Language, Nation, Race

Front matter

LANGUAGE, NATION,

RACE

IN MEIJI JAPAN leoo 9 2

Part I. “pre-nation”: Linguistic Chaos

1. Competing “Languages”: “Sound” in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan

2. Sound, Scripts, and Styles: Kanbun kundokutai and the National Language Reforms of 1880s Japan

3. Zoku as Aesthetic Criterion: Reforms for Poetry and Prose

PART II. RACE AND LANGUAGE REFORM 4. Racializing the National Language: Ueda Kazutoshi’s Kokugo Reform

5. Tropes of Racialization in the Works of Natsume Soseki

Notes Bibliography Index

40 60

121 145 155

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I finally get to thank the many people who have supported me in various ways throughout this project. Among my colleagues at Princeton, present and past, who have given me not only a great intellectual community but also pleasurable company throughout the years, I thank Eduardo Cadava, Ksenia Chizhova, Steve Chung, Ben Elman, David Howell, Erin Huang, Paize Keulemans, David Leheny, Federico Marcon, Susan Naquin, Willard Peterson, Franz Prichard, Anna Shields, and Brian Steinenger. I'm particularly grateful to Joowon Suh for her continued friendship and support over many years. I thank Setsuko Noguchi, a friend and librarian without whom this work could not have been completed. Many of my former and current students engaged with my ideas on which this book is based: David Boyd, Will Bridges, Junnan Chen, Miyabi Goto, Claire Kaup, Jessica LeGare, Qinyuan Lei, Bernard Shee, Tomoko Slutsky, Ajjana Thairungroj, and Ron Wilson. I also thank Joseph Henares for his help in compiling the bibliography.

My mentors— Brett de Bary, Ken Ito, and Mizumura Minae—have supported me for many years. Formal and informal conversations with many colleagues were essential in bringing this project to fruition. I especially thank the many close friends in my field who have brought intellectual inspiration along with their capacity to drink pleasurably: Michael Bourdaghs, Rich Calichman, Jim Dorsey, Mayumo Inoue, Thomas LaMarre, Michele Mason, Simone Müller, Doug Slaymaker, Toba Koji, and Toeda Hirokazu. In addition to being great company, I also thank Pedro Erber for his incisive comments on my manuscript. I am also grateful to Richi Sakakibara not only for being a long-term friend but also for sharing with me the desire to continually think about what constitutes "Japan" and the "Japanese" language. I thank Jim Reichert for his professional support and for visiting New York when possible to continue our Michigan reunion.

ix

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Rethinking Asian Languages, edited by Benjamin Elman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), while a version of chapter 2 has appeared in Translation in Modern Japan, edited by Indra Levy (New York: Routledge, 2010). A small portion of chapter 5 has also appeared as “Bungakuron and ‘Literature’ in the Making,” Japan Forum 20, no. 1 (March, 2008).

Iam grateful to Reed Malcolm at the University of California Press for his enthusiasm and encouragement. I also thank Archna Patel and Enrique Ochoa-Kaup for shepherding this manuscript through. Additionally, I thank one anonymous reviewer, whose comments were extremely helpful in revising the manuscript.

Oddly enough, I feel that there is a strong affinity between this project and my family. In many ways, it is precisely how my parents raised me that shaped my interest in "Japanese" language, national community, and race. As difficult as it was growing up in different countries and being educated in multiple languages, that experience was essential for me to critically engage with “Japan,” nationalism, and linguistic modernity. I thank my sister, Tomoko, for sharing the experience with me, and for all the emotional and material support she has given me throughout the years. And I am immensely grateful to my parents, Naoharu and Yasuko Ueda, for raising me the way they did and for all the support they have continued to give me. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction

This book is about a variety of language reforms that occured in Meiji Japan (1868-1912). It is certainly not at all comprehensive, but is rather an attempt to intervene in the vast scholarship of language reform that has defined the past two decades. In thinking about linguistic reforms, it is of course vital that we consider issues of nation formation, as many scholars have done in the past. Lee Yeounsuk, Komori Yoichi, Yasuda Toshiaki, and Osa Shizue all published works in the 1990s and beyond, and to this day their works define the field of language reform.’ It is not a coincidence that with the proliferation of postcolonial and nationalization theories in the 1990s, scholarship began to adopt a new focus with regard to the production of national language and its ideological implications. Many works, engaging with Michel Foucaults theory of systems of power and governmentality, began to focus on the structure of violence constitutive of any nation within which the construction of language, especially national language, played an integral role.” These texts have produced fruitful analyses that rewrite the somewhat facile teleological narrative of modernization and vernacularization that shaped previous scholarship, as represented by the monumental works of Yamamoto Masahide from the 1960s.

