Race

What is it about?

"Race" offers a compelling 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: 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

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Why is it important?

We will gain a deeper understanding of the notion of race in our times by analyzing pre-enlightenment texts. There have been debates between “presentism” and “historicism,” between the approach that involves reading the past directly from the present perspective that acknowledges the partisan perspective of the enquirer, or the approach to isolate and privilege historical usage of a particular concept such as race without connecting it to the perspective of the enquirer, although this latter position has undergone some revision in recent years. We argue that even though evidence of early modern racial hatred comes under different terminologies, it is still hatred. Reading histories of race enables us to develop a broader perspective involving the identification of the various ways in which issues that are at root similar operate by way of different discourses or guises.

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