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Racism is now so extensively used in polit-
ical discourse that it often gives the impression
of being a timeless universal concept. In fact,
the word did not exist in the English language
until the 1930s, and only slightly before in
German and French. Its rise coincides with
the specific context of 1930–40s Germany.
Specifically, ‘racism’ at the time was employed
as a political critique of the German biologized
understanding of race (seeholocaust). Alth-
ough the roots of the term have a much longer
and divergent history, racism as a phenomenon
was present in multiple forms before the use of
the term. Among these forms were the relational
differentiation of the Self and the Other in colo-
nial practices, in which the securing of one’s
own positive identity was formed against the
stigmatization of the inferior characteristics
(often fixed through physical or biological char-
acteristics) of an ‘Other’ (seecolonialism).
However, some critics have become wary of
understanding racism as simply biological or
physical, asserting thatcultureorethnicity
can be reified and naturalized to the point at
which they become ‘functionally’ equivalent to
biological understandings of race (Fredrickson,
2002). The idea of cultural racism was first
presented in 1952 by Frantz Fanon, who saw
the emphasis on cultural differences as a mod-
ern replacement of biologically based ideas of
different races (see Fanon, 1967 [1952]). Still
later, Martin Barker pointed to what he called
the ‘new racism’ that arose through the con-
servative political milieu in England in the late
1970s and 1980s, in which conservatives and
liberals alike would criticize biological ideas of
race only to naturalize ideas of community
and culture (Barker, 1981). Etienne Balibar
argues that this new racism ineuropeis actu-
ally ‘racism without race’, in which ideas of
immutable human difference are used to rigid-
ify racial categories or assert the impossibility
of coexistence (Balibar, 1991b, p. 23; see also
Gilroy, 2000a). This concept of the ‘new
racism’ was taken up by other writers, most
notably a group at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK,
who came to understand racism, or more
accurately racisms, as highly variable historical
formations with shifting meanings that are
temporally and spatially uneven and fiercely
contested. They, and later others, emphasized
the political importance of denying a universal
and essentialist understanding of race or
racism outside of the historically specific and
intimate contexts of their formations and prac-
tices (Hall, 1980, p. 336; Gilroy, 1987, 2000:
see also Goldberg, 1993; Stoler, 1995). Theseunderstandings of racisms as spatially and
temporally variable, lacking any thematic
unity, or that challenge intrinsic characteriza-
tions of race, have been particularly import-
ant in contemporary understandings of new
forms of biological racism such as new genetic
determinism as well as historical and cultu-
ral racism, such as post 9/11 racism towards
Muslims, and neo-nationalist projects such as
the rise ofnationalismin Europe. jkSuggested reading
Barker (1992); Fanon (1967 [1952]); Fredrickson
(2002); Gilroy (2000a); Miles (1993); Miles and
Brown (2003); Stoler (1997).radical democracy A postmodernist or
post-structuralist rethinking of modern
democratic theory and practice. It takes a
broad-ranging and flexible perspective on
citizenship, emphasizing capacities to ‘be
political’ in ademocracyrather than neces-
sarily on rights-claims or formal membership
in a polity. It challenges two popular concep-
tualizations of the citizen. Rather than locating
citizenship as oneidentityorperformance
alongside, but mutually exclusive to, others
(such as kin, worker, consumer etc.), as is
common inliberalism, or heroically elevating
it as the principal and optimal identity of the
individual, as is common incommunitarian-
ism, radical democracy rethinks citizenship as
a potential moment or dimension of any iden-
tity when it becomes politicized or contested
(Mouffe, 1993). Radical democracy is ‘radical’
because it refuses closure on the questions of
democracy everywhere, in all their forms. In
other words, it seeks to democratize all aspects
of politics, especially at sites of doxa, shared
assumptions, or where things are deemed
apolitical or pre-political
Radical democracy has important conse-
quences forpolitical geography. It has been
part of a turn towards a more encompassing
and theoretically informed way of under-
standing politics and the political. It has
helped geographers broaden their focus on
thestateand sites of politics towards loca-
tions in civil society, public space and
thehome, as well as hybrid spaces such as
theshadow state(Brown, 1997a). Barnett
(2004b) has cautioned, however, that the spa-
tial rhetoric in radical democratic theory
desensitizes us to different temporal scales so
often at work in politics. He insists that we
must pay close attention to their complexity,
or elseuniversalismwill unintentionally creep
back into our thinking.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 618 2.4.2009 9:12pmRADICAL DEMOCRACY