Description
Book SynopsisThe Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo draws on the resources of Merleau-Ponty to show how the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the subtle but more fundamental workings of racism--to catch its insidious, gestural expressions, as well as its habitual modes of racialized perception. Racism, as Ngo argues, is equally expressed through bodily habits, which, once reformulated, raises important ethical questions regarding the responsibility for one's racist habits. Ngo then/also considers what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches us about the nature of embodied and socially-situated being, arguing that racialized embodiment problematizes and extends existing accounts of embodied experience, and calls into question dominant philosophical paradigms of the self as coherent, fluid, and synchronous. Drawing on thinkers such as Fanon, she argues that the racia
Trade ReviewHelen Ngo has written a thought-provoking and highly engaging book. She weaves together, in careful and astute readings, the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger with recent phenomenologically-oriented work in philosophy of race, in particular Linda Martín Alcoff's, George Yancy's, and my own work. Her account of habit as holding and held, her critical reformulation of 'sedimentation' as active receptivity, and her theorization of the bodily work, stress and affectivity of managing and anticipating racialization are keen analyses that take phenomenology of race—and phenomenology more generally—further and open up new and exciting spaces for thinking. -- Alia Al-Saji, McGill University
Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Racist Habits: Bodily Gesture, Perception, and Orientation Chapter Two: The Lived Experience of Racism and Racialized Embodiment Chapter Three: Die Unheimlichkeit: The Racialized Body not-at-Home Chapter Four: Racism's Gaze: Between Sartre's Being-Object and Merleau-Ponty's Intertwining Conclusion
