Context of Reading “Race”

“Bio-Power” and the Colonialism

Abstract

“Race” and “racism”, are often described as “biological categories”. And “nation” as “cultural category”. But this seemingly clear-cut dichotomy is misleading. In this paper, I focus on these categories -espacially “racism”-, examine the historical context and explore the methodological perspectives utilized in its prior examination. To do so, Foucault's argument about “bio-power” is helpful to us. According to him, “racism” can be considered with the notion of the power of “normalization”. Ann Stoler posed that Foucault's framework should be taken in a context which brings metropole and colony into a single analytical field, stressing the import of this combination for overcoming the previous theoretical limitations.