There was never anything merely black or white about brazilian notions of race and the differences attributable to it. IT IS easy to see today that the poor tend to be darker than those in the middle and upper classes and that those of darker color are most often poor. Yet there are dark-skinned persons in positions of power and prestige, and many whites live cheek by jowl with nonwhites, especially but not only in poor neighborhoods. Despite regional variations, Brazil is characterized by the complex interweaving of racial and social categories, making it hard to separate color from class as the predominant marker of differentiation. Racial identity has always been a tangled business, and in the past the existence of a finely ranked but permeable social order meant that society could absorb individual mobility without becoming egalitarian.

Over the last few decades, my work has been animated by the fundamental question, how can we make strange the universalist claims or assumptions of the epistemologies with which we work in order to reveal their cultural specificity? It is a question that also emerges in connection with modes of racialization. Thus, one should not simply compare types of racialization, as though they were commensurable, but ask what one can do to show the work these concepts perform in relation to specific histories and languages. My own familiar methods of articulating processes of racialization became thoroughly destabilized on a recent visit to India, where the functions of caste appeared to trump questions of racialization in critical discussions. But before entering this minefield of complexities and contradictions, let me summarize the previous work with which I've been associated.

How shall we face the enormous evidence of impersonation as a central cultural practice in the development of national discourses in the Americas?

It is well known that, in December 1773, a ship named Dartmouth sat idle in Boston Harbor, prevented from unloading her cargo by the governor in protest of the import tax and prevented from leaving the harbor by customs rules. As the customs period came to a close, a group of newly patriotic Bostonians came up with a plan to resolve the crisis. One historian recounts, “a chorus of Indian war whoops sounded outside the hall and a party of what looked like Indian men ran to the wharf, entered the ships, and proceeded to dump the tea in Boston Harbor” (Deloria 2). And the rest, as they say, was history: the Boston Tea Party has since functioned as favored tale of origin for American independence and national identity.

If the spate of recent publications on transnational Afro-Asian connections is any indication, we may have finally arrived at a welcome third stage of ethnic studies, one long postponed by a standoff between a multiracial model limited by a national horizon and a diasporic model that lacked a historical ground for conducting cross-racial analysis. The neo-Bandung allegiance of this Afro-Asianism—most prominent in the work of Vijay Prashad and Bill Mullen—explicitly aligns itself against the postnationalist ethos of hybridity theory and in favor of a toughened anti-imperial stance. There is much to admire about this critical turn; its increasing influence is surely a sign of our worsening times, reflected in the difference between the postsocialist euphoria of the 1990s—which projected the radicalization of democracy through the articulation of class with race, gender, and sexuality—and the return of empire and its banalization of democratic rhetoric after 9/11. Despite this Afro-Asianist project's more open recognition of the relevance of Asian embourgeoisement to its own desire for a renewed resistance politics, however, it is not yet clear whether the retrieval of Third Worldist genealogies accomplishes something more than a nostalgic response to the rise of Asian capitalism on a world scale and to the thinning claim of Asian American intellectuals to any representative function. And yet, to fulfill the originary promise of ethnic studies, which emerged out of the articulation between anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle in the late 1960s, this is what it must and should do.

The research that I reported in the darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) was driven by my desire and need to understand the opening up of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, its historical, theoretical, and political consequences. How was it that coexisting socioeconomic organizations like the Ottoman and Mughal sultanates as well as the incanate in the Andes and the tlahtoanate in the Valley of Mexico were either inferior or almost absent in the global historical picture of the time? I became aware, for example, that people in the Valley of Mexico living in the Aztec tlahtoanate, whether in conformity or dissenting, were compared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. The comparison was twofold: on the one hand, the Indians and the Jews were dirty and untrustworthy people; on the other hand, the Indians in the New World may have been part of the Jewish diaspora. So, the comparison got in trouble, because Indians and Jews may have been the same people. The Jesuit priest José de Acosta, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589), asked whether the Indians descended from the Jews, addressing a question that was on everybody's mind. He dismissed the possibility of the connection, because the Jews had had a sophisticated writing system for a long time while the Indians were illiterate (in the Western sense of the word). Jews liked money, Acosta pointed out, while Indians were not even aware of it; and while Jews took circumcision seriously, Indians had no idea of it. Last but not least, if Indians were indeed of Jewish origin, they would not have forgotten the Messiah and their religion.

Black studies is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution and on its edge; Its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth. The cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency in which the poor trouble the proper, is our open secret.

Steve Martinot argues that racism is the system and racialization “The process through which white society has constructed and co-opted differences in bodily characteristics and made them modes of hierarchical social categorizations” (180). Over half a century ago, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was so concerned about the genesis and consequence of the “process” that it issued a statement on race. Reeling from World War II, the global community saw the urgent need to put in place mechanisms for promoting global peace. The establishment of UNESCO in 1945 was aimed specifically at promoting a culture of peace. Convinced that racism and racial inequality were a root cause of the war, the authors of the UNESCO constitution (1945) condemned “the doctrine of the inequality of men and races” in the constitution's preamble. Responding to a resolution adopted by the United Nations Social and Economic Council at its sixth session in 1948, UNESCO gathered a group of experts (anthropologists and sociologists) from almost all continents (Africa was the exception) to develop for dissemination a statement on race that was based on scientific facts. The committee released a “Statement on Race” on 18 July 1950 which concludes that “there is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect of intelligence or temperament [and] the scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is much the same” (9). The statement also asserted that the “biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical and social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth” (8). The committee affirmed the universality of the “brotherhood of man” and suggested that race as a concept be replaced by “ethnic” (6). Criticism of the statement was swift and vehement. The controversy prompted UNESCO to empanel another committee to produce a second statement the following year. Over the years, other organizations, such as the American Sociological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, have issued their own statements on race.

When the murders at Virginia Tech in spring of 2007 began to be processed, by mainstream media and Asian American commentators alike, in tenuously racial terms as the un/intelligible acts of a Korean American student, Seung-hui Cho, some observers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in 2004. Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so what effect would they produce? Would they destabilize tropes of Asian American men as studious, reserved, effeminate model minorities? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun-toting, ruthless, killer Asian males, and what would be the fallout? What difference would it make to discursive homogenization that one of the killers was Hmong, a member of a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans?

I moved to Hong Kong about fourteen months ago to teach in a liberal arts university located in the new territories, on the border between Hong Kong and mainland China, about half an hour away by bus. Before coming to Hong Kong, I had taught for a few years in several American institutions, ranging from a community college to a research university. The courses I taught were mostly in Asian American literature, postcolonial literature, and Chinese literature in translation. Immersed as a graduate student and a teacher in American multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and ethnic studies, I have found a great deal of difference between the situation in Hong Kong and the social contexts of the United States and former colonial nations in South Asia, in which most ethnic, multicultural, and postcolonial theories are situated.