4 March 2009: "Should we hold it against Kanye West for ‘dating outside of his race’?"

This post is about postcolonialism. Carles adopts a stance of racial essentialism to question the logic of ahistorical repudiations of the colonial past. Carles notes, "I know that Kanye’s personal brand is all about ‘being different’, but do u think he is stepping ‘too outside the box’ by dating such a progressive white woman with a shaved head." In speculating about whether West has become a race traitor, Carles is interrogating the limits of self-branding, which are curtailed not merely by their commercial prerogatives but by the preexisting a prioris regarding race and gender. These in turn derive from the historical inflections on the category of "human" as geographical dispersement has given way to technologically enabled globalization in the field of production, which has its reflection in the cultural sphere in which West operates. In short, West must either be considered the apotheosis of postracial potentiality within the circumscribed bounds dictated by reactionary remainders from past regimes of cultural apartheid, or he must be regarded as the new harbinger of race relations encoded in the inversion of previously hegemonic hierarchies.

Carles complicates this interpretation by adopting the mask of the "concern troll" racist: "u should know that I see beyond colour…but at the same time…kinda makes u think… We live in a modern world where transportation allows all different people to mingle and interact…but maybe…just maybe… that’s not as ‘natural’ as we think." This is misdirection played simultaneously at several levels. What is not "natural" is not the interracial relationship itself but the very idea of race as an a priori category. Carles foregrounds the geographical element, but this inevitably focuses our attention on historiography, liminal spaces, how the maps have been demarcated, how "territories" have been subject to control by foreign powers and the significance of internal dissidence as a racialized mode of resistance. By evoking the impossible, prehistorical continent of Pangea, Carles highlights the folly of dehistoricizing questions of reproductive fitness. Interestingly, for Carles, imagining the end of racism inherently involves a retrogression through time to a utopia of the past rather than the future. Globalization, he implies, is just another mode of internalizing the divsions imposed by colonialism, which have not been mitigated by the promises of free-trade prosperity.