A formidable critical project on the limits of antiracist philosophy.

Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism.

"An undertaking to provide a critical philosophical grounding to the claim of racial pessimism. Key to her argument is that core enlightenment and postenlightenment commitments to equality, anti-essentialism, openness, and relationality is a constitutive antiblackness." - Ethnic and Racial Studies

"The extreme finesse of these analyses comes to deeply disturb the satisfied certainty of radical thought in its emancipatory scope, by underlining the intrinsic violence that it contains." - Hegelian Bulletin