Toward a Comparative History of Racial Thought in Africa: Historicism, Barbarism, Autochthony

Abstract

Using material from the history of African thought, this essay proposes a strategy for writing a comparative history of race that ranges beyond a consideration of white supremacy and its anti-racist inflections. Studies of race outside the global north have often been hobbled by rigid modernist assumptions that over-privilege the determining influence of Western discourses at the expense of local intellectual inheritances. This essay, in contrast, proposes a focus on locally inherited discourses of difference that have shown signs of becoming racialized, at times through entanglement with Western ideas. It pays particular attention to discourses that arranged “human kinds” along a progression from barbarian to civilized, suggesting the presence of African historicisms that in modern times have converged with the stadial ideas that played a major role in Western racial thought.

Navigating “Race” at Tahiti: Polynesian and European Encounters

“…In a broader context, this was also the period of European history when voyages of “discovery” fueled and were interpreted as confirming the secular Enlightenment theory of the diversity of human people, the putative chronological transitions over time from savagery to barbarism to civilization, in which different societies were to be located at different stages of civilizational development. This is what Glassman (2021: 78) frames as “stadial historicism”: Europe of course was at the pinnacle, and the peoples Europeans were contacting and colonizing represented earlier moments in the long march of progress toward that pinnacle (Stocking 1982). 9 Thus, the interpretation of Polynesians as aristocrats of the Pacific rested on readings of their society and polity that European visitors assimilated to the more familiar or recognizable: through this, Polynesians were signified as both exotic and civilized.…”

“… 12 In addressing this question, all manner of things came to be grouped under the sign of “race” difference and relevant to the debate about what it was voyagers were finding, how they should think about it, and what they should or could do with these Others: language, temperament, morality, religion, labor practice, work ethic, sexuality, polity, as well as skin color, hair texture, and the like. See Glassman 2021; and also note 9, above. …”