Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity - Hardcover

by Rei Terada (Author)

A formidable critical project on the limits of antiracist philosophy.

Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism.

Author Biography

Rei Terada is professor of comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine. She is the author of Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject and Looking Away: Dissatisfaction and Phenomenality, Kant to Adorno.