Book Review: Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race, Race, History and Culture in Western Society (original) (raw)
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Man, 1993
This article examines the way definitions of 'race' are currently constructed with reference to an opposition between nature and culture, and how these definitions often take for granted the category of 'phenotypical variation', tending to reproduce 'race' as a problematic category. The frequently drawn contrast between the USA and Latin America is then examined. This also often rests on certain assumptions about nature and culture which distort the character of the contrast.
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies, 2017
understanding biology and its tendency to view the human body as pre-programmed by genes that are transmitted from parent to offspring. In this view racialism is pred icated upon a rather inflexible idea of biology, one that underscores the role of inherited traits to denote an individual' s racial identity at birth (Hannaford 1996; Appiah 1990). In such theories, a person' spcial identity-delivered biologically-is an aspect ofhis/her nature that cannot be changed. Such understandings of difference are conditioned by a rather rigid divide-even an opposition-between the concepts of nature and culture. Although cultural differences might serve to express one' s racial or ethnic identity, modern ideologies do not afford culture the power to alter or shape racial identity. In this view culture is "superficial" or "skin deep;' while race, bound to nature, is a permanent marker of difference that pervades the body at a deep level. Attentive to this modern ideology of difference, despite its dubious claim to scientific rigor (Venter 2007; Gould 1996; Fields and Fields 2012), historians have argued that pre-Enlightenment societies have not been bearers of"racial ideologies" in this modern sense (Bartlett 1993; Kidd 2006; Banton 2000). Rather, as they have compellingly argued, earlier eras-Medieval or early modern-have leaned more heavily on accounts of cultural practice to theorize human difference, suggesting that the lines dividing one population from another are more flexible in earlier eras and therefore fundamentally at a remove from modern ideologies. Speaking of the Medieval period, for instance, Robert Bartlett has argued: "To a point, therefore, medieval ethnicity was a social construct rather than a biological datum ... When we study race relations in medieval Europe we are analyzing the contact between various linguistic and cultural groups, not between breeding stocks" {1993, 197). Still more compellingly, Bartlett, quoting Isidore of Seville, a famous schoolmaster of the Middle Ages, observes: "Races arose from different languages, not languages from different races, or, as another Latin author argues, 'language makes race' (gen tem lin g ua Jacit)" (1993, 198). Implicit in this observation is the premise that culture precedes and instates nature in the earlier periods in ways that cease to be possible for modernity. And yet, the view of these historians has been called into question by critics who observe resemblances, connections, and relations between modern and pre-modern forms of race thinking, in large part due to a growing suspicion that "the bifurcation of'culture' and 'nature' in many analyses of race needs to be questioned" and that we need to "query the very boundaries between these categories" (Loomba and Burton 2007, 8, 25.) (For the Medieval period see Heng 2011 and Nirenberg 2007). If that is true of all periods-since nature and culture always "develop in relation to one another" (Loomba and Burton 2007, 8)-it is absolutely crucial for analyzing pre modern cultures. For the noun "culture" that appears in modern vocabularies to describe the endeavors of distinct human populations was never used in the same way in the earlier period, a point whose significance to the study of early modern race cannot be overstated. As Raymond Williams long ago argued, culture was not a thing so much as "a noun of process" in the early modern period, an activity that exerted a shaping force on any aspect of nature-human or otherwise-whether a
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2014
The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s (1735) Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II (WWII) in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. “Race” is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept.
Devin Griffiths and Deanna K. Kreisel, eds. After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century.Cambridge University Press, 2023
This essay traces some of the lines of descent that race has followed since Darwin's Origin of Species. Far from his work putting an end to the Species Question (whether human races constituted separate and unchanging species), race flourished not only in "Social Darwinism" and eugenics, but also in various academic disciplines, law, social policy, and everyday life. The essay discusses how race served as an organizing concept within Natural History and remained such in the emerging sciences of life: biology and sociology; how Critical Race Theory sought to use recent scientific critiques of race without engaging in a critique of race in the sciences and social sciences; and how despite Darwin's intervention "the truth of race" remains central to notions of diaspora, homeland, identity, and the structural racialism of everyday life while simultaneously naturalizing race in stereotypical phenotypes and in technology, especially robotics and applications of artificial intelligence (AI).
Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of View
The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: The invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (1735); and the demise of racial typologies after WWII in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. “Race” is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race, but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept.
Syllabus for Science and the Origins of Race (SS.490), Fall 2014
The Sociology of Science and the Origins of Race We often try to understand race as it confronts us today, either as a source of diversity and multiculturalism or as a social problem. This is not surprising given the fact that racism is a historical production and so today we still exist amidst its' vast accumulation. But racism presupposes the existence of Race, of something so essential to us that it is visibly manifested by our bodies, and these manifestations fall into a limited number of scientifically defined types. Race began as a scientific concept within the discourse of Natural History, but with far reaching connections to nationalism, sexuality, industrialism, and authoritarianism. To place our contemporary discussion of human variety into a historical context, this class will investigate the history of scientific discourses on race from Blumenbach’s classification of humanity into the five familiar races, to Gobineau’s Essay of the Inequality of Human Races, the Social Darwinists, and Thomas Dugdale’s The Jukes, a classic study of degeneration in fin de sciel upstate New York. Along the way, we will examine the debate on the origin of species, whether races represent different species of humans (the monogenesis/polygenesis dispute in Antebellum America), phrenology, intelligence testing, criminal anthropology, the culture of poverty, and degeneration. Throughout the semester, we will apply what we are learning to the discussion of contemporary ideas and conflicts regarding race and racism.