Description

Dying Planet, Deadly People: “Race”-Sex Anxieties and Alternative Globalizations

This article presents an antiracist critique of recent calls by social justice advocates for the realization of “alternative” globalizations. It engages cultural analysis to examine the work of “race”-racism in constitutions of one popularly touted “alternative” globalization model, global environmentalism. Employing analytical frameworks developed in postcolonial and Cultural Studies, the author identifies some of the ways in which some celebrated configurations of global environmentalisms assume a cultural logic that privileges whiteness and racial hierarchy through the deployment of “race”-based anxieties about sex. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which these anxieties are collaboratively circulated and reproduced in discourses on overpopulation, environmental degradation, and, in the aftermath of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, national security.

global environmentalism and racism, elite concerns about overpopulation, environmental degradation, September 11, “race”-based anxieties about sex and sexuality, colonialism”

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005): 69-86