Racializing Humankind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of 'Race' and Racism [1 ed.] 9783412524180, 9783412524166

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Julian T. D. Gärtner Malin S. Wilckens (Eds.)

RACIALIZING HUMANKIND Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ and Racism

Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur begründet von Jörn Rüsen herausgegeben von Stefan Berger, Angelika Epple, Thomas Sandkühler und Holger Thünemann Band 43

Julian T. D. Gärtner / Malin S. Wilckens (Eds.)

Racializing Humankind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ and Racism

BÖHLAU VERLAG WIEN ⋅ KÖLN

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2022 by Böhlau, Lindenstraße 14, D-50674 Köln, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria). Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike, V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Proofreading: Dore Wilken, Freiburg Typesetting: satz&sonders GmbH, Dülmen Coverdesign: Michael Haderer, Wien Printed and bound: Hubert & Co BuchPartner, Göttingen Printed in the EU Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-412-52418-0

Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Wilckens, Malin S. / Gärtner, Julian T. D. Introduction – Conceptualizations and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ & Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on ‘Race’ and Racism Winkel, Heidemarie Tracing (Theories of) Racism in Sociological Thinking: A Postcolonial Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Roth, Julia Tracing Racism: Insights from Postcolonial Studies, Global History, and the Law – American Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. Practices of Comparing as Immanent Constructive Forces in the Thematic Complex of ‘Race’ & Racism Becker, Andreas Climate or Biology? Differences in the Description of the Sami Body in European Ethnographic Discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Wilckens, Malin S. Racializing, Collecting and Comparing Skulls. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s and Anders Retzius’ Practices of Ordering Humankind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Gärtner, Julian T. D. A Sentimental Science: Comparisons to Plants and Slavery in George Sand’s Indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 3. Practices of (Current) Institutional / Systemic Racism Brown, Mark B. White Identity Politics in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Ragunathan, Sheila Institutional Racism and Classroom Dynamics in German Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

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Fiocchi, João No Negro Citizens: Slavery and Citizenship in Comparative Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 4. The Momentum of ‘Race’ in the Production of Knowledge Hoffarth, Christian Like Marvels, like Monsters: Experiences of Otherness and the Emergence of Racial Thought in Medieval European Travel Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Vartija, Devin J. Natural Equality and Racial Inequality: An Enlightenment Paradox? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Bitter-Smirnov, Sophie Arguing against Monogenism: Strategies in Polygenist Argumentation against the Unity of Humankind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 5. Narrative and Representational Practices of ‘Race’ in Popular Media Smith, L. Katherine (De)constructing Race and Racism at the Ends of the Earth. The Hollow Earth and Open Polar Sea Theories in Nineteenth Century American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 De Boodt, Robrecht The Green Heart of Africa: Literary Knowledge of Scientific Racism

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Njanjo, Burrhus Articulations of Racism in Vénus Noire (2010) and A United Kingdom (2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Baßenhoff, Lisa Presenting White. Scientific Conferences and the Practice of Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

Acknowledgments This volume emerged from the 11th Annual Seminar of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) in 2019. We want to thank the BGHS, especially Sabine Schäfer, for making this event possible and for the openness to all our ideas and requests as well as for organizing the internal university Interdisciplinary Dialogue in the context of our conference. We would like to thank all speakers for stimulating thoughts: Ulrike Davy, Angelika Epple, Julia Roth and Heidemarie Winkel. In addition to the editors, also Lisa Baßenhoff, Andreas Becker, Lena Gumpert, Ina Kiel, and Malika Mansouri were part of the conference’s organizing committee, and we would like to thank them most sincerely for their teamwork, ideas, and constructive discussions. Without them, this publication would not have come into being. We also want to thank all the participants of the conference who made it such a lively space for exchange, discussion and to learn. A special thanks goes to our keynote speakers, Manuela Boatc˘a, Nikita Dhawan and Demetrius Eudell, for the stimulating and thought-provoking presentations. We would like to convey a warm thanks to Ojudun Taiwo Jacob, who demonstrated to us in a tangible way the pain of the colonial experience during our evening event, and to our moderator Ouassima Laabich. Furthermore, we would like to thank Diana Ejaita for her extraordinary artwork that gave a face to our conference. We are especially grateful to Böhlau Verlag, in particular Kirsti Doepner, Laura Röthele, Kathrin Reichel, and the editors of the series “Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur” for placing their trust in us and for providing a platform to present our research. Further, the conference and this volume were supported by the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center “Practices of Comparing,” (CRC) awarded to Bielefeld University in 2017. We would like to thank the CRC for their substantial input as well as for their financial support in the realization of this volume. Also many thanks to Angela Gutierrez and Paula Bartels. We would also like to thank Heidemarie Winkel, Julia Roth, and Mark Brown for their valuable feedback. Special thanks go to Angelika Epple and Eleonora Rohland, who have always been there to advise and support us throughout the project. Bielefeld, October 2021 Malin S. Wilckens, Julian T. D. Gärtner

Wilckens, Malin S. / Gärtner, Julian T. D.

Introduction – Conceptualizations and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ & Racism racism remains the pale face of sickness that privately and publicly eats away at us May Ayim, blues in schwarz weiss 1

The latest political events, racially motivated attacks, and strengthened right-wing movements worldwide were the reason for us to bring racism to the agenda again. 2 Structural racism is ingrained in everyday life. What we need is a discussion that brings together its social, cultural and institutional manifestations. One of the consequences in an anti-racist struggle has been the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. As interdisciplinary working researchers, we consider racism to be one of the most pressing issues of our time that can best be tackled from a multi-, trans- or interdisciplinary angle, then we are in the position to contribute critical and nuanced research on this topic. As White 3 European editors (male / female), we are

1 The original version reads: “rassismus bleibt / bleiches gesicht einer krankheit / die uns heimlich und öffentlich auffrißt,” May Ayim: soul sister. In: Id.: blues in schwarz weiss. Berlin 1995, translated by Tina Campt: In: Affilia Journal of Women and Social Work 23 (2008) No. 1, pp. 92–94. May Ayim (1960–1996) was a German poet of color and activist. 2 This volume has been written within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing. Changing and Ordering the World,” Bielefeld University, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). 3 We capitalize White to mark White as a powerful, historically constructed ‘racial’ identity to counter the ‘racial’ invisibility of White people. We also follow the widespread practice of capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black to mark it as a socially and historically constructed category. In doing so, we follow the arguments of Nell Irvin Painter, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ): Nell Irvin Painter: Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too. In: The Washington Post (July 22, 2020), https://www. washingtonpost. com/ opinions/ 2020/ 07/ 22/ why- whiteshould- be- capitalized/ (last accessed September 9, 2021); Kwame Anthony Appiah:

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aware of our privileged position from which we write. We don’t face racial discrimination and are able to position ourselves – but we also see the responsibility that this privileged position puts on our shoulders as a new generation of scholars. The historical and contemporary examination of this highly sensitive topic ultimately aims to identify and counteract racist structures. We want to emphasize right at the beginning that ‘race’ is a socially constructed idea and lacks any biological basis. This volume emerged from an international and interdisciplinary conference that was organized in the context of the 11th Annual Seminar of Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) at Bielefeld University in Germany in July 2019. The Annual Seminar is a renowned conference format that invites researchers from all over the world. This format aims at reaching out for fresh, innovative ideas, perspectives and approaches that have not yet been included into well-established fields of research. During the process of this volume other appalling racist events occurred. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, shocked the world and brought the issue of systemic racism back to the agenda once again. The Covid-19 pandemic also demonstrates aspects of structural racism and racial injustices as a disproportionally high number of People of Color (PoC) or Indigenous People are affected by the virus and its consequences. 4 Rather than just focusing on the history of ideas and its discursive development, this volume will focus on what actors do when they construct ‘race’ and practice racism. By practices of ‘race,’ we specifically mean how so-called ‘races’ are produced through processes of categorization and stereotyping, combined with the production of symbolic boundaries and processes of devaluation. It is thus aligned with cultural theoretical and sociological perspectives that have long made explicit the relationality of meaning and the significance of power. 5 Practices hold a key position in negotiating and consolidating racism. The Collaborative Research Center 1288 at Bielefeld University, which focuses on comparing as a constructive The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black. In: The Atlantic (June 18, 2020), https://www. theatlantic. com/ ideas/ archive/ 2020/ 06/ time- to- capitalize- blackand- white/ 613159/ (last accessed September 9, 2021); NABJ Style Guide (June 2020), https://www. nabj. org/ page/ styleguide (last accessed September 9, 2021). Contributors to the chapters may have chosen a different spelling. 4 Rohland points out the connection between the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, the Anthropocene and systemic racism, see Eleonora Rohland: Covid-19, Climate, and White Supremacy. Multiple Crisis or One? In: Journal for the History of Environment and Society 5 (2020), pp. 23–32. 5 Cf. Stuart Hall: The Spectacle of the “Other.” In: Id. (ed.): Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London 1997, pp. 223–290.

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force for social and historical change, has highlighted the importance of practices of comparing for establishing categories, hierarchies, and inequalities 6 – these terms are also closely linked to the phenomena of racism. This volume’s goal is to show how and which practices, especially practices of comparing, are constitutive in the construction of ‘race’ and manifestations of racism. Comparing is an omnipresent operation and yet – until recently – it has hardly been discussed in the humanities. Comparisons are a basic form of relationing: it takes at least two entities or objects of comparison (comparata) that are being related to each other in certain respects (tertia) in order to highlight commonalities, similarities, incomparabilities or differences. Usually, the premises of comparisons are hardly ever made explicit. This is the reason why it is important to ask what actors do when they compare. Rather than comparison as a method or approach, this section will make practices of comparing the object of study in its own right. As a power-sensitive approach the emphasis lies on the verb in its progressive form in order to observe practices of comparing more closely. 7 The ways in which actors compare are highly depended on the circumstances and contexts in which they occur. 8 The concept of ‘race’ has recently been the subject of increasing, critical public discussions, often accompanied by debates on historical and contemporary racism, for example in connection with museums, exhibitions, cultural institutions and places of remembrance. 9 Thus, racism poses important questions for the discourse about “historical culture” 6 Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart / Johannes Grave (eds.): Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld 2020; Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan: Why Compare? In: New Literary History 40 (2009) No. 3, pp. 453–471; Walter D. Mignolo: On Comparison: Who Is Comparing What and Why? In: Rita Felski / Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.): Comparison. Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore 2013, pp. 99–119. 7 Here we follow the assumptions and terminologies developed by the SFB 1288; cf. Epple / Erhart / Grave (fn. 6); Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart (eds.): Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens. Frankfurt a. M. 2015; Willibald Steinmetz (ed.): The Force of Comparison. A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World. New York / Oxford 2019. 8 See also Mary Louise Pratt: Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York / London 1992 Second Ed. 2008. 9 The recently published volume in this series addresses the restitution debate and its connection to the concept of “historical culture” from various perspectives, see: Thomas Sandkühler / Angelika Epple / Jürgen Zimmerer (eds.): Geschichtskultur durch Restitution? Ein Kunst-Historikerstreit (Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur, Vol. 40). Wien / Köln / Weimar 2021. Further, French president Emmanuel Macron sparked a debate about the restitution of African cultural heritage also concerning the inventory of Musée de l’homme in Paris. This resulted in a critically acclaimed report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, several publications and international reactions by many African states. Similar controversies and concerns surrounded the opening of the Humboldt Forum on Berlin’s museum island in 2021 and the exhibition Ras-

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(Geschichtskultur) 10 in a globalized world. In the process, demands long raised by PoC activists in many contexts, including Germany, finally entered the public discourse on a broader basis. 11 Following the term coined by German historian Jörn Rüsen, the volume foregrounds historical and contemporary practices of racism in their own right and discusses manifestations of racism in different epochs and locations. Aspects of institutional and structural racism as well as racist practices in literature, science, media and performances offer an important extension of the study of “historical culture” (Geschichtskultur) with new perspectives on racism. The chapters presented in this volume are less about dealing with history itself, in the narrow sense of dealing with the past in social life, than about representations, mediations and constructions of ‘race’ and racism in their respective contemporary contexts of knowledge. Critical Whiteness Studies or Critical Race Theory, e.g. as critical engagements with racism in public discourse, have pointed out the racist foundations of various disciplines and urged for new ways and methods to understand the social world. 12 The legacy of White supremacy in its historical past up to the present is addressed in order to counteract recent color-blindness that fosters racial inequalities. 13

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sismus. Die Erfindung von Menschenrassen in German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. One question was: how to present artifacts and materials from contexts of colonialism and slavery without reproducing the inherent racism? Berlin Postkolonial is one initiative from civil society that raised attention to colonial histories and backgrounds in the city. Jörn Rüsen: Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art, über Geschichte nachzudenken. In: Klaus Füßmann / Theo Grütter / Jörn Rüsen (eds.): Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute. Köln 1994, pp. 3–26. Cf. May Ayim / Katharina Oguntoye / Dagmar Schultz (eds.): Showing our Colors. Afro-German Women Speak Out. Amherst 1992; Fatima El-Tayeb: European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis 2011; Theodor Michael: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Eva Rosenhaft. Liverpool 2017; see also the campaigns of Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e. V. (Initiative of Black Germans) or the trans-disciplinary artistic-activist symposia BE.BOP (Black Europe Body Politics) by Alanna Lockward. For further discussions of artistic and activist theorizations of Afropeanness see Julia Roth: Re-Performing Germanness from an Afropean Lens. In: Michaeline A. Crichlow / Pat Northover (eds.): Decolonialitiy in the Break of Global Blackness. Durham, forthcoming. Cf. Kimberlé Crenshaw / Luke Charles Harris Williams / Daniel Martinez HoSang / George Lipsitz (eds.): Seeing Race Again. Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines. Berkeley 2019; Ibram X. Kendi: How to be an Antiracist. New York 2019; Sara Salem / Vanessa Eileen Thompson: Old Racisms, New Masks: On the Continuing Discontinuities of Racism and the Erasure of Race in European Contexts. In: Ninety Sixty Nine: an Ethnic Studies Journal, Special Edition: Across Difference 3, (2016) No. 1, pp. 1–23; Karen Shimakawa: National Abjection. The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham 2002; Kim F. Hall: Things of Darkness. Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. New York 1996. For the German context see: Maureen Maisha Eggers / Grada Kilomba / Peggy Piesche / Susan Arndt (eds.): Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in

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In line with this critical approach, our aim is to uncover epistemic as well as practical racial power structures. Practice theory in general and practices of comparing, in particular, allow us to gain new insights into how racism(s) and ‘race’ are being done. We ask how exactly do the idea of ‘race’ and its practical application relate to each other. How are both being made? Racializing Humankind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ & Racism will approach this topic from a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary research from the social, literary, and historical sciences. It inquires into practices related to the (re)production of power relations, the idea of alleged innate biological properties of different groups of people, processes of social differentiation, and material inscriptions, e.g., in institutions, state formation, sciences or the literary canon. The interdisciplinary approach of the volume, ranging from the Middle Ages to modern times, from Brazil, through the United States, the Congo to Europe, precisely reflects the complexity of the phenomenon of racism, which has shaped humanity in the most diverse contexts over centuries – right up to the present day. The volume is interested in the asymmetries racializations have constructed and the persistent inequalities and violence they produce.

Premises We assume three premises on which we elaborate later in the text: firstly, this volume will present empirical case studies that examine the social production of so-called ‘races’ and racism from a praxeological perspective. 14 Practice theory, as a specific form of cultural theory, locates the social in the practices of subjects. It is concerned with reconstructing the routine attribution of meanings to objects, persons, or abstract entities. These forms of knowledge are not universal, but are historically, contextspecifically, and contingently situated. In contrast to other theories of culture, the locus of the social is neither in the mind nor exclusively in texts or discourses. Instead, practice theory understands collective knowledge orders as practical knowledge. Social practices are thus understood as routines of behavior held together by a practical understanding that is

Deutschland. Münster Third Ed. 2017; Martina Tißberger / Gabriele Dietze / Daniela Hrzán / Jana Husmann-Kastein (eds.): Weiß – Weißsein – Whiteness. Kritische Studien zu Gender und Rassismus. Critical Studies on Gender and Racism. Bern 2009. 14 Cf. Angelika Epple: Comparing Europe and the Americas. The Dispute of the New World between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In: Steinmetz (fn. 7), pp. 137– 163, esp. pp. 140–143.

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incorporated. 15 Thus, empirical studies lend themselves well to naming concrete practices that make up the social world. Also, this allows us not to stop at individual actors but to trace the structural manifestations of racism. We assume that actors are involved in practices and structures in their respective time and context, without these structures determining the actors’ agency. Structures consist of practices; both are inter-related. It is a kind of circular model that is subject to constant change. Secondly, racism consists of a set of practices. We argue that a special emphasis should be paid to practices of comparing as an immanent productive force in doing ‘race’ and racism. Practices of comparing can initiate or trigger racist practices, but they can also stabilize already existing racist ideologies and actions; therefore, practices of comparing can also be considered racist themselves. Why do certain actors make particular comparisons in specific contexts and how do they choose the different comparata? Comparing is constitutive in relating assumptions of difference and similarity. 16 In many studies racisms and especially classifications always seem to point towards differences, whereas it is important to note that comparisons can also perpetuate ethnic prejudices through claims of similarities. The Collaborative Research Center is exploring a new research paradigm by shifting attention from comparison as a seemingly invariant operation to the history and culture of a practice: doing comparisons. Taking up the idea of the project, the aim of this volume is to uncover the dynamic forces of practices of comparing regarding the construction of ‘race’ and racism. Thirdly, in our assumption of the connection between ideology and practice, we assume that ‘race’ functions as a constructed idea that can be created in various ways. We see the idea of ‘race’ as an important premise of racism, without denying the breath of this notion. The idea of ‘race’ can include a strong bodily, cultural or religious focus, or a combination of these. Even a strong physical connotation always includes cultural assumptions. The assumption of the strong link between ‘race’ and racism, is not meant to obscure the notion that racism also encompasses color blindness and 15 See esp. Andreas Reckwitz: Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. In: European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002) No. 2, pp. 243– 263; Marian Füssel / Tim Neu: Doing Discourse. Diskursiver Wandel aus praxistheoretischer Perspektive. In: Achim Landwehr (ed.): Diskursiver Wandel. Wiesbaden 2010; Anthony Giddens: The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley / Los Angeles 1984. 16 On the connection on ‘race’ and comparing, see Angelika Epple: Inventing White Beauty and Fighting Black Slavery. In: Epple / Erhart / Grave (fn. 6), pp. 295–328; on the connection between ‘race,’ comparing and the environment, see Eleonora Rohland: Entangled Histories and the Environment? Socio-Environmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1492–1800 (Inter-American Studies, Vol. 33). Trier / New Orleans 2021.

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other practices that claim not to rely on culturally constructed concepts of ‘race.’ 17 The category of so-called ‘races’ also emerged out of different social practices. 18 But these classifications of ‘races’ did not precede racist action. In all contributions, whether they focus on the negotiation of ‘race’ as an invented category or that deal primarily with racist practices, the idea or assumption of a subject constructed as unalterably inferior, or threatening is predominant. Furthermore, we want to emphasize the limits of this volume: both the period of National Socialism in Germany, antisemitism, and many world regions, such as China or India and the connection to caste, are not considered here. In addition, an intersectional perspective is only occasionally included in the contributions, but it does not run consistently through the volume. 19 We also do not claim to present a comprehensive account of racist practices. Rather, our goal is to identify certain practices that are central to the concept of ‘race’ and the system of racism based on our empirical material. To this end, we have identified four distinct sets of thematic issues that cover different social spheres, which will be outlined in more depth below.

The Interplay of ‘Race’ and Racism Racism becomes manifest in a variety of human practices in different societies at different historical times. Without going into too much detail in the discussion of the beginning of modern racism here, historical and conceptual perspectives will nevertheless be outlined to clarify our empirical and analytical starting points. 20 Depending on the academic background or re17 Cf. Étienne Balibar / Immanuel Wallerstein: Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities. London / New York 1991; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: Racism without Racists: ColorBlind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham Fifth Edition 2017. On the connection of ‘race’ and caste, see cf. Sureshi M. Jayawardene: Racialized Casteism. Exposing the Relationship between Race, Caste, and Colorism Through the Experiences of African People in India and Sri Lanka. In: African American Studies 20 (2016), pp. 323–345. 18 In our contributions concerning the term ‘race,’ we focus primarily on the construction of the all-encompassing category of ‘race’ that emerged with the natural sciences, which provided the basis for essentialist biological attributions and often served to legitimize racist practices in the wake of colonial conquest and slavery. 19 For an intersectional perspective see cf. Julia Roth: Feminism Otherwise. Intersectionality beyond Occidentalism. In: InterDisciplines 2 (2017), pp. 97–122; Heidemarie Winkel / Angelika Poferl (eds.): Multiple Gender Cultures, Sociology and Plural Modernities. Re-Reading Social Constructions of Gender across the Globe in a Decolonial Perspective. Abingdon / New York 2021. 20 For the discussion about the origin of racism see cf. Miriam Eliav-Feldon / Benjamin Isaac / Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge 2009;

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search focus, definitions of racism and its connection to ‘race’ vary widely. While several studies focus on the history of ideas, we want to shift the focus and analyze the practices of what actors do and how this creates a social reality of racialization, in claiming that a practical application / exclusion must take place in order to speak of racism. While Ibram X. Kendi claims that racism “is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequalities” 21, George M. Fredrickson states that “racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.” 22 Francisco Bethencourt also highlights the interplay between practice and idea. According to him the notion of racism consists of “prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory action” and is “motivated by political projects.” 23 Further, Tanya Golash-Boza emphasizes the connection of racist ideologies and practices on a micro- and macro-level, which she calls “structures.” 24 Although many concepts and different terms are used, these works share one common denominator: the interplay between idea / ideology and practice. Our volume follows this assumption with a focus on the practices of actors (individuals, groups, organizations, narrations, etc.). Therefore, we take this connection both to argue for a praxeological approach and to link the concepts of ‘race’ and racism. However, the social reality emerging from these practices, e.g. in the form of knowledge production, is also taken into account in individual contributions.

Research Perspectives Tanya Golash-Boza’s Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach 25 comes close to our interest in concrete practices. It presents an in-depth analysis of the history of the idea of ‘race,’ racial ideologies as well as policies and institutions. The United States serve as the paradigmatic object of compar-

21 22 23 24 25

Geraldine Heng: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge 2018; Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning. The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York 2016; Francisco Bethencourt: Racisms. From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton 2013; Christian Geulen: Geschichte des Rassismus. München 2007. Kendi (fn. 12), p. 17 f. George M. Fredrickson: Racism. A Short History. Princeton 2015. Bethencourt (fn. 20), p. 1. Tanya Golash-Boza: A Critical and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism. In: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2 (2016) No. 2, pp. 129–141, here pp. 6, 9. Tanya Golash-Boza: Race and Racisms. A Critical Approach. New York / Oxford Second Ed. 2018.

