This special issue interrogates race through the lens of face. Its central faces are those in forensic settings. Promising immediate legibility and access to the individual suspect, forensic faces nevertheless mobilize a variety of collectives. We offer conceptual and methodological tools to examine the face as both an individual and a collective phenomenon, and demonstrate through detailed cases how the face thus allows us to address the absent presence of race. Given its long and convoluted history in physical anthropology, as a marker of racial typology, the face forces us to reckon with colonial histories of ordering human difference. But the face also allows us to question a regime of visuality that congeals around the face in Western culture. In this introduction to The Politics of Face and the Trouble with Race we elaborate these concerns and introduce the contributions to this volume.

中文翻译：

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面子政治和种族问题：探索法医实践中个人与集体之间的关系。

本期特刊通过面孔镜头审视种族。它的中心面孔是法医环境中的面孔。法医面孔承诺立即清晰可辨并能够接触到嫌疑人个人，但它仍然动员了各种集体。我们提供概念和方法论工具来检验面部作为个体和集体现象，并通过详细的案例展示面部如何让我们解决种族的缺失问题。鉴于其在体质人类学中漫长而复杂的历史，作为种族类型学的标志，面孔迫使我们思考整理人类差异的殖民历史。但面部也让我们对西方文化中围绕面部的视觉体系提出质疑。在《面子政治和种族问题》的简介中，我们详细阐述了这些问题，并介绍了对本书的贡献。