The Origins of Racism

A Critique of the History of Ideas

Bibliographic Data

ID4496036
AuthorsSeth (0000-0003-3303-1359, University of California, Santa Cruz, corresponding author), Vanita Seth (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Year2020
Volume59
Issue3
Pages343-368
Publication date2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/hith.12163
OpenAlexW3081632078
LanguageEN
Citations received14

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

Aesthetics · Alterity · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Politics · Race (biology) · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

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