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ison or set comparatum. Other societies as diverse as South Africa, France or Brazil are compared to the US in regard to the tertium of racial injustices – but practices of comparing are hardly addressed on a meta-level. Comparing is rather used as a heuristic tool or method than discussed as a practice. Our volume claims that comparing itself is crucially involved in racist ideologies and practices. Although we are bound to a European perspective, the approach of practices of comparing (“doing comparison”) takes a reflexive stance towards comparisons and is informed by postcolonial studies. A further most noteworthy contribution is Francisco Bethencourt’s Racisms. From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century 26 from 2013. Bethencourt makes an important contribution to our discussion of the nexus between ‘race’ and racism. Similar to Golash-Boza’s approach Bethencourt also addresses racism in the plural form of racisms as a set of practices. These culturalist, homogenizing and pejorative practices result in a reality of so-called ‘races’ or ethnicities, which, however, lack any biological basis. Additionally, daily updates of racist practices underline the very variability and constructedness of racism and its high adaptability. In contrast to many insightful studies on racism, this volume does not narrow its scope to a specific region or time. Rather than overarching explanations of development, it provides individual empirical examples, emphasizing the concrete production of racist practices by specific actors at specific points in time. Thus, the latest sociological and historical research as well as cultural studies point to the high flexibility of racism: depending on the political, cultural and social context as well as time and space, racism as well as the concept of ‘race’ can take on different forms. 27 The category of ‘race’ is also constantly evoked and practically applied through racism and subject to constant change. If one traces the term ‘race’ and the history of the concept in a genealogical perspective, it shows that the meaning varies widely over time and refers to local or regional populations, families, cultures, religions, classes, sexes, or elites. But instead of focusing on the history of the word itself, in the following we rather want to emphasize the different ways, in which the term ‘race’ is understood and used in research. Understandings diverge widely whether to use ‘race’ analytically as a social relation or as a concept. Firstly, ‘race’ is understood as a structural relationship, social relation, political system, technology, or organizing principle. It can be based on moving signifiers at different times and contexts. 28 26 Bethencourt (fn. 20). 27 See also Fredrickson (fn. 22); Geulen (fn. 20). 28 Geraldine Heng understands ‘race’ as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship, and assumes that racial practices or phenomena occurred before the word as such

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Secondly, ‘race’ is grasped in the narrower sense of a concept or idea. 29 Thirdly, ‘race’ is seen as both, a political system and a political category. 30 The respective understandings strongly frame the notion of the relationship of ‘race’/racism. 31 The idea of ‘race’ as a political system or social relation comes very close to the understanding of racism in its practical application. In research it is common sense that ‘race’ is a social construct and has no biological foundation. For some researchers a physical marker is a requirement in order to speak of racism (biological racism). 32 For other researchers the physical attribution is only one among many markers, like religion, culture, class, that can become racialized or carry a racialized

29

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32

existed. Yet she uses the word in the sense of “race-making” to describe certain phenomena, see Heng (fn. 20); Demetrius Eudell stresses the symbolic and material dimension of ‘race’ as an organizing principle, see Id.: The Monocultural Origins of Multiculturalism. In: Olaf Kaltmeier / Sebastian Thies / Josef Raab (eds.): The New Dynamics of Identity Politics in the Americas. Multiculturalism and Beyond. London 2014, pp. 13–37; also Omi and Winant understand ‘race’ as an organizing principle, see Michael Omi / Howard Winant: Racial Formation in the United States. New York / London Third Edition 2015; Wulf D. Hund emphasizes the combination of natural and cultural aspects of racism and sees racism, not ‘race,’ as a social relation. He differentiates between different forms of racism (gender-racism, class-racism, national-racism, cultural-racism and races-racism) and identifies different stereotypes of dehumanization (barbarians, impurity, devils, savages, races, inferiority), see Wulf D. Hund: Rassismus. Bielefeld 2007; on Muslim experience see Saher Selod / David G. Embrick: Racialization and Muslims: Situating the Muslim Experience in Race Scholarship. In: Sociological Compass 7 (2013) No. 8, pp. 644–655. Kowner and Demel for example argue that ‘race’ and racism need not necessarily be thought of together. They have a very narrow understanding of ‘race’ as a category based on physical genetic characteristics; see their discussions: Rotem Kowner / Walter Demel: Modern East Asia and the Rise of Racial Thought: Possible Links, Unique Features and Unsettled Issues. In: Id. (eds.): Race and Racism in Modern East Asia. Western and Eastern Constructions. Leiden 2013, pp. 1–37. Wulf D. Hund also uses a narrow understanding of ‘race’ as a category and argues for the detachment of the concept of ‘race’ from research on racism, emphasizing that there was racism before the concept and also after the construct of ‘race’ was discredited, see Hund (fn. 28), p. 120. (We have to acknowledge here, that ‘race’ and ‘Rasse’ as a German term have different connotations.) But even scholars who understand ‘race’ as a socially constructed biological / physical concept (without denying other aspects like culture) argue for thinking ‘race’ and racism together, as a modern phenomenon, cf. GolashBoza (fn. 24). Others do not explicitly explain their understanding of ‘race.’ Cf. Dorothy Roberts: Fatal Invention. How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in Twenty-First Century. New York 2012, pp. 2. She further states that “[. . . ] creating race, dividing human beings into these categories, is a political practice.”, ibid. Researchers who see ‘race’ as a social relationship often trace it back to antiquity, while those who use it as a category see it as a modern phenomenon. Depending on the definition, however, it can be the other way around. This strict division is usually not that explicit, but this simplification helps in this context to show the different uses. Cf. Suman Seth: Difference and Disease. Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge 2018, esp. pp. 165–276; Kowner / Demel (fn. 29).

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meaning (cultural racism). 33 This edited volume is not intended to present a conclusive definition on ‘race’ and racism, nor to provide a complete account of these phenomena, but rather to make an empirical contribution to ongoing discussions by showing specific practices in their respective contexts. The relationship between racist ideologies and racist practices are two sides of the same coin and will be made visible through empirical case studies in an interdisciplinary way. Also, this allows for an innovative perspectivization of the genealogy of Eurocentrism and a more detailed analysis of power-relations in concrete situations and case studies. The chapters focus on different parts of the world as well as on different communities of practice that were doing ‘race’ and racism in specific settings. Further, practices will be analyzed that counteract, undermine and subvert racist structures and hegemonic power relations.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on ‘Race’ & Racism The following introductory chapters explore ‘race’ and racism in various disciplines. Heidemarie Winkel claims that sociological theories of racism and racialization do not belong to the main theoretical structure of sociology. By identifying different practices of exclusion and “Othering” Winkel shows to what extent the social reality of racism was marginalized in sociological theory since its inception. By sketching the racist and imperialist knowledge matrix in sociological thinking around 1900 using the examples of Max Weber and William E. B. Du Bois, Winkel argues that sociological knowledge production was – and still is – inherently marked by a colonial episteme. In order to decolonize sociological thinking Winkel proposes different practices of unveiling and reconstructing power asymmetries. Racialized social hierarchies are crucial parameters of social and cultural organization in the Americas. ‘Race’ as a category of social stratification is therefore an integral part of American studies. However, the systemic dimensions of racist practices are often neglected. Julia Roth therefore takes a critical look at the history of academic disciplines – particularly area studies and American studies. Thereby Roth examines hegemonic academic knowledge implementation through practices of disciplining and producing specific knowledge for their respective geohistorical settings and interests. Thus, Roth argues for research practices inspired by Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness, and intersectionality – as pro-

33 Cf. Balibar / Wallerstein (fn. 17), esp. pp. 17–28.

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posed by Black feminists in the U.S. and other parts of the Americas – as essential to critical and relational analyses of racist structures. Drawing on perspectives from anti-colonial thinkers as well as decolonial approaches the article argues to consider more historical, relational, and structural approaches. Roth also emphasizes the need to consider both how theories and concepts ‘travel’ and to focus on locally context-specific dimensions as well as entanglements and commonalities of processes and phenomena between different spaces. In doing so, she calls for always including one’s own speaking position and for always revisiting the shifting dynamics of racism along other categories and axes of stratification (e.g., also transnationality, migration, citizenship status).

Practices of Comparing as Immanent Constructive Forces in the Thematic Complex of ‘Race’ & Racism Debates about the validity of the method surrounded comparing since the emergence of ‘comparative sciences’ at around 1800. 34 In the 19th century ‘the comparative method’ became prevalent in many disciplines. 35 However, the ‘age of comparison’ 36 should not deceive us that comparing is a historical, social, and quotidian operation in different centuries and (world)regions. Therefore, it is necessary to ask for the “cultural functions and effects of comparisons at different points in time and among specific groups of historical actors.” 37

34 Peter V. Zima (ed.): Vergleichende Wissenschaften. Interdisziplinarität und Interkulturalität in den Komparatistiken. Tübingen 2000; Gilbert Casasus / Sabine Haupt (eds.): Vergleichen? Komparatistische Wissenschaften im Vergleich. Comparer? La comparaison dans les sciences (Freiburger Sozialanthropologische Studien, Vol. 31). Münster 2011; Vittorio Hösle: Über den Vergleich von Texten. Philosophische Reflexionen zu der grundlegenden Operation der literaturwissenschaftlichen Komparatistik. In: Orbis Litterarum 63 (2008), pp. 381–402; Michael Eggers: Vergleichendes Erkennen: Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie des Vergleichs und zur Genealogie der Komparatistik (Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Vol. 68). Heidelberg 2016; Haun Saussy: Axes of Comparison. In: Felski / Friedman (fn. 6), pp. 64–76. 35 Matei Candea: Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method (New Departures in Anthropology). Cambridge 2019. 36 Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human. A Book For Free Spirits (1878), transl. by A. Harvey. Chicago 1908, pp. 49–50. 37 Eleonora Rohland / Kirsten Kramer: Introduction on ‘Doing Comparison’ – Practices of Comparing. In: Eleonora Rohland / Angelika Epple / Antje Flüchter / Kirsten Kramer (eds.): Contact, Conquest and Colonization. How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism Around the World. New York 2021, pp. 1–16, p. 2.

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Notably post-colonial scholars have, in the more recent past, asked for the actors and ‘politics of comparison.’ 38 It became clear that comparisons are a constructive force. They shape their objects and highlight specific features. Also, comparisons are hardly neutral but often manifest power relations. Therefore scholars such as Indian literary critic Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan but also feminist literary theorists Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman have theorized the political and ethical dimensions of comparing. 39 (Post)colonial historian Ann Laura Stoler stated: “I call for more reflection on the history and politics of comparison, on the doing of comparison, on the doing of a certain kind of comparative cultural history, and urge attention to practices of colonial comparison.” 40 The essential point of this line of argument is not only about Eurocentrism or Western conceptual imperialism. It is rather the challenge that any actor of comparison is inevitably bound to produce in a certain way the compared units and categories, that are needed to make the units comparable by drawing on the conceptual repertoire of a particular language, perspective, standpoint, etc. By inquiring into the connection of colonialism and comparisons environmental historian Eleonora Rohland and comparative literature scholar Kirsten Kramer state that: “comparison has been an instrument of power and dominance throughout European expansion” but they also consider, “when such practices were subverted or appropriated by the colonized or marginalized groups.” 41 Consequently, colonial entanglements of comparisons have already been addressed. The context of slavery and colonial policies regarding the local populations are deeply intertwined with the development of racist doctrines. 42 But the connection between comparative practices and ‘race’/racism has hardly been interro-

38 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Rethinking Comparativism. In: New Literary History 40 (2009) No. 3, pp. 609–626; Homi K. Bhabha: The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse. In: K. M. Newton (ed.): Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. A Reader. London 1997, pp. 293–302; Pheng Cheah: Grounds of Comparison. In: Diacritics 29 (1999) No. 4, pp. 1–18; Natalie Melas: Merely Comparative. In: PMLA 128 (2013) No. 3, pp. 652–9. 39 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan: “Why Compare?” In: New Literary History 40 (2009) No. 3, pp. 453–71; Felski / Friedman (fn. 6). 40 Ann Laura Stoler: “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” In: The Journal of American History 88 (2001) No. 3, p. 831. 41 Rohland / Kramer (fn. 37), p. 4. 42 Alina Helg: Slave but Not Citizen: Free People of Color and Blood Purity in Colonial Spanish American Legislation. In: Millars: Espai I Història 42 (2017), pp. 75–99. Jerome Branche: Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature. Columbia 2010; Nina Möllers: Kreolische Identität. Eine amerikanische ‘Rassengeschichte’ zwischen Schwarz und Weiß. Die Free People of Color in New Orleans. Bielefeld 2008.

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gated and urges for further inquiry. 43 When it comes to ‘race’ in practice it is important to analyze precisely, in which way the term ‘race’ is used – as a comparatum, tertium or category. Our examples examine the connection of comparing and ‘race’/racism as well as how comparing produces a specific understanding of ‘race’: on the one hand, this understanding changes permanently, and, on the other hand, it must be produced time and time again through comparisons in order to be relatively stable. 44 In the following chapters we hope to learn more about the situations and conditions in which racial comparisons were made, to which end, which positions were able to compare or how they turned into (other) racist practices. Over the course of the book comparisons will be addressed. This section, however, will present highly contextualized case studies that explicitly explore political and colonial ties to racial comparisons. The papers deal with historical situations and contexts in which racial comparisons became prevalent. Andreas Becker’s chapter focuses on practices of comparing in ethnographic writing on the Sami people in Scandinavia in the Early modern time. Based on works such as Jakob Ziegler’s Schondia (1532), Olaus Magnus’ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555), Johannes Schefferus’ Lapponia (1673), or Carl Linné’s Lachesis lapponica (1732) Becker argues that comparing is a crucial force in the development of ethnic and racial categorizations. Over the course of said time-period external factors become internal qualities, traits formerly seen as alterable are regarded as essential and peoples living in supposedly remote places are subject to global ethnographic comparisons. Tertia and comparata initiate and change scientific schemes and methods of racialized descriptions. But more importantly comparisons order and stabilize the ways ‘races’ are perceived, imagined and hierarchized not only in ethnographical thought but also in the policies of hegemonic governments such as the Swedish. The Sami are of importance also in Malin S. Wilckens’ paper as they illustrate complex comparative ‘race’ constructions. Wilckens situates Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s (1752–1840) and Anders Retzius’ (1796– 1860) material practices of ‘collecting’ and comparing skulls in the context of colonial exploitation and epistemic violence. The social imaginary of (pseudo-)scientific theories of both naturalists were highly dependent 43 The connection has already been theorized, for example by Epple (fn. 16); Rohland (fn. 16). 44 Besides our own contributions, see theoretical elaborations in: Ulrike Davy / Johannes Grave / Marcus Hartner / Ralf Schneider / Willibald Steinmetz: Grundbegriffe für eine Theorie des Vergleichens. Ein Zwischenbericht (Working Paper des SFB 1288, No. 3). Bielefeld 2019. DOI: https://doi. org/ 10. 4119/ unibi/ 2939563 (last accessed September 9, 2021).

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on their respective skull collections and a constant supply from violent colonial encounters, plundered graves and burial sights, etc. Blumenbach and Retzius performed comparative analyses on these skulls that became seminal for comparative anatomy and craniology and show that practices of comparing were crucial to the construction of ‘races.’ Different practices as well as the use of different tertia and comparata show the flexibility of the concept of ‘race.’ Wilckens makes the case, however, that these seemingly neutral practices and their visual representation rather served to perpetuate racial differences. Julian T. D. Gärtner’s contribution examines ‘race’ in George Sand’s novel Indiana through comparisons to plants and slavery. French abolitionism of the time develops specific practices to observe, narrate and compare. Sand’s novel presents a comparative social analysis of French aristocratic society and plantation society on La Réunion, formerly known as Île Bourbon. Through a narrative of conjugal love, the narration examines the continuity of colonial power in gender relations. Comparisons to plants as well as to slavery are closely tied to colonialism: not only do they explore the erotic and exoticizing aspects, but rather they speak to the social and ethnic dimensions of colonial ties that culminate in a ‘race’ struggle. George Sand’s narration can be understood as a social experiment. Comparing is used as a counter-practice against hegemonic power. However, it is a practice that is hardly un-biased and can be reappropriated by hegemonic forces and thus the abolition of power relation fails.

Practices of (Current) Institutional / Systemic Racism Sociologists, political theorists, and education researchers have pointed out the perseverance and relevance of racism in current societies and its transforming character. 45 Most sociological theories conceptualize ‘race’ and racism together, as they argue that ‘race’ is a modern concept that emerged with colonization and slavery and that ‘race’ is brought into being by racism. 46 Recent research also points to the global and structural dimension of racism and argues that all of the “governing technologies,” 45 Cf. María Do Mar Castro Varela / Paul Mecheril (eds.): Die Dämonisierung der Anderen. Rassismuskritik der Gegenwart. Bielefeld 2016; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: White Supremacy & Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boulder 2001; Julian Go: Postcolonial Possibilities for the Sociology of Race. In: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2018), pp. 1–13. 46 Cf. Golash-Boza (fn. 24); Karen E. Fields / Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft. The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London 2012.

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e.g. western expansion, capitalist economy, knowledge production, nation states, citizenship, are hierarchically racialized. 47 In this perspective ‘race’ and racism “are central organizing tools of modern society.” 48 The research strongly focuses on the hierarchy between Whiteness and Blackness assuming that White supremacy is the basis of all racial order, but emphasizes that Whiteness should not be reduced to bodies. 49 Michelle Christian argues that we see White supremacy today through practices emblematic of deep and malleable Whiteness. Instead, Ramón Grosfoguel emphasizes the Fanonian divide into “zone of being” and “zone of non-being” and defines racism as a global hierarchy / structural domination of superiority and inferiority where it can encompass different markers, such as color, religion, ethnicity, culture and language. Nevertheless, he sees anti-black racism as one of the prevalent forms. 50 But which practices are crucial and how do these practices manifest institutional and structural racism? In recent years, White identity politics has become a common topic of public discourse in the United States and is usually associated with rightwing White nationalism. Mark B. Brown focusses in his chapter on different forms and practices of White identity politics. The chapter examines White identity politics with regard to three ideal-types: 1) the conservative White identity politics of those who seek, either implicitly or explicitly, to maintain the political and cultural dominance of White people; 2) the color blind antiracism of White liberals; 3) the radical White identity politics of those who both identify as White and seek to repair and abolish systemic racial injustices. Thereby Brown examines different practices of White supremacy as a de facto system of institutionalized cultural, economic, and political power, and he further shows how antiracist practices, associated with radical White identity politics, seek to overcome this very system of White supremacy.

47 Michelle Christian: A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness. In: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5 (2019) No. 2, pp. 169–185; on the coloniality of citizenship, see: Manuela Boatc˘a/Julia Roth: Unequal and Gendered: Notes on the Coloniality of Citizenship. In: Current Sociology 4 (2015); for a cosmopolitan model and theorization of global citizenship see Chielozona Eze: Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa. Rochester 2018; on the connection between ‘race,’ colonialism, and capitalism, see Anibal Quijano: Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. In: Nepantla: Views from South 1 (2000) No. 3, pp. 533–580. 48 Vilna Bashi Treitler / Manuela Boatc˘a: Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective. An Introduction. In: Current Sociology Monograph 64 (2016) No. 2, pp. 159– 171, p. 163. 49 Cf. Christian (fn. 47). 50 Ramón Grosfoguel: What is Racism? In: Journal of World-Systems Research 22 (2016) No. 1, pp. 9–15.

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Sheila Ragunathan discusses institutional racism in German higher education. She highlights from a feminist postcolonial perspective how historical mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion re-emerge into contemporary structures of higher education and shows how exactly racism operates through institutional, exclusionary practices. Based on interviews with student activists, Ragunathan examines what we can learn from the students’ classroom experiences about how ‘race’ and racism shape academic classroom dynamics and how this informs pedagogical practices, if we take student learning experiences seriously. Ragunathan opens up ways in which an anti-racist teaching strategy can be developed. The role of ‘race’ as a central mediator for citizenship is taken up by João Fiocchi. He analyzes how racial capitalism produces disparate outcomes among racialized human populations by focusing on the legal practices of slave societies (United States and Brazil). Rodrigues claims that constitutional practices of silencing on slavery have not led to a lack of regulation of it. Exclusion from citizenship rights and the regulation of territorial movement for Blacks reveal the racial stratification in the process of state formation in the US as well as Brazil. Thereby it was rather the process of racialization than solely the function of being enslaved that led to political marginalization.

The Momentum of ‘Race’ in the Production of Knowledge Many historians locate the “invention of ‘race’” in the context of rising discussions of natural scientists about the origin and differences of humankind in the 18th century. 51 Without denying the specificity of this epoch in the history of ‘race,’ these approaches share a strong focus on the scientific invention of ‘race’ as a category. We would like to go into this aspect in more depth in this section, without locating knowledge production exclusively in academia or attributing it only to this period. With precursors in the Middle Ages within contact zones, the contributions here too focus primarily on the increasing production of knowledge in the natural sciences in the context of the European Enlightenment and colonial conquest. 52 The construction of ‘race’ as an all-encompassing 51 Sara Eigen / Mark Joseph Larrimore (eds.): The German Invention of Race. Albany 2006; Susanne Lettow (ed.): Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences. Albany 2014; Nicolas Bancel / Thomas David / Dominic Thomas (eds.): The Invention of Race. Scientific and Popular Representations. New York / London 2014. 52 Andreas Becker’s and Malin Wilckens’ contributions in the section on comparison also connect thematically here.

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category emerged in the natural sciences in the late 18th century within the debate about monogenism and polygenism. 53 During this time scientists’ goal was to create clear boundaries, classifications, and categories to render the ‘ever-expanding’ world intelligible. A particular focus was put on the production of scientific theories about human beings. The search for one’s own identity was closely related to the understanding of ‘others’ with a simultaneously differentiation. 54 At this stage of knowledge production, the idea of ‘race’ as an allegedly natural, bodily characteristic became central. The idea received a basis, then considered to be scientific, and served, often, to legitimize practices of racism in the wake of capital colonialism and slavery. The transition from the 18th to the 19th century was a decisive phase in the production of the physical categories of ‘race’ and species. The ascribed physical and mental traits were elevated to immutable characteristics in the 19th century and ‘race’ gained its specific innate biological ascription. But even in pseudo-scientific theories ‘race’ was negotiated in many controversies and there was no unified definition. The following chapters examine how exactly difference was perceived, also before the emergence of natural sciences, and how knowledge about so-called ‘races’ or difference was produced and negotiated. Christian Hoffarth examines situations in which late medieval European travelers to Asia and Africa were confronted with the peculiarities of their corporeality by the people they met there. He argues that the processing of these ‘experiences of otherness’ through travel texts, and their reception, contributed to a lasting change in the notions of the diversity of the human body in Europe. Deploying examples from travel texts from the 13th to the 15th century, it is demonstrated how European travelers integrated their new experiences into existing ‘pre-racial’ systems of thought about the bodily diversity of humankind. In doing so, Hoffarth identifies two different practices of differentiation which can also be seen as a transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. They shift from exegetical to empirical practices of differentiation, which Hoffarth associates with a transition from a culturalist to an essentialist principle of differentiation. It is thus shown that the racial thinking of the colonial era was based at least in part on ideas conceived in individual contacts of European travelers with non-European peoples in the late Middle Ages.

53 The idea of the ‘limpieza de sangre’ (purity of blood), however, was already prevalent after the Spanish Reconquista, cf. Max Sebastián Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne. Die “Reinheit des Blutes” im Spanien in der Frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt a. M. 2006; Helg (fn. 42). 54 Cf. Fernando Coronil: Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories. In: Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996) No. 1, pp. 51–87.

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There is much argument about the impact of the European Enlightenment. In most cases, the central question is whether it brought about modern egalitarianism or created the ground for scientific racism. Devin J. Vartija focusses on leading French philosophers and naturalists and their new materialism. By analyzing what the philosophes were doing when using the concept ‘race’ or when integrating humanity into natural history, Vartija dismantles the paradox of the Enlightenment. Through a naturalistic representation (physical and moral) of the human being, according to Vartija, the tension between ‘race’ and equality in Enlightenment thought could best be explained. Denis Diderot and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon sought to explain humanity’s physical diversity through naturalist causes embedded in new theories of animal generation, superseding a parochial biblical framework. Vartija argues that the search for the origins of morality gave equality a normative authority, as inequality came to be seen as something artificial and in need of justification. In her paper, Sophie Bitter-Smirnov analyzes the discursive strategies of polygenists vis-à-vis advocates of monogenism and shows why polygenism gained ground by the middle of the 19th century. One reason lied in the development of a new line of reasoning. Bitter-Smirnov examines in detail the various practices of argumentation, especially how polygenists reacted to Buffon’s species concept, which served most monogenists as proof of a single origin of humans. Thereby she shows how polygenists worked on dismantling monogenists’ argumentation. Bitter-Smirnov has identified three argumentation strategies: 1) The rejection of the species concept as a whole, 2) The rejection of the implicit premise that the species concept is applicable to all genera and species in equal measure, 3) The rejection of the claim that all ‘races’ and peoples can intermix and give birth to a fertile, healthy generation.

