Race

Brian Niro

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780333753132
• eBook ISBN: 9781350317826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This dynamic study of the history of the idea of race traces the concept from its prehistory across 400 years to its current status. Brian Niro introduces key theorists and philosophers and a wide variety of literary and theoretical concepts, taking the central view that the notion of race is a fluid concept that has altered consistently since its inception in Western ideology. Starting with Greek philosophy, Niro moves effortlessly through such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Voltaire, Kant, Mary Shelly, Darwin, Fanon and Achebe in order to explore the representation of race in its various guises. Many contemporary discussions of race are intricate and limited in their scope to current doctrine, but by using a series of close readings of often-studied texts, Niro helps to demonstrate key ideas and make complex theories understandable.

1False Origins: The Greeks, Methodology, Etymology, and Shakespeare

One of the great problems of modern-day race relations is that few people have the slightest idea of the origin of the ideas and concepts they employ with such profligacy. (Hannaford 1996: 15)

Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves. (Achebe 1989: 16)

Theory, practice, and origins

And now, let us look closely at the original object/subject of race itself. A compelling point of departure for such an endeavor, as one might expect, is the beginning. And indeed, there are at least two distinct (although imprecise) beginnings that deserve our attention. We must observe not only the conditions within Western cultures (European in particular) that cultivated a necessity for the word, but also the word’s practical entry into Western languages. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to question the context and history of both the fundamental dispositions that cultivate the need for the word’s existence, and the word in its earliest manifestations.¹ The isolation of two basic elements, the word as a material object that has passed through Western languages (most pertinently for this discussion, English) and its compositional principles, is central to treating the twofold archeology of race’s history, conceptually and pragmatically. The goal here is to isolate the theoretical framework of race, and to trace its practical application. (In stating this ambition, we must also fully recognize the mythical nature of origin. Because isolating origins is an act of recovery, they must always/already be speculative or even partially fictional.) To isolate the framework (to draw the boundaries of the field, as Pierre Bourdieu might venture), is also to define the criteria for racialized thought and the principles that would allow the concept to be applied in the political world.

This is, however, an inverse proposition, as we are defining race largely through the observation of where it is not yet developed, or at least not developed with proficiency. Essentially, we are looking for the concept before it had a label. Our definition also questions the relationship between racial thought and its material practice. This is not to say that material practice signifies solely tangible examples of oppression, or dehumanizing behavior. It is not viable to suggest that we may locate the original racialized community, for example, if we simply locate the first community of slave owners. Although slavery represents a system of exploitation and oppression based implicitly on one’s standing as a human agent and the applied (real) manifestation of the oppression that accompanies a denial of that humanity, we must note that the existence of a system of oppression does not, per se, denote the existence of racial thought. Generally speaking, we know race when we see it. But here, we are also trying to locate race by observing where it is not, or where it exists only partially and by observing the transition of those elements into a genuinely tenable construction.

It seems pertinent to begin with an investigation of the more distinctly ideological, structural foundations of racial thought and work toward the more conventional, etymological history of the word itself. Of course, the relative merits and detractions of an attempt to actually isolate these two complementary components must be acknowledged. The effort alone reveals the distinction between theory and practice, the pitfalls of reading any history, and the impossibility of side-stepping the critical limitations of our own temporal location, i.e., the danger implicit in not recognizing that we are irretrievably composed by our limitations. The value of this approach lies, therefore, in the admission that we will never completely know the history of race, and in the realization that we are at least capable of outlining inherited false starts, misreadings, and misappropriations, of renegotiating those readings, and of re-appropriating a distinct historical perspective from this performance. As one might imagine, already, we are in something of a conundrum.

The original conundrum stems, at least in part, from the manner in which race evolved from an abstraction to a pragmatically fixed, institutional piece of Western cultural exchange. This transformation began with a misreading of ancient ideological and philosophical musings on rational thought and the individual’s responsibility within the political world. This misreading involves, primarily, seventeenth and eighteenth-century theorists who borrow the basic tenets and authority of the ancient Greeks in order to shore up the radical expansion of racialized thought, which comfortably (although not necessarily intimately) coincides with the expansion of Western imperial influence and domination. This is our original false start. Race seems to stem from the Greeks because the men who (actually) created and disseminated race believed that it did. Their authority to explicate racial theory resided in their just and appropriate interpretation of it. However, several significant theorists have recently begun to reread the Greeks and, in so doing, have redefined the criteria that denote racial thought. This redefinition, as suggested earlier, relies heavily on noting the combination of the theoretical and practical applications of race.

