Discours sur le metissage, identites metisses: en quete d’Ariel (review)

Kandé, Sylvie, ed. Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses: en quête d’Ariel. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999.

Can rabbits have interracial sex? This question, posed in the title of Werner Sollors’s contribution to Discours sur le métissage, could serve as a screening question for potential readers of the book. The progressive (or politically-correct) but too-hasty reader, making the cognitive jump from rabbits to humans, might respond heatedly that yes, rabbits, like humans, should be allowed to have sex with the partner of their choice, regardless of race. But a more reflective respondent will understand that this question is as much about the definition of the term race as it is about regulating repro-duction. After all, don’t all rabbits belong to the same race (i.e. species)? Under what circumstances does it make sense to distinguish between, say, black and white rabbits? By projecting the idea of interracial sex onto rabbits, Sollors’s question acts as a kind of reductio ad absurdum encouraging us to consider the mutability and social nature of the concerns that govern racial categorization. In this way, his question opens up the problem that is at the heart of the twelve essays that make up Discours sur le métissage.