When it comes to Foucault and questions of race, the critical challenge to date seems to be the ready reproach of Eurocentrism – the charge that Foucault's perspectives, derived as they are from close studies of European cultures and histories, stand negligent of other parts of the modern world. In particular, the disciplinary institutions in Europe that he analyzes with such brilliance were, chronologically speaking, evolving during the very period when European nations aggressively pursued their imperial enterprises overseas, but Foucault has not offered any analysis of such enterprises. Even as he helped popularize the important concept of heterotopia, then, Foucault has been found guilty of not being heterotopic enough. This chapter is an attempt to argue the relevance of Foucault's work to the study of race in a different manner from this justifiable, though in my view not necessarily productive, approach.

Foucauldian Discourse and Its Post-Colonial Inflection

In his critique of European imperialism, Edward Said, greatly influenced by Foucault's early work on discourse, performs the trend-setting task of mapping the systemic and structural correlations between textual formations and economical-political formations. Said's Orientalism argues that these correlations constitute a kind of material history – one based as much on representational traditions as it is on empirical invasions and annexations, a history that has contributed to the construction of the Orient as a distinct entity from the Western world and inferior to it. From the standpoint of race, Foucault's imprints on Said's seminal work are less a matter of the objects of study chosen (the texts that make reference to oriental identities and cultures) than a new, reflexive way of conceptualizing the colonial situation and its aftermath.

Judging from the regularity with which events of captivity and detention occur on the international political stage, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the theme of confinement, a hallmark of Michel Foucault's works from Madness and Civilisation (1965, 1967) and The Birth of the Clinic (1973) to Discipline and Punish (1977), has lost none of its critical relevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Indeed, in so many ways, the post 9/11 global scene only seems a fantastical set of demonstrations of Foucault's arguments about the omnipresent and omnipotent reach of technological-cum-ideological surveillance under the guises of our neo-liberal society.

Any discussion of poststructuralism will need to revisit, however briefly, the intellectual event known as structuralism. According to Michel Foucault, structuralism is about problematizing – or denaturalizing – the centrality of the human subject: “[D]uring the mid-sixties,” he said in an interview, “an entire series of intellectual figures were defined as 'structuralists' who had conducted completely different kinds of investigations, but having one point in common: the need to oppose that set of philosophical elaborations, considerations, and analyses centered essentially on the theoretical affirmation of the 'primacy of the subject.'” Foucault's remark was made with the privilege of hindsight, and what remains important to our discussion is how the structuralist method accomplishes this task that he summarizes so succinctly.

The problem of the subject is enunciated in structuralism by way of the investigation of the age-old philosophical question, meaning. To perform its tasks, structuralism specializes in isolating and articulating the synchronic organizational relations that underlie, that give coherence to, observable phenomena. To cite two common examples from linguistics and anthropology: speakers of a particular language are often able to use it fluently without being entirely conscious of the rules that inform their utterances; similarly, peoples living within particular kinship arrangements can conduct their social relations without being entirely conscious of the rules that define their customs. Structuralism, in seeking to explain how languages, kinship systems, and other such collective behaviors work, aims methodologically at uncovering the logic that holds them together despite their superficially fragmentary appearances, that makes them function systematically, as it were.