Now, conventional wisdom suggests, almost unequivocally, that race is a European construction. Likewise, this construction has been vehemently tied to several moments of European progress: the rise of rationalism, the Enlightenment, and the advent of imperialism and industrialization. Indeed, a few critics have gone so far as to suggest that Western society is fundamentally a racial society and is therefore explicitly responsible for the term and its subsequent spread across the globe. The rather odd significance of this gesture, however, lies in the implicit insistence that race is a relatively recent (historically speaking) construction. To this end, scholars have repeatedly argued over the precise moment that the word race appears in the Western lexicon. Ivan Hannaford broadly suggests that “Between the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain and the landing of the first Negro in the North American colonies in 1619, the word ‘race’ entered Western languages” (1996: 147). More directly, Michael Banton heralds the exact moment of the word’s entry into our specific lexicon, stating, “the word race entered the English language in 1508 in the poem The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Sins by the Scotsman, William Dunbar” (1987: 1). Although the placement of precise dates is often sketchy, mythological work at best, Hannaford and Banton’s two basic assertions seem appropriate. The specificity of the word race entered Western languages somewhere in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the denotative, connotative scope of the word relates only distantly to the word as we currently understand it. Rather, race could denote a trove of disparate ideas, some more relevant than others, and some more persistent than others. One need merely consider the second most common use of the word race, as a contest (e.g., horse race), to note the malleability of the term. Indeed, upon its entrance into English, race could signify “running, mathematical or astrological lines, millstreams, ships’ wakes, marks, and courses,” as well as “being of good, noble, and pure lineage” (Hannaford 1996: 147). More than merely the broad scope of referents, however, a key component in understanding the movement of race from there to here is the malleability allowed in being of good, noble, and pure lineage. Here, the term waited, sufficiently readied and pliant, for the time in which it might assume its present shape.

What is odd and somewhat disconcerting in Hannaford and Banton’s accounts, however, is the necessary repetition of the word “entered” to describe the emergence of the term. Without deliberately misappropriating either Hannaford or Banton’s metaphor, one might easily wonder from where the word entered, for if the word race enters Western languages from this specific point, a logical presumption demands that it entered from somewhere. To deny this would suggest a bizarre spontaneous origin (tellingly, an origin that is not claimed by those who helped the term gain much of its momentum in Western languages), and a seemingly random occurrence. At first glance this may appear as meaningless hairsplitting, for there seems little point in contending that race is a Western construction, given the commonsensical critical acceptance of the premise. Perhaps one of the most confounded aspects of this paradox stems directly from this confusion. Race is either a seventeenth or eighteenth-century fabrication developed in response to profoundly disparate cultural contact, or it was inherited from earlier conventions of cultural exchange. As ever, the most obvious response to this conundrum is the most difficult to develop and substantiate. Put simply, the word race, as it most closely resembles our contemporary conceptualization, did originate somewhere across the seventeenth or eighteenth-century. This fabrication, however, relied heavily on a misrepresentation and misappropriation of earlier cultural theoreticians, primarily the Greeks. It has, however, been convincingly argued that the Greeks entertained no notion of race, as we shall investigate at greater length in a moment. And indeed, many early racial theorists used the isolation of these apparently exterior/causal elements to legitimize their own construction of race. The focal point of this debate, therefore, resides outside of the Greeks, but also claims to locate the Greeks as its foundation and center. Here we can see how highly political such a contest must be.

