Racialised Representations and the Global South: Insights from Critical Race Studies

Explicit representations of race have played a major role in shaping world order since the era of colonialism. Although overt/explicit racisms have retreated in the wake of anti-racism advancements globally, the legacies of historical racial signification continue. Racialised representations have shifted from explicit notions of biological difference to notions of essentialised and primordialised social difference (wherein biological determinism remains implicit), employing seemingly more neutral and acceptable proxies for race, including culture’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’. Drawing insights from an eclectic body of works loosely termed ‘critical race studies’, we show how ‘racialisation’ as a representational process organises, structures and produces assumptions about race in mainstream Global North (GN) scholarly, policy and influential media representations of the Global South (GS). ‘Racialisation matters’ not because observers in the GN are necessarily racists, but because the legacies of historical racial significations are so deeply embedded structurally and institutionally. ‘Representations matter’ because they continue to inform the lived experiences of people in the GS, producing real physical effects on them as racialised subjects and on the material conditions of their existence. Revelation of the racialised dimensions of representations of the GS is necessary to reclaim the dignity, identity and agency of the racialised.