The trend of postcolonial and cultural studies, accompanied by various studies of imperialism and nationalism, is worthy of reflection, as it extends far beyond the scholarship of Meiji language reform. As early as 2000, scholars such as Harry Harootunian issued an apt warning regarding the link between postcolonialism and area studies. In his Historys Disquiet, Harootunian discusses the trap of postcolonial theory as follows:

Postcolonial theory’s promise to supply a critique of Eurocentric conceptions of knowledge and provide a forum for the hitherto excluded to speak in their own voice from the margins where domination and power had held them silent since the beginning of modernity—now reread as colonialism— stands as the true successor of area studies, which can be seen as their prehistory. Yet the search for the excluded voice often leads to the futile pursuit of authenticity and restores the Eurocentric claims of the sovereign subject it wishes to eliminate.

Elsewhere, he also states:

Rather this obsessive Foucauldianism has often found power everywhere, as well as an opportunity for resistance everywhere. Too often this has resulted in lavish declarations of resistance by the powerless and weak. . .. Sometimes, the mere enunciation of cultural difference and thus the claim of identity is made to appear as an important political act when it usually signals the disappearance of politics. The politics of identity based on the enunciation of cultural difference is not the same as political identity whose formation depends less on declarations of differences than on some recognition of equivalencies.

What Harootunian incisively demonstrates here is that what began as a critical examination of the ideological nature of knowledge produced in area studies turned into something slightly but crucially different. Postcolonialism and cultural studies instead discovered a new space that worked to relieve the frustrations that many felt about the Eurocentric tendency of theoretical discourse. As a result, focus shifted to the recovery of the voices of those unjustly oppressed. This resulted in a scholarly surge toward identity politics, which, despite its historical importance, contains an intrinsic trap. The discourse of identity inherits the culturalism inscribed in area studies—one that postcolonial studies and cultural studies set out to criticize in the first place. In other words, scholars tend to seek out unique voices of the oppressed, and as such end up essentializing identity— whether this be the identity of the subaltern or the oppressed non-West. Furthermore, what is symptomatic of such trends is a naive opposition posed between the oppressor and the oppressed. The desire to give voice to the oppressed, however just and moral it may sound, tends to demonize the oppressors operating within the system of authority. I of course understand this sentiment, but demonizing these figures ultimately attributes an excess of power to them, reifying the very thing that it seeks to undermine. I am entirely sympathetic with such desires, but Ialso want to be vigilant against inadvertently strengthening the systems that we attempt to criticize.

I raise this issue in order to reflect on the ways in which the “nation,” a structure of modernity within which we live, has been approached by scholarship in the past two decades. It is nota coincidence that the nationalism studies that have shaped our scholarship since the 1990s grew alongside postcolonial and cultural studies that focused—rightly or wrongly—on systems of power, as embodied by the "nation? A tremendous amount of work has been produced engaging with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, coupled with Foucault's many theorizations of systems of power as inscribed in the institutions of the modern nation.* I of course believe that a nation is a system of violence, and it is imperative that we explore the ways in which such violence is implemented. We must, however, be mindful of the implications of this scholarly trend. The inextricable relationship between such works and the rise of postcolonialsm and cultural studies in our field is one that requires attention, for here too we find signs of Harootunian’s warning. The systems of power that Foucault delineates are structural, and by no means offer a space outside of which subjects can exist. But here again the desire to give voice to the oppressed, in this case minorities who are excluded from the so-called “authentic citizens” of the nation—oppressed by such factors as class, ethnicity, and gender—leads to the excessive attribution of power to the very thing that it seeks to undermine. It is one thing to expose the ideological structure by which the nation sustains itself. But it is quite another to suggest that such awareness can open up a space in which oppressed voices can be redeemed and given their rightful, “equal” status.

