Book Review: Extraordinary Racial Politics: Four Events in the Informal Constitution of the United States, by Fred Lee

• Date: 01 April 2020
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719852311
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

852311PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719852311Political TheoryBook Reviews
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Book Reviews
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(2) 245 –265
Book Reviews
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Extraordinary Racial Politics: Four Events in the Informal Constitution of the United States,
by Fred Lee. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018, 240 pp.
Reviewed by: Kirstine Taylor, Political Science and Law, Justice & Culture, Ohio
University, Athens, OH, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719852311
Fred Lee’s Extraordinary Racial Politics is an exemplary piece of histori-
cally moored interdisciplinary scholarship. This carefully researched book
refocuses our gaze from longstanding processes of racial formation that pre-
occupy much of ethnic studies scholarship—the establishment of Asian “for-
eignness,” for instance, or the steadfast criminalization of blackness—and
draws our attention to historical moments in which the ordinary dynamics of
racial politics are disrupted and transformed. Lee calls these disruptions
“extraordinary racial politics” and argues that because they “rupture out of
and reset everyday racial politics,” they have the power to meaningfully
reconstitute race, nation, and the polity (2). Extraordinary Racial Politics
demonstrates that transformations in racial meaning in the United States are
indistinguishable from enactments of public freedom and order. Throughout
the book, Lee uses Hannah Arendt’s theorization of freedom and judgment
and Carl Schmitt’s theorization of sovereignty to understand how race inflects
the reconstitution of the public. This approach successfully bridges disciplin-
ary norms in ethnic studies and political theory, not only applying canonical
political theorists to issues of race but also illustrating that what we take to be
perennial questions of race and settler colonialism in the United States are
already questions of what constitutes the American public.
Lee’s central project is to conceptualize the varied ways that race, nation,
and the public are reconstituted through historical moments of rupture in the
normal, ordinary processes of racial politics in the United States. According
to Lee, these historical moments have three powers: (1) the power to disrupt
normal processes of the racial order, (2) the power to enact transformative
events, and (3) the power to constitute the racial order anew and thus recreate
ordinary racial politics. This last power hinges on Lee’s understanding of
rearticulation, a concept he borrows from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s

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Political Theory 48(2)
classic text, Racial Formation in the United States. For Omi and Winant,
rearticulation is both a practice of “discursive reorganization” of ideology
and a “process of redefinition” whereby familiar identities, interests, and sub-
jectivities are “recombined” in...