Race is a term that has been shaped over time by political and cultural forces. Around it (and its companion term, ethnicity) struggles have been fought and rights debated. The essays here chronicle some of these debates, investigating along the way the relationship between equality and white supremacy, racial domination and racial desire, and the politics of ethnicity and ethnographic exploration.

Elizabeth Abel, "Shadows," Fall 2003, 84: 166-99.

Janet Adelman, "Her Father's Blood: Race, Conversation, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice," Winter 2003, 81: 4-30.

J. Jorge Klor de Alva, "Is Affirmative Action a Christian Heresy?" Summer 1996, 55: 59-73.

Herman L. Bennett, "'Sons of Adam': Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject," Fall 2005, 92: 16-41.

Stephen Best, "Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive," Winter 2010, 113: 150-163.

Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, eds., Redress, special issue, Fall 2005, number 92.

Katherine Biers, "Syncope Fever: James Weldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice," Fall 2006, 96: 99-125.

Richard H. Brodhead, "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," Winter 1988, 21: 67-96.

Christopher Bush, "The Ethnicity of Things in America's Lacquered Age," Summer 2007, 99: 74-98.

Judith Butler, "An Affirmative View," Summer 1996, 55: 74-83.

Anne Anlin Cheng, "Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility," Fall 2009, 108: 98-119.

Barbara T. Christian, "Camouflaging Race and Gender," Summer 1996, 55: 120-28.

Huey Copeland, "Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects," Winter 2011, 113: 73-110

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, "Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual," Winter 2011, 113: 1-15

James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority," Spring 1983, 2: 118-46.

Marianne Constable, "The Regents on Race and Diversity: Representations and Reflections," Summer 1996, 55: 92-97.

David Damrosch, "The Ethnic Ethnographer: Judaism in Tristes Tropiques," spring 1995, 50: 1-13.

Troy Duster, "Individual Fairness, Group Preferences, and the California Strategy," Summer 1996, 55: 41-58.

Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Literary Ellington," Winter 2002, 77: 1-29.

Michael Feher, "Empowerment Hazards: Affirmative Action, Recovery Psychology, and Identity Politics," Summer 1996, 55: 84-91.

Gabrielle P. Foreman, "'This Promiscuous Housekeeping': Death, Transgression, and Homoeroticism in Uncle Tom's Cabin," Summer 1993, 43: 51-72.

Takashi Fujitani, "Right to Kill, Right to Make Live: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During WWII," Summer 2007, 99: 13-39.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," Fall 1988, 24: 129-55.

Olakunle George, "Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman," Summer 1999, 69: 67-91.

Irene Gorak, "Enter Beadle with Whips: Pauline Smith's The Beadle and the Afrikaner as Fetish," Summer 1993, 43: 73-88.

Paul Goring, "'John Bull, pit, box and gallery, said No!': Charles Macklin and the Limits of Ethnic Resistance on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage," Summer 2002, 79: 61-81.

Janet Gray, "Passing as Fact: Mollie E. Lambert and Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert Meet as Racial Modernity Dawns," Fall 1998, 64: 41-75.

Eric Griffin, "Un-sainting James: Or, Othello and the 'Spanish Spirits' of Shakespeare's Globe," Spring 1998, 62: 58-99.

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, "Negative-Positive Truths," Winter 2011, 113: 16-38.

Martin Hall, "Heads and Tales," Spring 1996, 54: 104-23.

Eric Hayot, "Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures," Summer 2007, 99: 99-129.

David A. Hollinger, "Group Preferences, Cultural Diversity, and Social Democracy: Notes Toward a Theory of Affirmative Action," Summer 1996, 55: 31-40.