Buffer Zones: Notes on Afghanistan, Race, and Empire

This short essay traces my own path to what we might call Victorian race studies. I begin with an account of how nineteenth-century Afghanistan exceeds Said's Orientalism and the wider frames of the postcolonial. I then turn to some thoughts on how a more extensive and complex account of racialization from critical race theory might help our field confront the brutalities of white supremacy in the nineteenth century through to the present. Michel Foucault's lectures on governmentality and the biopolitical remind us that these brutalities began to structure everyday life in the nineteenth century and have become formalized and normalized institutionally into the present. The case of Afghanistan shows how re-engaging postcolonial studies through an engagement with critical race theory allows us to address more fully the historical realities of racialization and empire working in concert in the nineteenth century.