There is no lack of theories suggesting alternative sources for the original, ancient fabrication of racial thought. As suggested, the quest for isolating origin remains something of an indistinct notion for both the intellectual conditions that inspire it, and, most importantly, for the contemporary material consequences. These consequences, however, often trace a keenly sharp political edge. It is with this political single-mindedness that the ultimate and often insidious side to the debate over origin muddles the genuine questioning of the origin of race with dubious concentration on accountability. As ever, and as suggested by the first epigraph of this chapter, (re)reading history is always a political act, but one with varied levels of jaded cynicism. And there is no shortage of potential resources for those who would trace the lineage of race to founts outside the borders of Western thought. Although receding in number and prominence, there is a significant body of scholarship that has consistently claimed “to find the idea of race 5,000 years ago, in India, and among the early Chinese, Egyptians, and Jews” (Boxill 2001: 10). Such research, valid and insightful, can also be quite disarming, or at least distracting to those who hold fast to a culpability that is purely Western. For those uneasy with the suggestion, it seems a purely academic exercise (excuse the expression) to postulate whether the Incas conceived racial differentiation independently of the European encounter when it remains rather improbable, quite simply, that we could ever trace any material consequences of that disposition. The matter becomes purely conceptual and significantly removed from the pragmatic. And here is the rub. An integral part of our working definition of racial thought is that it must accompany practice. The distinctly pragmatic dimension to the advent of racial research leaves racial theorists out in the political cold. As Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon clearly state, the concept of race, and more importantly racism, “is a cultural politics, producing its effects in the conjoined spaces of culture, power and subjectivity” (Jordan and Weedon 1995: 161). Because race embodies this direct and significant political dimension, the concept must be married to pragmatic, active, tangible, bodies of information. To put it simply, if we are to find race in earlier cultures, we must find it active in early cultures, or we have not found it at all. Moreover, it is not enough simply to suggest that ancient Indians were capable of noting that some people were of a different colored skin. This alone does not constitute race. The simple, practical policies of base social exclusion do not constitute race either, even when such practices closely resemble a bigotry we have since experienced racially. To clarify, perhaps contentiously, while the ownership of a slave certainly makes an individual socially parasitic, the practice itself does not intuit racism, per se. To condemn all exclusionary social policy as racially motivated, or as evidence of the practice of racial ideology, threatens to cheapen the idea through grossly expansive definition, and may very well miss the more significant opportunity to criticize racial practice. All cultures, and many interactions that we would not even deem worthy of the title cultural, have mechanisms that protect the familiar and resent the exterior. While this practice may resemble it, this is not racism, pure and simple. To suggest otherwise is to condemn racialized thought to each and every living human being as fundamental as social organization and familial structures. This may explain why evidence of other racialized cultures is so easy to find elsewhere, but this ultimately confuses and distorts the definition of race. We will encounter this confusion again in a moment with the more intrinsically conceptual and concretely practical misreading of racial origin and the Greek arts of philosophy and politics.

Before moving forward, it must be noted that what can be so disarming in such a debate is the tremendous, but often spurious, political relevance in arguing the origins of racial thinking. When performing such a dramatic rereading, we must also consider what is at stake today in denying or maintaining the theoretical status quo. It would be rather naive to suggest that were we to attribute the concept of race to, say, the ancient people of India, that there would be little, if any, impact on its current postcolonial position. India’s position in the world today is a result of its history as the oppressed and not the oppressor, but to attribute this oppressive mechanism to its ancestors would have a profound effect on our ability to sympathize with its political standing today. The somewhat cynical effort in such thought lies in either shifting entirely, or at least diluting, the perceived responsibility of an almost exclusively traditional Western social theory. An attempt to relinquish its own culpability explicitly demonstrates the obvious stake that the West now has in the absolution of its social conscience. Nonsensical or otherwise, for better or for worse, there is a great deal on the line in playing out the political blamegame and isolating those responsible. When placed under this light, the rhetorical finger-pointing, however, fails in its ability to articulate what exactly these cultures did with the concept of race. As Imtiaz Habib states, “Even if . . . racial formations may be said to be anterior to early modern European colonialism, since they can be detectable in earlier historical epistemes such as the classical and the medieval periods . . . it is in the potency they acquire in the latter moment that gives them their greatest, and from the standpoint of our own temporal location, their most significant discursive visibility” (2000: 3). And so, again, we point away from antiquity and toward the advent of European progress to locate “racial formations” because of the practical significance of that period. To discuss race before then seems pointless as it held no explicit ideological currency, either culturally or politically, until this point in any other culture. However, we still have not resolved either the original conundrum or the “entered” puzzle and, in continuing the pursuit, we approach the most impressive false start yet. The issues here are how we define racial thought and how those who created it justified doing so.

