ABSTRACT
At a moment in feminist theorizing when scholars are grappling with ethnocentric presumptions of a ‘generic woman’ implicit within ‘imperial feminism’ (Amos and Parmar 1984), it is timely to note the paucity of attempts to unsettle the epistemology of separation implicit in much race research. The fictionalized collectivities of ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘European’, ‘Asian’ and so on-the stock in trade of the field called ‘race relations’—are often the corollaries of a dichotomized us/them framework that (unwittingly) obscures the subjectivities of identities internal to those categories. Such a framework also tends to overwrite the interconnections of privileged race positions with other sources of identity and power. Whereas the critique of Western feminism by Black, post-colonial and lesbian writers has challenged feminist consensus (Butler 1990; Collins 1991; hooks 1981, 1991; Larbalestier 1991; Singleton 1989), much race researchincluding work by anti-colonialists such as Said (1978) and Clifford (1988)—has worked with modernist presumptions of an ordered (racialized) reality whose subject positionings are, for the most part, fixed and undifferentiated (c.f. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Donald and Rattansi 1992).