Narrative and Representational Practices of ‘Race’ in Popular Media The verses of May Ayim’s poem and the motto of this introduction already emphasize the importance of the form, the medial presentation, language and genre in which ‘race’ and racism are being discussed. Only a little more than twenty years ago it was noticed that some of the most prestigious literary prizes were awarded to authors from former colonies and the so-called “periphery.” 55 Many productive discussions followed about world litera-

55 Bill Ashcroft / Gareth Griffiths / Helen Tiffin (eds.): The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York / London 2010. Under slavery, en-

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ture, 56 orientalism, 57 hybridity 58 and what post-coloniality could possibly mean. 59 Undoubtedly, these perspectives enriched the literary and cultural life in the former ‘centers’ and the northern hemisphere as a whole and still do. Authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison, Amanda Gorman, Leïla Slimani, Afua Cooper and many others still make untold, suppressed and ousted stories heard and raise awareness for the continuities of violence, racial discrimination and colonial injustices to this day. Without their efforts and manifold contributions in forms of novels, shortstories, poems, songs, performances, etc. our discussion and this volume would have been unthinkable. Post-colonial criticism also led to new discussions of long-standing conventions, routines and traditions, such as the canons of literature and many other arts. 60 The revision is still in progress, but it has shown so far that art and sciences alike, all aspects of popular and intellectual culture are affected and that the pale face of racism is a global concern. Therefore, the following section examines how literature and contemporary cinema deal with racism from decolonial perspectives. It inquires into the violent racist imagery and colonial entitlement in the literary canon and its sub-genres as well. This section traces the manyfaced ways, in which literary, discursive, narrative and imaginary practices of ‘race’ and racism operate. The chapter of L. Katherine Smith provides a survey of three selected utopian novels. Symzonia by Captain Adam Seaborn (pseudonym, 1818), Mizora by Mary Bradley Lane (1880), and The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896) are the most relevant examples for 19th

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slaved humans were systematically excluded from literacy (and thus to what counted as ‘legitimate,’ ‘modern’ knowledge production), cf. the inclusion of ‘slave narratives’ into the literary canon: Elahe Haschemi Yekani: Feeling Modern: Narratives of Slavery as Entangled Literary History. In: Hans G. Kippenberg / Birgit Mersmann (eds.): The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity. Berlin / Boston 2016, pp. 117–134. David Damrosch: What is World Literature? Princeton 2018; Elke Sturm-Trigonakis: Global Playing in der Literatur: Ein Versuch über die Neue Weltliteratur. Würzburg 2007. Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism. New York 1993; Edward Said: Orientalism. New York 1978. Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture. New York / London 2003. Stuart Hall: When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit. In: Iain Chambers / Lidia Curti (eds.): The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. New York / London 1996, pp. 242–60; María do Mar Castro Varela / Nikita Dhawan: Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung. Bielefeld 2005. Chinua Achebe: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In: W. W. Norton (ed.): Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. Authoritative Text. Backgrounds and Contexts. New York / London 1989 Third Edition 2006, pp. 336–349; Hunt Hawkins: Heart of Darkness and Racisms. In: Ibid., pp. 365–375; John Thieme: Postcolonial Con-Texts. Writing Back to the Canon. London / New York 2001.

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century American novels that deal with theories of hollow earth and open polar sea. Besides the exploration of the earth’s interior or free passage through the Arctic Ocean, Smith argues, that the discovery of new peoples or ‘races’ is a defining feature of the genre. On the one hand, these novels discuss national issues of the time such as the expansion of the frontier in the American West. On the other hand, the fictional travel accounts also discuss anxieties and ambivalences about racial hierarchies that a further expansion and contact with other ethnicities could entail. Smith points out that comparing is a decisive process in scientific exploration and the negotiation of racial hierarchies. Similar to the previous chapter, Robrecht De Boodt urges for more awareness of tenacious pseudo-scientific racism in discussions on colonial pasts in the current debates on colonial Geschichtskultur in Belgium. He specifically underlines the importance of the ‘literary knowledge’ of popularized colonial ideology and sciences that colonial literature historically produced. De Boodt’s paper deals with the colonial author Sylva de Jonghe. The prolific Flemish writer published a programmatic essay titled Het Koloniale in de Literatuur (1938), as well as the colonial novel Het Groene Hart van Afrika (1940). Not only does the present paper trace the connections between colonial aesthetics, such as stereotypical colonial imagery and themes, preconceived pseudo-scientific ideas and vocabulary and popular narrative practices. It also investigates the various sources and sciences (ethnology, tropical medicine, eugenics, etc.) that Sylva de Jonghe drew on to elaborate and popularize his racist ideas of superiority and justification of the Belgian colonization of Congo. Burrhus Njanjo’s contribution highlights two recent movies by filmmakers from the so-called “periphery,” namely Vénus Noire (2010) by Abdellatif Kechiche and A United Kingdom (2016) by Amma Asante. While Vénus Noire tells the fatal story of Saartje Baartman, who is exhibited and humiliated as ‘Hottentot-Venus,’ A United Kingdom is about the struggles the Person of Color Seretse Khama and his British wife Ruth Williams face as a couple. Both examples are set in specific historical backgrounds – the popular and scientific racism in European societies in the 19th century on the one hand and the independence politics of Botswana in the middle of the 20th century on the other hand. It is Njanjo’s argument to say that both movies in their own ways bring practices of sexuality and racialized bodies in relation to broader social issues and different regimes of racism such as the knowledge production of scientific racism and the political discrimination in the apartheid system. According to Njanjo these movies showcase and discuss racism through medial and visual practices: exhibiting bodies (for purposes of science, power and amusement alike), comparing body parts, and other practices of ostentatious humiliation.

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In her paper, Lisa Baßenhoff examines academic presentations from the perspective of Critical Whiteness Studies. Drawing on practice theory and performance theory, Baßenhoff reflects on our own conference and identifies moments of irritation in scientific presentations and artistic performance through changes in the relationship between saying and showing. In doing so, she explores different practices of proximity and distance. Baßenhoff emphasizes the necessity for White scientists to deal with their own (bodily) entanglement and White privilege and to consciously develop anti-racist strategies for the presentation of one’s own research.

1. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on ‘Race’ and Racism

Winkel, Heidemarie

Tracing (Theories of) Racism in Sociological Thinking: A Postcolonial Approach

In her research journey across the US from 1834 to 1836, early sociologist Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) encountered the social reality of massive inequality in America. 1 The British social theorist concluded that the supposed nation of equals had developed its own class distinctions and power asymmetries in contrast to European societies, which were still largely characterized by estatist differentiation at that time. Next to women’s discrimination, Martineau identified slavery as a fundamental societal contradiction. 2 With few exceptions, Martineau’s work has been widely ignored in the sociological domain until today. 3 The first African American sociologist, William E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), largely shared this fate. However, in the younger past Du Bois’ Sociology of Slavery and Black Folk in America is getting greater attention. 4 On occasion, Du Bois is even introduced as a founding father of sociology. 5 This can be taken as

1 The results of this ethnographically based study were published in Harriet Martineau: Society in America. New Brunswick / London 1837 Fourth Ed. 2005. Cf. also Harriet Martineau: How to Observe Morals and Manners. New Brunswick / London 1838 Third Ed. 2002. 2 Susan Hoecker-Drysdale: Harriet Martineau (1802–1876). Kritische Sozialforschung: Theorie und Praxis. In: Claudia Honegger / Theresa Wobbe (eds.): Frauen in der Soziologie. Neun Porträts. München 1998, pp. 28–59, here pp. 48 f. 3 Alice S. Rossi: The First Woman Sociologist: Harriet Martineau (1802–1876). In: Alice S. Rossi (ed.): The Feminist Papers. From Adams to de Beauvoir. Hannover / London 1973; Susan Hoecker-Drysdale: Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist. Oxford 1992. 4 William E. B. Du Bois / Isabel Eaton: The Philadelphia N*. A Social Study. Philadelphia 1899 (1996); William E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk. Essays and Sketches. Chicago 1904; William E. B. Du Bois: Die N*frage in den Vereinigten Staaten. In: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 22 (1906), pp. 31–79; William E. B. Du Bois: The N*. London / Oxford 1915 (1970); William E. B. Du Bois: Black Folk, Then and Now; an Essay in the History and Sociology of the N* Race. New York 1939. 5 Mathias Bös: ‘Rasse’ und ‘Ethnizität’. W. E. B. Du Bois und die wissenschaftliche Konstruktion sozialer Großgruppen in der Geschichte der US-amerikanischen Soziologie.

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evidence for a growing awareness of racism, slavery and colonialism as key topics of sociological analysis. De facto, sociologists are continuously contributing to the study of racism and slavery, beginning in the 19th century 6 and afresh since the 1960s and 1970s 7, followed by postcolonial approaches in the younger past. 8 Sociologists are reconstructing a variety of social mechanisms that foster the production of racism, like institutional discrimination 9, symbolic boundary making and social exclusion 10, representations of difference and subalternity 11, or the interactive production of racism in everyday life as well as part of growing nationalist tendencies in various European contexts. 12 Yet, social theories of racism and racialization are not part of the theoretical mainstream in sociology; nor is racism envisioned as a deep-rooted, historically traceable pattern of knowledge within sociological thinking. 13 The steadily growing migration in Western-European

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In: Marion Müller / Darius Zifonun (eds.): Ethnowissen. Soziologische Beiträge zu ethnischer Differenzierung und Migration. Wiesbaden 2010, pp. 37–60, here p. 60; Aldon Morris: The Scholar Denied. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Oakland 2015. Societally relevant voices were next to Du Bois the illiterate abolitionist Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) and Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964). Cf. Avtar Brah / Ann Phoenix: “Ain’t I a Woman?” Revisiting Intersectionality. In: Journal of International Women’s Studies 5 (2004) No. 3, pp. 75–86. Most prominent: Eugene Genovese: The Political Economy of Slavery. Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. London 1966; Orlando Patterson: The Sociology of Slavery. An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of N* Slave Society in Jamaica. London 1967; Orlando Patterson: Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study. Harvard 1982; Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge MA 1993; Stuart Hall: Rassismus und kulturelle Identität. Ausgewählte Schriften II. Hamburg 1994; Stuart Hall: Ideologie, Identität, Repräsentation. Hamburg 2004. Cf. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez / Manuela Boatc˘a/Sergio Costa (eds.): Decolonizing European Sociology. Farnham 2010; Julian Go: Postcolonial Sociology. Bingley 2013; Gurminder Bhambra: Connected Sociologies. London 2014; Julian Go: Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford 2016; Julian Go / George Lawson (eds.): Global Historical Sociology. Cambridge 2017. Cf. Stokely Carmichael / Charles Hamilton: Black Power. Politics of Liberation. New York 1967. Cf. Patricia Hill Collins: Learning from the Outsider Within. In: Social Problems 33 (1986) No. 6, pp. 14–32; Andreas Wimmer: Ethnic Boundary Making. Institutions, Power, Networks. Oxford 2013. Hall, Rassismus (fn. 7). Cf. Avtar Brah: Re-framing Europe. En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe. In: Feminist Review 45 (1993), pp. 9–28; Noah Sow: Deutschland Schwarz Weiß: der alltägliche Rassismus. München 2008; Mark Terkessidis: Die Banalität des Rassismus. Migranten zweiter Generation entwickeln eine neue Perspektive. Bielefeld 2015. This does not contradict Tanya Golash-Boza’s argument that a comprehensive and critical sociological theory of ‘race’ and racism exists. Tanya Golash-Boza: A Critical

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(industrial) nation states since the last decades of the twentieth century resulted into a renewal of sociological studies on migration. However, its theoretical core turned on ethnic differentiation and integration 14, followed by multiculturalism 15 and since about a decade on diversity. 16 Racism remained a marginal theoretical issue, with few exceptions like Stuart Hall’s research in Birmingham at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where he became known as a leading cultural theorist in the 1970s and 1980s, Patricia Hill Collins’ award winning writings on Black feminist thought 17, sexual politics and new racism 18 or Tariq Modood 19, who founded the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in the late 1990s. Despite these voices, sociological thinking on racism is institutionally segregated from the theoretical mainstream; the “shift in focus form [sic!] class conflict to race conflict” 20 that British sociology experienced in the early 1970s and which is also visible in the US, does not pertain to continental sociology, and definitely not to sociological thinking in Germany. On closer examination, it is astonishing that the turn towards racism and so-called ‘race relations’ in the second half of the twentieth century, whether in the UK or in the US, was experienced as a paradigm shift 21, because right from the beginning, in the 19th century, Western, European societies and nation states were structured to the core by racism, nation-

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and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism. In: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2 (2016) No. 2, pp. 129–141. Hartmut Esser: Ethnische Differenzierung und moderne Gesellschaft. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17 (1988) No. 4, pp. 235–248; Hartmut Esser: Integration und ethnische Schichtung. In: Arbeitspapiere – Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung 40 (2001). Cf. Amy Gutmann (ed.): Multiculturalism. Expanded Paperback Edition. Princeton 1995; Andreas Reckwitz: Multikulturalismustheorien und der Kulturbegriff. Vom Homogenitätsmodell zum Modell kultureller Interferenzen. In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 11 (2001), pp. 179–200; Tariq Modood: Multiculturalism. A Civic Idea. Cambridge 2007. Cf. María do Mar Castro Varela / Nikita Dhawan (eds.): Soziale (Un)Gerechtigkeit: Kritische Perspektiven auf Diversity, Intersektionalität und Antidiskriminierung. Berlin / Münster 2011. Patricia Hill Collins: Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York 1990. Patricia Hill Collins: Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York 2004. Tariq Modood: Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship. Stokeon-Trent 1992. Halsey op. cit. John Solomos: Sociology of Race, Racism and Ethnicity. Trends, Debates and Research Agendas. In: John Holmwood / John Scott (eds.): The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology. London 2014, pp. 396–412, p. 297. Solomos (fn. 20), p. 298.

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alism and colonialism. At that time, sociological thinking took shape – in contrast to ethnology’s focus on societies outside of Europe – as the science that reflects the effects of the socio-economic and political revolutions in Western, European societies; put in a nutshell by Max Weber in the notion of occidental rationality as distinct European development path. Partly, this included a consideration of imperial realities. Max Weber for example was known as advocate of an “eminently harsh imperialism” 22 in favor of Germany’s cultural superiority in the East 23, while Karl Marx viewed imperialism – more or less prosaic – as a necessary stage in the development towards communism. 24 But generally, imperialism was an uncontroversial social reality, kept to the sidelines in sociological thinking with its primary focus on the seemingly internally caused shifting of European societies in the saddle period (1750–1850) 25 as an exceptional case. Put another way, social theorists in sociology’s foundation phase have ignored empire and colonialism as a pivotal framework of European societies’ constitution. 26 I suggest that this is a result of white sociologist’s privileged power position in the social sphere of academic knowledge production and their colonial knowledge matrix. In this contribution, I want to trace how the social reality of racism and related theoretical approaches like William E. B. Du Bois’ were marginalized in this white dominated knowledge and meaning frame. To this end I sketch the racist and imperialist knowledge matrix in sociological thinking around 1900 in a first step using the example of Max Weber (1). I argue that sociological knowledge production was – and still is – inherently marked by a colonial episteme and a white doxa. The notions of the colonial episteme and the white doxa seize on postcolonial theory’s basic premise, according to which colonial forms of knowing and understanding social reality are continuing in postcolonial constellations 22 Wolfgang J. Mommsen: Diskussionsbeitrag zum Vortrag von Raymond Aron. Max Weber und die Machtpolitik. In: Otto Stammer (ed.): Max Weber und die Soziologie heute. Verhandlungen des 15. Deutschen Soziologentages in Heidelberg 1964. Tübingen 1965, pp. 130–137, p. 131. 23 Several national economists in the Verein für Socialpolitik – the first institutional pillar of sociologists in the 19th century before the German Sociological Association was founded in 1909 – expressed strong interest in Germany’s African colonies, for example Gustav Schmoller; Max Weber however did not share this concern at all. He was entirely attracted by Prussia’s settlement colonization in the east. Cf. Andrew Zimmerman: German Sociology and Empire. From Internal Colonization to Overseas Colonization and Back Again. In: George Steinmetz (ed.): Sociology and Empire. The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline. Durham 2013, pp. 166–187, here p. 175. 24 Cf. Wolfgang J. Mommsen: Imperialismustheorien. Ein Überblick über die neueren Imperialismusinterpretationen. Göttingen 1987. 25 Reinhard Koselleck coined the notion of the saddle period as the formation phase of ‘Western modernity’. 26 Bhambra (fn. 8), p. 152; Go (fn. 8).

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in powerful ways, including academic discourses. The colonial episteme will be discussed in the second step (2). Against this backdrop, possibilities to decolonize sociological thinking will be outlined in a third and final step (3). That way the contribution aims to motivate a critical, postcolonial inspired reading of classical as well as contemporary sociological thinking.

1. Racism in Sociology’s Foundation Phase The first African American sociologist, William E. B. Du Bois, wrote intensely about slavery and ‘race’ discrimination in the US. Like Harriet Martineau, Du Bois was deeply concerned how a nation that envisions democracy as a central feature of its self-image can develop such a caste spirit. 27 In an article, Max Weber had requested from Du Bois during his visit in America in 1904 for the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Du Bois sketched the tense discourses about slavery in the first decades of the 19th century and explained the continuing denigration of Blacks after abolition as a matter of discrimination and dehumanization. 28 In various publications, Du Bois also emphasized the relevance of slavery as a central pillar of industrialization: “There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slavery trade. [. . . ] more and more it came in time to be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a new industrial system.” 29 Nevertheless, the relevance of slavery – and colonization – for the differentiation of bourgeois-capitalist societies in North America and Europe has been widely ignored by sociology’s early thinkers, and still today, it has not been fully acknowledged in its consequences for societal development and sociological thinking in the global North. Accordingly, racism unfolds twofold in the sociological domain; first as the ignorance of subaltern experiences and realities as object of study; and second as institutional exclusion of individuals due to their ascribed ‘racial’ status and the non-thematization of white privilege and dominance, resulting in what I call a white doxa, that is, all opinions and ideas that are taken for granted regarding the superiority and privileged status of white people and the inferiority of non-white people. Throughout his whole academic life, William E. B. Du Bois had experienced this double scientific racism: “white universities at the turn of the twentieth century

27 Du Bois used the term caste in order to mark that this difference was not only economically caused, but rather pointed at humans, their socio-political status and life chances as well as their identity in an abusive manner. 28 Du Bois, Die N*frage in den Vereinigten Staaten (fn. 4). 29 Du Bois, The N* (fn. 4), pp. 89 f.

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did not hire or collaborate with black scholars,” nor were they “interested in research exploring African Americans.” 30 Only at Atlanta University, a Black college, Du Bois was appointed as professor (in 1897); he developed a sociological school – the first sociological school – on racial oppression, convinced that sociological thinking includes the means to uncover the social mechanism of racism and white power structures. 31 When Max Weber visited America in 1904, he became aware of Du Bois’ research; Weber is described as admiring Du Bois, primarily because of the latter’s “mixed blood”. 32 Using a marked biologist terminology, Weber wrote in a letter from America to his mother about “‘half-N*, quarter-N*, and one-hundredth part N*’.” 33 What Weber attracted about Du Bois as a researcher, were his studies on the agrarian economy of Black people in the south of the US. This paralleled Weber’s interest in agrarian labor in East Elbian Prussia, and here particularly in Polish migrant workers in Prussian settlements. According to Marianne Weber, Max Weber “‘felt one of the most important political problems was the winning of the east by a policy of settlement’”. 34 While the economic status of peasant populations and their future in industrializing societies indeed was a highly relevant facet of the 19th century’s social question, for Weber this was entirely a matter of Germany’s cultural superiority which he believed to be threatened by Polish migrants; an opinion, Weber shared with many German intellectuals 35: “He [Max Weber] was concerned that Germans’ contact with inferior Poles could cause Germany to undergo a process of ‘Polonization’ that would cause the decline of its superior culture and render Germany a second-rate European power.” 36 Weber was an unmitigated racist and nationalist. As Andrew Zimmerman argues, although Max Weber was not fully convinced of biological racism, because so-called ‘race theories’ did not offer empiri-

30 Morris (fn. 5), p. 55. 31 Ibid., p. 57. About eighty years later, Patricia Hill Collins sketches ongoing institutional discrimination in academia, this time highlighting African American women’s experience of racism from an intersectional perspective, Collins (fn. 10). 32 Morris (fn. 5), p. 155. 33 Weber op. cit. Andrew Zimmerman: Decolonizing Weber. In: Postcolonial Studies 9 (2006) No. 1, pp. 53–79, p. 56. 34 Weber op. cit. ibid., p. 61. 35 Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 about 5,5 million people had emigrated to the United States, “more than a third of them from the eastern territories,” added by massive internal migration between the 1880s and 1910 (cf. Zimmerman (fn. 32), p. 169). In the last decades of the 19th century also Polish peasant workers, and to a smaller extent Russian workers, immigrated to Germany’s east. This was Max Weber’s concern. 36 Morris (fn. 5), p. 153.

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cally verifiable data 37, Weber took a cultural racist view based on “a system of [alleged] cultural differences that functions as effectively as race”. 38 While William E. B. Du Bois struggled with the ‘race theoretical’ thinking of his time – as a knowledge horizon that was taken for granted despite the abolition of slavery – and tried instead to reveal the social structures of violence, discrimination and denigration that constitute racism, Max Weber believed in the existence of so-called ‘races’ as core element of cultural communities (“‘Kulturgemeinschaft’”) and as a central facet of the national character (“‘Nationalcharakter’”). 39 In his widely discussed study on Max Weber and German politics, the historian Wolfgang J. Mommsen 40 had found ample evidence that Weber was a pronounced nationalist and imperialist: “For Max Weber, the first world war was a fight for [. . . ] the extent of German cultural authority.” 41 At the periodic congress of German sociologists 1964 in Heidelberg 42, which was devoted to Weber’s centenary, Mommsen 43 confirmed that Weber had maintained an imperialist stance throughout his whole life. Already in the 1890s, Weber had advocated to ensure Germany’s economic interests by armed forces, where necessary. For Weber, national power politics was an indispensable means to influence world history. 44 However, Max Weber was no single case. Like his fellow colleagues in the Verein für Socialpolitik, and later in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, founded in 1909, Weber was a social product of his day; all the more it is important to render the racist, nationalist and imperialist knowledge matrix of this generation of social scientists visible and to reflect to what extent sociological knowledge production is structured by a colonial episteme and white doxa. This includes the insight that social scientists like Weber contributed with their work and their pursuit to a social reality whose racist and nationalist undertone was unquestioned. 37 Weber (1911) voices this at the first congress of the German Sociological Association in Frankfurt am Main 1910. 38 Zimmerman (fn. 33), p. 53. 39 Jürgen Kaube: Max Weber. Ein Leben zwischen den Epochen. Berlin 2014, p. 214. According to Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Weber also used Darwinist terms like ‘the struggle for existence’ and ‘the survival of the fittest,’ in order to describe the inexorable character of this ‘struggle of man with man.’ Wolfgang J. Mommsen: Max Weber und die deutsche Politik: 1890–1920. Tübingen 1959. 40 Ibid. 41 Mommsen (fn. 22), p. 132. 42 These periodic congresses were carried out by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, the German sociological association, founded in 1909 among others by Max Weber. 43 Mommsen (fn. 22), p. 131. 44 Raymond Aron: Max Weber und die Machtpolitik. In: Otto Stammer (ed.): Max Weber und die Soziologie heute. Verhandlungen des 15. Deutschen Soziologentages in Heidelberg 1964. Tübingen 1965, pp. 103–120, here p. 106.

