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October 1, 2006
Mark Kelly in his article in Contretemps entitled Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics: Foucault's Society Must Be Defended, says that :
The success of these discourses of race struggle was such that they became ubiquitous as a way of thinking about society. In the eighteenth century, the state itself started to colonize these discourses, to use them to its own ends, to justify the status quo. Ultimately, the subversive discourse of race struggle, which Foucault 'praises' mutates utterly from the idea that there is a struggle between opposing forces which is basic to society to the idea that society itself is the agent caught in a struggle with its enemies both within and without--from the discourse of race struggle to that of state racism. This involves the idea of the nation as race, of a people as which is racially homogenous, for which internal and external racial others are dangers.
The argument is that co-option of the discourse of race struggle as the discourse of state racism is intimately connected with the emergence of biopolitics.
That makes sense of the first part of the 20th century in Australia where the White Australia policy presupposed state racism.
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That is a very good point.
A good example of this in the post-9/11 United States, with an external "Other" in the form of the Arab and an internal "Other" as the African-American male, both threats to the hegemonic identity of "Heartland" America, so consistently referenced in the campaign speeches of conservative politicians.
Yet this is part of a continuum. There was a straight line from Rodney King to Katrina, and the current hysteria over the "Islamofascists" is an echo of the subconscious nightmares conjured forth in Hollywood action movies.