but it also indicates a legacy of denial of inconvenient truths.7 This kind of denial is often laced with populist political agendas. The genocide of Armenians in Turkey in the early decades of the twentieth century has been met by successive Turkish governments with rabble-rousing counteraccusations of ‘Turkey-bashing’. When, in 2003, the Swiss Federal Assembly recognized the genocide of the Armenians, Doğu Perinçek, an influential left-nationalist Turkish politician, flew into Switzerland, along with a retinue of 160 academics and state officials, to give a series of speeches arguing that the Armenian genocide was ‘an international … [and] imperialist lie’ and connecting its dissemination to ‘racist hatred’ of his country.8 In other contexts, racism has been acknowledged but defined in such a restricted way as to diminish its significance. In Japan, for example, Takezawa argues that ‘the discourse around racism has been framed narrowly’ to address a particular set of troubling but limited issues such as ‘discrimination against foreigners’, thus allowing a widespread belief in Japanese racial purity to go unchallenged.9
The identification of racism as being a uniquely Western project and, hence, as having a single geographical and political source, is explicable by reference to the world-changing power of Western colonialism, as well as to the conceptual elaboration and global enactment of European supremacy from the seventeenth century onwards. Although my focus is on Asia and Africa, this book shows how, globally and in many specific contexts, racism emanating from Western nations and empires caused and created the expression and practice of racism elsewhere. Moreover, although different racisms can be compared, in terms of their impact they are not equivalent. Western racism has mattered because the West has been more powerful than other places. Yet power shifts and so does the power of different racisms. To explain what I mean we can return to the example of China. In the early twentieth century what might be termed a ‘racialized Chinese modernity’ can be identified (albeit problematically, for China did not have a unique, discrete or homogeneous form of racism or modernity any more than the West), but its power to influence societies far beyond China’s borders was small. China was poor and disunited. Today China is a superpower. China’s ‘belt and road’ infrastructure-led trade initiative, which is building roads, ports, and much else besides across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, is impacting the lives of the majority of the world’s population.10 The past forty years have witnessed a major shift away from Western dominance and the Washington–Moscow axis of political rivalry, and towards a polycentric distribution of global influence. Moreover, the majority of the world’s population now live in middle- or high-income countries.11 The dawn of an ‘Asian century’ is convincingly evidenced by a comparison of the vigorous economic growth seen in East, South East, and South Asia with the minimal growth rates typical of many major Western countries. I doubt that many people, flying from the spectacular new skylines of urban China to, for example, my home town – the rather battered, post-industrial city of Newcastle in the North East of England – would conclude they have journeyed from the ‘Third World’ to the ‘First World’. It would be better framed as a journey from a newly risen to a residual part of the world economy. Power has shifted and the familiar model of a ‘rich West’ and ‘poor rest’ has become an anachronism, perhaps even a ‘nostalgic fantasy’.12 We can rephrase and expand this observation: a singular focus on Western power and non-Western submission or resistance is not just dated, it is Eurocentric.
A ‘post-Western’ turn in global studies appears inevitable but it is also ripe for misuse.13 Registering the new reach of non-Western power, Friend and Thayer, writing about China, articulate one Western response, which I suspect we will hear more of in the years to come; namely to point the finger at ‘the rise of a superpower where bigoted views are accepted as a legitimate part of discourse’.14 Friend and Thayer’s argument is that Chinese power is a problem because Chinese racism is a problem. Even more pointedly, they claim that racism is more ‘their’ problem than ‘ours’ and that Western superiority is evidenced by the West’s anti-racist, multicultural, and critical culture:
the fundamental question for the future of peace and stability in international politics is how China sees the rest of the world and whether the norms that the West has created, particularly against racism and exploitation, could be maintained under Chinese hegemony. Knowing what the Chinese think about race, the answer is not positive for maintaining a global culture of antiracism.15
These ideas register a new narrative of cosmopolitan supremacism, in which international legitimacy is tied to possession of the capacity, supposedly uniquely Western, for interrogating racism. I have taught a university course on international perspectives on racism for over three decades and one of the first things I tell students is not to use phrases like ‘how China sees the rest of the world’ or similar constructions (other examples might include: ‘what Kenya thinks’; ‘what Japan does’). Such anthropomorphic national generalizations can be hard to avoid but they become problematic when they sit at the heart of one’s argument. Another temptation I try to steer students away from is ranking nations by how racist they are. The important point is not whether China is ‘more racist’ or ‘less racist’ than anywhere else but that what China does matters more, including its traditions of discrimination and social justice.
The concept of multiracism employed in this book is built on two major interests, one empirical and one theoretical. The empirical interest is the regional, national, international, and transnational study of ethnic and racial discrimination in Asia and Africa. I approach this material thematically, organizing it into chapters that focus on historical, religious, political, and economic expressions of racism. Comparative global scholarship on these topics is not new but it remains disparate and marginal to the mainstream of ethnic and racial studies. Relevant early studies include two major comparative statements, both published in 1948: Cox’s critique of the idea that ‘race relations’ in the USA have a caste rather than a class character, and Furnivall’s colonial administrative studies of ‘pluralism’ in South East Asia.16 Later decades brought a number of post-imperial overviews.17 However, all these works were focused either on European and US contexts or/and White actions and non-White reactions. In 1967 Pierre van den Berghe noted that over ‘the last three decades’ the literature on ‘race relations’ had been dominated by American studies and added that the ‘scarcity of sociological literature’ on ‘important multi-racial or multi-ethnic societies’, such as Indonesia, ‘is disheartening’.18 The next fifty years saw little change.
Asia and Africa account for about 80 per cent of the world’s population. They are neither a periphery nor a ‘Third World’ but culturally, economically, and politically central and primary. The need for an internationalization of ethnic and racial studies is set out by Suzuki as follows:
race scholars are in dire need to move beyond U.S.- and Europe-based models and paradigms of race in order to (1) objectively analyze the realities of racial and ethnic phenomena of the non-Western world without a presupposed white supremacy lens and (2) create a constructive feedback loop to encourage self-reflexivity on the current dominance of the U.S.- and Europe-based approaches in the era of transitional migration in which the world is afflicted and conflicted by different kinds of racial ideologies and ethnocentrism.19
The spatial diversity of racism is widely recognized. In 1990 Goldberg urged a shift away from singular notions of racism and towards an interest in racisms, arguing that ‘the presumption of a single monolithic racism is being displaced by a mapping of the multifarious historical formulations of racisms’.20 Yet this geographical turn was not designed to challenge the idea that racism is ‘a European invention’ and a ‘European phenomenon’ but to empirically elaborate it.21 Indeed, even purportedly international works in ethnic and racial studies frequently fail to include Africa or Asia. Thus, for example, none of the thirty-four chapters in the Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms looks beyond the Americas or Europe.22 This is also true of Bowser’s edited volume Racism and Anti-racism in World Perspective.23 In other ‘international’ collections, we find the inclusion of just one or two essays on racism in Asia
