“Drawing on thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Fred Ho, Hannah Arendt, Michael Omi, and Howard Winant, Fred Lee explores a rich archive of racial struggles ranging from Indian removal to Japanese internment, from the civil rights movement to red power on Alcatraz Island to Asian-American activists at the International Hotel. His book is a timely reminder that even in the most perilous of times, the extraordinary is always latent within ordinary U.S. racial politics.”—Cristina Beltrán, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

“With unusual elegance and perspicacity, Fred Lee’s Extraordinary Racial Politics challenges familiar accounts of racial continuity and change in American politics. Courageously forging new ground between ethnic studies and political theory, Lee challenges readers to reaffirm and remember our capacity for extraordinary politics as integral for revitalizing collective political belonging in the most profound sense of what we can and could be. Extraordinary Racial Politics will be of vital interest to all seeking to come to terms with the compulsive idiosyncrasies of racial politics in our own dark times."—Edmund Fong, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Utah and author of American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race: Multicultural Exorcisms