By Professor Marzia Milazzo
A study of anti-Blackness and white supremacy across four continents demonstrates a critical argument. Colorblindness is neither new nor a subtype of racist ideology. Instead, it operates as a constitutive technology of racism. In this context, Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power frames colorblindness as central to the reproduction of racial domination.
In Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy.
Reorienting the debate toward continuity rather than rupture
Professor Marzia Milazzo challenges the dominant emphasis on historical change in current racial theory. According to her, this emphasis on change obscures critical lessons from the past. Therefore, Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power reorients the debate toward continuity rather than rupture.
Milazzo brings together a capacious archive of texts on race. These texts come from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States and South Africa. They span multiple disciplines and genres. Through this material, she uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse. These continuities extend from the inception of colonial modernity to the present.
A discourse of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics
In addition, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools. These tools function as technologies and strategies. They simultaneously camouflage and reproduce white domination.
For example, she examines Rijno van der Riet’s defence of slavery in the Cape Colony. She also analyses discourses of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics. Furthermore, she considers how these discourses reverberate in contemporary scholarship. In addition, she critiques the pitfalls of white “antiracism”. She also engages with Chicana indigenist aesthetics.
Across these cases, Milazzo illustrates a consistent pattern. White people collectively disavow racism to maintain power across national boundaries. At the same time, anti-Black and colonial logics persist. They can even reappear in some decolonial literatures.
Milazzo’s study advances a clear and forceful conclusion. Colorblindness is not new. It is not a subtype of racist ideology. It also does not define only the current era. Instead, it functions as a constitutive technology of racism. It remains a tool that systems of power cannot discard. Through Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, she demonstrates how this mechanism operates across time and geography.
About the author
Marzia Milazzo is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg. Her research explores race, literature, and the global histories of racism, with particular focus on Critical Race Theory, Black radical thought and comparative studies of African American, Afro-Latin American, and South African literatures.
Her book Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power received the Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award. Before joining the University of Johannesburg, Milazzo held academic appointments in the United States and South Africa, including serving as Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University.
Born in Sicily, Italy, Milazzo’s scholarship engages with transnational histories of colonialism and race. Her work has appeared in numerous international journals and edited collections, and she serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
- PUBLISHER | UJ Press |
- ISBN | 9780906785577 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R375.00 |
- Classification | Critical Race Studies |
