Engendering race research : unsettling the self-other dichotomy

At a moment in feminist theorizing when scholars are grappling with ethnocentric presumptions of a ‘generic woman’ implicit within ‘imperial feminism’ (Amos and Parmar 1984), it is timely to note the paucity of attempts to unsettle the epistemology of separation implicit in much race research. The fictionalized collectivities of ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘European’, ‘Asian’ and so on—the stock in trade of the field called ‘race relations’—are often the corollaries of a dichotomized us/them framework that (unwittingly) obscures the subjectivities of identities internal to those categories. Such a framework also tends to overwrite the interconnections of privileged race positions with other sources of identity and power. Whereas the critique of Western feminism by Black, post-colonial and lesbian writers has challenged feminist consensus (Butler 1990; Collins 1991; hooks 1981, 1991; Larbalestier 1991; Singleton 1989), much race research—including work by anti-colonialists such as Said (1978) and Clifford (1988)—has worked with modernist presumptions of an ordered (racialized) reality whose subject positionings are, for the most part, fixed and undifferentiated (c.f. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Donald and Rattansi 1992). In this chapter I seek to problematize the polarity of race identities upon which rests the cohering argument of my earlier work Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991). I aim to undertake such an auto-critique by feeding into the Chinatown story the discursive fields and social positionings of gender and sexuality, a task I undertake not for its own sake, but rather to sharpen the critical analysis of the many valences of social power. By extension, the chapter critiques other work in race relations that implicitly or explicitly disengages race identities from other historically situated oppressions such as those surrounding gender, class and sexuality. Without discrediting work that specifies the contribution that race-based oppression makes to structures of inequality, the chapter seeks to foreground the multiplicity and mobility of subject positionings, including those of race and gender