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2. Sociology’s Colonial Heritage: The Colonial Episteme Max Weber is known for his hermeneutic approach to social reality based on the methodological principle of Verstehen; it is an important pillar of his theoretical heritage. However, sensing the meaning of reality is part of a dialectic process that simultaneously contributes to the fabrication of social reality. Like in everyday life, sociologists produce knowledge about the world while interpreting the meaningful, even if this is coupled to a methodological attitude that strives for value neutrality. 45 This dialectic of meaning-making and interpretation of social reality begins with the choice of research objects and the related theoretical approach. It is also reflected in the topics of debate in research communities like the Verein für Socialpolitik and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. It is undoubtedly, but widely ignored that Max Weber and his fellow colleagues in the Verein für Socialpolitik were making a racist and nationalist sense of social reality. In the Verein, founded in 1873 two years after the German microstates had been unified to the German Empire, Max Weber had strongly advocated for studies on Polish migrant workers and Prussian settlements in the East Elbian region, and finally had succeeded to conduct a series of studies on peasant workers in East Elbian Prussia in 1891/2. As Andrew Zimmerman argues, Weber’s interest in peasant workers stemmed from “the supposed inferiority of Poles and the cultural degeneration of the Prussian East”; Weber was not concerned about “proletarianization and class conflict on land,” but rather about “ethnic mixing” and resulting “national decline”. 46 This characterization of Weber as a nationalist and imperialist researcher does not contradict his championing of a value-neutral approach to social theory and his search for a research community that respects this methodological point of view. During his membership in the Verein für Socialpolitik, Weber had felt the urgent need of such a research hub and had – after some disappointments with the Verein – finally hoped to find it in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, which was founded in 1909. Like other socio-theoretical scholars of his time, Weber was convinced that reality is a social product; consequently he wanted to focus on the social mechanisms that constitute this reality in every respect in a valueneutral way, and this meant for him, irrespective of the political agenda of the Verein. 47 This conceptualization of social-theoretical thinking as 45 Anthony Giddens denotes this twofold process of meaning-making and interpretation of meaning as double hermeneutic. Anthony Giddens: Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Cambridge 1987, pp. 20–21. 46 Zimmerman (fn. 33), pp. 61–62. 47 While the prominent actors of the Verein für Socialpolitik aimed with their studies to empirically substantiate social policy measures, Weber refused to derive ‘statements

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micro-socially based, hermeneutic science of reality has been an enormous effort, without which contemporary sociological thinking is unthinkable. Nevertheless it would be an erroneous conclusion that the situatedness of a researcher in a given socio-political context, its underlying history of ideas and concepts of the world do not structure the approach to this reality and its meaning. In the case of Max Weber, not only Wolfgang J. Mommsen, but also Raymond Aron identify a strong connection between Weber’s writings, in particular his political sociology, his conceptualization of power politics as well as his public lectures and political activities. As Aron states: I do not forget for a moment the differentiation that Weber made between science and politics. However, the way Weber himself managed this differentiation, is not always comme il faut. Certainly, one has to make an effort to see the world as it is, and not as one wants it – yet also not how one fears it could be. Because a pessimistic distortion of reality, inspired by the wish to make power politics appear unavoidable and indispensable, is not less dangerous then an idealistic [characterization of reality]. 48

In his contribution at the congress of German sociologists 1964 in Heidelberg, Raymond Aron left no doubt about Weber’s imperialist stance and his nationalist attitude. When Weber has primarily been characterized as a liberal since the 1960s, this proves to be a misjudgement. Both, Mommsen and Aron unveiled Weber’s racist rhetoric, for example his usage of the term Herrenvolk and his conviction of Germany’s superior national culture striving after world power, while parliamentarism primarily was for Weber a useful instrument to support the enforcement of power interests. In Weber’s approach to power politics, nationalism, and imperialism, I see a colonial episteme and a white doxa at work. It results from hegemonic beliefs and ethnocentric patterns of thought that fundamentally structure his mode of understanding social reality and the processing of theoretical knowledge production, that is, the social practice of academic understanding and analyzing, such as in the form of antithetical and hierarchically ordered categorization practices, as in the case of Polish workers. Following Michel Foucault 49, my question here is what is conceded as true and taken for granted in these processes of making up of people 50 and, how the of ought’ (Sollens-Aussagen) from academic studies. Max Weber: Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis. In: Johannes Winckelmann (ed.): Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen 1904, pp. 146–173. 48 Aron (fn. 44), here p. 104, translated from German into English by HW. 49 Michel Foucault: Der Wille zum Wissen. Sexualität und Wahrheit 1. Frankfurt a. M. 1983. 50 Ian Hacking: Making up People. In: Mario Biogioli (ed.): The Science Studies Reader. New York 1983, pp. 161–171.

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unquestioned conceptualization of societal reality in terms of hierarchical categorization practices structures social experience, action, and orientation in the world, also in the context of academic knowledge production. Around 1900, this includes a representation of reality that does not take the social experience of subaltern, colonial subjects like William E. B. Du Bois or Polish migrants into consideration on equal terms, but contributes to their social representation as cultural Others. The way in which Max Weber approaches social reality in East Elbian Prussia thus constitutes a social practice of othering due to the alleged ‘cultural difference’ to Polish workers, which he takes for granted. The case of African Americans is relevant for Weber in this regard, as it is another example that mirrors the so-called ‘cultural problems’ that Weber identified as crucial for agrarian economies, whether in the south of the US or in East Prussia. That way, Weber did not deconstruct, but rather reproduce ‘the color line,’ a term that Frederick Douglass 51 had coined in order to characterize ‘racial’ segregation and prejudice in the US, and that was likewise used by William E. B. Du Bois. 52 The labelling of assumed, imagined differences based on constructed representations and categorizations of Others as inferior in contrast to once ‘own culture,’ the creation of antitheses between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the implied claim to hegemony, is the core of the colonial episteme and its related practices of othering. In postcolonial theory, this has been denoted as coloniality of difference. 53 The structural and methodological, knowledge-based axis of inequality that marks colonized subjects is reproduced in many ways: through the “re-construction and (. . . ) restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages.” 54 Accordingly, postcolonial thinkers like Latin American sociologist Anibal Quijano urge to reconstruct how colonial – that is ‘Western’, ‘European’ – interpretive frames and knowledge structures are reproduced in postcolonial contexts. 55 In the notion coloniality of power, Quijano highlights that the marginalization of cognition and experience 51 Frederick Douglass: The Color Line. In: The North American Review 132 (1881), pp. 567–577. 52 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (fn. 4). 53 Walter D. Mignolo: Epistemischer Ungehorsam. Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität. Wien 2012; Khaldoun Samman: Die eurozentrische Sozialtheorie kaputtdenken. In: Manuela Boatc˘a/Willfried Spohn (eds.): Globale, multiple und postkoloniale Modernen. München 2010, pp. 285–308. 54 Walter D. Mignolo: De-Linking. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality. In: Cultural Studies 21 (2007) No. 2, pp. 449–514. 55 Aníbal Quijano: Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality. In: Cultural Studies 21 (2007) No. 2–3, pp. 168–178; Aníbal,Quijano: Kolonialität der Macht, Eurozentrismus und Lateinamerika. Wien 2016.

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does not belong to the past. 56 This includes the request to white academics, to reconstruct colonial histories of knowledge production and to reflect the consequences of the colonial episteme for contemporary theoretical thinking. As a result, not only Weber’s conceptualization of power politics will be put in a different complexion, but also his approach to other world religions or his pejorative notion of ‘adventure capitalism’ in the colonies. 57 That way, Weber both trivializes the violent character of the colonizer’s capitalist activities and devalues indigenous forms of economic activities and trade. That these theoretical notions are no isolated cases like Weber himself is no exception, demonstrates the foundation phase of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie and its first conferences in Frankfurt am Main in 1910 and Berlin in 1912. At the suggestion of Max Weber, Alfred Ploetz 58, the founder of the term ‘race hygiene’ (eugenics) and at that time already member of the board, was invited to give a lecture in Frankfurt. Ploetz was the main speaker in a panel on Race and Society, one of six thematic sessions in this conference. 59 That this was no unusual or disputed topic is mirrored by the discussion of Ploetz’ biologist contribution; with the exception of Weber, everybody, Rudolf Goldscheid, Leopold von Wiese or Ferdinand Tönnies, agreed with the speaker. And also Weber did not question the existence of so-called biological ‘races’ categorically; he was rather critical about ‘race theory’ due to the already mentioned lack of its

56 Anibal Quijano: Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. In: Nepantla: Views from the South 1 (2000) No. 3, pp. 533–580. 57 Manuela Boatc˘a was the first to pay systematic attention to the pejorative term adventure capitalism. Manuela Boatc˘a: ‘From the Standpoint of Germanism’. A Postcolonial Critique of Weber’s Theory of Race and Ethnicity. In: Go (fn. 8), Postcolonial Sociology, pp. 55–80. See also: Manuela Boatc˘a: “Vom Standpunkt des Deutschtums”. Eine postkoloniale Kritik an Webers Theorie von Rasse und Ethnizität. In: Schirin Amir-Moazami (ed.): Der inspizierte Muslim. Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung in Europa. Bielefeld 2018, pp. 61–90. In this contribution, Boatc˘a shows how Weber draws a picture of Western capitalism, understood as modern, according to which only this mode of capitalism is rational due to its legal and administrative anchoring. He contrasts this industrial capitalism with what he calls adventurous capitalism, which is violent, warlike and based on slavery and colonialism. This creates the highly problematic impression that there is no connection between slavery, violent exploitation and oppression in the colonies on the one hand and ‘rational’ European capitalism on the other as Boatc˘a demonstrates. 58 Darwinist, so-called ‘race hygienic thinking’ developed in the 19th century and became the forerunner of eugenics in the nazi-era. Alfred Ploetz became a prominent eugenicist after the fascist’s takeover in 1933. 59 Alfred Ploetz: Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft. In: Georg Simmel / Ferdinand Tönnies / Max Weber / Werner Sombart / Alfred J. Ploetz (eds.): Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentags vom 19.–22. Oktober 1910 in Frankfurt a. M. Tübingen 1911, pp. 111–136.

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empirical evidence. Weber challenged Ploetz, because in his view Ploetz had combined so-called ‘race hygienic questions’ in a wrong way with explanations of societal development and transformation. 60 Further on, Weber problematized the demise of traditional values in the course of history, taking the example of the Roman Empire, in contrast to peoples ‘without culture’ and ‘without tradition’ that had succeeded instead. He added that there is no evidence that ‘race theory’ can explain these developments, but admits “that perhaps such [theoretical] aspects have contributed in a way that is today, for us, not any longer recognizable. However, we do not know this [. . . ] and it conflicts with scientific methodology, where we have noted and adequate reasons, to sideline these [theories] in favor of an [. . . ] uncontrollable hypothesis.” 61 Weber does not question ‘race theory’ per se, but its basic methodological assumptions and implications. This conference in Frankfurt – and the following one in Berlin – mirror the normality of an academic world, where discussions about ‘race,’ nationality, and fatherland are not out of the ordinary. These topics do not contradict, but rather confirm common social worldviews and socio-political relevance structures of white sociologists in the nationalist German Empire. 62 Against this backdrop, the perception of sociological conferences before 1930 as “dissociated of the world” (Weltdistanz), as was done in a handbook on the history of German sociology from 2016 is elusive. 63 Likewise it has to be questioned when M. Rainer Lepsius introduces Alfred Ploetz as a natural scientist without mentioning his ‘reputation’ in the Nazi era or asking for the meaning of Ploetz’s contribution to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. 64 Since Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s work on Weber, it is undisputable that the latter’s worldview was structured by a colonial,

60 Max Weber: Diskussionsbeitrag zum Vortrag von Alfred Ploetz. Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft. In: Ibid., pp. 151–157, here p. 152. 61 Ibid., p. 152, translated by HW. 62 It has to be added that the only thorough challenge of so-called ‘race theory’ was voiced by Franz Oppenheimer on the Berlin congress; he clearly characterized it as pseudo-science and as group ideology of the dominant upper class. Oppenheimer’s paper was strongly criticized by Sombart, while Weber insisted to pose the actual relevant question by asking whether historical, political and cultural relevant differences are verifiably inherited (cf. Weber 1913, p. 188). Weber also adds that he was part of a research that focused on the differences in the applicability and rentability of workers of different ethnic origin. Franz Oppenheimer: Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie. In: o. A. (ed.): Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 20.–22. Oktober 1912 in Berlin. Tübingen 1913, pp. 98–139. 63 Sven Papcke op. cit. Sonja Schnitzler: Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. In: Stephan Moebius / Andrea Ploder (eds.): Handbuch Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Soziologie. Wiesbaden 2016, pp. 849–865, p. 2. 64 M. Rainer Lepsius: Max Weber und die Gründung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie. In: Soziologie 40 (2011) No. 1, pp. 7–19, here p. 15.

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nationalist, and racist knowledge matrix. 65 A reconsideration of this fait social is not a simplistic attempt to dethrone Weber, but to understand and acknowledge to what high degree sociological thinking is based on white, racist conceptions of social reality and to ask to what extent this influences our work today. This finally also leads to the question how a decolonialization of sociological thinking is possible.

3. Decolonization of Sociological Thinking Decolonization of sociological thinking basically means to unveil power asymmetries in the institutional foundations and methodological approaches to social reality. This includes the identification of blind spots and un-thematized hegemonies in the process of meaning and knowledge production. Following Gurminder Bhambra, a first step is to acknowledge the provincial, Eurocentric conceptualization of social theory and its inherent “asymmetry of recognition”. 66 This asymmetry results from the invisibility of colonialism as empirical object and the colonial epistemological framework in the processes of interpreting social reality and sensing the meaningful. One example is Europe’s ongoing tacit characterization as an exceptional case, like originally in Max Weber’s conceptualization of Europe’s distinct developmental path, while colonialism and slavery are “not a major feature of sociological accounts” 67 or are conceptualized as inferior, like in Weber’s portrayal of adventure capitalism in the colonies that is supposed to fall short of rational capitalism. 68 In postcolonial thinking this has been characterized as sociology of absences, as everything that happens outside Europe is constructed as nonexistent in hegemonic thinking. 69 Boaventura de Sousa Santos understands this as the failure of Western epistemologies to identify non-Western realities and forms of knowledge, and instead produce their non-existence, invisibility and non-intelligibility. 70 According to Sousa Santos this is not only an epistemological question, but an ontological one: “movements in different continents construct their struggles on the basis of ancestral, 65 66 67 68 69

Cf. Kaube (fn. 39). Bhambra (fn. 8), p. 5. Ibid., p. 9. Boatc˘a (fn. 57). Cf. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.): Another Knowledge is Possible. Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London 2007; Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder 2014. 70 Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South. In: Africa Development 37 (2012) No. 1, pp. 43–67, here p. 42.

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popular and spiritual knowledge that has always been alien to Eurocentric critical theory. Moreover, their ontological concepts of living and being are quite distinct from Western individualism”. 71 As a consequence, colonial interpretive frames and knowledge structures are also reproduced in postcolonial contexts. With the notion coloniality of power, Anibal Quijano highlights that the marginalization of cognition and experience does not belong to the past. 72 It is sociology’s task to unveil the mechanisms that reproduce the coloniality of difference – that is the structural axis of inequality marking all colonized subjects and to realize that Western epistemologies too often fail to identify non-Western realities and produce instead their non-existence and non-intelligibility time after time. As a consequence, the challenge is not only how to incorporate contextually contingent historical experiences into social theory and to make the social reality beyond the West as well as marginalized histories in ‘the West’ visible, namely as entangled histories of uneven modernities, as Shalina Randeria urges to ask. 73 The challenge is also to understand sociological theorizing about European modernity itself in a first step as expression of coloniality. This is mirrored in Sujata Patel’s notion of colonial modernity as well as in Anibal Quijano’s concept of modernity / coloniality: colonialism is conceptualized as the core of global modernity. 74 In other words: it has to be reconsidered in sociological thinking that western modernity is intrinsically colonial and authoritarian. But according to Gurminder Bhambra, it is not enough to reconstruct the hegemonic sociological understanding of social history in Europe and to include the fact “that the world has long been a space of imperial globality”. 75 Instead, as Bhambra argues, there is a need for an alternative understanding of sociality; Bhambra’s approach aims at rethinking sociological knowledge production and societal histories as not only shared, but as inherently connected. 76 Bhambra envisions connected social histories that result into connected sociologies beyond ideal types as a possibility to overcome the social exclusion of exactly those parts of European his-

71 Ibid., p. 50. 72 Quijano (fn. 56). 73 Shalini Randeria: Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie: Zur Ortsbestimmung der nichtwestlichen Welt in einer zukünftigen Sozialtheorie. In: Soziale Welt 50 (1999) No. 4, pp. 373–382, here p. 373; Shalini Randeria: Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India. In: John Keane (ed.): Civil Society – Berlin Perspectives. New York 2006, pp. 213–242. 74 Quijano (fn. 55). 75 Go / Lawson (fn. 8), p. 3. 76 Bhambra (fn. 8), p. 142.

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tory, namely colonialism, empire and enslavement, “that constitute the conditions of [Europe’s] very possibility”. 77 I personally think that we are only at the beginning to understand this, and that a reconstruction of hegemonic sociological conceptualizations of reality is an important step, like in the case of Max Weber and his production of subaltern realities and subjects. At the same time, it is definitely profoundly important to focus on the connections and entanglements that constitute social experience in concrete local contexts. Particularly in times, where Europeans again succeed to exclude the social realities of manifold Others, for example as refugees, and to reestablish cognitive and material boundaries.

4. Résumé Does it make sense to reconsider and trace racism again in sociological thinking, although sociology obviously underwent a paradigm shift towards racism in the 1970s and 1980s, and manifold sociologists profoundly contribute to the study of racism since decades? It does. Sociology claims to be a science of reflection that also critically observes its own processes of knowledge and meaning production. This has already been Max Weber’s concern, when he demanded a value-neutral methodology. However, as sketched in this contribution, it continuously slipped the attention of sociological thinkers around 1900 – and later – that the development of bourgeois-capitalist societies since 1800 cannot be explained without considering colonialism and its inherent dehumanizing (epistemic) power structures. Just like sociological thinkers back then, who were not aware that they lost sight of institutional and cognitive violence structures underlying European academic knowledge production, we are not sufficiently aware of our white doxa today. In particular, we are not sufficiently aware about the extent to which classical sociological methodology contributed and still contributes today to the (re)production of blind spots that result from white researcher’s positionality, which is constantly characterized by the production of exclusions and asymmetries, that is, subaltern voices and knowledges. Sociological thinking made a lasting contribution to the imagination of a hierarchical world order in which European societies and European knowledge production occupy a distinct place, such as in the case of German classical sociologist Max Weber and his understanding of ‘endangered’ (national) culture and rational capitalism. The underlying modali-

77 Ibid., p. 152.

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ties of knowledge production unfold in the form of practices of othering, for example in terms of comparison that centers on European experience as the central point of reference. This finally results into a matrix of difference based on conceptions that derive from European modes of experiencing and being in the world, such as the notion of (German) culture or capitalism. What remains unobserved in this context is how sociological theory production – in particular as a science of reality – not only tries to understand, but constantly creates meaning and, in this regard, marginalizes cognition and experience that does not reflect European perception. Hence, othering and denigration not only significantly result from the institutional exclusion of non-white sociological thinkers due to their ascribed ‘racial’ status or the invisibilization of colonial histories. It is the – unintended or not – production of supposedly non-intelligible modalities of knowing and understanding the world, and with it, the production of an episteme of difference and superiority by means of a wide variety of topoi of difference (such as ‘culture,’ ‘gender’ or ‘religion’ and ‘migration’) that constitutes the core of colonial knowledge production. Accordingly, sociology is not only asked to continually reconsider the episteme of difference that codifies the interpretation and sensing of meaning, but rather to take on the task to continuously reflect on one’s own methodological practice and to constantly reconsider the socio- and cultural-historical context of knowledge production. This includes a realistic view at knowledge production as a hegemonic, relational process that is based on white domination and the production of subaltern knowledges. This is not simply a question of intellectual honesty, but rather of the recognition that sociological thinking comprises a history of colonial continuities and power mechanisms. Precisely in times like these, as nationalism and racism are stabilizing, it is growingly important to deepen the reflection on sociology’s colonial heritage and to make this – for example – a basic theme of sociological education. In what way does the study of sociological classics such as William E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber contribute to this? In this contribution, I discussed the racist and imperial knowledge matrix in sociological thinking around 1900 by taking the examples of Du Bois and Weber. These two sociologists are meaningful cases that demonstrate the entanglement of methodology, epistemic power and political realities of inequality. The most irritating insight is probably that knowledge production is not merely a methodological, but always a socio-political question, as social theory is constantly concerned with the entirety of socio-historical reality and just one voice in the concert of many others who are sensing meaning. Consequently, sociologists have to be all the more aware that social theories as well as their research objects are socially constructed. Hence, it is a good

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start to provincialize the socio-theoretical framework. Instead of starting the fundamentals or the history of sociology with white sociologists, we have to reflect on entanglements and blind spots as well as on non-white intellectuals and subaltern experiences, and ask, how it was possible to marginalize these realities.

Roth, Julia

Tracing Racism: Insights from Postcolonial Studies, Global History, and the Law – American Studies

Black Interventions and the Foundation of Black Studies and Critical Race Theory in the US In American Studies, the category ‘race’ is by now well-established as an axis of social and cultural differentiation and identity formation. In the USA, after more than half a century of racist segregationist politics following the abolition of enslavement, this paradigm shift was mostly achieved through the engagement and fight by civil rights activists. 1 The American Negro Academy (1897), the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), or numerous conferences, studies and publications inaugurated at Atlanta University (1897–1910), or the Black Women’s Club organizations are important predecessors for later projects such as Black Studies programs. Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois defined the structural racism of US-American society as decisive dimension of social inequality and psychological outreach already in the late 19th and early 20th century. His work is, however, seldom quoted by hegemonic sociologists (rather in cultural studies departments). Shortly after the end of segregation in education following the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case, 1954, African American and Hispanic students entered the institutions of higher education in the US and challenged the White status quo as well 1 Throughout the Americas and the Caribbean enslaved Africans have from the outset protested against their dehumanization, exploitation and oppression in form of rebellions and escape (as well as syncretic practices and prohibited rituals and artistic practices) resulting often in so-called maroon communities. Resistant practices from the late 18th century culminated in the different abolitionist movements, see e.g. The Abolition Project: https://www. historians. org/ publications- and- directories/ remote- teaching- resources/ the- abolition- project (last accessed September 9, 2021), for enslaved women’s resistance see: Verene A. Shepherd: Women and the Abolition Campaign in the African Atlantic. In: The Journal of Caribbean History 42 (2008) No. 1, pp. 131–153; id. (ed.): Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Kingston 2011.

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as Eurocentric curricula, turning universities into central arenas for the struggles for liberation and justice. The idea of Black Studies programs was inspired by study groups on African American History such as the “AfroAmerican Association” in Berkeley that also studied community organizing and African languages, and also pushed e.g. for the inclusion of African History courses into college curricula as well as by Black students’ organizations who fought for educational self-determination. 2 A great gain of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s – the Civil Rights Movement (1955–65), the movement for “Black Power” (1965–75) and Chicano and Chicana movements, the Black Consciousness and Black Arts movements – was the implementation of sub-disciplines and programs at US-American universities and higher education such as Black Studies 3 and Ethnic Studies (in the late 1960s and 70s), later African American Studies (from the late 1980s and 1990s on). 4 In 1968, after a five-month students’ strike during which the Black student leaders had organized the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition with Native American, Chicano and Asian student groups resulted in the implementation of the (first) School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State College in 1968. African American women like Bertha Maxwell-Roddy, chair of Black Studies at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who in 1970 prepared the national Black Studies organization (finally established in 1975 as the National Council for Black Studies, NCBS) were essential for the consolidation of Black Studies. 5 2 See Alan Colón: Review: Noliwe M. Rooks: White Money / Black Power. The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. In: The Journal of African American History 93 (2008) No. 2, pp. 271–279, here p. 274. 3 The first black-studies department was started at San Francisco State College in 1968. At least 200 new programs were set to start within 12 months of the founding of the department. The Ford Foundation (the main funder of academic programs under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) promoted racial inclusion, awarding most grants between 1969 and 1971 to programs and institutions aiming to diversify predominantly white curricula and institutions, thus adding to Black Studies becoming structurally and intellectually dependent on traditional disciplines. See Noliwe M Rooks: The Beginning of Black Studies. In: The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2006, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-beginnings-of-black-studies/ , (accessed May 5, 2021). 4 The National Council of Black Studies in 1989 stated that among 181 institutions where Black Studies were offered, 76 programs were designated to “Afro-American Studies,” 50 to “Black Studies,” 21 to “African and African American Studies” and 9 to “African American Studies,” while the remaining programs shared various labels (see Colón (fn. 2), p. 276). Colón names a further 2007 national survey which identified 311 Black Studies programs, out of which 29 were entitled “Black Studies,” 59 “Africana Studies” and 86 “African American Studies,” the rest was subsumed under more than 24 further labels. 5 Delores Aldridge co-founded and directed the first Black Studies program at Emory University and Carlene Young initiated the implementation of a master’s program at

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However, with the institutionalization of the programs, their dependence on funding by big foundations, and the withdrawal of the early activist impulses and representatives who were closely linked with the movements, partly led to a depoliticization and neglect of the material and systemic dimensions of racism as well as the underlying structures of inequality. In numerous places, a strong focus on social / identity categories and on groups as well as on cultural dimensions was moved to the center stage. Nevertheless, numerous scholars in the field continued their critical endeavor. Thus, the reasons for the renaming of many Black Studies programs into “African American Studies” programs or “Africana Studies” are disputed. 6 From the 1980s on, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and later Critical Whiteness approaches addressed racial inequalities in their structural and systemic dimensions and in relation to their function for maintaining social hierarchies and offered a critical framework for analyzing racist structures 7. CRT originated in the mid-1970s academic

San José State University in California and published the foundational and widelyread volume The Black Experience: Analysis and Synthesis (1972). Both were chairs for their departments and became presidents of the NCBS, see Colón (fn. 2), p. 276. 6 Different views exist on whether this shift signaled a depolitization and separation or distinction from the radical “Black Power” movement, or whether “African American” was rather the new preferred self-denomination and the term “Africana Studies” an expression of the inclusion of knowledge of people of African descent both on the African continent and in the Americas, see Colón (fn. 2); Noliwe M. Rook: White Money / Black Power. The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Boston 2006. 7 The Encyclopedia Britannica quotes the following claims as the “basic tenets” of Critical Race Theory (CRT): “(1) Race is socially constructed, not biologically natural. (2) Racism in the United States is normal, not aberrational: it is the common, ordinary experience of most people of colour. (3) Owing to (. . . ) ‘interest convergence’ or ‘material determinism,’ legal advances (or setbacks) for people of colour tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups. Thus, the racial hierarchy that characterizes American society may be unaffected or even reinforced by ostensible improvements in the legal status of oppressed or exploited people. (4) Members of minority groups periodically undergo ‘differential racialization,’ or the attribution to them of varying sets of negative stereotypes, again depending on the needs or interests of whites. (5) According to the thesis of ‘intersectionality’ or ‘antiessentialism,’ no individual can be adequately identified by membership in a single group. (. . . ) Finally, (6) the ‘voice of colour’ thesis holds that people of colour are uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of other members of their group (or groups) regarding the forms and effects of racism. This consensus has led to the growth of the ‘legal story telling’ movement, which argues that the self-expressed views of victims of racism and other forms of oppression provide essential insight into the nature of the legal system.”; cf. Richard Delgado / Jean Stefancic: Critical Race Theory, https://www. britannica. com/ topic/ critical- racetheory, (accessed June 2, 2021); Richard Delgado / Jean Stefancic (eds.): Critical Race Theory. An Introduction. New York 2001. For an overview on Critical Race Theory see also Lewis R. Gordon: A Short History of the “Critical” in Critical Race Theory. In: American Philosophy Association Newsletter 98 (1999) No. 2.

