The Concept of Race and Critical Discourse Studies in Contemporary Western Historiography

The concepts of race and racism are widely discussed in contemporary postcolonial studies and cultural anthropology. However, the intellectual context of their functioning rarely attracts the attention of researchers. The article attempts to outline the transformation of the meaning of the concept of race in the 1950-2000s in the context of the rejection of the Marxist concept of class struggle and the victory of identity politics, which assume the inevitability of cultural differences. As studies by D. Block, S.M. Guillem, G. Erikson and a number of other supporters of critical discourse analysis show, neoliberalism changes the context of perception of the concepts of race and class in the 2000s, contributing to their unreflected internalization through the standardization of the cliches of “our" and “heir". In the 1950-60s these concepts largely referred to the problems of social injustice and the critique of capitalism in the modern era, the discourse of identity puts such connotations out of the equation, replacing them with the illusion of cultural diversity and promises of inclusiveness.