ABSTRACT

In what may very well be the most recognized statement in the history of social scientific inquiry on race, W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) wrote in his classic book The Souls of Black Folk that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. In making this claim, Du Bois forecast what ultimately became a major social preoccupation. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, race became a central factor in social conflicts that emanated around the globe, and in the formation and (in some cases) re-formation of various nation-states-many of those on the continent of Africa (McKee 1993; Rex 1986; Winant 2001). A great deal of sociological investigation of race throughout the twentieth century was

rooted in a vision of race as a formidable structural force that divided social groups into hierarchies and afforded them differential access to societal resources and rewards. An effect of such dividing and positioning was the production of cultural traits and properties (e.g. attitudes, worldviews, and practices) that were presumed to be directly linked to the social categories (or structural positions) that people occupied. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, cultural sociologists and other scholars of race began exploring how race operated as a dynamic cultural artifact as much as (if not more than) an element of the structural arrangements of society. Scholars began seriously examining the centrality of race in various patterns of action, meaning-making, and representation at both individual and collective levels and exploring how these patterns ultimately reshaped as well as reinforced the structural dimensions of society. Cultural approaches to race attempted to explain how people consciously or

inadvertently construct new meanings or interpretations about racial categories, how perceptions of self and of others as racial beings come to surface, how people perform and represent themselves as racial beings, and how people employ discursive and interactional strategies to downplay or diminish the significance of race in their understandings and interpretations of social reality. These research initiatives reveal the ways in which race shapes what people think and do in ways that sometimes challenge and sometimes affirm the structural positions they occupy (whether by choice, imposition, or some combination of the two). It also reveals the extent to which racial categories remain fluid despite the durability of race itself as a social construct. The panoply of

concerns and issues suggests that there is an expansive terrain for cultural analyses of race in contemporary sociology. In documenting cultural analyses of race in modern sociology, this essay first will

explore sociology’s late-twentieth-century break from early understandings of race as a static dimension of social life and the move toward a logic based upon fluidity and dynamism. I will then consider how cultural analyses have addressed the transformation in racial categories and the meanings attached to them, and how cultural inquiry into racial identity, subjectivity, and representation has reshaped our understanding of everyday lived experience.