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movement of civil-rights scholars and activists 8 in the US who sought to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. By the 1980s, CRT became a movement to rework theories of critical legal studies with a stronger focus on race, rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by psychological individual factors. CRT is based on the assumption that white supremacy maintains its power through the law and that the transformation of the relationship between the law and this racial hierarchy is possible. Critical Whiteness approaches address the other end of the spectrum by shifting the focus from the victims to the usually “unmarked norm” and thus to those privileged by racist structures, or, as Toni Morrison (1992) has formulated it: “from the observed to the observers.” 9 Starting in the 1960s, another crucial school of thought strongly impacted on the strengthening of attention to racism as a decisive and structural factor of social hierarchy: the emergence of cultural studies as developing around the Birmingham school and scholars such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy with a Caribbean background. These pioneers of cultural studies made a claim for “popular” culture as different from but (at least) equally relevant and representative for understanding societies as ‘high’ culture which had heretofore been considered the only objects worthwhile of academic attention (outside of “ethnology” departments, etc.). It is the gain of cultural studies, a field soon becoming very popular also in the US, that everyday practices by all, particularly also representatives of the working class, such as popular music, film and television series, etc. are now being studied in academia – even though still often considered as “less relevant” than the study of “classical” forms and genres. Cultural studies scholars also strongly emphasized a focus on race, class and gender for all study of cultural representation. All these mentioned interventions by those historically excluded from human and citizenship rights and subjects of (academic / “relevant”) knowledge production through colonial and racist power structures addressed the very exclusionary and unjust character of Western-style institutions that had made their interventions necessary. Disciplines like “anthropology,” “ethnology” (in which European scholars study non-European people, regions and ‘cultures’), and “sociology” and 8 Among them: Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams. 9 Toni Morrison (ed.): Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York 1992.

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“history” (European scholars studying and defining European ‘societies’ and ‘civilizations’ (‘arts’)) speak from that history. The aforementioned interventions thus questioned the very foundations on which hegemonic forms of knowledge and academic modes of its production are built, such as disciplines. First and foremost, it might therefore be constructive to start with a critical gaze on the trajectory of academic disciplines in general, and area studies and American studies in particular.

Academic Disciplines as Colonizing and Racializing Machines As the short outline of the coming-into-being of Black Studies, African American Studies and Critical Race Theory et. al. in the US has demonstrated, all academic disciplines emerged in particular contexts and with specific aims. Just like – following a critical standpoint theoretical approach – all knowledge is situated, that is, tied to the respective contexts and actors producing it, disciplines are embedded in power hierarchies and they discipline knowledge in particular ways, in accordance with the respective geopolitics of power and knowledge. Besides all poststructural relativizations, disciplines continue to claim to produce somewhat ‘objective’ knowledge, and it is thus crucial to keep in mind, when, where and why disciplines came into being, and who was entitled to represent which discipline and produce knowledge about whom and what and when. What lies behind the critique and interventions by the activists who fought for the implementation of programs that would represent their experiences and histories that had heretofore been completely denied or (mostly) violently represented by others, most of what are today considered major academic disciplines originated in the so-called West (or “Global North”), where the University was part and parcel of the building of the modern nation state. 10 In Germany in particular, this was expressed in terms such as Kulturstaatskonzept (state / national cultural concept) or Staatswissenschaften (state sciences) which came into being with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s humanist ideas and the resulting academic standards (based on the unity or close entanglements of research and teaching) in the 19th century, 11 10 Boaventura De Sousa Santos: The University at a Crossroads. In: Decolonizing the University. Practicing Pluriversity, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge X (2012) No. 1, pp. 7–16, here p. 9. 11 Manuela Boatc˘a: Catching Up with the (New) West. The German “Excellence Initiative”, Area Studies, and the Re-Production of Inequality. In: Decolonizing the University: Practicing Pluriversity, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge X (2012) 1, pp. 17–29, here p. 18.

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and still resonates in terms such as “Bildungsnation” (education nation) German politicians still do not get tired of promoting based on that history and the Humboldtian model. Following such national and colonial boundaries, disciplines were organized along the division between “anthropos” – those to be studied, the objects of science, e.g. enslaved persons, colonized people, non-Christian and non-European regions – and “humanitas” – the “humans,” those meant to represent the humanities and thus, the subjects of academic knowledge productions, who were for centuries almost exclusively White male European academics 12. Most academic disciplines as we know them today came into being during the so-called Enlightenment era and were paralleled by Eurocentric notions of superiority and claims to universality. They are thus marked by the long resonance of Georg Friedrich Hegel’s dictum of the “people without history” in non-European regions in history curricula around the world that globalize Europe and European experiences as universal and Immanuel Kant’s racist ideas of differently-colored people in different continents and at different levels of civilization and humanity (soon to be followed by scientific racist theories that would justify 19th century imperial colonialism). 13 Also in (modern / Western) law, the subjects of law and human rights as proclaimed in both the American and French Revolutions were first White male property owners, while women, nonWestern and non-White populations were excluded from such privileges (some of whom were included only gradually and partially). It thus comes as no surprise that soon after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen women such as Olympe de Gouge in France (1791) or Mary Wollstonecraft in Great Britain (1792) pointed to the exclusion of women from these rights. Likewise, the revolutionaries of the Haitian Revolution in Saint Domingue (today Haiti) rebelled against the non-application of the rights to the colonies and to colonized and enslaved populations, thus alluding to the inherent contradiction of the claim of universal human rights and their real exclusivity. While in the USA in 1851, the formerly enslaved Africana American feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth confronted the early White women’s rights advocates with their complete omission of the situation of enslaved Black women.

12 Mignolo elaborates on the division into “anthropos” and “humanitas” as part of the coloniality / modernity dialectics; Walter D. Mignolo: Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom. In: Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009) No. 7/8, pp. 1–23. 13 See Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton 2000.

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Area Studies and American Studies Programs Abroad: Export Expertise and Exceptionalism A particular way of disciplining knowledge and disciplines is in the peculiar potpourri of disciplines subsumed under the term “area studies.” 14 With the exception of “American Studies” (referring to the US), area studies refer to the study of predominantly (but not / no longer exclusively) non-European regions which are studied from predominantly European / Western perspectives. Regional studies such as “Oriental studies” as an academic field of study for example, go back to a long tradition and focused on Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology that were all subsumed under this essentializing term, regardless of the immense differences between and within the thusobjectified societies. Originally motivated by the European religion, to race and study the origin of the monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the “modern” study of the regions was influenced by imperialist interests, as well as by what has been termed “Orientalism,” an often naive fascination and exoticizing view of the East as represented by European writers, thinkers, and artists, that still surfaces in cultural representations and media coverage. 15 American Studies programs came into being after 1945 simultaneously with the increasing power and influence of the US as an imperial power. Interdisciplinary area studies became increasingly common in the United States of America and in Western scholarship after World War II. Before that war American universities had just a few faculties who taught or conducted research on the non-Western world. Foreign-area studies were virtually nonexistent. After the war, liberals and conservatives in the US sought to respond effectively to perceived external threats from the Soviet Union and China in the context of the emerging Cold War, as well as to the fall-out from the decolonization of Africa and Asia. 16 They were 14 Area studies (also regional studies) are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national / federal, or cultural regions. The term exists primarily as a general description for what are, in the practice of scholarship, many heterogeneous fields of research, encompassing both the social sciences and the humanities. Typical area study programs involve international relations, strategic studies, history, political science, political economy, cultural studies, languages, geography, literature, and other related disciplines. 15 Edward Said: Orientalism. New York 1978. In recent years the subject is framed by the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies, while “Oriental” studies in Europe focus on the discipline of Islamic studies, whereas the study of China is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia is often called East Asian studies (particularly in the US). 16 In this context, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York claimed that the US must invest in international studies.

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founded in light of US-American exceptionalism, Cold War politics and decolonization movements in Africa and Asia, and, in the US, dedicated to the mission of spreading US-American knowledge and civilization all over the globe. In the US the first interdisciplinary program in “History and American Civilization” in 1940 set the precedent for present-day American studies programs, which first focused predominantly in literature and history. Outside of the US, area studies programs were implemented in the 1940s and 1950s mainly in East European and formerly colonized African regions. This was argued on geopolitical grounds as part of the US-American geopolitics during the Cold War and catering directly to US foreign policy and implementing development policies on the US model. 17 American Studies programs outside the US in particular were part of the endeavor of practicing “cultural diplomacy” and control over the knowledge produced about the US in the Cold War context and had their strongest bastions in Great Britain and Germany (e.g. the famous John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin). 18

Therefore, the foundations of the field are strongly rooted in the US. Since their inception, area studies have been subject to criticism, because area studies were connected to the Cold War agendas of the CIA, the FBI, and other intelligence and military agencies. While some argue that there is the notion that US concerns and research priorities will define the intellectual terrain of area studies, others insist that once they were established on university campuses, area studies began to encompass a much broader and deeper intellectual agenda than the one foreseen by government agencies. 17 The Ford Foundation e.g. granted aid to US area studies programs through their Foreign Area Fellowship Program and between 1952 and 1966 contributed 270 $ to 34 universities for area and language studies. The US National Defense Education Act of 1958 as a reaction to the Sweet Sputnik success granted funds to 125 area studies units at US universities in addition to Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships for graduate students, see Boatc˘a (fn. 11), p. 26; cf. Immanuel Wallerstein: Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science. In: Sociological Bulletin 46 (1997) No. 1, pp. 21–39; David Szanton (ed.): The Politics of Knowledge. Area Studies and the Disciplines. California 2004. 18 See Boatc˘a (fn. 11), p. 2; in the GDR, “regional sciences” (Regionalwissenschaften) were less strongly tied to geopolitical goals (besides Chinawissenschaften which were based on a direct contract). Middle Eastern and South Asia Studies as well as Africa sciences (Afrikawissenschaften, including African philosophy and African sociology) before 1980 produced significant internationally valuable research, but were partially under constraint by the status of foreign political affairs. After 1990, most research was incorporated into the West German university system which followed the US mode of area studies and had no regional science departments, see Boatc˘a (fn. 11), p. 24. European centers for American studies include the Center for American Studies in Brussels, Belgium, in Germany the Bavarian America-Academy at the University of Munich, the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) and the Center for North American Studies (ZENAF) at Goethe University Frankfurt. Graduate studies in the field of North American studies are also offered at the University of Cologne

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In turn, Latin American Studies as an academic discipline emerged in the twentieth-century mostly in Europe and North America. In the USA, Latin American Studies was boosted by the passing of Title VI of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which provided resources for Centers of Area and International Studies. In the US, a group focusing on Latin America was created among historians with an interest in Latin American history within the American Historical Association, who in 1918 founded The Hispanic American Historical Review, and the Conference on Latin American History in 1926, which is now separately incorporated (since 1964), but continues to coordinate its annual meetings with the American Historical Association. Latin American Studies programs often include or are closely associated with, for instance, Development studies, Geography, Anthropology, Caribbean studies, and Transatlantic studies. Implicitly, then, American Studies as well as Latin American Studies follow the paradigm of the “intellectual division of labor” that emerged at the end of the 19th century and a “geopolitical distribution of scholarly tasks in function of their pertinence to Western modernity still paves the way for present-day research.” 19

Anti-Colonial Critiques, Decolonial Thinking and the German “Sonderweg” Anti-colonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon early on critiqued the racist underpinnings of such geopolitics of knowledge, and dependency theorists in the 1970s questioned the reproduction of colonial dependencies and inequalities. 20 From the 1980s on, postcolonial studies rendered the locus of hegemonic academic knowledge production and circulation problematic. Following the initial attempt of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, who claimed that Latin America had been absent from the map of postcolonial theory, decolonial thinking emerged in the early 2000s as a

in joint partnership with the North American studies programs at the University of Bonn. Further programs exist mostly in Scandinavian countries, in the Netherlands, in Slovakia, Russia (one institute), Canada, New Zealand, Bahrain, Teheran, Korea and China. 19 See Manuela Boatc˘a/Costa Sérgio: Postcolonial Sociology: A Research Agenda. In: Encarnación Guitiérrez-Rodríguez / Manuela Boatc˘a/Sérgio Costa (eds.): Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches. Abingdon / New York 2010, pp. 13–32, p. 13. 20 See André Gunder Frank: The Development of Underdevelopment. In: James D. Cockcroft / André Gunder Frank / Dale Johnson (eds.): Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy. New York 1972; Fernando Henrique Cardoso / Enzo Faletto (eds.): Dependency and Development in Latin América. Oakland 1979 (rendered into oblivion in German academic memory).

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response to postcolonial approaches and focuses on Iberian Colonialism since 1492. Decolonial approaches go back to anticolonial thinkers (e.g. José Martí, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire), liberation theology (e.g. Enrique Dussel), dependency theory and World Systems analysis (e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein, Aníbal Quijano) 21 as well as to Border Thinking as introduced by Chicana feminists (e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa 1987). When it comes to area studies, the ideological underpinnings of the disciplines are particularly obvious: “Orientalism” for a long time provided the hegemonic lens of knowledge production by Western scholars of all people and regions, thus constructing the “Others” of the West. According to Fernand Coronil, 22 the prior self-construction as superior provided the precondition – or condition of possibility – for such forms of Oriental Othering, which he defines as “Occidentalism” and describes as follows: the expression of a constitutive relationship between Western representations of cultural difference and worldwide Western dominance [. . . ]. [T]he ensemble of representational practices that participate in the production of conceptions of the world, which 1) separate the world’s components into bounded units; 2) disaggregate their relational histories; 3) turn difference into hierarchy; 4) naturalize these representations; and thus 5) intervene, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of existing asymmetrical power relations. 23

Racism accordingly was no by-product of capitalism. On the contrary, based on the racialized division of labor (and unpaid enslaved racialized labor), racism was foundational for the colonial / modern capitalist endeavor, of which the racialized division of labor formed part and parcel. As decolonial critic Ramón Grosfoguel emphasizes: “Racism is a global hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the line of the human that have been politically, culturally and economically produced and reproduced for centuries by the institutions of the ‘capitalist / patriarchal western-centric / Christiancentric modern / colonial world-system’” – thus also by universities and other educational institutions: The people classified above the line of the human are recognized socially in their humanity as human beings and, thus, enjoy access to rights (human rights, civil rights, women rights and / or labor rights), material resources, and social recognition to their subjectivities, identities, epistemologies and

21 See e.g. Aníbal Quijano: Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. In: Nepantla 1 (2000) No. 3, pp. 533–79; Aníbal Quijano / Immanuel Wallerstein: Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World System. In: International Journal of Social Sciences 134 (1992), pp. 549–57. 22 Fernando Coronil: Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization. In: Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise 3 (2013). 23 Fernando Coronil: Beyond Occidentalism. Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories. In: Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996), pp. 51–87, p. 57.

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spiritualities. The people below the line of the human are considered subhuman or non-human; that is, their humanity is questioned and, as such, negated (Fanon 1967). In the latter case, the extension of rights, material resources and the recognition of their subjectivities, identities, spiritualities and epistemologies are denied. 24

Consequently, racist thinking is deeply inscribed into our knowledge – as we can see through a postcolonial reading of literary and other cultural texts. Also, racist structures have historically impacted academic disciplines. In relation with ethnic studies programs in the US, Grosfoguel speaks about the “colonial methodology of the social sciences and the humanities.” 25 This has increasingly been expressed also in the critique of the term “American”: Toni Morrison has for instance posted out that “American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” 26 Elaborating on a World Systems Analysis Decolonial approach, dependency theorists Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein in their essay “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System” (1992) take an implicitly entangled perspective and hence follow the main argument that “[t]he Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas” (549). For his part, José David introduces the concept of “Trans-Americanity” as a way to contest US-American (and “Western”/Occidentalist) hegemony on knowledge, epistemic and cultural production (in the Americas) as a logic of domination marked by structural racism and coloniality. Such approaches add / strengthen the important material and economic basis of racist power structures and a dimension critical of capitalism and thereby provide a crucial corrective for perspectives on race and racism that seek to apply a critical historical and transnational or global frame. The named approaches also help avoid

24 Ramón Grosfoguel: Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of PoliticalEconomy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. In: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (2011) No. 1; Ramón Grosfoguel: What is Racism? In: Journal of World-Systems Research 22 (2016) No. 1, pp. 9–15, p. 10. 25 Ramón Grosfoguel: The Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies in the United States: Between Liberal Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, Disciplinary Colonization, and Decolonial Epistemologies. In: Decolonizing the University: Practicing Pluriversity, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge X (2012) No. 1, pp. 81–89, p. 88. For a decolonial perspective see also Santiago Castro-Gómez: Decolonizar la Universidad. La Hybris del Punto Cero y el Diálogo de Sabers. In: Id./Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.): El Giro Decolonial. Reflexiones para una Diversidad Epistémica más allá del Capitalismo global. Bogotá 2007, pp. 79–91. 26 Qt. in Dwight Andrews: In Search of Real Progress. In: Reflections, Yale Divinity School, The Future of Race 1 (2013), pp. 4–6.

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an all too celebratory focus on Black culture (expressed e.g. in narratives of a “post-racial” era during president Barack Obama’s presidency). More recent Transnational American, Hemispheric American and Interamerican approaches 27 or perspectives build on such interventions and aim to challenge the limits posed by narrow national and cultural boundaries and to change the asymmetries inscribed into such container concepts. They do so, however, mostly from within the very confines of the academy in the so-called Global North and the disciplines and from very privileged positions and possibilities of access to resources and knowledge

27 See for instance for “Hemispheric American Studies” José David Saldívar (ed.): The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham / London 1991; Ralph Bauer: Hemispheric Studies. In: PMLA 142 (2009) No. 1, pp. 234–50; Caroline F. Levander / Robert S. Levine: Introduction: Hemispheric American Literary History. In: Special Issue: Hemispheric American Literary History 18 (2006) No. 3. pp. 397–405. New Brunswick 2006; id.: Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick 2007; José David Saldívar (ed.): The Dialectics of Our America. Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham / London 1991; Peter Birle / Marianne Braig / Ottmar Ette / Dieter Ingenschav (eds.): Hemisphärische Konstruktionen der Amerikas. Frankfurt a. M. 2006; Susan Gillman: Afterword: The Times of Hemispheric Studies. In: Caroline F. Levander / Robert S. Levine (eds.): Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick 2007, pp. 328–336; for an overview see Bauer 2009. Parrish even speaks of a “hemispheric turn in colonial American Studies,” Susan Scott Parrish: Review: “The Hemispheric Turn” in Colonial American Studies. In: Early American Literature 40 (2005) No. 3, pp. 545–553, p. 545; for “Inter-American Studies” Joan C. McClennen: Domestic Violence Between SameGender Partners. In: Journal of Interpersonal Violence 20 (2005) No. 2, pp. 149– 154; for “Post-Nationalist American Studies” Coronil (fn. 23); José David Saldívar (ed.): Border Matters: Re-Mapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley 1997; Walter D. Mignolo (ed.): The Idea of Latin America. Oxford 2005; John Carlos Rowe: Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley 2000 or for “Transnational American Studies” Donald E. Pease / Robyn Wiegman (eds.): The Future of American Studies. Durham / London 2002; Inderpal Grewal (ed.): Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham 2005; Shelley Fisher-Fishkin: Crossroads of Cultures. The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004. In: American Quarterly 57 (2005) No. 1, pp. 17–57; Winfried Fluck / Stefan Brandt / Ingrid Thaler: Transnational American Studies. In: REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 23 (2007); John Carlos Rowe: A Concise Companion to American Studies. Hoboken 2010. See also Donald E. Pease (ed.): National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives. Durham / London 1994; Joseph M. Gilbert / Catherine C. LeGrand / Ricardo D. Salvatore: Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Durham / London 1998; Hermann Herlinghaus / Utz Riese (eds.): Sprünge im Spiegel: Postkoloniale Aporien der Moderne in beiden Amerika. Bonn 1997; Rowe 2000; Thomas C. Brickhouse / Nicholas D. Smith (eds.): Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Trial of Socrates. London 2004; Earl Fitz: Inter-American Studies as an Emerging Field: The Future of a Discipline. In: Rethinking the Americas: Crossing Borders and Disciplines. Special Issue of Vanderbilt E-Journal of LusoHispanic Studies 1 (2004), pp. 13–28; Olaf Kaltmeier (ed.): Transnational Americas. Envisioning Inter-American Area Studies in Globalization Processes. Inter-American Studies / Estudios Interamericanos Vol. 7. Trier 2013.

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circulation, thus rather broadening the content then changing the terms of the conversation. 28 Nevertheless, hemispheric and interamerican approaches undoubtedly added to broadening the horizon and overcoming the restrictions of narrow national disciplinary containers and boundaries. Moreover, being embedded in the structures of an ever more economized university system, the critical scope of academic knowledge production has become immensely restricted through the pressure to fulfill the requirements of efficiency and “excellency.” Recent endeavors such as the German “excellence initiative” are reinforcing established core-periphery patterns on which development theories have been based. Manuela Boatc˘a (2012) carves out the means by which a politics of “Re-Westernization” is sought to be achieved through the excellence initiative as: academic objectives that foreground regional expertise and downgrade historical-philological knowledge to the benefit of ‘systematic disciplines’ (i.e., hard science), reveal wider geopolitical goals: in the race for the top positions in the global hierarchy of knowledge production, reproducing a core perspective on the value of knowledge (neutral expertise in the core vs. empirical evidence in the periphery), the methods used in order to generate it (science vs. the humanities), as well as the intellectual division of labor among subjects and objects of knowledge production on a global scale (the West vs. the Rest)(.) 29

Against the backdrop of these developments, de Sousa Santos therefore rightly claims that the nation-bound mission is being refunded in globalized world and asks whether and in how far the university is prepared to refound the idea of universalism on a new, intercultural basis (de Sousa Santos 2021, 12). As a consequence, Boatc˘a makes out a “regrettable German ‘Sonderweg’”[special path], according to which, on the one hand, Germany’s century-long entanglement with and active engagement in colonial endeavors is denied or played down (as short and irrelevant), and, on the other hand, due to the crimes of the Nazis, memory culture focuses on the Holocaust, and racism is being dismissed. This is reflected e.g. in the use of the term “immigration as ‘proxy’ for race” (Boatc˘a 2021: 27). The 28 See Julia Roth: Decolonizing American Studies: Toward a Politics of Intersectional Entanglements. In: Fiar. Forum for Inter-American Research 7 (2014) No. 3, pp. 135– 170; Julia Roth (ed.): Occidental Readings, Decolonial Practices: A Selection on Gender, Genre and Coloniality in the Americas: Inter-American Studies / Estudios Interamericanos Vol. 10. Trier 2014; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera: After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. London 2017. He critiques “these transnational turns” as “unhyphenated-American phenomenon” that “tends to have colonial characteristics: English-language texts and their authors are promoted as representative.”; cultural material can only be understood as unhyphenated when authors meet certain “demographic criteria; any deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordinated to hyphenated status.” Ibid., p. 5. 29 Boatc˘a (fn. 11), p. 25.

