Scholars’ inverted commas around race exposed but sealed the concept

Evidence

Many a preface to an historical or sociological study of apartheid (my own included) comments on the use of racial “nomenclature.” Announcing a distaste for official apartheid racial categories, yet recognizing the impossibility of dispensing with them, many scholars have resorted to inverted commas to deal with this dilemma. But within the space of these inverted commas, the raw nerve of “race” is exposed and then sealed: on one hand, the association of racial categories with the discourse of apartheid, imposed on the country by a repressive regime, rendered them aberrant; on the other hand, these categories could not be erased since they were also (somehow) constitutive of the lived experiences of South African people. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 575

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A subtle point about how scholarly typographic hedging (inverted commas) simultaneously exposes and seals a ‘raw nerve’ concept that scholars simultaneously disavow and cannot dispense with — a genuinely nuanced observation about the materiality of analytic discourse.