Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism by Jodi Melamed (review)

Moving expertly between macrocosmic historical evaluations and microcosmic analyses of literary texts and cultural artifacts, Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy is a timely and rigorous intervention into the discourse surrounding the way we have come to understand race and racism in the United States since World War II. Agreeing with previous scholars like Howard Winant that World War II marked a distinct racial break from “white supremacist modernity” in the United States, Melamed introduces a three part chronology for tracking the development of what she calls “official, state-sponsored antiracisms” during the second half of the twentieth-century. In tracing these three stages—racial liberalism (mid-1940s to 1960s), liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s)—Melamed argues that these state-sponsored “race-liberal orders,” as she calls them, have systematically disarticulated race from material conditions, thereby circumscribing the limits of racial expression and the possibilities for the elimination of racism in the United States.

These temporal frameworks provide a convenient way of conceptualizing the evolution of a variety of complex intertwined forces and their impact on the lived reality of individuals and communities, and they really never feel reductive or limiting. Melamed is clear that the date ranges are fluid, recognizing the inevitable overlap of residual and emergent orders within the same time periods. The book’s forays into literary criticism, cultural studies, critical race studies, and sociology, among other things, make it of particular interest to American Studies scholars working on race, capitalism, institutionality, and fiction in the twentieth-century. One also gets the distinct feeling that Melamed’s methodologies could be usefully brought to bear on earlier periods of American history, such as the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years.

In a fifty-page introduction, Melamed lays out the basis of her overall analysis and the framework of each of her successive chapters. At times the introduction seems repetitive, and this feeling is enhanced in later chapters, many of which repeat almost verbatim statements Melamed made earlier. While this repetition can sometimes seem unnecessary, its purpose appears evident at the end of the book. One’s mind is left indelibly imprinted with Melamed’s unique nomenclature, a familiarity with which is required in order to really conceptualize the trajectory of her arguments which are, indeed, articulating entirely novel ways of understanding something we thought we knew so much about. The deployment of so much new terminology—“race-liberal orders,” “race-radical” literary texts, her three periods of evolving race-liberal orders, and so on—is bold but essential if Melamed hopes to succeed in her project of reconceptualizing thought about U.S. racism since World War II.

Represent and Destroy makes many original claims and excavates little-recognized historical sources. Two of the most exceptional of the latter are the monumental study of mid-century racial conditions in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, founded in 1917 by a partial owner of Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Melamed 63). Melamed argues that An American Dilemma emblematizes the confluence of forces—governmental, institutional, educational, philanthropic, and social-scientific—that professionalized the study of race relations and produced the first official program for “solving” the race issue in the United States. An American Dilemma married the issues of racism and American global ascendancy, articulating the idea that the United States could find geopolitical success if it improved domestic race relations and made itself a model for the decolonizing world. Thus, significantly, Melamed points out that the issue of race relations became a means to an end in a highly politicized cold war environment, not an end in itself. An American Dilemma was prescient in its recognition that internal systemic racial discrimination would delegitimize U.S. claims to equality and equal opportunity. Indeed, as Melamed also notes, the Soviet Union would exploit U.S. hypocrisy on race relations in its anti-U.S. and anti...