In this roundtable, scholars from different disciplinary locations take up Patrick Wolfe’s 2016 book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, and consider its importance for the field of American studies, including its relationship to formulations of “Home/Not Home.” Wolfe argues that race is a trace of history—that racial regimes reflect and reproduce colonial ones. With attention to the different racial discourses that obtain in Australia, the United States, Brazil, central Europe, and Palestine/Israel, Wolfe explores how “colonised populations continue to be racialised in specific ways that mark out and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted these populations” (2). A central contention of Traces of History is that racialization “represents a response to the crisis occasioned when colonisers are threatened with the requirement to share social space with the colonized” (14). The implication of this argument—that race and space are inextricable, and that racialization results from colonizers being confronted with the threat of having to share social space with the colonized—leads to the proposition that race distinguishes those who belong in the national home from those who are deemed out of place in it. Traces of History thus affords insights into ways that, for those living under colonization, race is experienced as being out of place in one’s home and sometimes homeland.
On this roundtable, scholars consider contributions Traces of History makes, including the challenges it poses and the possibilities it opens to American studies and its approaches to home. Panelists approach the discussion of Wolfe’s book as experts in one or more of the racial discourses and histories it takes up, and from different disciplinary homes. As they do so, they explore how and why the study of sites of settler colonialism have and have not found a home in American Studies. Of particular interest will be how the book provokes a rethinking of erasure narratives that have characterized historical writing in what became the US. They also consider ways a comparative approach—their own, in dialogue with the one Wolfe takes in Traces of History—can enable new and necessary understandings of the articulations among racisms as they take place in disparate sites that are linked through circuits of imperialism. Interrogating how Traces of History is and is not at home in American Studies, in other words, offers an opportunity to take up larger questions about the future of American studies. Through their discussion of Traces of History, panelists take up the invitation in this year’s call for papers to grapple with the material conditions that make home possible and impossible in the Americas, and in the places where we do American studies—and to think about ways to disrupt its racialized foundations.
Participants:
Cynthia G. Franklin
Jean O'Brien
Robin D.G. Kelley
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
Saree Makdisi
David Colles Lloyd
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