Beyond race? The radical temporality of the 'post-' [abstract only]

Typically, post-racial assertions rely on the consideration that our societies are, today, ‘post-racism’—i.e., that the effects of racism no longer obtain the significance that they once held or that the history of racism is ‘in the past’, and, thus, should now be ignored (approaches that clearly maintain forms of racism and racial inequality). However, in the ‘planetary humanism’ that he seeks to establish, Paul Gilroy adopts a unique relation to the articulation of a post-race future (Gilroy 2000). Though Gilroy’s project does not propose a post-racial outlook, it nonetheless seeks an approach that moves beyond the idea of race by taking (the human) race seriously. Following Gilroy, this paper argues that in order to criticise race, a consideration of the temporality that the ‘post’ prefix provides is required. That is, it is not simply the case that our racism should be challenged, but that our efforts towards forging our very anti-racism must look towards the ‘yet-to-come’: a ‘post-race’ position where one’s relation to the present and the past can be forged. Insofar as it is through introducing a relation to lack that our ties to race can be doubted (and challenged), this paper offers a psychoanalytically inspired account of the effects of time and temporality in the music of Kendrick Lamar. In lyrics that proffer a temporal experimentation of the ‘post-’, it is argued that Lamar develops a space through which the temporal ambiguity of the ‘post-’ can be confronted via the doubt it avails. This is achieved not from some external position of understanding or higher knowledge (an anti-racism driven by ensuring that one can be educated out of the racism they expel), but through encountering the Real. It is here that a restructuring of one’s relation to language and new forms of mediation can be achieved.