The Greeks: Plato and Aristotle

Now, a more grounded pitch for discussion in the creation of a racial revelation revolves around the role of the ancient Greeks, those forefathers of Western thought. At least part of what makes this arena so enticing is that, if sufficiently decisive, the scholar may potentially resolve the original, and origin-ary, conundrum posed at the outset of this chapter. If we attribute the origin of racial thought to the Greeks, then we have simultaneously isolated the disposition necessary to create the need for the term, and potentially the object of race itself. In other words, by locating race in ancient Greece, the scholar is able to marry the ideological origin to a relatively more precise etymological one. In this line of thinking, one need not bother with the specifics of how, where, or from whom the term race entered Western languages in the sixteenth century, because the conditions necessary for the entry (or perhaps re-entry) lay dormant in the unconscious of Western thought, full stop. This dormancy becomes merely an ideological memory repressed through the bad old days of the Dark Ages, waiting patiently to re-emerge in the enlightened European man.

Ivan Hannaford must be credited for his grand rereading of Greco-Roman thought and his historicizing of racial thought in the West. His work has gone to exhaustive lengths to challenge the inherited account of the Greek role in race. Simply, the line of thought suggests that Europeans used reason to create race and the Greeks gave us the impetus to value reason. Race, therefore, is the always/already child of Hellenic influence on Western civilization. In going beyond the general resistance to traditional interpretation, Hannaford more directly confronts the antagonism between Greek civics and barbarism. Indeed, Hannaford builds fundamentally upon Foucault’s assertion in The History of Sexuality, that “it is unhistorical to consider that the antipathy between Greek and barbarian presupposes a certain racial resentment” (Hannaford 1996: 41). Instead, Hannaford quite usefully insists that “Antiquity was, in fact, riven by slavery and barbarism – but not by race, and for that reason the classical idea of politics still has something to say in our time” (Hannaford 1996: 9). Can we read the Greeks on their own terms? The mental maps that we apply to the world, knowingly or otherwise, are problematic because of our relative inability to accommodate other maps, independently or in hindsight, without (mis)appropriation.

There is, admittedly, some fertile pasture from which we might gather the racist dispositions of several key Greek theorists. A great majority of Greek philosophers and scribes often entertain a strong, near-oppressive, cultural arrogance that undoubtedly grates on our current, postcolonial sensibilities. In particular, there are moments where it seems effortless to attribute racist thought to a chain of Greek philosophers linked to Plato and Aristotle, perhaps two of the most significant figures in Greek philosophy. Among others, however, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days has been interpreted as containing a division of the world into races, Herodotus’ Histories was regarded by “the great historian Barthold Georg Niebhur, as the precursor of modern ethnography,” while Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, and Places, was manipulated by Johann Gottfried von Herder and Alexander von Humboldt as “proof of their newly invented cultural and climatic theories of existence” (Hannaford 1996: 20). The sum of these parts would seem to suggest, irrevocably, that the Greeks were fundamentally a society imbued with race as an integral part of their cultural exchange.

The interpretation of Hesiod that situates his work as racially motivated, however, relies on a substantial variety of misinterpretations, particularly on a translation of the word “genos” as synonymous with race rather than genealogy, and an awkward ability to ignore the simple notion that the Greeks never presumed themselves a people “possessed of distinctive characteristics and qualities – physical, intellectual and cultural – that mark them as superior” (Hannaford 1996: 22, 25). Instead, all individuals, Greek or otherwise, participate in the rather desperate state of the human condition, whereupon the Greeks salva...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. False Origins: The Greeks, Methodology, Etymology, and Shakespeare
• 2. The Enlightenment and the Fabrication of Race
• 3. Scientific Authority and Appropriation
• 4. Modernity, Orientalism, Négritude, and the Phenomenology of Race
• 5. America
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index