ABSTRACT
In the middle 1970s I was carrying around an early issue of Dialectical Anthropology and ran into a very distinguished, very senior radical historian of Africa. He glanced at the title and offered, ‘At last anthropology has a journal to preside over its own demise.’ I was at the time preoccupied with getting next week’s seminar readings done, not the fate of disciplines, but I have often since thought of that remark when trying to change a discipline, sub-discipline, or inter-discipline—or more often when rooting for others trying to do so – in ways that run up against the history, logic, and limits of the enterprise being challenged. What is it to champion a critical legal theory? To forward critical management studies? To queer imperial history? Before considering the tremendous possibilities raised by this volume, it is apposite to think briefly about the project of bringing IR into confrontation with both the loudly proclaimed theories of racial hierarchy at its origins and the stealthy racialization of its recent past and present.
