Colonial recursion: state categories of race and the emergence of the “Non-Western Allochthone”

Abstract

Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything but stable and self-evident. Indeed, states continuously change the number of racial categories, their labels, and methodology for classification. Yet, despite the instability that characterizes official racial classification, colonial distinctions between Western and non-Western continue to shape racial taxonomies. This article advances an analytic of recursion to explain this continuity. Recursion refers to cultural processes that sustain and reanimate colonial logics of race beyond formal colonial contexts. I highlight three processes in particular: recuperation, modification, and reinscription. I demonstrate the utility of a recursive analytic through a historical analysis of the twentieth-century emergence of the novel Dutch race category “non-western allochthone.” Examining government reports and social science research on immigrant populations, I trace how state officials and prominent social scientists drew on and recalibrated a colonial binary distinction between Europeanness/whiteness and non-Europeanness/non-whiteness to distinguish supposedly assimilable from unassimilable migrants. A recursive analysis illuminates how changes to official taxonomies do not necessarily unsettle, and may even rest on, durable colonial conceptions of race.