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debates about the “Humboldt Forum” museum in the rebuilt Berlin castle around the redistribution of looted art and artefacts provides an insightful example, as does the 2021 debate about “multidirectional memory” caused by the publication of the German translation of Michael Rothberg’s pathbreaking book (2021). 30

Re-Framing American Studies: Towards a Relational Entanglement Perspective Respectively, as an (US/North) American Studies scholar, I was trained in the field of Cultural Studies (Birmingham School style) which comes with an implicit race-class-gender paradigm and provides me with a critical take on power relations. It sharpens the awareness of the multidimensional character of inequalities and axes of oppression, as encompassed in an intersectional lens. 31 This lens helps also to broaden my gender studies perspective in the direction of a more interrelated understanding of this important arena of social hierarchies. I have learnt a lot from the feminisms of the Americas, particularly Black and afro-descendant feminisms, from Critical Race, Critical Whiteness and postcolonial foci, and from Queer perspectives when it comes to think gender always also and always already as articulating with and through other dimensions, particularly racialization. Through these schools of thought one also learns how racism is inseparably entangled with the economic structures of capitalism, colonialism and enslavement, for which the history of the Americas provides an illustrative example. Therefore, the Center for Interamerican Studies here at Bielefeld University is a particularly stimulating environment for my decidedly interdisciplinary (or undisciplinary) approach, which is not easy to pursue in the German academic context and in the contemporary

30 Michael Rothberg (ed.): Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford 2009; on the debate over the publication in German see: Michael Rothberg: Comparing Comparisons: From the “Historikerstreit” to the Mbembe Affair. In: RLS News (11/23/2020); Michael Rothberg: Holocaust Memory after the Multidirectional Turn. In: Berliner Zeitung, (21. 2. 2021), https://www. berliner- zeitung. de/ open- source/ gegen- opferkonkurrenz- es- gibt- auch- in- deutschland- kein- isoliertes- gedenken- li. 141816 (last accessed September 9, 2021). 31 See Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement. In: Cherry Moraga / Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.): This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York 1981, pp. 210–218; Angela Y. Davis (ed.): Women, Race, and Class. New York 1981; Patricia Hill Collins (ed.): Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. London 1990; Kimberlé Crenshaw: Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. In: Standford Law Review 43 (1991) No. 6, pp. 1241–1299.

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climate. Despite these current trends of economization and “Re-Westernization,” however, Boatc˘a, makes out a loop whole in the “chronic underfunding” of the German system which leads to the “lack” or absence of governmental control which presents the funded programs with the opportunity to implement their own intellectual agendas and to choose neither to enforce the main assumptions of modernisation theory in their study of ‘other’ world regions, nor to reproduce the asymmetries of knowledge reproduction characteristic of Euro- and state-entered approaches(.) 32

As an example, Boatc˘a mentions the research network on interdependent inequalities in Latin America as global inequalities beyond the nation state (desiguALdades.net, last accessed September 9, 2021) 33 at the Latin American Institute of Freie Universität Berlin (2009–2016) as an endeavor for a “mutual exchange with Latin American researchers rather than German experts about Latin America” funded in the scope of the BMBF (German Ministry of Education and Research) area studies program. The research project “The Americas as Space of Entanglements” at the Center for Interamerican Studies at Bielefeld University (2013–2019) was financed through the same BMBF funding line and also followed a relational approach focusing on interrelations and interdependencies and also decidedly dedicated to overcoming knowledge asymmetries by fostering a transnational dialog. The follow-up projects of the also BMBFfunded international Maria Sybilla Merian Centers in both Guadalajara in Mexico (Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies, CALAS) and Sao Paulo in Brazil (Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, Mecila) also build on a dialogical and horizontal approach and include partners from the locations the centers are positioned in. 34 In general, the program promotes the internationalization of the humanities, and the cultural and social sciences, and can thus also be read as an attempt to go beyond merely foreign policy and modernization oriented strategies. However, the German (main) money givers define selection and funding criteria. Thus, regardless of such niches, what Boatc˘a calls the “Re-Westernization” of German universities through the attempt of “catching up” with US institutions not only monopolizes resources at “elite” institutions and reproduces the social inequalities that mark the German educational system as a whole,

32 Boatc˘a (fn. 11), p. 26. 33 https://www. desigualdades. net/ (last accessed September 9, 2021). 34 With respective centers also in Accra, Ghana, Tunis, Tunisia, and Delhi, India.

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it furthermore prevents “the systematic incorporation – much less the institutionalization – of subaltern(ized) views.” 35 This described German “Sonderweg” promotes the tendency to position racism “elsewhere” but in the own context, for which a “classical” area studies frame provides a suitable tool. Against the background of this history, it is all the more important that students don’t see racism as a phenomenon that can be found elsewhere, but an all-encompassing power structure that is deeply ingrained and inscribed into our knowledge and episteme and that affects us all. Particularly the students from diverse contexts of the Interamerican Studies program force me and usually the entire group / class to constantly reflect on our different positionings as well as on the varying workings and articulations of race and racism. This is why I consider it crucial to tie back findings from and about the Americas also to the European and German context and change or broaden the still very narrowly Eurocentric curricula here e.g. through including Postcolonial City Tours through Bielefeld in seminars or examples from the German (or the students’ varying) context(s), including Afro-German voices and feminisms. This attempt is reflected also in my research, e.g. various comments on the German Humboldt Forum 36, or in an article on the involvement of German actors, ideas, and capital in the conquest and colonial endeavor focusing on the Welser merchants of Augsburg and in the series of teaching materials for schools on “Knowledge on Global Entanglements” here at the CIAS in Bielefeld to which I have contributed. 37 Such a lens enables us to trace the continuities of colonial power structures and provides a point of departure for tracing also the transformations of racism. Therefore, the challenge as a lecturer of American (and Interamerican Studies) is to pursue such a critical perspective in an increasingly efficiency- and competition-oriented as well as economized environment and from temporary positions and to transfer approaches that have emerged in very particular contexts to the teaching location and the students’ (often very diverse) prior knowledge and experiences. Another challenging aspect is this difficult trajectory of the discipline in the described framework of geopolitical aspirations and the related unequal and hierarchical locations and positions of knowledge production and knowledge produc35 Boatc˘a (fn. 11), p. 26. 36 E.g. in Julia Roth / Carsten Junker (eds.): Weiß sehen. Dekoloniale Blickwechsel mit Zora Neale Hurston und Toni Morrison. Sulzbach / Taunus 2010; Roth (fn. 28); Julia Roth: Sugar and Slaves: The Augsburg Welser as Conquerors of America and Colonial Foundational Myths. In: Atlantic Studies 14 (2017) No. 4, pp. 436–456. 37 In German: Wissen um globale Verflechtungen (includes volumes and versions in Spanish, English and German), see https://www. uni- bielefeld. de/ cias/ unterrichtsmaterialien/ index. html.

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ers it has helped create. Thus, on the conceptual level, it is furthermore important to “translate” approaches that have emerged or been developed in particular locations to other contexts. Gabriele Dietze has for instance elaborated on a “critique of Occidentalism” as a hegemony critical tool for the German (or European) context based on Critical Whiteness and Critical Race approaches, but tying them to the specific forms of racism such as anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic racism. 38 In order to overcome such Eurocentric and Occidentalist hierarchies and the persistency of the related racialized hierarchies of knowledge production and circulation inscribed in academic disciplines – toward a more relational, multidirectional notion of conviviality – Ramón Grosfoguel emphasizes the necessity of a problem-based “thematic internal organization within ethnic studies programs” beyond the restrictions of either fixed identity containers or Eurocentric exclusionary disciplines, one being “based on problems (racism, sexism, xenophobia, Christian-centrism, ‘other’ epistemologies, Eurocentrism, etc.) rather than either ethnic / racial identities (Blacks, Indigenous, Asians, etc.) or Western colonial disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, arts, economics, etc.).” 39 The constant reappraisal of the shifting dynamics of racism along other categories and axes of stratification (e.g. also transnationality, migration, citizenship status) is a further necessity for that aim. Alongside the necessary refounding of disciplines and area studies, I consider it particularly urgent for our German university context, to be more sensitive to the interlocking character of exclusion and inequalities. My colleague sociologist Yulexis Almeida Junco from the University of Havana in Cuba works on inequalities of access and permanence to the Cuban educational system through an intersectional lens. 40 A while ago in

38 “Critical Occidentalism” or a critique on / of Occidentalism is a concept coined by Gabriele Dietze as an attempt to adopt a hegemony critical perspective as represented by Critical Whiteness Studies to European contexts, see Gabriele Dietze / Claudia Brunner / Edith Wenzel (eds.): Kritik des Okzidentalismus. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo)Orientalismus und Geschlecht. Bielefeld 2009; Gabriele Dietze: Occidentalism Reconsidered: Hegemoniekritik, Hegemonie(selbst)kritik, Desintegration und Intersektionalität. In: Birgit Mersmann / Hauke Ohls (eds.): Okzidentalismen. Konstruktionen und Imaginationen des Westens in Kunst und Ästhetik. Bielefeld 2021 (forthcoming). For transnational approaches to racialization processes and histories see also Ella Shohat / Robert Stam (eds.): Race in Translation. Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York 2012. On Intersectionality in transnational constellations see Julia Roth: Feminism Otherwise: Intersectionality beyond Occidentalism. In: InterDisciplines 2 (2017), pp. 97–122. 39 Grosfoguel (fn. 25), p. 88. 40 Yulexis Almeida Junco: Género y Racialidad: Una Reflexión Obligada en la Cuba de hoy. In: Daisy Rubiera Castillo / Inés María Martiatu Terry (eds.): Afrocubanas. Historia, Pensamiento y Prácticas Culturales. Havana 2011, pp. 133–149. In En-

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a presentation at Bielefeld University, she showed how through mere “Gleichstellungspolitik” the ones who profit are White, middle class, gender conforming women. What I learned from that is that through sensitizing ourselves towards the impact of factors such as family environment, access to adequate housing and technology, we can work towards institutional settings that are less racially discriminating. And this refers also to the level of university teachers who remain strikingly little diverse here in Germany. Structural racism and the interlocking character of oppressions as made visible through an intersectional lens thus needs to be addressed more strongly also at the structural level and be implemented as part of Gleichstellungspolitik. Otherwise, the hierarchies will not change. This would mean to make what is now at Bielefeld University a mere “Leitbild” of “diversity” – as something desirable, aimed for, and promoted, but in no way legally binding – into an integral part and parcel of Gleichstellungspolitik which until now looks exclusively at the equal treatment of “men and women,” and it would require different politics of job advertisements (of which we can elsewhere in Germany already see examples). The current increasingly hostile and nationalist climate demonstrates that racism is far from decreasing in our society / societies. Quite the contrary! While the #BlackLivesMatter movement that we can observe in many places has recently moved the long legacy and brutal persistency of racist violence center stage, we also observe a newly fueled wave of violent nativist White supremacy in the US and in many other places. An American Studies framework that reflects the interventions of subalternized voices and knowledges that Critical Race and Intersectionality Theory, cultural studies, postcolonial and decolonial interventions and transnational perspectives have enforced into the originally hegemonic disciplines might provide one possible part of a toolbox, or a starting point, to address persistent and (re-)new(ed) racisms and work towards outdoing them.

glish: Devyn Spence Benson / Daisy Rubiera Castillo / Inés María Martiatu Terry (eds.): Afrocubanas: History, Thought, and Cultural Practices. Transl. Karina Alma. London / Lanham 2020.

2. Practices of Comparing as Immanent Constructive Forces in the Thematic Complex of ‘Race’ & Racism

Becker, Andreas

Climate or Biology? Differences in the Description of the Sami Body in European Ethnographic Discourses

According to most researchers, bodily attributes and physical aspects played a less important role in European ethnographical discourses about different cultures and ethnicities in the Early Modern Era than in later periods. Scholars place the change of the main elements of describing different people from religious and customary aspects to national and ethnic categories in the later 18th and 19th centuries, coinciding and interacting with emergent scientific fields, most prominently biology. 1 This does not mean that the body did not play a significant role in the description of ‘foreigners’ and that no hierarchical concepts of physical attributes existed (and some scholars would even place the origin of race as an essentialized category in the European Middle Ages 2), but that these concepts and categories were less fixed and clear-cut than later. 3 Additionally, not only were these categories more fluid, but also less essentialized, meaning that they were more grounded in habitual and environmental reasons, which could be changed, and less in the – measurable – nature of the people that were described, as was the case with biological and especially later genetic and racial argumentations. 4 This paper aims to contribute to the research of this change in depictions of physical differences and their attributed meaning and thus the 1 Cf. Hannelore Bublitz / Christine Henke / Andrea Seier: Der Gesellschaftskörper. Zur Neuordnung von Kultur und Geschlecht um 1900. Frankfurt a. M./New York 2000; Ernst Mayr: The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge 1981. 2 Cf. Geraldine Heng: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge 2018. 3 Cf. Peter Burschel: Die Erfindung der Reinheit. Eine andere Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit. Göttingen 2014; Angelika Epple: Inventing White Beauty and Fighting Black Slavery. How Blumenbach, Humboldt, and Arango y Parreño Contributed to Cuban Race Comparisons in the Long Nineteenth Century. In: Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart / Johannes Grave (eds.): Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld 2020, pp. 295–328. 4 Cf. Stuart Hall: Rassismus und kulturelle Identität. Hamburg 2016.

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development of essentializing classifications and categorizations. While many descriptions of the physical attributes of peoples in the Early Modern Era are not directly related to theories of ‘race’ or to elaborated systems of racism, the difference in diet, customs, clothing, and bodily aspects could still be seen as severe. While in the Early Modern theories these differences were mostly mutable and could change regarding to the environment the observed people lived in, in legal and social spheres it could take a long time to lose all attributes assigned to descent. The markers described in these ethnographic descriptions could be very strong and could be early forms of discrimination based on racialized thinking. The goal of this paper is to describe the development of increasingly racialized categorizations, which is why it has a place in a book about ‘race’ and racism. To do this, the focus is set upon the practices of comparing. Practices of comparing were an important cornerstone of the methods of ordering a population and different people, to produce knowledge of the unknown and to translate it into the own worldview. 5 To follow the changing perception of the body during the early modern period, the tertia and comparata pertaining the physical attributes used in ethnographic literature – what is compared in regard to what, how are the actors doing comparisons – are studied. A perspective on these practices of comparing and how the actors do compare can be helpful in analyzing different patterns of categorization and hierarchization of humans and groups, but also in describing change happening in these contexts over time. By focusing on the specific tertia and comparata used in different contexts, small variations in different practices can be identified. The sources used to do this are descriptions of the Sami people of northern Scandinavia. 6 The Sami are featured prominently in Swedish and general European ethnographic literature and have since the Middle Ages evoked great interest in scholars and authors, 7 despite being sometimes confused with Finns. 8 Since Antiquity, the description of the physical features of foreign peoples in Europe followed the understanding of the influ-

5 Cf. Angelika Epple: Doing Comparisons. Ein praxeologischer Zugang zur Geschichte der Globalisierung / en. In: Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart (eds.): Die Welt beobachten. Praktiken des Vergleichens. Frankfurt a. M./New York 2015, pp. 161–199. 6 The terms used in the sources are either lapp, Laplander or the Swedish lappar, which are also used in citations here. In the text, the term ‘Sami’ is used, as it is the term used by the Sami themselves today. 7 Cf. For example Jakob Ziegler: Quae Intus Continentur Syria, Palestina, Arabia, Aegyptus, Schondia, Holmiae, Regionum Superiorum (= Schondia). Strasbourg 1532; Olaus Magnus: Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus. Rome 1555. 8 Cf. Anssi Halmesvirta: The British Conception of the Finnish “Race”, Nation and Culture, 1760–1918. Helsinki 1990, pp. 32–34.

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ence of the climate, the environment, and the diet on the body. Difference was formed not in fixed patterns, but through external and internal factors, and was thus mutable. 9 Harsh weather and high temperatures could turn a person’s skin black, but in a generation in a milder climate this could change. The effects of the climate were thought to have created certain ‘monstrous’ abnormalities, like humans mixed with animal parts, giants, exceptionally short people (‘pygmies’) and so on. 10 Additionally, there a connection between the diet and physical features, but also character traits were imagined. A full diet with bread, meat and salt (a ‘normal’ diet from a European point of view) made people courageous and able to fight, while those lacking these foods were thought fearful in war. 11 While there is a consensus that there is a change during the early modern period and definitely during the 19th century, I want to look at how exactly this change takes form. The thesis is that by studying the practices of comparison used by the authors in the descriptions of the Sami body and by looking at the chosen comparata, tertia and the internalized knowledge of the actors, we can trace this change in detail. The article will focus on different examples from the period of intensified Swedish expansion into the Sami regions during the 17th century and the following ordering of the population in a diverse and multicultural empire, where the Sami were one of many different groups of subjects of the Swedish king. The goal is to identify the tertia and comparata used in the description of Sami bodies and to create an overview of the ‘knowledge of comparing’ that was available in the Swedish ethnographic discourse at the time. The ‘knowledge of comparing’ describes the knowledge base of the actors regarding what could be compared with what and to what end. 12 To achieve this description of a shared base of knowledge used in the ethnographic discourse, the main source to be analyzed will be Johannes Schefferus’ Lapponia 13 from 1673. Other texts, like Jakob Ziegler’s Schondia

9 Valentin Groebner: Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte? Personenbeschreibungen und ihre Kategorien zwischen dem 13. und dem 16. Jahrhundert. In: Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 30 (2003) No. 1, pp. 1–17. 10 Cf. Peter Burke: Frontiers of the Monstrous. Perceiving National Characters in Early Modern Europe. In: Laura Lunger Knoppers / Joan B. Landes (eds.): Monstrous Bodies / Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca / London 2004, pp. 25–39, here pp. 25–27. 11 Cf. Phebe Fjellström: Företal. In: Israel Ruong (ed.): Berättelser om samerna i 1600-talets Sverige. Umeå 1983, pp. V – XII. 12 Cf. Ulrike Davy / Johannes Grave / Markus Hartner / Ralf Schneider / Willibald Steinmetz: Grundbegriffe für eine Theorie des Vergleichens. Ein Zwischenbericht. Working Paper des SFB 1288, No. 3, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/2939563 (accessed on 05/19/2021), pp. 4–5. 13 Johannes Schefferus: Lapponia, id est, regionis Lapponum [. . . ]. Strasbourg 1673.

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from 1532 14 and Olaus Magnus’ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus 15 from 1555, will also be addressed in a shorter form. These works were core parts of the European and Swedish ethnographic discourses about the Sami population in the northern half of Scandinavia and informed many if not most of the court officials and other actors in the Swedish kingdom who and what the Sami were as a group and how they were perceived. The focus of this analysis lies on the description of bodily and physical features of the Sami, how they were related to other groups (including the Swedes) and what meaning the authors attributed to these features. In the second part of the paper the analysis is focused on Carl Linné’s journal of his Lapland travels from 1732, 16 one of the key experiences which formed his thought on the classification of plants and animals, but also on humans. 17 Linnaeus presumably plays a key role in the development of the description of bodies and physical attributes with his contributions to the categorization and classification of species. On the one hand, he stands for a systematic approach and for the practices of scientific classification, on the other hand he is still informed by the discourses of his time and, in the case of the Sami, especially by the work of Schefferus. But the standing of the Sami in the Swedish empire had changed since the publication of the Lapponia. The consolidation of national thought in Sweden and the loss of great parts of the multinational empire in the first half of the 18th century made the Sami a kind of foreigner in the now mainly Swedish-national kingdom. 18 The authors discussed are all writing from a scientific and ethnographic point of view and are all adherents to environmental and monogenetic beliefs. 19 That means, that they all believed the human species to originate from a single origin and having developed over time into the different varieties that they were describing, mostly through the influences of the environment. 20 14 Ziegler (fn. 7). 15 Magnus (fn. 7). 16 Published in English as Carl Linnaeus: Lachesis Lapponica; or, a Tour in Lapland. London 1811. 17 Cf. Nellejet Zorgdrager: Linnaeus as Ethnographer of Sami Culture. In: Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 29 (2008), No. 1 & 2, pp. 45–76, pp. 45–48. 18 Cf. Henrik Höjer: Svenska Siffror. Nationell Integration och Identifikation Genom Statistik 1800–1870. Hedemora 2001; Gregor Mattson: Nation-State Science. Lappology and Sweden’s Ethnoracial Purity. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (2014) No. 2, pp. 330–350. 19 Cf. in this volume Sophie Bitter-Smirnov: Arguing against Monogenism. Strategies in Polygenist Argumentation against the Unity of Humankind. 20 Cf. Susan Lettow: Introduction. In: Susan Lettow (ed.): Race, Gender and Reproduction. Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences in Context. New York 2014, pp. 1–17, here pp. 2–4.

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The main thrust of the paper will be the study of the development of practices of comparing in early modern ethnographic literature and travelogues about the Sami people of northern Scandinavia. Questions addressed will include: how are the Sami related and compared to other groups, which tertia and comparata are used? How do the tertia and comparata, with which the comparisons are constructed, change over the course of time and in different contexts? Can the established ‘knowledge of comparing’ identified in the works of Magnus and Schefferus still be seen in later works? Can the replacement of habitual aspects by measurable physical aspects be confirmed, or is it rather a re-ordering and rehierarchization of already used categories?

Practices of Comparing and the ‘Knowledge of Comparing’ Comparison, or comparing, is not understood as an objective, scientific method, but as a set of subjective practices which change over time and are dependent on the context they are being used in and on the actors using them. This includes the choosing of comparata and tertia to compare, sometimes conscious, sometimes informed through learned, unconscious decisions taken by the actors. A comparative operation consists at minimum of two comparata which are compared regarding one or more tertia, and the context in which the comparison is done in. Additionally, there needs to be a conception of comparability between the comparata, an understanding by the actors doing the comparison that they can be successfully compared. This conception precedes the choosing of the comparata and is part of the knowledge which comparata can be chosen in which way. The knowledge internalized by the actors about which comparata and tertia can be chosen in the construction of a comparison during a comparative operation is described as the ‘knowledge of comparing.’ This knowledge is not limited to basic factual information but can also be the product of comparative operations and practices of comparing. It is shared by different actors participating in the use of practices of comparing but can differ regarding certain groups of actors and varying fields of use. For example, the Swedish bailiffs tasked with collecting taxes in Lapland in the 16th and 17th centuries would probably have a at least slightly different shared knowledge about the Sami than actors participating in ethnographical discourses. Not all comparative operations done by actors are fully visible in the text. One of the comparata or the tertium can be alluded to implicitly, if the actor doing the comparison thinks that their addressees will know to fill in

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the rest. This can be done by using a ‘universal comparatum’ as a standin for an explicitly chosen comparatum. In ethnographic texts in the early modern era, the perspective of the author and as such the person doing the comparison was in most times that of a European, white, Christian male, living in a society of orders with an economy based on agriculture and artisanship. On the one hand it shows the inherent eurocentrism of the sources, on the other hand it opens up possibilities for the actors in regard to comparisons. So, for example, any description of religious rituals or practices in ethnographic contexts can in this way be constructed as ‘heathen’ and ‘deviant’ from the Christian norm, without an explicit comparison with the Christian faith. In the context of this paper, the sources are all written by European (in particular, Swedish), white, Christian (in particular, Lutheran protestant) men with an academic background. Practices are changing with every instance they are being used in and are at the same time only existent in these instances, they do not exist independently of use by the actors. 21 As such, practices have to be recreated in each instance and can be subject to slight changes every time they are used in such a manner.

