Overview

Extraordinary racial politics rupture out of and reset everyday racial politics. In his cogent book, Fred Lee examines four unusual, episodic, and transformative moments in U.S. history: the 1830s–1840s southeastern Indian removals, the Japanese internment during World War II, the post-war civil rights movement, and the 1960s–1970s racial empowerment movements. Lee helps us connect these extraordinary events to both prior and subsequent everyday conflicts. Extraordinary Racial Politics brings about an intellectual exchange between ethnic studies, which focuses on quotidian experiences and negotiations, and political theory, which emphasizes historical crises and breaks. In ethnic studies, Lee draws out the extraordinary moments in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s as well as Charles Mills’s accounts of racial formation. In political theory, Lee considers the strengths and weaknesses of using Carl Schmitt’s and Hannah Arendt’s accounts of public constitution to study racial power.  Lee concludes that extraordinary racial politics represent both the promises of social emancipation and the perils of state power. This promise and peril characterizes our contentious racial present.

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9781439915752

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Reviews

With unusual elegance and perspicacity, Fred Lee's Extraordinary Racial Politics challenges familiar accounts of racial continuity and change in American politics. Courageously forging new ground between ethnic studies and political theory, Lee challenges readers to reaffirm and remember our capacity for extraordinary politics as integral for revitalizing collective political belonging in the most profound sense of what we can and could be. Extraordinary Racial Politics will be of vital interest to all seeking to come to terms with the compulsive idiosyncrasies of racial politics in our own dark times. -Edmund Fong, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Utah and author of American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race: Multicultural Exorcisms Drawing on thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Fred Ho, Hannah Arendt, Michael Omi, and Howard Winant, Fred Lee explores a rich archive of racial struggles ranging from Indian removal to Japanese internment, from the civil rights movement to red power on Alcatraz Island to Asian-American activists at the International Hotel. His book is a timely reminder that even in the most perilous of times, the extraordinary is always latent within ordinary U.S. racial politics. -Cristina Beltran, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

Author Information

Fred Lee is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Asian/Asian American Studies at University of Connecticut, Storrs.

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