Race, beyond Fact and Fiction

Abstract

What is biological race and how is it made relevant in specific practices? How to address the materiality of biological race without fixing it? And how to write about it without reifying race as a singular object? These are the central questions in this short essay. Instead of debunking or trivializing biological race, it wants to attend to race and investigate how it is made relevant in practices. I am interested in what it is made to be in them. By engaging with race in practices, I want to move away from two dominant and mutually exclusive notions: race as a fact, and race as a fiction. As a contrast to these approaches I present one short case to show how race is enacted but also that it is both factual and fictional.