Read more
This collection brings together a dozen academics from diverse racial, ethnic, and gender perspectives to explore race in a postmodern way.
Postmodernism and Race articulates the differences between modern and postmodern discourses. It then offers a third alternative based on comparative civilizational studies, which suggest a multidimensional approach to power, identity, and social order. Also drawing on Western and non-Western interpretations, the discursive nature of race as a cultural product and semiotic marker is explored.
The collection seeks to achieve three tasks: To present a uniquely kynical approach to truth-saying presented by modernists and sophisticated so-called postmodernists (with their faith in lingualism); to explore what modernism is in the context of race; and to investigate the concept of race in an aperspectival way, including the language-gaming of racism. The obsession with racial measurement and its correlation with measures of intelligence is explored, as is the mythology of racial homogeneity in Japan. Also examined are the discursive nature of racial reality and power, and racial identity in Africa.
All those concerned with issues of race and/or postmodern civilization, as well as those interested in operational definition, scalar phenomena, relativism, and postmodern views of truth, justice, and power, will find this a provocative collection.
List of contents
The Spiders of Truth by Eric Mark Kramer
The Importance of Social Imagery for Race Relations by John W. Murphy
A Brief Archaeology of Intelligence by Eric Mark Kramer and Lonnie Johnson, Jr.
Dialogue and Race by Algis Mickunas
Symbolic Violence and Race by Karen A. Callaghan
What Is a "Japanese"? Culture, Diversity, and Social Harmony in Japan by Eric Mark Kramer and Richiko Ikeda
Community Control, Base Communities, and Democracy by Woo Sik Chung and John T. Pardeck
Racist Ontology, Inferiorization, and Assimilation by Jung Min Choi
Analyzing Racial Ideology: Post-1980 America by George Wilson and Jomills Braddock
Neoconservatism and Freedom in Postmodern North American Culture by Norman N. Morra
Selected Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
About the author
ERIC MARK KRAMER is Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Oklahoma. Among his earlier publications are Consciousness and Culture: An Introduction to the Thought of Jean Grebser (Greenwood, 1992) and Postmodernism and Race, forthcoming from Praeger.
