Race

Martin Orkin, Alexa Alice Joubin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317445302
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Race offers a compelling introduction to the study of ideas related to race throughout history. Its breadth of coverage, both geographically and temporally, provides readers with an expansive, global understanding of the term from the classical period onwards. This concise guide offers an overview of:

• Intersections of Race and Gender
• Race and Social Theory
• Identity, Ethnicity, and Immigration
• Whiteness
• Legislative and Judicial Markings of Difference
• Race in South Africa, Israel, East Asia, Asian America
• Blackness in a Global Context
• Race in the History of Science
• Critical Race Theory

This clear and engaging study is essential reading for students of Literature, Culture, and Race.

PART I

FIXING THE FETTERS OF RACE

1

MARKING BARBARIANS, MUSLIMS, JEWS, ETHIOPIANS, AFRICANS, MOORS, OR BLACKS

This chapter is concerned with early attempts to formulate notions of race. First, it considers classical Greek articulations of identity, read as difference from an Asian, mainly Persian, other. Second, it explores medieval European Christian readings of religious others. Third, it examines early modern European readings of others, based not only on religion but also on different skin pigmentation. Traditional attempts to fathom the beginnings of notions of race also involved attempts to present these phenomena as constitutive or originary. But this strategy has been replaced nowadays with the recognition that ideologies of race, wherever and whenever they occur, are complex and often overlap. This will be evident even in the account that follows, which isolates particular strands for the sake of clarity and for purely analytical purposes.

“Civilization” and “barbarism”

One of the ways in which notions of race have emerged is in early impositions of a binary division between, on the one hand, that which is known, or familiar, deriving from the same culture that is designated as “civilized,” and, on the other hand, that which is not understood, or that is hostile deriving from a strange culture that is designated “barbaric.” This hostility is often accompanied by both ignorance and intellectual laziness. Take China, for example. On the one hand, due to lack of contact with the outside world, the premodern Chinese court and intelligentsia designated peoples of many ethnicities and cultural origins “black,” or kunlun. These included the Malayans and other South-East Asians. On the other hand, increased knowledge of cultural others only seemed to have broadened the lump-sum category of blackness for the Chinese consciousness. According to a study by Don J. Wyatt, from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries and through expanded maritime activity, the Chinese came into contact with slaves from Africa (modern-day Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania) who accompanied European expatriates to Asia. This only made the term black more capacious in China, as it now included even Bengali peoples of the Indian subcontinent.¹ Peoples who had not previously been regarded as “black” were now given the label “black.” Such a designation, like the word “barbarian” in the West, involved relative description and is sometimes used arbitrarily.

Likewise, the Classical Greek identification of “Persians” is another early example of evolving notions of civilization and barbarism.² Ety-mologically, the word “barbarous” first meant “one who does not speak Greek.” Edith Hall has argued influentially that, although there were in ancient Greece a number of Greek communities and ethnic loyalties, a simultaneous heightening of Pan-Hellenic consciousness was partly a result of continuing enmity against the Persians, “which buttressed first the Delian league … and subsequently the Athenium empire … [as a consequence the] image of an enemy extraneous to Hellas helped to foster a sense of community between the allied states.”³

Hall traces in detail the process whereby the polarization of “Hellene,” or Athenian empire, and “barbarian” emerges in fifth century tragedy, and she argues that the opposition between rational Greek and savage barbarian turned, primarily, on political difference:

The members of the league, by the middle of the century redefined as the Athenian empire, were encouraged to think of themselves not just as the inhabitants of a particular island or state, but as Hellenes, as democrats and supporters of Athens … The invention of the barbarian was a response to the need for an alliance against Persian expansionism and the imposition of pro-Persian tyrants.⁴

The emergence of the concept of the “barbarian” in fifth century Greek tragedy also coincided with the need to consolidate Athenian democracy against the specter and the threat of despotism. Not only did the Persians favor despotic rule, but certain Greek cities were also ruled by tyrants. The defeat of the Persians, whose tyrants had ruled Asiatic Greek cities in their domain during the fifth century BC, was “conceptualized at Athens … as a triumphant affirmation … over the demon of tyranny.”⁵ Thus the need to foster “Athenian hegemony in the Aegean”⁶ involved not only the isolation of Persians but also other Greek cities which had fallen under Persian influence. In addition, other groups, such as the Egyptians, and, to the West, the Thracians, were also “barbarized.”⁷ Hall also traces how “barbarians” were conceptualized, in the tragedies, not only in “aspects of civic life—politics, law, speech-making,”⁸ but also in terms of domestic and familial life. In this way theatrical representations of “otherness” reflected particular facets of the process whereby cultural and political differences could be assimilated into a binary structure in which the key terms, “civilization” and “barbarism,” were defined differentially and incorporated into the Greek language.

Of the several points that may be further stressed in Hall’s study is her recognition that “the character traits imputed to other ethnic groups are usually a simple projection of those considered undesirable in the culture producing the stereotypes.”⁹ From the outset she argues that “Greek writing about barbarians is usually an exercise in self definition, for the barbarian is often portrayed as the opposite of the ideal Greek.”¹⁰ Thus, for example, the “cardinal Hellenic virtues as defined in fourth-century philosophy … normally included wisdom or intelligence … manliness or courage … discipline or restraint … and justice.”¹¹ She observes that Plato lists the vices that are differentiated from these virtues, such as stupidity, cowardice, abandonment, and lawlessness. Barbarian types “are often made to manifest one or more of these vices, thus helping the tragedian to define the nature of Greek morality.”¹² Again, Greek moderation was defined against “different kinds of extremism, stupidity or excessive cunning, cowardice or bravado, primitivism or luxuriousness.”¹³

Furthermore, such mechanisms of projection and self-definition resonate in the process of differentiation, which involved the obscuring of, for example, indigenous Greek violence and cruelty and its projection onto different, alien, or foreign groups. For instance, whereas the distribution of the propensity for violence in Homer’s earlier poems is more even-handed and, for example, “desecration of corpses is by no means the prerogative of non-Greeks,”¹⁴ in fifth century tragedy, the conflict with Persia is conceptualized as “a struggle of united and disciplined Greeks against alien violence.”¹⁵ “Barbarians”—not merely Persians, but Egyptians, Danaids (Greeks in an alien environment), and Thracians— were represented in tragedy as being wholly without restraint, “invested with an overbearing temper or wild ethos … [as well as, sometimes, a] failure to control … sexual desire.”¹⁶ Thus, in one of Euripides’s tragedies, Hecuba, the depiction of an imaginary Thracian king, Polymestor:

delineates the wild barbarian character at its most uncontrolled; he has crawled out of the tent on all fours, like a “mountain beast”, and even threatens to eat the corpses of the women who have punished him (Hecuba, 1057–8, 1070–2) … [v]ocabulary suggestive of animal nature or appetites is often used in the characterization of barbarians.¹⁷

Of course it may be possible to argue that these observations are merely a form of cultural differentiation or xenophobia, rather than evidence of a more sophisticated racism that was to come centuries later. However, Edith Hall notes that: “The Greek term barbarous, by the fifth century, used both as a noun and as an adjective, was ironically oriental in orig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Fixing the fetters of race
• PART II: Recasting the fetters of race
• PART III: Loosening the fetters of race
• Conclusion: race in the world
• Glossary
• Index