National language scholarship of the 1990s was not free of this trap. This is apparent in the focus on Ueda Kazutoshi, the “founder” of kokugo (national language) and father of Japanese linguistics, who trained many of the scholars who went on to institute language reforms in Japan's colonies. Here Ueda is situated as an evil nationalist/imperialist whose project entailed the oppression of local dialects and colonized subjects—as for example Okinawans, Ainu, Koreans, and Taiwanese.”

I do not doubt that these minorities and their languages were oppressed in light of Uedas kokugo reform, which sought to produce a standardized language shared by the occupants of “Japan” and its empire. And it is certainly important to study these “minority” languages that are too often disregarded. But what we must pay attention to is precisely what the scholarship that demonizes Ueda takes for granted, which ultimately contributes to the oppression of these minority voices. For example, binary thinking of oppressor and oppressed makes us lose sight of the fact that a nation, in order to sustain itself, needs minorities. That is to say, no one is inherently an “authentic citizen.” Such a fictive group—in Japan’s case, yamato minzoku—needs to be constantly fabricated, marking and remarking boundaries between self and other. Yamato minzoku does not exist. It is only through the constant reproduction of minorities that such “authentic citizens” can be sustained. Authentic citizens, in other words, can only be defined by the various minorities that make them "authentic? Structurally speaking, anyone can be designated a minority, as anyone is prone to markers of difference. Just as no one is inherently an “authentic citizen,’ no one is inherently a minority. In effect, the facile binary of oppressor and oppressed cannot sustain itself, as one is invariably defined and contaminated by the other. And to valorize minority identities without critically understanding this system can only reinforce the system that is the nation.

What I want to call attention to is that studies of identity politics, in having recourse to so-called "exteriorities" of Japan (Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, etc.), perhaps too hastily conceive of the notion of Japanese exteriority. Such research is absolutely crucial in relativizing Japan's claims of national sovereignty, and must be supported. At the same time, however, without first reflecting on what it means to be “outside” Japan, one runs the risk of repeating the traditional conception of what belongs within and without the nation. This tendency, I believe, is of a piece with those traditional notions of nationalism that privilege national “interiority’— that is, yamato minzoku. In other words, unless one reflects on what it means to be outside Japan, one risks reifying the notion of Japanese interiority. In this sense, ironically, certain forms of identity politics may ultimately be seen as complicit with a very traditional notion of nationalism. I would like to problematize the very notion of national interiority and exteriority. In my view, a certain exteriority of Japan can be seen within "Japan" itself. This integral relationship between the majority and minority is a crucial one that I will develop further in the discussion of race later in this introduction.

In this book, I make interventions in these scholarly trends from two different angles, coinciding with the two parts of this volume. The first part, entitled "Pre-Nation: Linguistic Chaos,” examines the first two decades of the Meiji period prior to the emergence of Ueda Kazutoshi, with a specific focus on the chaotic nature of language reforms. What is symptomatic of the scholarship that focuses on Ueda is that the "nation" appears to preexist the nation. In the effort to condemn the nation and its creators, the nation is posited as a preexisting telos to which the leaders aspired, as it focuses on the production of an ideologically-charged “national language" (kokugo), which forcefully excludes or assimilates otherwise heterogeneous languages. The following passage by Yasuda Toshiaki captures the trend most clearly:

The construction of ‘language’ in the modern sense is a political process. When the nation-state is established and "linguistic modernity' emerges together with the awareness of the role language plays within it, the vernacular language is molded as ‘kokugo; which is a process that is often considered a national development toward progress. ‘Kokugo’ is then deemed homogeneous; it begins to embody the institutions (such as law, education, military and media) that consolidate the kokumin (there are many efforts to organize such consolidation), exerting its power on ‘dialects’ and other non-national languages that were unable to attain the status of kokugo. It is possible to say that such a scheme appears in any nation when the modern nation-state is formed. (I have inserted scare quotes around concepts that are constructed).?

