The Origins of Racism: A Critique of the History of Ideas

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.

Identifying and filling racism data gaps in Victoria: A stocktake review

“…Racism draws on characteristics such as 'race', ethnicity, nationality and religion, and is related to constructs such as Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and xenophobia (Seth, 2020).…”

Provincialising American Capitalism: From Universal Instance to Contingent Case

“…7 Among many examples, Quijano (2000) contends that it was first in the Americas that diverse ethno-cultural identities were subsumed under overarching "racial" categories while Fields (1990) traces the origins of modern conceptions of race to the stark discrepancy between ideals of freedom and the fact of Black enslavement in the American colonies. Given the controversies of these origin debates (see Seth 2020), it is notable that much of the geographical commentary seems to accept Robinson's alternative historisation at face value while-rightly so-stressing its centrality for his argument that racialism predated capitalism (e.g. Pulido 2017:527).…”

The Past, the Present, and the Future: Memory and Literature as Gateways from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century With a focus on Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival

“…Little wonder, for instance, that we have discovered in recent years the phenomenon of race before racism, pervasive homophobia, deeply anchored sexism and misogyny, and antisemitism, among many other problems. Those continue to be with us, and we must confront them both with the help of a historical and a contemporary lens (regarding race, see, e.g., Dagenais and Greer, 2000;Heng, 2018;Kaplan, 2019;Seth, 2020).…”