Racism in the Modern World

Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation

Manfred Berg, Simon Wendt, Manfred Berg, Simon Wendt

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781782380856, 9780857450760
• eBook ISBN: 9780857450777
• Edition: 1
• Subtopic: World History

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

Table of contents

• Racism in the Modern World
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Racialization of the Globe: Historical Perspectives
• Chapter 2. How Racism Arose in Europe and Why It Did Not in the Near East
• Chapter 3. Culture’s Shadow: “Race” and Postnational Belonging in theTwentieth Century
• Chapter 4. Racism and Genocide
• Chapter 5. Slavery and Racism inNineteenth-Century Cuba
• Chapter 6. Toward a Transnational History of Racism: Wilhelm Marr and the Interrelationships between Colonial Racism and German Anti-Semitism
• Chapter 7. Transatlantic Anthropological Dialogue and “the Other”: Felix vonLuschan’s Research in America, 1914–1915
• Chapter 8. Transits of Race: Empire and Difference in Philippine-American Colonial History
• Chapter 9. Interrogating Caste and Race in South Asia
• Chapter 10. The Making of a “Ruling Race”: Defining and Defending Whiteness in Colonial India
• Chapter 11. Glocalizing “Race” in China: Concepts and Contingencies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 12. Race without Supremacy: On Racism in the Political Discourse of Late Meiji Japan, 1890–1912
• Chapter 13. Hendrik Verwoerd’s Long March to Apartheid: Nationalism and Racism in South Africa
• Chapter 14. The “Right Kind of White People”: Reproducing Whiteness in the United States and Australia, 1780s–1930s
• Chapter 15Race and Indigeneity inContemporary Australia
• Contributors
• Select Bibliography
• Index