Anna Skarpelis (Harvard University)

Race in Parentheses

What do we talk about when we don’t talk about race? France famously eschews mention of race or ethnicity in official statistics; Germany confines race talk to the Nazi dictatorship; and Japan has trouble officially accounting for the racialized dimensions of its colonial empire. The social sciences and the humanities offer a treasure trove of theories and approaches to engage with absences, erasure, and things that cannot be said, but these cannot account for several crucial cases. This article draws on race in Japan, Germany, and France as the kind of case only partially explained by the above approaches and suggests that different forms of absence can be made sense of as forms of bracketing. I develop a cultural process theory called “race in parentheses” that renders the racializing project of absenting legible and introduces four concepts that undergird the process.

Anna Skarpelis is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center

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