The Bloody Riddle

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a central proposition of the sociology of everyday life, which is the need to think about ‘the everyday’ as a problematic historical category in its own right. Following on from this idea — that we can use the everyday to help us make sense of the bloody riddle of modernity — it argues that we need to understand, also, the ways in which the emergence of the ‘everyday’ as a category is bound to a history of empire and the formation of modern ideas of ‘race’. Drawing on evidence from the European context, it aims to show how the ‘everyday’ is racialized as it is born. The chapter ends by showing how that relationship between ‘race’ and the everyday is expressed in contemporary political agendas around security and anti-terrorism.