Racial inquiries

Law and the political visibility of racism in the Air India inquiry

Bibliographic Data

ID18973155
AuthorsBonar Buffam (0000-0002-6690-4956, UBC Okanagan Campus, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume27
Issue4
Pages385-402
Publication date2020-07-03
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIdentities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1070-289X • E-ISSN: 1547-3384
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1070289x.2019.1600312
OpenAlexW2926928855
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited28

Critical race scholarship has effectively documented how the legal institutions of liberal democratic states figure as both mechanisms of systemic racism and avenues of redress against these forms of power. This article offers new insights into the racial effects of these legal institutions by examining the epistemic dynamics of a Canadian public inquiry that was tasked with investigating why state institutions failed to prevent and successfully prosecute the bombings of two Air India flights, which investigators attributed to Sikh nationalist groups operating in Canada. Through a discourse analysis of documents generated during the inquiry, I track how its complex epistemic dynamics precluded recognition of the racial effects of Canadian state institutions. Approaching the inquiry as an instrument of juridical knowledge production and mechanism of political accountability, this article tracks the contingent processes through which liberal epistemologies of race are validated by state actors to extend race’s systemic conditions of existence

Accountability · Critical race theory · Democracy · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Racism · Redress · Scholarship · Sociology · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Race, History, and American Society

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