Chapter Title: [PART ONE Introduction]

Book Title: Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century

Book Editor(s): Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett and Laura Pulido
Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pn6cq.5

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 pa rt o n e

Racial Formation Theory Revisited

The essays in this section underscore racial formation theory’s enduring

intellectual force. The contributors revisit Omi and Winant, demonstrating
how the roots of racial formation continue to develop as scholars address-
ing topics from gender and sexuality to indigeneity and settler colonial-
ism, and spanning disciplines from literary studies and American studies
to sociology, adapt the racial formation framework to portray a complex,
evolving picture of racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized subjects.
The charge that racial formation theory, like critical race theory, sub-
sumes gender to privilege race as “the primary axis of disadvantage in the
U.S.” (Price 2009, 151), finds new, analytical currency in an essay by Priya
Kandaswamy that utilizes legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of
intersectionality alongside racial formation theory. Intersectionality ini-
tially sought to explain how the experiences of women of color are simul-
taneously “the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and
how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of
either feminism or antiracism” (Crenshaw 1991b: 1243–1244). Like Omi
and Winant, Crenshaw was critical of the intellectual movement to reject
race as an analytical category. She maintained, however, that “recogniz-
ing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect
thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about
categories at all” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 299). Following Crenshaw, Kan-
daswamy addresses the unexplored opportunities in Racial Formation to
theorize gender and race as mutually constitutive. Her essay juxtaposes the
profound effect Racial Formation has had on the field of ethnic studies with
its relatively obscure place within women’s and gender studies, using this
conundrum to investigate why theories that analyze the historical produc-

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tion of race and gender have not adequately engaged with one another.
The chapter interrogates the alleged gender deviance of black women on
welfare, comparing this to similar discourses surrounding black women’s
citizenship during Reconstruction to advance an intersectional reading of
Omi and Winant’s work. Kandaswamy explains “both how racial forma-
tion is a gendered and sexualized process and how the theoretical frame-
work of intersectionality might better account for the dynamic processes
through which racial categories are constructed.”
Rather than seeing race, gender, class, and sexuality as discrete axes that
cross each other, Kandaswamy rejects the imagined singularity of these
structures, describing them as intrinsically conjoined. These “intertwined
issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class” also form the basis for Roderick
Ferguson’s fresh periodization of anti-racist mobilizations in “The Gender
and Sexual Historiography of Racial Formation.” For Ferguson, Omi and
Winant’s attention to the rise of the new right in the 1980s obscures the
proliferation of feminist and queer organizing that took place during this
time that made strident anti-racist claims. Moreover, this organizing chal-
lenged many of the core assumptions of a unified politics of racial identity
by demonstrating the complex “reality of dissension, conflict, and hetero-
geneity within anti-racist formations.” Ferguson’s erudite critique of Racial
Formation positions the text “not as a canonical object whose theorizations
and pronouncements we must obey, but as a field of investigation that is
alive and beating.”
This understanding of Racial Formation’s legacy as “alive and beating”
is applied in James Kyung-Lee’s excursion into the literary archive in “The
Transitivity of Race and the Challenge of the Imagination.” While Fer-
guson uses Omi and Winant’s notion of the “great transformation” to
delineate the emergence of women- and queer-of-color activism, Kyung-
Lee takes up Omi and Winant’s representation of the transformed political
landscape of the 1960s and 1970s as a springboard for reflecting on the
authors’ “settled understanding” of the racial present by the publication of
Racial Formation’s second addition. Omi and Winant’s understanding of
the Reagan era’s racial topography resonated with the thinking of Kyung-
Lee and his colleagues in the humanities, who turned to Racial Formation
in the years between the publication of the first edition in 1986 and the
second edition in 1994. Here, Kyung-Lee offers a close reading of “tense
and transitivity” in the two editions and argues that in spite of the melan-
cholic inheritance of the “post-racial” era that Omi and Winant describe,

20 • racial formation theory rev i s i te d

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their work is still premised on the notion “that the r acial imagination,
like power, is not something that is seized, but an act, many acts in fact,
of creativity.” It is because of this “startling capacity” of race to “helps us
imagine anew” that Lee retains optimism for envisioning “a racial future
worth securing.”
A reengagement with Omi and Winant’s concept of the racial state
figures prominently in Andrea Smith’s “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism,
White Supremacy.” For Smith, insufficient exchange between ethnic studies
and Native studies prevents us from imagining an alternative to the racial
state. Smith unpacks Omi and Winant’s notion of the state as inherently
racial to question how it might be possible to eradicate white supremacy
while presuming the permanency of the U.S. state. She argues that racial
theorists and scholars in Natives studies can work toward “transcendent
change” by accounting for how settler colonialism intersects with white
supremacy. Comparing the strategies used by a range of Native scholars
and activists in the United States, including the collaboration between
indigenous and immigrant groups to fight the 2010 Arizona bill allowing
police to arrest “suspected” undocumented immigrants, with the devel-
opment of indigenous struggles in Latin America, Smith boldly calls for
“theoretical and political projects that address the intersections of settler
colonialism and white supremacy simultaneously,” in order to build “a
politics of liberation that engages us all.”

rac ial formation theory rev isite d • 21

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