Racism Beyond the West: Empire, Capital, and the Racial Logics of Non-Western Modernity

Is racism a uniquely Western affliction? The dominant scholarly common sense treats it as such, locating its origins in Atlantic slavery and European colonialism, and assuming that elsewhere other idioms—ethnicity, nation, caste, class—occupy the ground that race holds in the West. This session contests that geography of the concept. Reading the history of racial contact, racial ideology, and racial regime formation against the grain, it argues that capitalist relations of domination have everywhere been racially mediated, and that non-Western empires generated racial projects of their own.

Japan's imperialist expansion from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century offers a paradigmatic case in which racial thinking—including civilisational hierarchies, eugenic and assimilationist discourses, and the racialisation of colonized populations—was central rather than incidental to rule. Equally important are the racial undercurrents of contemporary sub-imperial nationalisms, Korea among them, where former colonial subjects reproduce hierarchies of belonging and exclusion even as they narrate themselves as victims of empire.

Building on, rather than merely against, scholarship on racial capitalism and comparative colonialism, the session asks how discourses of racial, ethnic, and national difference in non-Western societies should be understood, and how taking them seriously globalizes and deepens our theory of racism. We invite historical and sociological papers—comparative or case-based—from across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and beyond, that extend or contest existing frameworks of race and racism.