THE ORIGINS OF RACISM: A CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS |
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Authors: | VANITA SETH |
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Affiliation: | University of California, Santa Cruz I would like to thank Mark Weller, Suman Seth, Sanjay Seth, and Sharon Kinoshita for their critical reading of earlier drafts of this article as well as for providing thoughtful suggestions and encouraging words of support. |
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Abstract: | This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre- and early modern periods. In pursuing its second objective, the essay turns from histories cataloguing ancient, medieval, and early modern racisms to objections leveled, in these same literatures, against scholarship defending the modernity of race. The defense of a premodern origin to race is, I argue, not just a historical argument but a contemporary politics embedded in a narrative of continuity that insists on the relevance of the medieval past to the racial configurations of our current moment. Rather than demonstrating continuity and sameness, this essay seeks to draw attention to alternative modes of historicizing that are more attentive to the alterity of the past. |
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Keywords: | race Quentin Skinner skin color Middle Ages modernity early modern antiquity |
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