The Sociology Research Forum hosts Dr. Anna Skarpelis for her talk titled, “Race in Parentheses.”
Abstract: What do we talk about when we don’t talk about race? France famously eschews mention of race or ethnicity in official statistics; Germany confines race talk to the Nazi dictatorship; and Japan has trouble officially accounting for the racialized dimensions of its colonial empire. Social sciences and humanities offer a treasure trove of theories and approaches to engage with absences, erasure, and things that cannot be said, often due to racialized power struggles: Agnatology, epistemicide, the sociology of the unmarked, ghostly haunting (Avery Gordon) and the cunning of imperialist reason (Bourdieu & Wacquant). However, these five approaches 1) rarely connect and systematically compare different forms of theorizing absence, and 2) cannot account for several crucial cases. This article draws on “race” in Japan and in Germany as crucial cases only partially explained by the above approaches. I develop four concepts emergent from the empirical cases: linguistic subterfuge, the logic of parentheses, untranslatables, and conceptual graveyards. The article then situates these concepts in relation to the existing frameworks and theories. By doing this, I hope to contribute to building comparative sociological theory that more granularly describes and explains different forms of erasure, bracketing, and absence.
Dr. Anna Skarpelis
Anna Skarpelis Bio:
Dr. Anna Skarpelis
Anna is a cultural and comparative-historical sociologist applying qualitative and computational methods in her research on racialized authoritarianism, subjectification and the transformation of large scale institutions (such as citizenship and the welfare state).
She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University, where she co-organizes Michèle Lamont’s Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. She received her Ph.D. from the department of sociology at New York University under the supervision of Jeff Manza, Craig Calhoun, David Garland, Ann Morning and Sheldon Garon.
