The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era (review)

Roopali Mukherjee's study of race, discourse, and public institutions is a thought-provoking addition to the field of critical race theory. From a historical perspective, Mukherjee connects social changes and developments in public policy from the 1960s to the neoliberal fervor around racial identity in the 1990s. The author borrows her title from Michel Foucault's influential The Order of Things, a history of the way knowledge is structured and produced, and carries out a similar analysis of contemporary racial politics. In addition to bridging two eras crucial to contemporary racial politics, Mukherjee's work does a close study of the way race was strategically deployed by political and cinematic institutions across the ideological spectrum in the 1990s, performing what the author calls a "cross-pollination" of two fields to understand the contemporary move towards neoliberalism (87). Mukherjee's analysis moves the discussion of race and identity away from trying to ask "what race is" and towards "what race does," revealing important ways identity has been related to the circulation of both knowledge and power in American culture.

Mukherjee's first chapter, "Race, Gender, and the Constitution of Subjects," explores the imagery associated with race in public policy and affirmative action debates of the 1990s. Mukherjee investigates the "protagonists" and "antagonists" within narratives constructed around race in 1990s policy debates, using the "model majority" of white women as her primary example. Similar to the "model minority" category often applied to East and South Asian immigrants, "model majority" as applied to successful white women describes a population that has succeeded, despite hardship, without government or state assistance (46). As these allegedly independently successful white women allied themselves with white men in anti-affirmative action movements such as Washington's 1998 Initiative 200 campaign, they ironically ignored the historical influence affirmative action had on their positions and called attention away from the experiences of working class women of color.

Mukherjee argues that campaigns for affirmative action mobilized equally problematic associations of gender, class, and economic opportunity. Subversive women such as Ellen Degeneres and Candice Bergen voiced support for affirmative action, while commercials such as the famous Stop Prop 209 "stripper ad" claimed that disabling affirmative action would force disenfranchised women to resort to sex work for survival. Mukherjee points out that both of these tactics missed the target audience of middle-class white women by creating a kind of "freak show" of radical and scandalous women, rather than constructively addressing the benefits of affirmative action on the lives of everyday women (58). The depictions of these "everyday women" in anti-affirmative action advertisements focused primarily on white working-class women who were denied access to education or benefits because of racial quota systems; the blame, Mukherjee contends, was subsequently placed upon minority women, the so-called "quota queens," who undeservingly took away jobs from the truly needy. Calling upon older stereotypes of black and Latina women unfairly milking the state for benefits, these ads, combined with the support of conservative successful black politicians and businesspeople, revealed a deepening neoliberal distrust for government-funded assistance and a valorization of individual effort as a means to financial success.

Mukherjee traces the emphasis on the individual at the expense of the collective in both public policy and cinematic discourses in her second chapter, "The Affirmative Action Film of the Nineties: Hollywood Cinema as Racial Regime." Mukherjee's analysis zeroes in on the race and gender conflicts stemming from the "cultural imaginaries of work and workplace" from mainstream films of the 1990s (87). The dynamics of what Mukherjee terms the "affirmative action" film focus on a female protagonist who must battle gender-based obstacles within primarily white male workplaces, and these films manage to turn white male fear of reverse discrimination into the new "social problem" of the 90s. Mukherjee argues that the replacement of the minority worker with the powerful woman is a form...