Lecture: Race, Post-Race

Associate Professor Alana Lentin gave a lecture entitled 'Race, Post-Race' at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in June.

The talk examined the persistence of race in purportedly postracial times. Why do racial logics continue to underpin disparities in social, economic, cultural and political opportunities despite official commitments to the eradication of racism, not only within individual states but across them?

Alana Lentin built on Barnor Hesse’s invocation of a ‘raceocracy’ which rules performatively and as a system for the management of human life. Zoning in on the global laboratory for the ‘production of horror’ that is the Australian system of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, she examined the co-dependency between the maintenance of the racialized border and professed commitments to a postracial future, a division which entrenches a divide between purified inside and the contaminants that lurk outside the contemporary racial state.

September 25, 2014

News

Research at ICS

People at ICS

Contact ICS

Contact ICS

The Institute for Culture and Society is located in Parramatta, “the place where the eel sets down” in Dharug language,
along the north bank of the Parramatta River. It sits on the traditional lands and waters of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation,
who have been stewards and caretakers of these territories since time immemorial, in what today is referred to as Greater Western Sydney,
one of the most diverse cultural communities in the world and home to the largest number of Indigenous Australians in the country.
The Institute for Culture and Society acknowledges the Dharug, Eora, Dharawal (also referred to as Tharawal)
and Wiradjuri peoples as traditional custodians and Indigenous knowledge-holders, whose storytelling serve
as historical record, a form of teaching and learning, a way to care for Country,
and an expression of Indigenous culture and identity.