Los desplazamientos de la «raza»: de una invención política y la materialidad de sus efectos

Abstract

This article proposes a journey around the concept of «race», starting from the critiques to biological racism that refute the existence of «races» in its bio-genetic definition, With the «linguistic turn» and the arise of social constructionism, «races» come to be understood in «merely cultural» terms, that is, a move from a «naturalist» definition where the privileged element in the explanation is nature, to one where the privileged element is society, occurs. However, social constructionists perspectives have also sustained a new version of racism: «cultural racism». In a perverse twist of culturalists ideas of respect to diversity, cultural racism perspectives claim that if differences are cultural and cultures incommensurable, they should not mix to preserve their own identity. Cultures will be then considered as watertight compartments without any relation between them. From liberal versions of this culturalist model claims appear to promote “multiculturalism”. It is understood that there are multiple cultures, all of them respectable and they should tolerate each other, as they inhabit o common space. This article analyzes the materialities of these discourses on everyday political practices and how they «racialize» particular subjectivities through performative practices, which inscribe concrete bodies, spaces and representations as others. It analyzes also some narratives of multiculturalism and the implications of these discourses highlighting the materialities they (re)produce and the exclusions they (re)create, by proposing a theoretical artifact that may allow to give account to the complex formations of subjectivities racialized, genderized, sexualized and incorporated into class discourses. An elaboration that allows going beyond the ideas of juxtaposed and isomorphic axis of oppression, and paying attention to the situations where o particular mark of exclusion becomes the unmarked condition for the action of some other.