Yasuda appears conscientious when making his parenthetical remarks about key concepts such as “kokugo” and “dialects” being constructs. But in his and similar accounts, the process of said construction is predetermined by that of nationalization, which "appears in any nation when the modern nation-state is formed": the “vernacular” becomes “kokugo,’ consolidating the national community, which then begins to exert power on “dialects and other non-national languages? In effect, he logically posits the nation as a preexisting entity. In large part, the scholarly trend of which Yasuda is an example reflects the notion of “imagined communities" put forth by Benedict Anderson, who theorized the ideological formation of the nation-state in which the production of “national language” played a significant part. 1990s Japanese scholarship appropriated this theory, producing a teleological narrative that posits the “national language” of the imagined nation as the putative telos, often producing an inverted narrative that figures the nation as the entity that inspired the movement that created it. Of course, scholars are aware that the “nation” is created or imagined. But the movement toward the nation is not at all questioned. In such a paradigm, which can be seen in some works more than in others, the urge to nationalize is deemed the primary cause of change.9 The formulaic discussions that seemingly trace the nation-building process often end up self-fulfilling prophecies.

What is important is that the language reformers of the first few decades of the Meiji period did not yet know what the “nation” was. Given that the nation is assumed, however, the many reforms that preceded those of Ueda are situated in scholarship as a preparatory phase.” At the core of Meiji discursive space is a very simple yet often forgotten linguistic condition: the Meiji literati did not have a shared notion of “the language we speak” that helped to constitute an imagined national community, nor a shared notion that “the language we speak” was indeed their goal. What I seek to highlight in this part of the book is precisely this lack of a goal. In so doing, I seek to liberate the discussion of linguistic reform from the “national” so as to analyze how the “national” itself became possible.

Such perspective is important for several reasons. The first is to reevaluate the role of kan in the production of linguistic modernity. Recent scholarly focus on the nation aligns with an urge to emphasize the de-Sinification of the “Japanese” language. More often than not, these scholars construe kan—be it kanji, kanbun, or kangaku—as a manifestation of “China,” for “Asia” to be left behind in Japan’s efforts at modernization.” As such, scholars treat kan as a negative reference point against which to posit a new “national” form of prose. Of course it is true that many Meiji intellectuals designated kan as the other to the modern, but that certainly does not mean that kan was not appropriated.

This is not to say that all forms of kanbun have been undervalued in recent scholarship. The importance of kanbun kundokutai (kanbun in “Japanese” or local syntax), for example, has been emphasized by many scholars, especially those who have focused on its role in the political arena, as well as its crucial role in translations of Western philosophy and materials.” Interestingly, however, some of the same critics who see the importance of kanbun kundokutai take up the Meiji intellectuals’ claims for de-Sinification and uncritically link these to colonialist/ imperialist tendencies. These critics call such acts manifestations of the “colonial unconscious,’ which refers to the act of seeking out “Asia” as the “more barbaric other" in the urge to “identify with the West?’ The aim of this argument is to criticize Meiji intellectuals for their imperialist tendencies—an important aim, certainly—but such an argument tends to identify kanbun as “Asian, thereby essentializing the process of de-Sinification. Such overemphasis on de-Sinification conceals the critical role that kan indeed played in the production of a new language. Much work has been done recently by scholars, such as the literary critic Saito Mareshi, to reassess the importance of kan in the Meiji period, and my study clearly follows this trend.“

In discussing the linguistic reform movements of the Meiji period, the use of the categories “Chinese” and “Japanese,” terms which in our vocabulary designate “national” languages, is quite problematic. Given that we are dealing with a time when the “national” had yet to take form, these categories appear anachronistic. This is especially true when we translate. Kanji, kanbun, and kangaku are often translated as “Chinese” characters, “Chinese” writing, and “Chinese” classics, but such regionally and culturally specific designations, in our post-national age, seem to indicate that kanji, kanbun, and kangaku all belong to this entity called “China” and are hence “foreign” (indicating that they are merely “borrowed”). The designation “Japanese” for such words as kokubun (“Japanese” writing), kokugo (the “Japanese” language), and kundoku (the reading of kanbun in “Japanese” syntax and with “Japanese” suffixes) must also be used with caution, as it, too, assumes an “untainted” realm of “Japanese,” a rhetoric that many Meiji intellectuals used when they suddenly discovered that their language was “tainted” by “Chinese.” As painful as this may be for readers, I will retain the original terms without translating them to avoid the anachronism, and will qualify every translation of “Chinese” and “Japanese” when I need to revert to them.

