Page 193 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Race For cultural studies, ‘race’ is a signifier indicating categories of people based on
alleged biological characteristics, including skin pigmentation. Thus, the
distinctiveness of the cultural studies approach to the topic lies in its treatment of
race as a discursive-performative construction; that is, race is taken to be a form of
identity. Race is understood not as a universal or absolute existent ‘thing’ but rather
as a contingent and unstable cultural category with which people identify. However,
racial categories are not entirely arbitrary either; rather, what they mean is
temporarily stabilized by social practice. Indeed, race appears to be one of the more
enduring ‘nodal points’ of identity in modern Western societies.
Understood as a form of identity, race does not exist outside of representation
but is forged as a meaningful category in and by symbolization in the context of
social and political power struggles. Thus, observable characteristics are
transformed into signifiers of race, including the spurious appeal to essential
biological difference. In this context, cultural studies has explored the shifting
character of cultural understandings of race and ethnicity in terms of
representation. That is, the cultural politics of race as a ‘politics of representation’.
The representation of race continues to bear the traces of its origins in biological
discourses that stress ‘lines of descent’ and ‘types of people’. Here the concept of
race refers to alleged biological and physical characteristics, the most obvious of
which is skin pigmentation. These attributes are frequently linked to ‘intelligence’
and ‘capabilities’ and then used to rank groups in a hierarchy of social and material
superiority and subordination. The process by which a group is ‘turned into’ a race
through racial classifications constituted by power is known as ‘racialization’. The
concept of racialization refers to the way in which social relations between people
have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics. Thus,
the idea of ‘racialization’ or ‘race formation’ is founded on the argument that race
is a social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology.
The historical formation of ‘races’ has been a process dependent on power and
subordination so that people of colour have generally occupied structurally
subordinate positions in relation to every dimension of ‘life-chances’. For example,
British Afro-Caribbeans, African Americans and Australian Aboriginal peoples have
been disadvantaged in the labour market, the housing market, the education system
and within the media. In this context, race formation has been inherently racist, for
it involves forms of social, economic and political subordination that are lived
through the categories and discourses of race. Indeed, an anti-essentialist
understanding of race entails recognition that race is always articulated with other
categories and divisions such as class, gender and ethnicity.

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