Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Let us start with what “race theory” is not. It is not a unified body of analytic work, nor does the signifier race name a singular object of investigation that would remain consistent across different theoretical traditions or schools of inquiry. If we can say anything at all about “race theory” in general, it is that the work of theorizing race remains fundamentally bound up in the effort to historicize the production of race as an epistemological category, as well as to address the centrality of race to the production of modern epistemologies; to situate racial tropologies within the wider discursive fields of modernity (discourses of gender, class, nationalism, empire, and mass culture, for example); and to chart the manifold articulations of racial epistemologies and discourses to institutionalized social practice—to the material conditions of raced bodies and raced subjects. In other words, if there is anything that “race theory,” in general, might tell us at the outset, it is that race is less an object than a field of inquiry—an inquiry into processes of racialization at the center of modern knowledges, discourses, and institutions. What this means for the student of the novel is that the matter of race neither begins nor ends with the matter of racial “content”—of explicitly racialized themes or characters. The nineteenth-century realist novel, its critics tend to agree, ... log in or subscribe to read full text