In Part I, I also seek to shed light on the epistemological shift that occurred in the understanding of language (gengo), especially in its relationship to literature (bungaku), a shift that has yet to be addressed in any significant way. Scholars of national language have stressed that there was no unified sense of “the language we speak,” focusing instead on how such language came into being. What they fail to note is that the category of gengo, the equivalent of what we now call “language,” had yet to be discovered in the early Meiji period. Bungaku, or what we translate as “literature” today, constituted “language”; it is thus not a coincidence that kokugo textbooks featured literary histories.’ In discussing gengo and bungaku, contemporary scholars tend to impose current notions of “language” and “literature” onto their supposed Meiji equivalents, unable to challenge such categories.

Take, for example, the following passage where Lee Yeounsuk describes the efforts of scholars of kokubungaku (national literature):

In such efforts, [scholars] did not adhere to the ideals of genbun’itchi, according to which the written language was to be unified with the spoken language. This signifies that kokugo was still subjugated to kokubun. Even Sekine Masanao, who argued that ‘today’s commonly used language’ was the ‘core of kokugo; stated that the purpose of ‘kokugo study’ was to ‘standardize a kokubun of authentic elegance: This was because he, too, could not see the clear boundaries between kokugo and kokubun. For this hurdle to be overcome, we had to wait for Ueda Kazutoshi.'®

I owe a great deal to Lee’s work, and among the national language scholars of the 1990s, she is perhaps the most sensitive and insightful. However, Lee here resorts to a retrospective narrative and posits a division between kokubun and kokugo that had yet to exist at that time. She faults Sekine for not being able to see the boundaries between kokugo and kokubun, but such a view is contingent upon the production of kokugo as an independent entity from kokubun. Only when we recognize the existence of kokugo as an entity separate from kokubun can we say that it was subjugated to kokubun.

Lee then credits Ueda for going beyond bungaku = "language; the idea to which kokubun scholars were bound. She naturally assumes that Ueda, when he introduced the division between kokugo and kokubun, produced gengo as "language.’ This is a process that she traces back to his encounter with the theories of Bopp and Schlegel. Here Ueda claims, "Schlegel mixes literature and history in his study of gengo, but Bopp goes against such tendencies and studies gengo itself, offering a dry but clear explanation?” In essence, at the core of Lees understanding is the idea that gengo is langue (in the Saussurian sense); that bungaku is one manifestation of it; and that it was Ueda who was able to finally see this difference. As we shall see in detail in chapter 4, however, Ueda's use of gengo and bungaku does not coincide with Lees understanding. For Ueda, kokugo was equivalent to the language of “voice,” and bungaku or kokubun was equivalent to the language of moji (letters). In other words, for Ueda, gengo (kokugo) and moji (kokubun) constituted two separate modes of expression, one via voice and the other via letters.

Both kokubun and kokugo, and hence the understanding of “language” and “literature,” constituted something entirely different from what they mean in our current interpretive scheme. This difference is too often glossed over in a narrative that focuses on the processes of nationalization, which posits kokugo as an entity that developmentally emerged from the kokubun movement (given the attention to the establishment of the shared sense of nation). An examination of the Meiji period language reform betrays the fact that our perception of "language" and “literature" is quite limiting. Inscribed in the many arguments for reform, especially those in the early Meiji period, are various "languages" that are incompatible with our own. I seek to underscore such paradigms while paying attention to the categories of "language" and “literature.”

With such aims in mind, the first three chapters examine the linguistic terrain that historically preceded the Ueda-led kokugo reforms. My first chapter analyzes calls for a different orthography, such as the adoption of indigenous syllabic scripts (kana), the use of the Roman alphabet, the rejection of kanji characters, and the call to adopt the English language. This chapter seeks to highlight the competing "languages" inscribed in the claims for a different orthography that formed the discursive space of the 1870s. The second chapter looks at the early to mid 1880s, with a special focus on kanbun kundokutai, the main style of language of the intelligentsia at the time, a form that enjoyed the status of “common language"

(or futsübun). I analyze the many arguments against kanbun kundokutai and the seemingly contradictory proliferation of the same style, and argue that it was precisely the proliferation of this style that opened up a space for kokugo to later claim. The third chapter examines the realm of zoku (often translated as the “vernacular”), with a specific focus on the intersection of prose and poetry. The late 1880s and early 1890s featured an increasing focus on zoku both by fiction writers and national literature scholars, a tendency that is often integrated in the teleological narrative of kokugo, given the appearance of kokugo as reflecting a “populist” choice. I show that zoku was in fact an aesthetic category for these groups of writers and that it was mobilized in ways that did not signify the vernacularization of language.

