Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities

Amos Morris-Reich, Dirk Rupnow, Amos Morris-Reich, Dirk Rupnow

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319499529
• eBook ISBN: 9783319499536
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust – years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement – the concept of 'race' slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?1
• Formal Analysis: Art and Anthropology
• Max Grunwald and the Formation of Jewish Folkloristics: Another Perspective on Race in German-Speaking Volkskunde
• Racism and Anti-Semitism in the German Political Economy: The Example of Carl Schmitt’s 1936 Berlin Conference “Jewry in Jurisprudence”
• Theogony as Ethnogony: Race and Religion in Friedrich Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology
• Race and Richard Wagner
• The Concept of Race in Musicological Thought: From General Remarks to a Case Study of So-called Gypsy Music in European Culture
• On Racial Thinking and the Problem of “Oriental” Prehistory
• “Nordics” and “Hamites”: Joseph Deniker and the Rise (and Fall) of Scientific Racism
• Phonocentrism and the Concept of Volk: The Case of Modern China
• “The Creation of a Frustrated People”: Race, Education, the Teaching of History and South African Historiography in the Apartheid Era
• Afterword
• Index