The Sami in the Swedish Empire While basic contact and indirect forms of taxation existed in northern Scandinavia between the Swedish and Norwegian kings and the Sami people since the 13th century, the direct influence of the southern kingdoms – especially Sweden – was very limited. This was about to change in the 16th century, when the Swedish king Gustav Vasa abolished the indirect taxation practices and ventured to increase the control of the Swedish crown in these parts by establishing government officials to collect taxes, preside in courts and to propagate the Christian faith. 22 While the interest of the crown in the Sami was at a high at the end of the 16th century, mostly because of territorial conflicts with Denmark-Norway in which the Sami and their taxation played an essential role, knowledge about them was still very limited in Sweden. During the 16th and 17th century they were seen as royal subjects and their rights were defended against the intrusions of Swedish farmers, but they still held a foreign and exotic place in the imagination of

21 Cf. Angelika Epple / Antje Flüchter / Thomas Müller: Praktiken des Vergleichens: Modi und Formationen. Ein Bericht von unterwegs. Working Paper des SFB 1288, No. 6., DOI: https://doi. org/ 10. 4119/ unibi/ 2943010 (accessed on 05/19/2021), p. 3. 22 Lars Ivar Hansen / Bjørnar Olsen: Samenes Historie fram til 1750. Oslo 2004, pp. 234– 237.

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many Swedes. 23 At the end of the 17th century the Crown and high-ranking officials like provincial governors sought to increase the economic viability of the Lappmarks by encouraging Swedish and Finnish settlers to take up a farmstead in the north for reduced taxes and other support. While slow at the start, this drive to settler colonialism increased the contacts between Sami and Swedes especially in the 18th century. The role and position of the Sami as a group and as royal subjects was increasingly pressured by more and more arriving settlers and their requests for land ownership. While the courts at first defended the rights of the Sami as subjects of the Crown, they were more and more curtailed with matters pertaining the Sami being transferred from the sphere of law to the administration. 24 This, together with the homogenization of the Swedish kingdom because of the loss of overseas territories in Europe, Africa and America caused the Sami to become a distinct group outside of the Swedish nationality. The economic importance of the Lappmarks and their products of food and clothing for the army, silver and iron or as well as furs declined after the 17th century, leading to a weaker position of the Sami in the Swedish economy. The status of the Sami as a group in the hierarchy of the Swedish empire and their legal standing thus changed considerably between the writing of Schefferus’ Lapponia in the 1660s and the travels of Linnaeus and the writing of his diary in 1732.

The Sami Body in Early Modern Europe: Environmentalism and Mutability Jakob Ziegler was a theologian from Bavaria who wrote geographic and ethnographic treatises about different parts of the world, including Syria and the Levant, but also about Scandinavia as a whole. In his Schondia, which was broadly received in the Swedish ethnographic discourse, he describes the northern parts of the peninsula and its inhabitants. The Sami are described as a short and stocky people who fish and hunt for their livelihoods. Ziegler puts the Sami in a context with the weird and monstrous ‘races’ which populated the periphery of the ‘known’ world in the mind of middle-European ethnographers in the aarly modern ages. He does so by comparing livelihoods and diets: “They do not use agriculture . . . They catch fish in large quantities, and they live from fishing like

23 Cf. Gunlög Fur: Colonialism in the Margins. Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland. Leiden 2006, pp. 27–31. 24 Cf. Lennart Lundmark: Samernas Skatteland i Norr- och Västerbotten under 300 år. Stockholm 2006, pp. 91–94.

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the Ichtyophages [Greek for fish-eaters, A. B.] in Ethiopia.” 25 For Ziegler, both the Sami and quasi-mythical Ichtyophages lived on the periphery of the known world and were thus able to be used as comparata. The result of the comparison is the observation that both people live primarily from fishing. This connection between Sami and fishing will become one of the most important connections in the following centuries. This also was followed up in the most important account of the Sami way of life and history during the 16th century. The Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus of Olaus Magnus, the last catholic archbishop of Uppsala, was published in Rome in 1555. Despite being from a catholic source, the work remained the most influential text about the Sami, or ‘people of the woods’ (homines sylvestres) as Magnus called them, till the latter part of the 17th century. Magnus also describes their bodies as short and stocky, without a deeper interpretation. He continues to focus on their diet, same as Ziegler: “They do not live on wheat, but on game and birds. But in recent times they had sun- and wind dried fish as their main food source.” 26 Magnus compares them to the different people living in the northern part of Scandinavia, and not to Ichtyophages: “These people, who live in the great wastes of the high north, live on hunting and fishing, and they trade with the Muscovites. The Finns are using agriculture, fishing, and are logging wood. The Goths and Swedes are doing the same.” 27 The comparata used here are neighboring people in the north and the Swedes themselves. This places the Sami not in the quasi-mythological context of Ichtyophages in Ethiopia, but in the people of Scandinavia and making them less ‘exotic.’ But while Magnus’ comparisons place them in a more ‘normal’ context, he still accentuates the differences between the Sami and the other people of the north, especially in their diet. And, while also having descriptions of the Sami diet and body, they focused strongly on their ‘heathen’ religion and practices, thus creating a long-lasting image of Sami religious heterodoxy, which

25 Ziegler (fn. 7), p. 13: “Åkerbruk idka de icke. Fisk fångas i stor vmnighet och häraf lefva do såsom Iktyofagerne i Etiopien.” Cf. on the role of Ethiopia in the ethnographic discourse Renato Mazzolini: Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropology (1640–1850). In: Lettow (fn. 20), pp. 131–161, esp. pp. 136–140. 26 Quoted from Olaus Magnus: Historia om de Nordiska Folken, Vol I, 4. Hedemora 2010, p. 18: “Dessa lifnära sig ej af säd, utan endast af villebråd och fåglar. Till hufvudsaklig näring tyckas dessa senare emerllertid hafva sol- och lufttorkad fisk.” 27 Magnus (fn. 26), IV, 4, p. 178: “Dessa människor, nämligen de som bebo de stora ödemarkerna i höga Norden, utöfva såsom näringsfång jakt och fiske och lefva i byteshandel med moskoviterna. Finnarna ägna sig åt åkerbruk, fiske och timmerhuggning. Götarna och svearna lägga sig äfven vinn om de nämnda näringarna.”

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was known throughout Europe. 28 The main markers of difference were religious practices and the way of living, but not physical attributes. The next extensive description of the Sami was the Lapponia, published in Latin in 1673, by the Uppsala professor of rhetoric, Johannes Scheffer. 29 He composed his work on the order of the Chancellor of the Realm, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, with the aim to create a font of knowledge for the Crown to use in the administration of the empire, and with the goal to dispel the rumors of the Swedish use of Sami sorcerers in their armies, which circulated in Europe especially during the Thirty Years’ War. 30 This is the main reason why the Lapponia was first written in Latin and published in Strasbourg. While it was translated in different languages and published all over Europe shortly after, a Swedish version only came to be in the 19th century. 31 Scheffer compiled the Lapponia from various different sources, ranging from older works like the Historia or the Schondia to reports of former students of him, who were now priests in different Lapland parishes. 32 This makes the work an excellent source to trace different aspects of imaginations of Sami culture and livelihoods, and also lets us take a look at how the Sami body was described in one of the most influential texts on the subject. Chapter Five of his work concerns the “inclinations, temper and habit” as well as the “bodies and minds” of the Sami, which aptly displays the early modern imagination of the influence of habit on the physical appearance. 33 While Scheffer ascertains the remark of many different authors, that the Sami are generally of a shorter stature, he denies that they are ‘pygmies,’ which are extraordinarily short people in Greek ethnographic tradition. 34 His reasoning is done through a comparison: the Sami are not deformed enough, too agile and too fit to be put into this category. In the

28 Cf. Daniel Lindmark: Syndiga Hedningar och Ädla Vildar. Synen på Samer och Indianer i Tidigmoderna Svenska Missionsskildringar. In: Hanne Sander (ed.): Mellem Gud og Djævelen. Religiøse og Magiske Verdensbilleder i Norden 1500–1800. Copenhagen 2001, pp. 203–230. 29 Cf. Anders Burius: Art. ‘Johannes Schefferus’. In: Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon, URL: https://sok. riksarkivet. se/ sbl/ artikel/ 6376 (accessed on 05/19/2021). 30 Linda Andersson Burnett: Abode of Satan. The Appeal of the Magical and Superstitious North in Eighteenth-Century Britain. In: Northern Studies 41 (2010), pp. 67– 77, here p. 69–70; Fjellström (fn. 11), pp. V – XII. 31 For the different versions of the Lapponia see Andreas Klein: Early Modern Knowledge about the Sámi. A History of Johannes Schefferus’ Lapponia (1673) and its Adaptations (doctoral thesis). 32 Cf. Fur (fn. 23), pp. 27–28. 33 Schefferus (fn. 13), p. 12: “Chapter V: Of the Laplanders in Reference to their Inclinations, Temper and Habit, of their Minds and Bodies.” 34 Cf. Burke (fn. 10), p. 26.

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German and Latin versions of the text there is an additional comparison of their stature with the other Nordic peoples, which is missing in the English version. In this comparison, Scheffer comes to a similar conclusion: And as they are generally short, they are also very lean, and ’tis rare to see a fat man amongst them, for the cold that prevents their growing tall, dries up likewise their moisture, and makes them apt to be slender. 35

Here we can see the thought, which is deeply seated in humorism 36, of the climate directly influencing the physical features of the Sami, not only making them shorter but also slender. This is also helped by their diet: “They are also very light in respect of their bulk and stature, which comes from their not eating any Salt.” 37 But their slender frame does not equal low strength: “They are very strong in their limbs, so that in a bow which a Norwegian can scarce half bend, they will draw an arrow up to the head.” 38 They also differ in posture from, in the view of Scheffer, ‘normal people,’ because “[t]ho they are thus nimble and strong, yet they never go upright, but stooping, which habit they get by frequent sitting in their cottages on the ground.” 39 Again, this difference is attributed to a habit rather than to a permanent deformity. The same goes for the complexion of the Sami. Many Swedish sources describe them as being darker than Swedes and as swarthy. But this is not a natural disposition, but habitually created: “besides the smoak [sic] which continually fills their cottages empairs very much their natural complexion, which is the reason why most of the men also are so swarthy.” 40 The whole description of the skin color is part of a comparison between the sexes in Sami society, but not an important distinction of Sami and Swedes, but rather a curiosity. Scheffer and his sources praise the Sami women for their beauty (and whiteness, in a medieval sense of the tempers and humors 41), which is attributed to the women caring about their body and keeping themselves clean and warm, while the men are less thorough in their care and thus look less appealing. But again, this is attributed to their behavior: “and therefore if they are less amiable then the other Sex, it is to be imputed to their choice, not nature.” 42 Additional 35 Schefferus (fn. 13), p. 12. 36 Humorism describes a theory of medicine, in which diseases were the result of a disturbance of the balance of the four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Cf. Staffan Müller-Wille: Reproducing Difference. Race and Heredity from a longue durée Perspective. In: Lettow (fn. 20), pp. 217–237, here pp. 219–220. 37 Schefferus (fn. 13), p. 12. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Cf. Groebner (fn. 9), pp. 7–8. 42 Schefferus (fn. 13), p. 12.

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reason is given to the environment, in which they live: “To which we may add the length of their frosts, and the bitterness of the Air.” 43 While the Sami, and especially the men, are described as swarthy, the connection to Africa which Ziegler made cannot be found in Scheffer’s work. Lastly, not only are the physical features of the Sami influenced by their environment and behavior, and are thus changeable, but also their character traits. 44 One especially prominent example is their alleged cowardice, which early modern authors always emphasized. Scheffer is no exception, and as a reason for their inability to be used in war he stresses again the environment and the behavior: “the reason of all this being the cold to which they are condemn’d, and the meanness of their diet, which cannot supply good blood and spirits; wherefore they are useless in war.” 45 After that, he finishes the argumentation with another comparison between the Sami and people of other Swedish provinces: “and the Swedes who raise men in all the other Provinces, find none in this.” 46 To summarize, Scheffer’s work is deeply rooted in imaginations of environmentalism, humorism and the effects of the diet and other external factors on the body and mind of a people. Scheffer’s main goal is to describe the origins, the way of living and the religious practices of the Sami people, to make them understandable to the Swedish elite and the broader European public. In this context he also describes the physical features and bodily aspects of Sami. In all these instances, he uses comparisons to place the unknown Sami population in the north in understandable contexts for his readers and to explain the differences between them and the Sami culture and physical features. He contributes to the knowledge of comparison and, as with the other authors, gives examples on what comparata can be chosen, to be compared regarding which tertia and to what end comparisons can be used. His comparisons were fed from four different angles: The first set of comparative operations is part of an established practice of comparison regarding ‘exotic’ and ‘foreign’ people in European ethnographical discourses. Scheffer compares the Sami with reports about pygmies in the context of ethnographic traditions, with the tertia being their body, the degree of deformity and the level of agility. But he rejects the idea that the Sami are related to pygmies in any form.

43 Ibid. 44 For a discussion of these factors in a tropical and Caribbean context see Eleonora Rohland: Entangled Histories and the Environment? Socio-Environmental Transformations in the Caribbean 1492–1800. New Orleans 2021. 45 Schefferus (fn. 13), p. 13. 46 Ibid.

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Secondly, Scheffer compares the Sami as a people to the neighboring Nordic people (and his imagination of ‘normal’ persons) in regard of their habits, skin color, origin and religious practices. This is also an established practice, particularly prominent in Olaus Magnus’ Historia. The third way of comparing uses the two sexes as comparata, which he compares in regard to different looks and habits of caring for the body, the type of work being done and way of clothing. The difference in skin color between Swedish and Sami men is presented as being based in different customs and care for the body, not in any essentialized or racialized logic. Lastly, there is a comparison between the accounts of different authors, with Scheffer picking which ones to follow and which one to disregard. Scheffer uses the accounts of other authors to give an updated pool of knowledge about the different people of the Swedish empire. He uses comparisons in a prominent way in his work. These comparisons serve as a good way to generate knowledge and to shape a system of categories, in which the different people are ordered and placed in clear positions in the world.

Linnaeus and his Lapland Journey: The Sami Body in the Eyes of a Natural Historian After this short overview about the most prominent texts in European and Swedish discourse, the next focus of this paper is the diary of Linnaeus about his Lapland travels. In addition to the analysis of Linnaeus’ diary, the results are contrasted with the work of Comte de Buffon, one of the most prominent writers in regard to the development of racial theories of the time. Linnaeus and Buffon knew each other and were of differing opinions on the Sami. While Buffon was not part of the Swedish discourse on the Sami, setting both works in contrast can be elucidating on different ways the people in the north of Scandinavia were written about in the same time-period. Linnaeus undertook the journey in 1732 and it was the only major scientific expedition in his lifetime. He derived much of his knowledge and scientific authority from this journey. 47 The text of the diary itself is written in the form of a travelogue, with retellings of the happenings of each day (with a special focus on the flora and fauna of Lapland) but with breaks in between to address general and scientific questions. Linnaeus describes the physical aspects of Sami specifically only on two occasions

47 Cf. Zorgdrager (fn. 17), pp. 69–71.

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in his work. The first is an encounter with a Sami woman, while he was searching for a guide into the northern parts of Lapland. The account is highly exoticizing, with allusions to Greek myth (“I scarcely believe, that any poetical description of a fury could come up to the idea, which this Lapland fair-one excited. It might well be imagined that she was truly Stygian in origin.”) and otherness (“at first I did not know whether I beheld a man or a woman.” 48). But the rest of the description follows earlier traditions, focusing on her short stature and dark skin, which is again explained with the effect of smoke: “Her face of the darkest brown from the effects of smoke.” 49 Here we see a divergence from Scheffer, who only described the male Sami as black from the effects of smoke. But, as Scheffer, Linnaeus makes no connection between the Sami and African people. Despite this as terrifying depicted encounter, Linnaeus describes the conversations and actions of the Sami in a rather positive light, emphasizing their health, agility and good humor. He notes that his own body is not accustomed to their diet, lamenting that his strength had been sapped “by not tasting for a long time any boiled meat; by drinking a great quantity of water, as nothing else was to be had; and by eating nothing but fish, unsalted and crawling with vermin . . . This food, however, without bread, proved unwholesome and indigestible.” 50 By pointing out his own inability to endure the diet of the Sami, he emphasizes the difference between them and Swedes. Another prominent mention of the physical aspects of the Sami starts with Linnaeus citing a question about the agility and health of the Sami, and then him giving answers in different aspects. The main reasons for their agility are, as Linnaeus points out, their small stature, their training and exercise, their diet, and their “freedom from hard labor.” 51 He thus gives a reasoning very close to the ethnographical tradition, as could be seen in Scheffer’s Lapponia, but he also goes somewhat further. Not only is he citing the training and running habits of the Sami as the basis of their agility, but especially the exercise of the relevant muscles inside their bodies through their way of living. Additionally, Linnaeus states that:

48 For a discussion of gender and sex as an aspect of ‘the other’ in the diary of Linnaeus see Astrid Surmatz: Konfrontationen med det Andra och Genderdiskussionen i Valda Beskrivningar av Samerna under 1600- och 1700-talet. In: Jurij Kusmenko (ed.): The Sámi and the Scandinavians. Aspects of 2000 Years of Contact. Hamburg 2004, pp. 113–128. 49 Linnaeus (fn. 16), p. 144. 50 Ibid., pp. 146–147. 51 Ibid., p. 329.

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I examined their knees, ankles, and feet, but could not perceive the least difference in their shape from those of other countries, except perhaps that the sole of the foot seemed rather more concave, at the inner side, than usual. 52

Here we can see the development in the tradition of describing bodies. But Linnaeus states, that he cannot find a real difference, and argues, that the observed level of agility in the Sami is rather a cause of their training and habit, not of a different form of their body. Linnaeus as such continues the tradition of depicting the body as a mutable thing, being influenced by diet, habits and the climate, but we can find the first aspects of measurements of parts of the body as a reasoning for difference in physical prowess, thus a step in the direction of essentializing bodily differences. Like Scheffer, he uses comparisons as a way to order the knowledge he provides to the reader, while also giving it additional authority and signaling veracity. But we can also see a difference in the practices of comparison: Scheffer’s comparata are broader and less specific (e.g., ‘Nordic people,’ ‘Sami’), while Linnaeus for example compares Helsinglanders to Laplanders in regard to their stature and diet: “There is a striking difference in stature between the inhabitants of Helsingland and those of Lapland, nor is the reason of this difference at all obscure. If we give a young puppy plenty of food, he will grow large; if but little, he will turn out small.” 53 Another difference is, that Linnaeus openly states that he is comparing, and also why and what he compares, while the comparative operations used in the Lapponia are not specified in such a way. This can be a sign for the comparison as an emergent practice of science in the 18th and 19th century. 54 In summary, Linnaeus’ journal is an interesting development from Scheffer’s Lapponia. While retaining the view of outside influence of the climate and diet, it is in his account far less related to habits and character traits, and more limited to the shape of the body (and its agility). Additionally, Linnaeus argues with measurements of specific body parts and emphasizes the comparing in his work, which reminds, albeit on a far simpler scale, of later works of craniometry like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or Anders Retzius. 55 The color of the skin does not play a huge role in his 52 Ibid., p. 332. 53 Ibid., p. 333. 54 Cf. Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart: Practices of Comparing. A New Research Agenda Between Typological and Historical Approaches. In: Epple / Erhart / Grave (fn. 3), pp. 11–39, p. 18. 55 Cf. Nicolaas Rupke / Gerhard Lauer (eds.): Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Race and Natural History, 1750–1850. London 2019; for Retzius cf. Olof Ljungström: Swedish Golgotha. Anders Retzius’ Collection of Human Crania at the Karolinska Institutet according to an 1862 Manuscript. In: Lychnos: Arsbok för Idé- och Lärdomshistoriska. Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society (2014), pp. 159–171.

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description, while later being one of the core markers in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae and his description of the four main varieties of humankind. 56 This can be seen as a development in his thinking about different human varieties. The last example to focus on is Buffon’s Natural History. It was published between 1749–1788 in 36 volumes, and the fourth volume about the varying species of mankind is the one in which he describes physical features between different human groups. Published in 1753, it is one of the most influential works in the history of the development of racism and racial thought but still keeps within the traditions of Scheffer and Linnaeus. 57 Like them, he believes in the monogenetic origin of the human species, with all the difference visible evolving over time. For Buffon, the ideal climate for the human species to live in is Europe, with different climates and non-adequate food causing degeneracy about multiple generations with no short-term change being possible. He thus combined the polygenetic argument of no visible effect of the change of climate for dark skinned humans and their immediate offspring with the monogenistic notion, that the different types of humans being of one species, based on their ability to produce healthy offspring. 58 In his work, Buffon placed humanity firmly in the category of animals, with its own natural history and its effects on the species. In this work, the Sami are categorized as a sixth ‘race’ in the entirety of humankind. While the thought of the Sami as their own race originated almost a century earlier with François Bernier 59, Buffon describes it with a far more differentiated reasoning, also integrating the inhabitants of Greenland and the Samoyeds in his definition. While Buffon’s description on a cursory look does not differ greatly from Linnaeus’ or even Scheffer’s depictions, if one looks closer, there is quite a remarkable variation. While the older texts remarked on physical features and character traits that many of the Sami – from the author’s view – had in common, most of these aspects were explained with external influences of the climate and environment or through habits. Additionally, these differences always had

56 Cf. Staffan Müller-Wille: Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World. In: Kimberly Anne Coles / Ralph Bauer / Zita Nunes / Carla L. Peterson (eds.): The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900, pp. 191–210, pp. 191–193. 57 Cf. Marvin Harris: The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture. New York 1968, pp. 84–85. 58 Cf. Philip K. Sloan: The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s “Histoire Naturelle”. In: Harold E. Pagliaro (ed.): Racism in the Eighteenth Century. London 1973, pp. 293– 321, esp. pp. 293–294 and 308–310. 59 François Bernier: Nouvelle Division de la Terre par les Différentes Espèces ou Races d’Hommes qui l’habitent, in: Journal des Sçavans, 24. April 1684, pp. 133–140.

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a specific effect and a specific cause, like the diet not being able to support good spirits for war, or the Sami being especially agile and able to run for long periods because of their training. Buffon makes far wider reaching descriptions, while also giving more importance to differences of the body. He begins his chapter about the varieties of the human species with a ranking of his categories: “Of these varieties, first and most remarkable is the colour, the second is the form and size, the third is the disposition.” 60 Here we can see the emphasis Buffon puts on the external physical aspects, which are also not grounded in habit, but in biology. While the color of the skin was a curiosity that needed to be explained for Scheffer – who did it with the smoke and the missing care the male Sami had for their bodies – the skin color is the first denominator of the varying species of humankind, followed by stature and form. Skin color became the prime tertium, with which different people ought to be compared, according to Buffon. This does not mean that in Buffon’s worldview there are clearly distinct races that were created different – he is still a monogenist and an environmentalist. He explains the dark skin and small stature of the Sami with the effects of the harsh cold on the body: When cold becomes extreme, it produces effects similar to those of excessive heat. The Samoiedes, Laplanders, and Greenlanders are very tawny; and it is even asserted, that some Greenlanders are as black as those in Africa. 61

Here we can see another comparison between the Sami (and other people, which Buffon includes in his construction of a subarctic race) and people living in Africa. But where Ziegler’s comparison was based on the diet and habits of the people in question and was grounded in a worldview based on ethnographic traditions from European Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Buffon compares physical attributes. He takes up descriptions of the Sami as dark-skinned (which was a common trope in the ethnographic discourse, as can be seen in the examples of Scheffer and Linnaeus) and explains the phenomenon with the environmental effects of the cold climate in which they live. While he still sees the differences as being caused by the environment, the physical – or biological – aspects are the most important distinction between varieties of the human species for Buffon, and even serve as an identifier for larger groups of people, as he counts different people living in subarctic regions as “a common race,” based on their skin color, stature

60 Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière [. . . ] tome Quartrième. Paris 1753, here quoted from the English version: Buffon’s Natural History [. . . ] Vol IV. London 1797, p. 191. 61 Buffon (fn. 60), p. 349.

