‘Race’ and Its Articulation with ‘The Human’ (original) (raw)
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Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), art historian Ann Gibson shows how these artists contributed to universalizing— through their work and through interpretations of it—“a single identity position”: “white male heterosexuality.” According to Gibson, this consisted in “subsum[ing] other identities” (of women and so-called primitive societies) within their “single transcendent one.” 47 Anna Boschetti, Sartre et “Les Temps Modernes” (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 199. 48 In this chapter, I use the term “race” as defined by Colette Guillaumin in L’idéologie raciste (Paris: Mouton et Co, 1972). I am not interested in establishing the existence of physical race or not, as society’s “perception of race does not give it any importance: it creates this reality unconsciously to the same extent that it does consciously” (Guillaumin, L’idéologie raciste, 8). I am more concerned with the sociological perspective on race, specifically the way in which it divides societ...
Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”: Rethinking the Human/Race
2017
This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. On the one hand, the humanities face material threats as the politics of austerity continues throughout Europe and the United States, diminishing public support and making profit margin and “job creation” the primary measure of value or the basis of state university funding decisions. On the other, the humanities face conceptual, theoretical and ethical challenges, as the emergence of post-racial and post-humanist discourses signal what Foucault called “a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge.” The defining boundaries of constructs such as “race” and “human” have been radically called into question, challenging us to rethink the classificatory systems that found hierarchical relationships between, for example, the “fully human” and sub-human or non-human others. Despite dominant nations&rsqu...
A History of the Concept of Race
Science for the People, 2021
We find ourselves today at the intersection of global crises: an irreversible capitalist economic crisis, an ecological catastrophe engulfing the planet, a deadly viral pandemic, and the threat of resurgent fascism throughout the world. Undergirding the structures and institutions of American society is the intensifying white supremacy produced and reproduced by US policymakers representing the interests of the multi-billionaire investor class—from the origins of North American capitalism in settler colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery, to centuries of rebellion, reform, reaction, state violence and terror. White supremacy—infused throughout all material and ideological forms of society and humanity’s relations with nature—was and is an essential strategic tool of capitalist rule. The present urgency is driven by the recognition that a significant segment of the governing circles of the United States seems willing to abandon the traditional flawed but democratic forms of governance in favor of harsh autocratic rule. The multiracial struggles around Black lives, climate change, and the unequal burden of the raging COVID-19 pandemic have revealed the deepening economic inequality and racial and gender oppression that have become commonplace in a capitalist system that cannot survive without discrimination. In the twenty-first century we have the opportunity to take this historic intellectual and political struggle to its resolution—to abolish the capitalist system that requires white supremacy.
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.
SYLLABUS - "Theorizing Race" - Spring 2017
Modern racial ideologies are inseparable from the production of hierarchical differences giving shape to what Frantz Fanon characterized as a "division of the species". The process has historically accompanied European imperial and colonial expansion and the conceptualization of whiteness as a self-conscious project of global supremacy along political, economic, and epistemic lines. Drawing on long-standing images casting blackness or darkness as the opposite of morality, progress, and civilization, the globalization of White supremacy sought legitimacy in definitions of humanity that defined the Black as its inhuman other. Violent Black enslavement and the Middle Passage turned the division of the species into a principle of organization, unity, and value for White/Human civil society.