by Alana Lentin
Pluto Press
5/20/2025, paperback
SKU: 9780745347967
In the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, 'anti-wokeness is the perfect example of the functioning of the racial regime.' Taking the reader beyond the distracting framings of culture wars and moral panics, Alana Lentin shows how the attacks on Black, Indigenous and anticolonial thought and praxis reveal the processes through which racial colonial rule is ideologically resecured.
The often chaotic and contradictory restitching of the racial regime is traced through the attacks on Critical Race Theory; the 'whitelash' against the teaching of histories of slavery and colonialism; the counterinsurgent capture and institutionalisation of antiracism, Indigeneity and decoloniality in the interests of Zionism, settler colonialism, and imperialism; and the ways that the state mandated 'war on antisemitism' reforms white supremacism in a time of genocide.
While the racial regime undergoes constant recalibration, its inherent instability is the consequence of continual resistance from below. Maintaining and deepening that resistance is vital at a time of rapidly mounting fascism.
Reviews:
"What an extraordinarily instructive and timely book! Again and again, The New Racial Regime reveals the internal logics and methods of racial regimes and how they reproduce themselves, and in turn, reproduce the cultural and governing logic of capitalism - one that extracts, exploits and subjugates. By taking up Zionism to further interrogate the racial logic of governing, Lentin demonstrates the ways in which racial regimes are indeed inventive, indispensable to capitalism, and deadly." --H.L.T. Quan, author of Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living
"Thinking through and with Cedric Robinson's framework of "racial regime", Alana Lentin offers a powerful reminder that, without an emphatic rejection of colonialism and imperialism, white supremacy, Zionism, and antiblack racial oppression will endure in our intellectual and political projects. Accessible, rigorous, and unequivocal, The New Racial Regime is the principled treatise we sorely need in this 'time of monsters.'" --Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
"With intellectual rigor and moral urgency, this book dismantles the myths of liberal progress and reveals the recalibrations of white supremacy in the modern era. Lentin's work is a valuable tool for any policy based on a genuine theory of racism." --Houria Bouteldja, author of Rednecks and Barbarians: Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class
"An extraordinary theoretical and methodological engagement with Cedric Robinson's indispensable conceptualization of "racial regimes." Simultaneously an intellectual tribute and expansive explication, The New Racial Regime works from an archival foundation of Black and Indigenous, liberationist and anti-colonialist thinkers, honing analytical tools that make sense of the ongoing racial reconstructionist moment." --Dylan Rodríguez, author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide
About the Author:
Alana Lentin is a teacher and scholar working on the critical theorisation of race, racism and anti-racism. She is a Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University and the author of Why Race Still Matters. She is a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She lives on Gadigal-Wangal land (Sydney, Australia).