Temps et race

Abstract

Résumé La recherche historique sur la constitution de la catégorisation raciale en tant que ressource politique s’inscrit dans le paradigme du constructivisme social. À partir de ce point d’accord, des propositions s’affrontent sur la question de savoir à partir de quand une discrimination attestée peut à bon droit être décrite comme raciale. Plusieurs modèles sont présentés dans l’article. Il s’agit de montrer d’une part que la désignation de l’altérité porte en premier lieu sur des groupes qui ne sont guère marqués par des différences visibles, et d’autre part que les politiques raciales ont pour finalité de freiner les processus de réduction de l’altérité.

Revisiting “Racial Capitalism”

“…As regards the former, the intellectual historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub has proposed the existence of roughly five positions in the recent literature: (1) the view that a clearly defined concept of race had already emerged in classical antiquity with the Greeks and Romans and then persisted through European history [Perry et al ., 2021: 215-216]; (2) the position that race as an idea was in fact born during the Crusades, with the political and military confrontation between Christians and Muslims (and to a lesser extent Jews) producing forms of racialized alterity; (3) a view—largely supported by Schaub himself—that underlines the crucial role for the emergence of ideas of race of the Iberian expulsion of Jews and Muslims and the construction of the Iberian overseas empires in the 15th and 16th centuries, with their emphasis on colonization and the long-distance slave trade; (4) a position that emphasizes the central place of the European Enlightenment and its projects of human classification in the later 17th and 18th centuries; (5) and, finally, the position that race as a stable concept and racism as an ideology only emerged full blown from the 19th century, with Social Darwinism, “scientific racism”, and allied projects. While Schaub has not produced a rigorous “conceptual history ( Begriffsgeschichte )” of race, his exercise is nevertheless a useful point of departure for our purposes [Schaub 2018; Schaub and Sebastiani 2021].…”