Locating invisible privilege in Asia: Conceptual travel and contextual significance

Abstract

This article that forms part of a Special Section on ‘Invisible Privilege in Asia’ is committed to expanding the theoretical debates in race and ethnic studies, which has been previously critiqued as a field that has focused more on the gathering of empirical observations than the development of theory. This critique is even more pronounced within the realm of studying race and ethnicity in Asia, where research is often siloed within the contexts of national boundaries and area studies. While national, sub-regional and other specificities exist, here we provide a framework that identifies particular practices and structural processes that are best understood as indicative of a form of invisible, or latent ‘privilege’. In paying attention to the geographical and historical specificities of how privilege functions, this article seeks not to uncritically impose a definition, but understand how and when ‘privilege’ provides a useful analytical framework in the absence of, or in collusion with, other explanatory mechanisms. In doing so, this introduction speaks back to the Western-centric conceptual landscape that sociology as a discipline tends to draw from.