Madhumita Lahiri

"How We Hate Now: Xenophobia in the Age of Antiracism"

The flourishing of anti-racist activism across multiple global contexts in the early twenty-first century coexists uneasily with the simultaneous global proliferation of virulent xenophobia, violent border-policing, and anti-migrant politics. Drawing on literature from the early twenty-first century, and addressing the global shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, I will suggest that the proliferation of nation-centered ideas of antiracism both disavows and enables the divergently racialized violence of xenophobia. I will propose that xenophobia is the affective and political production of “migrants” out of persons, through the implicit or explicit decreeing that certain human migrations indicate practical and psychic competition. 

I focus on the disappearance of the extranational circuit from U.S. racial narratives, a phenomenon which has no simple empirical explanation. It is unlikely, for instance, that U.S. authors are simply traveling less than they once did, nor does it seem likely that geographical differences in racialization are no longer as evident as they once were. I suggest that the extranational has disappeared as an imaginative arena because a certain variety of globalization, one synonymous with a U.S.-led world order, is receding. Neoliberal globalization – the expansion of trade through the deregulation of markets – was fundamentally linked to U.S. hegemony, whether through the circulation of a global human rights agenda or in the commercialization decried as “McDonaldization.” The massive shift of manufacturing to Asia and the geopolitical ascendency of China, however, disrupted this equation. The end of U.S.-led globalization can thus be usefully marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which destroyed the global mobility of persons even as it created widespread supply chain disruptions. In this disconnected moment, U.S. anti-racist discourse increasingly divorced domestic concerns from global ones, with consequences for those racialized in xenophobic ways.

I also place our contemporary moment in productive contrast with the racial discourses of a century earlier, allowing the Cold War to serve as a historical and conceptual interruption. Through this structure of analysis, which Edward Said termed a contrapuntal reading method, I respond to a historical question, for the decolonization movements that triumphed across Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century radically disrupted the available paradigms for understanding the relationship among different races. What happened to comparative understandings of race as the British and French empires collapsed and U.S. hegemony expanded?

Madhumita Lahiri is an Associate Professor, English Language & Literature.