, Rahile Dawut, an expert in Uighur customs and identity at Xinjiang University, disappeared and is ‘suspected of being held by state authorities at an undisclosed location’. See Scholars at Risk Network, ‘Rahile Dawut’. Note, also, the telling authorship of Anonymous, ‘You Shall Sing and Dance’, a paper about Uighur heritage published in Asian Ethnicity. The author information records that ‘The author has been kept anonymous out of concern for his/her personal safety.’ In 2019 Füsun Üstel, a Turkish expert in nationalism and minority rights, was given a fifteen-month jail term for signing a petition calling on the Turkish government to halt military operations in predominantly Kurdish areas. See TurkeyPurge, ‘Turkish Academic Enters Prison’.
32 32 Dikötter, ‘The Racialization of the