In Part II of the book, entitled “Race and Language Reform,” I address one major issue that has not been studied in the prior scholarship on language reform: race. Meiji was a race war. And it is crucial to inscribe race in our examination, since no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without race.

When Japan entered the world order in the nineteenth century, the world was of course already racialized. Most importantly, this racialized world order was considered “scientific knowledge.” It is not a coincidence that Japanese intellectuals began to obsessively translate world maps early in the Meiji period to disseminate this form of “knowledge” Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Sekai kunizukushi (The Countries of the World, 1869) and Uchida Masaos Yochi shiryaku (An Abriged Account of the World, 1870) were two prominent texts that were used as school textbooks to teach world geography and disseminate the mode of categorization of the world inscribed within it. Relying heavily on Social Darwinian rhetoric, these texts designated Europe as the center of enlightenment and the most “civilized” geographical region, while portraying Africa and such Asian countries as India as full of ignorant “barbaric” people. Japan, in this framework, was designated as "half-civilized?'*

It was within such a worldview that Japan was forced to identify itself. In short, Japans relationship with the West and hence the modern is always already a racialized relationship, one that necessitated a process of self-colonization, which manifests itself as an urge to become the West. But this desire to become the West can only be frustrated, as the West is never fully accessible. How can this frustration be alleviated? Only through emulating the model that is the West and becoming a colonizer. Japan was one such example, and such actions are inscribed in Ueda Kazutoshi's language reform. Introducing race in the second part of this book thus presents a critical foundation through which nationalism and imperialism operated. The choices Ueda made, for example, were integral to such structure. In this way I will further complicate the imperialist nationalist narrative that envelops the scholarship on language reform.

It is curious that scholars of nationalization do not touch upon race, as race scholars have repeatedly shown the slippery slope that exists between nationalism and racism. At the same time, however, lack of references to race in Japan studies is not limited to the scholarship of language reform. Of course, race has been problematized in Japanese literary studies, but it is typically through the representation of “blackness” or “whiteness” in modern Japanese media such as literature, film, or visual culture. While such works have reinscribed race in an otherwise silent scholarly realm, they in many cases do not avoid the trap of biologism precisely because they typically take as their object the physical skin color of a character. When we think of modern Japanese literary studies, many scholars have discussed Japanese imperialism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, but it is very rare to discuss race. Of course there are definite exceptions—Naoki Sakai, for example, has consistently written on race. I would like to follow his lead and try to inscribe race in places that are not often discussed.

As Sakai has pointed out very succinctly in an essay entitled “Reishizumu sutadizu e no shiza" (“Perspectives on Racism Studies"), racialization needs to be understood as a system of social categorization by which a given individual's physical traits, chosen selectively yet dogmatically, define his/her place in the community to which he/she belongs.” Race, in other words, is fabricated—in the double sense of deception and construction. It is imagined or constructed and yet appears to be real, as if it existed somewhere. “Whiteness,” for example, only appears to exist and is in fact constructed as an object of desire, a vehicle for belonging to the most “civilized” community by which the modern order is defined. It is important to keep in mind that indexes of identity, such as the national community, national language, or race, must be constantly reconstructed. As with the notion of "authentic citizens" I discussed earlier, the boundaries that determine the indexes of identity are constantly in flux, and hence in need of repeated reinforcement. Furthermore, any index of identity is in itself insufficient; it needs to depend upon other indexes in order to be what it is. In effect, race is not something that can be separated from the categories of ethnicity or nationality. It is impossible to say that race is biological or physical, that ethnicity is cultural, and that nationality is political, despite the fact that many scholars have attempted to distinguish these categories.” These notions are all conflated, contaminated, and mutually invasive. The basic premise of this gesture to inscribe race in Japan studies is that racism is integral to our understanding of modernity, with all its slippages into ethnocentrism and nationalism. It is crucial to note that my primary interest is in the process of racialization, which occurs discursively in realms that on the surface appear to have nothing to do with race. As Balibar reminds us: "racism has nothing to do with the existence of objective biological ‘races?”™