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and other biological factors. 62 For him, these people are not only linked in external aspects, but also in their manners, as “incivility, superstition, and ignorance are alike conspicuous in them all.” 63 He gives no explanation on how they came to share the same manners. Nonetheless, manners and habits have a far lower influence on the body for Buffon than for his predecessors, nor has the diet a direct relation to character traits. The climate is the reason for different skin colors, while the diet is the explanation for differences in stature and size. For Buffon, all species that are recognizable in the world are a variation on the one original human species, with most of them being deformities or degenerations because of bad environment or food. So, every physical feature one can study in an individual or a people is not essential to them but caused through a variety of different factors: “From every circumstance may we obtain a proof, that mankind are not composed of species essentially different from each other.” 64 In this regard, his position is also close to those of Scheffer and Linnaeus. The main difference is that in Buffon’s view, the change is drawn out over a far longer period of time, needing generations to create a visible effect. This shapes, in his reasoning, the different species or ‘races,’ to whom physical features are essential and cannot be changed quickly. By calling these features deformities or degenerations he also clearly takes a position on whether he sees a hierarchy in value in these aspects. While the bodily differences Scheffer or even Linnaeus talk about could be changed by just adjusting the diet and the way of life, with maybe a change in climate, the species, as Buffon describes them, are relatively clearly marked and a reasonable change impossible. This creates a far wider gulf between the body of oneself and ‘the Other.’

Conclusion To summarize, we can see a difference in the importance of certain tertia in the work of Buffon and Linnaeus. Buffon openly states how people are supposed to be compared – skin color first, stature and form second, disposition third. This clear hierarchization of tertia is something Magnus and Scheffer lacked, and while both of the other authors used comparisons to strengthen their argument, Linnaeus and Buffon use it as the main tool of acquiring knowledge: “From the smallest reflection on the origin of our knowledge, it is easy to perceive that it is by comparison alone 62 Ibid., pp. 191–192. 63 Ibid., p. 194. 64 Ibid., p. 351.

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we acquire it.” 65 Additionally, Buffon compares on a greater scale than Linnaeus and Scheffer, using more and different comparata, as he uses his hierarchized tertia to create categories of groups of humans. This can mainly be attributed to the scope of the project itself: while Scheffer and Linnaeus wrote just about the Sami in the context of northern Scandinavia, Buffon encompasses humanity as a whole. Scheffer compared the Sami to neighboring Nordic people and Russians on the basis of their spatial nearness, which is the same Linnaeus did with the Sami and Helsinglanders, Buffon compares the different subarctic people on the basis of their skin color, stature, form, and way of living, thus creating a specific category for them. The skin color was just a curiosity for Scheffer, and, at first, also for Linnaeus, while Buffon champions it as the most important factor to categorize humans. So, looking at what is compared and how it is compared, with observing at the used comparata und tertia, can be an indicator for the development of the view of human groups and categories in scientific thought and literature. Additionally, as stated before, while the features of a group of people were not fully essentialized in Buffon’s work, they only could change over multiple generations and through relatively drastic changes in environment and behavior, which practically made these traits essential to the people living at the moment. He also counted every difference as a deformity and a degeneration from a once single human variety, thus creating a clear value structure, which was not completely absent from the other descriptions, but more ambivalent and less clear cut. All in all, in this short exemplary overview of early modern descriptions of the body of the Sami, we can see clear differences between Scheffer and Buffon in how physical features were described, explained and treated. While every one of the authors looked at had a monogenic understanding and was sure of the influence of the climate and the environment on the shape and form of the human body, we have three rather different accounts, though all agree on the basic image of the Sami as a short, lean people with a darker skin than other Europeans. A change in the importance of tertia and the relevant comparata is visible. While in the work of Scheffer only the men had darker skin because of the smoke, Buffon created a whole ‘race’ of subarctic people, who now looked the same, with comparable skin tone, stature and form. He also made the color of the skin an essentialized category, obtained by birth and unchangeable in a single lifetime. On this basis, he reactivated the connection between the Sami and Africa, but now with the tertium of skin color. 65 Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière [. . . ] tome Troisième. Paris 1749, here quoted from the English version: Buffon’s Natural History [. . . ] Vol III. London 1797, p. 319.

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Also, while this is only a look at three different authors, the rising importance of comparisons as scientific tools – or rather, the explicit talk about it – is another interesting observation. While the general assumption about the rising importance of essentializing thoughts could be ascertained, it would now be interesting to look further at other relevant examples, especially in the critical time frame of the 18th century, and to look at different ways of ordering people – such as religion or social status.

Wilckens, Malin S.

Racializing, Collecting and Comparing Skulls Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s and Anders Retzius’ Practices of Ordering Humankind

Since I had the honor of sending you the Carrib skull to which you have done so much honor in your Elegant publication I have not been so successfull as I could have wishd[.] the Loss of the Bounty which was bringing home bread fruit from the East to the West Indies & of the Guardian destind for the Releif of Botany bay have together deprivd me of the Fruits of requests on that subject made to both their Commanders[.] I do not | Doubt however of being able in due time to increase a Collection which you Sir by the scientific use you make of it interest every man who wishes well to Learning to extend. 1

These lines were written by the president of the Royal Society in London Joseph Banks (1743–1820) to the naturalist and anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) on May 18, 1790. They show very impressively how much the collecting of skulls for anthropological natural science was connected to global and political structures of that time. The example of the Mutiny on the Bounty named here is widely known, not least through numerous books, plays and films. 2 Even this globally known event, which in the context of European colonial expansion was to transfer the breadfruit from Tahiti to the Antilles, was linked to the research practices of Blumenbach, and was to bring him skulls for the classification of humankind. The surveying of the world is symbolic for the exploratory journeys of European powers in the late 18th century. “Discovering” the world and generating knowledge was a central concern and took place alongside classical power-political and economic motives, which of course were interwoven.

1 Banks to Blumenbach, May 18, 1790. In: Frank William Peter Dougherty: The Correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Rev. augm. and ed. by Norbert Klatt, Vol. III. Göttingen 2010, No. 613, pp. 306–307. 2 The story of the HMS Guardian, which was to bring supplies to Botany Bay, is also well known. The ship struck an iceberg on the way and thus did not reach its destination.

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Large collections were created; cartographers, ethnologists, botanists, and geographers, mainly male, were involved in the evaluation, systematization, and classification. 3 Observing, describing, collecting, classifying, and comparing were characteristic empirical-scientific activities carried out by the travelers and researchers. 4 By imposing their ideas on other regions of the globe, colonial powers occupied and claimed an “epistemic privilege” that instituted the notion of “epistemic inferiority.” 5 These overseas “opportunities” opened up new possibilities for natural scientists to produce their works and were decisive preconditions for the rise of skull comparison practices within the European Comparative Anatomy, which have been crucial to the resulting classifications of humanity. Blumenbach is considered one of the first naturalists to systematically acquire skulls from around the world and use them as an empirical basis to classify people into ‘races.’ In the 19th century, a veritable skull collecting mania broke out within anthropological research. Skulls were collected worldwide from contexts of injustice and transferred into a colonial order of knowledge. Graves were plundered, human remains looted and taken to the centers of Europe and North America. The empirical ‘object-subjects’ (scientific objects, historical subjects) most often served as evidence of a scientifically legitimized White 6 supremacy and the dissemination of racial stereotypes. The knowledge produced about ‘race’ in the sciences led to an assumed naturalization that in large part enabled and justified exclusionary and discriminatory practices and institutions in the context of colonialism and slavery. In the process, the anthropological natural sciences fought over the questions of monogenesis and polygenesis – two theories that argued about a single human origin or more. 7

3 Julia Angster: Erdbeeren und Piraten. Die Royal Navy und die Ordnung der Welt 1770–1860. Göttingen Second Ed. 2012, pp. 13, 82–85; for the colonial dimension of the collecting process see: Londa Schiebinger / Claudia Swan (eds.): Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia 2007. 4 Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart: Die Welt beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens. In: Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart (eds.): Die Welt beobachten. Praktiken des Vergleichens. Frankfurt a. M. 2015, pp. 7–31, here p. 10. 5 Ramón Grosfoguel: Epistemic Racism / Sexism. Westernized Universities and the Four Genocides / Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. In: Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of the Self-Knowledge XI (2013) No. 1, pp. 73–90, p. 74. This is by no means to say that knowledge was not relationally produced, but that “the West” claimed interpretive authority over that knowledge. 6 White is capitalized to mark White as a powerful, historically constructed ‘racial’ identity to counter the ‘racial’ invisibility of White people. See footnote 3 in the introduction. 7 On the hierarchical fixation of gender by anatomical arguments, cf. Claudia Honegger: Die Ordnung der Geschlechter. Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen und das Weib. Frankfurt a. M. 1991.

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The question of when racism in the modern sense began to exist has been discussed and debated many times in research. 8 This is not to be discussed here. Instead, the analyzed sample will show how exactly in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century certain knowledge about supposed ‘races’ was produced and how racial knowledge developed within the natural sciences. Neither the concept of supposed ‘races’ nor racism were fixed entities. They were constructed differently depending on context and time and varied in their manifestations. In the sense of Foucault’s genealogy, it is crucial to find out at which time which knowledge was able to establish itself and why. 9 The widespread assumption that the concept of ‘race’ became strongly fixed with the anthropological natural sciences that developed in the 18th century cannot be upheld entirely, as its meaning was strongly contested and by no means fixed in its application. However, the word ‘race’ experienced a wide spread in the 18th and 19th centuries. The article will use empirical examples to show how modern scientific racism and knowledge about ‘race’ has been produced and fabricated. The paper argues that practices of comparing were crucial to the construction of ‘races’ and ordering of humankind. The constructive force of practices of comparing has recently been analyzed in depth. 10 Promising insights also emerge in the context of the concept of ‘race’: “Disputes [about ‘race’ categories] were carried out more often than not on the ground of comparisons” as Angelika Epple notes. 11 This article shows how exactly different practices of comparing human skulls shaped the outcome of specific allegedly objective knowledge about so-called ‘races’ and classification systems. In doing so, the author will shed light on the processes of classifying humankind by means of two examples – namely the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the often overlooked Swedish anatomist 8 Cf. Miriam Eliav-Feldon / Benjamin Isaac / Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge 2009; Geraldine Heng: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge 2018; Francisco Bethencourt: Racisms. From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton 2013. 9 For the derivation of colonial knowledge-universalism at universities, cf. Grosfoguel (fn. 5). 10 Willibald Steinmetz (ed.): The Force of Comparison. A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World. New York / Oxford 2019; Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart / Johannes Grave (eds.): Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld 2020. 11 Angelika Epple: Inventing White Beauty and Fighting Black Slavery. How Blumenbach, Humboldt, and Arango y Parreno Contributed to Cuban Race Comparisons in the Long Nineteenth Century. In: Id./Erhart / Grave (fn. 10), pp. 295–328, p. 304; see also Eleonora Rohland: Entangled Histories and the Environment? Socio-Environmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1492–1800. In: Inter-American Studies Vol. 33. Trier / New Orleans 2021.

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Anders Adolf Retzius (1796–1860). Both had a different research interest and therefore compared differently. While Blumenbach initially wanted to order the world in its entirety, Retzius was primarily concerned with classifying the various groups of people in his own northern European environment. A look at the acquisition of the skulls makes it further possible to trace coincidences and contingencies as well as their effects on the formation of the theories. The examples enable us to understand the construction of different comparative and classificatory practices in transition and to extract different research intentions. This exemplifies both the contention and varying production of ‘races’ and human divisions. Scientific practices in general and practices of comparing in particular were decisive for the construction of human ‘races’ and provide information about the ambivalences of different natural models. 12 This becomes particularly productive through the object turn, the focus on the ‘materiality’ behind ‘race’ theories.

The Inextricable Link between ‘Race’ and Comparing Although much of the literature refers to the 18th century as “The Invention of Race,” this does not do proper justice to the term in its genealogy and narrows it down to its scientific dimension. 13 However, even before racial classificatory divisions gained momentum in the natural sciences, ‘race’ had already gone through several meanings and denotations. In the 15th century, it was used primarily in horse breeding and to designate noble dynasties. Beginning with the end of the Reconquista, when Jews and Muslims were excluded from catholic Spain, the term ‘race’ (“raza”) became prominent. 14 In the Iberian Peninsula, with an assumption of common ancestry, the “purity of blood” became the central criterion. Converting

12 For practice theory see Andreas Reckwitz: Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. In: European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002) No. 2, pp. 243–263; Christian Bueger: Pathways to Practice: Praxiography and International Politics. In: European Political Science Review 6 (2014) No. 3, pp. 383–406; Emanuel Adler / Vincent Pouliot (eds.): International Practices (Cambridge Studies in International Relations Vol. 119). Cambridge 2011. The core elements of practical theory are the double materiality, which encompasses both the body and the artifacts, implicit knowledge (knowing how), understanding, as well as routine. 13 Cf. Sara Eigen / Mark Joseph Larrimore (eds.): The German Invention of Race. Albany 2006; Nicolas Bancel / Thomas David / Dominic Richard David Thomas (eds.): The Invention of Race. Scientific and Popular Representations (Routledge Studies in Cultural History, Vol. 28). New York / London 2014. 14 Max-Sebastián Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne. Die “Reinheit des Blutes” im Spanien der Frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt a. M. 2006.

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to Christianity was no longer sufficient to be perceived as belonging, especially after the conquest of the Americas in 1492. 15 Continually, the term acquired such a high degree of flexibility that it referred to a number of communities, including homosexuals, classes, nations or families. A decisive development actually took place with the natural sciences in the late 18th century. From then on, the term subsumed all people and became a universalistic category. Both self-descriptions and descriptions of others fell under this term. The assumption of natural characteristics as markers of different groups of people thereby introduced a simultaneous particularity. With its scientific dimension, the term became one of the “most successful ideas of modernity” 16, without disregarding cultural, political or religious aspects. It is precisely this global application of ‘race’ that made it particularly attractive for comparisons that start from an assumption of sameness and can thereby highlight both differences and similarities in specific respects. A comparison consists of at least two comparata (objects of comparison) and one tertium comparationis, i.e., at least one respect to which two objects are compared. The prerequisite for comparisons is a certain assumption of similarity. The comparata are also located in a respective context, which can be shifted by the comparison. The decisive factor in this practice is the actor who can change the comparata and tertium comparationis according to perspective and purpose. 17 The comparata do not possess neutral features that allow a particular comparison to be made or not. It is always the actors who relate the comparata and thus direct the comparative gaze. Comparisons, although they suggest methodological objectivity, are hardly neutral. The focus here is the act, what actors do when they compare. This approach tries to empirically fill the theoretical discussions about the functions and effects of comparisons. What can practices of comparing tell us about the antonyms of difference and similarity in relation to human classifications? During the time when the world became ever “bigger” due to increasing conquest journeys, the question of identity became crucial to colonial conceptions of power. Susan Stanford Friedman states with regard to a social or cultural imperative: “identity requires comparison” or in more detail: “Identity requires sameness in difference, difference in sameness – in a word, comparison.” 18 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan notes that comparisons are hardly

15 16 17 18

Cf. Grosfoguel (fn. 5), pp. 81–82. Christian Geulen: Geschichte des Rassismus. München 2007, p. 14. Epple / Erhart (fn. 4), pp. 17–19. Susan Stanford Friedman: Why Not Compare? In: PMLA 126 (2011) No. 3, pp. 753– 762, here pp. 755–756.

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ever impartial. The cognitive interest of comparison is generated by an act of will determined by a will to have knowledge and thus power. 19 Walter D. Mignolo could be interpreted in a similar line of argumentation as Radhakrishnan. He is concerned with the decoding of hidden power relations that were produced by the colonial matrix of knowledge and power. Mignolo demands that we must free ourselves from the belief that we can compare from a neutral point of view. Especially Mignolo sees the introduction of the comparative method in Europe in the 19th century, at a time when it wanted to strengthen itself as a world imperial power. For Mignolo, comparative studies carry imperial traces. 20 It is therefore highly worthwhile to analyze the practices of comparative anatomists and their functions for racial theories.

Blumenbach’s Practices of ‘Collecting’ For the first time in 1777, Comparative Anatomy was the subject of a lecture series at a German university. 21 The young professor Blumenbach in Göttingen was the author of this series and became one of the most important natural scientists of his time. 22 The professor of medicine himself was not an explorer, but he exerted a strong influence on these ventures. 23 His way to discover and explore the world was through collecting and comparing. Blumenbach was and still is known for his unique collection of human skulls. He himself described the collection and investigation of the human skull as his “favorite studies.” 24

19 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan: Why Compare? In: New Literary History 40 (2009) No. 3, pp. 453–471, here p. 454. 20 Walter D. Mignolo: On Comparison: Who Is Comparing What and Why? In: Rita Felski / Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.): Comparison. Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore 2013, pp. 99–119, here pp. 116–117. 21 Gerhard Lauer: Über Menschen, Schweine und andere Rassen. Die Varietäten der Menschen und ihre zoologische Kritik in der gelehrten Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Claire Gantet / Flemming Schock (eds.): Zeitschriften, Journalismus und gelehrte Kommunikation im 18. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Thomas Habel (Presse und Geschichte – Neue Beiträge 81). Bremen 2014, pp. 221–232, here p. 227 f. 22 To get an overview of his works, see: Claudia Kroke: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Bibliographie seiner Schriften, in collaboration with Wolfgang Böker and Reimer Eck. Göttingen 2010, http://www. blumenbach- online. de/ Einzelseiten/ Bibliographie. php (last accessed September 9, 2021). 23 Blumenbach mediated amongst others between explorers (e.g. Jean Louis Burckhardt, Friedrich Konrad Hornemann) and the African Association, whose committee president was Joseph Banks. See Norbert Klatt: Einleitung. In: Dougherty (fn. 1), p. XVII. 24 Translation of the author: Dougherty (fn. 1), Vol. IV, No. 691, pp. 76–78.

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With the beginning of the 1780s Blumenbach began to specifically collect skulls which provided the multiple comparata. For the collecting process, he drew on a large network of colleagues, former students, or influential academics within his discipline. 25 One of his most important donors, Joseph Banks, was able to influence Royal Navy expeditions, sending skulls from distant regions such as the South Seas and the Caribbean. One of the suppliers from the Caribbean, Alexander Anderson, the head of the Royal Botanical Garden on St. Vincent, made clear the sense of injustice that the venture entailed: “their [Carribes] burial places are not easily Found & an attempt to disturb them is lookd upon as the greatest of Crimes.” 26 Likewise, missionaries of the Herrnhuter Brethren from Labrador and Greenland reported that grave openings could only be carried out against the will of the local inhabitants. 27 Nevertheless, the existing sense of injustice did not hinder them from ‘collecting’ the skulls to be used for science. During the ‘collecting’ process unexpected problems often arose, which illustrate the tension between purposefulness and contingency. The missing skulls from the H. M. S. Bounty had implications for the empirical basis of Blumenbach’s theory. For the publication of his skull collection, he waited many times for the receipt of the promised skulls in order to be able to describe and classify them appropriately. 28 He also received the famous Georgian skull – which was soon considered the central symbol of the “beautiful” white Caucasian “race” – by a “coincidence.” 29 The State Councilor Georg Thomas von Asch (1729–1807) sent the skull to Göttingen after the Georgian woman was taken to the Anatomy in Moscow due to her sudden death. 30 Otherwise, Blumenbach would have had to look for another skull as the representative for his Caucasian variety. The time of receipt and the coincidence of which skull he received thus had an influence on his theory and the visual representation in public, even if he did not change his main premises. 31

25 Wolfgang Böker: Zur Geschichte der Schädelsammlung Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs. In: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie (ed.): Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology 23 (2018), pp. 3–29, here pp. 8, 14. 26 Banks (citing Anderson) to Blumenbach, July 15, 1789. In: Dougherty (fn. 1), No. 560, pp. 236–238. 27 Dougherty (fn. 1), Vol. IV, No. 772, 773, pp. 197–200. 28 Blumenbach to Banks, January 9, 1791. In: Dougherty (fn. 1), Vol. IV, No. 646, pp. 3– 5. 29 Von Asch to Blumenbach, May 29, 1793. In: Dougherty (fn. 1), Vol. IV, No. 811, pp. 256–257. 30 Cf. Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People. New York 2010, pp. 83–90. 31 The name of the Caucasian variety appeared in the third volume of his dissertation in 1795, and in the fifth volume of his Handbuch der Naturgeschichte in 1797, after he received the Georgian skull.

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The skull procurement was a difficult and delicate undertaking. Graves were opened and corpses were desecrated by having their heads cut off and taken away, or they were prisoners taken to anatomy for autopsy. It was not only a physical predatory intervention in mostly ‘foreign’ cultures, it was also an epistemological violence with a vast impact on those people. 32

Blumenbach’s Practices of Comparing Skulls – Aestheticization and Symmetry Blumenbach determined the unity of humans as one species through analogies to domestic animals, zoological criticism, and also by probability. Buffon’s species concept of fertile offspring, which served widely as an argument for monogenesis, Blumenbach rejected in the sense that this cannot all be verified empirically. 33 He used comparisons of various anatomical features to determine the differences within the human genus and distinguished humans into five varieties: Caucasian, American, Mongolian, Ethiopian and Malay. 34 Proving the unity of the human ‘race’ was Blumenbach’s central concern. The subsequent goal was to bring the different skulls or humans into a classification. This was, among other things, due to the research trend of the time, which was concerned with classifying humans into more or less hierarchical systems of nature and explaining their phenotypic, morphological differences. The classification thus ran contrary to Blumenbach’s actual rejection of fixed racial boundaries, which he expressed in his scientific works. He often emphasized the impossibility of drawing a clear dividing line between the many varieties. Thus, through the socially shared practices of classifying and systematizing, Blumenbach could hardly avoid a clear classification. This shows the interconnectedness with structural conditions during the European Enlightenment. It should be noted that Blumenbach’s five types already existed before an acceptable number of empirical ‘objects.’ As early as 1779, the classification into five human varieties appeared in the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte,

32 Cf. Pablo Quintero / Sebastian Garbe: Einleitung. In: Id. (eds.): Kolonialität der Macht. De / Koloniale Konflikte: Zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Münster 2013, pp. 7–15, here p. 10; Walter D. Mignolo: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton / New Jersey 2000; Claudia Brunner: Epistemische Gewalt. Wissen und Herrschaft in der kolonialen Moderne. Bielefeld 2020. 33 See Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. Göttingen 1795, pp. 70 f. To Buffon’s species concept see the articles of Sophie Bitter-Smirnov as well as Devin Vartija in this volume. 34 The fifth (Malay) variety was added later in his writing, see: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. Göttingen 1779, pp. 63–64.

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when he had only two skulls. 35 Blumenbach primarily needed pattern skulls for this typology and also empirical criteria with which he could justify the classification and thus the difference. In the skulls Blumenbach found what he considered to be the most suitable comparata to establish the classification of human beings. The search for the most suitable tertia, on the other hand, was more difficult for Blumenbach since he was struck by the seamless transitions between humans. 36 As a method Blumenbach introduced the norma verticalis to differentiate between three different skull types – a view from behind and above. He basically differentiated between the shape of the face and the shape of the skull. Only in connection with the nationalities and geographical areas, i.e. the allocation of these five main skull forms to concrete people, he connected both perspectives. The fact that he first apparently objectively compared the bones with each other and only then assigned matching nations should underpin the scientific nature of his approach and also the supposed objectivity of his comparisons, even if he already made clear at this point which concrete skull could serve as a pattern. He compared the skulls by a number of small-scale, complex comparisons, such as in regard to the shape of the face, the nose, the forehead, the shape of the zygomatic bones, the shape of the chin, or the shape of the eyebrow arches, to name just a few. The well-known picture of the five-skull typology visualizes the different characteristics worked out by him (fig. 1). These visualized skulls represent the pattern skulls that Blumenbach selected for his ‘race’ classification. It is a leaflet attached to his third edition of De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. The juxtaposition of the skulls evokes a comparative view that would not be given in this strong form on individual sheets. The plastic experience of the skulls leads thereby to a kind of “sensual cognition.” The aesthetic experience increases the evidence of the comparability of racial images and their classificatory order. 37 The drawing underlines that Blumenbach formed a typology on the basis of comparative practices. Starting from an ideal type, the “medium,” other types were differentiated into two different directions (congruent with the norma verticalis). Blumenbach called the outer ends “extrema.” 38

35 Böker (fn. 25), p. 9. 36 Angelika Epple shows Blumenbach’s search for a suitable tertium, according to which he could distinguish humans and animals, see Epple (fn. 11), pp. 308 f. 37 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten published important theoretical works on aestheticization and sensual cognition during the Enlightenment. To fig. 1: The drawing was probably made by Johann Samuel Zimmer and the engraver is assumed to be Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen. 38 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. Gottingae edition tertia 1795, pp. 206–207.

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Fig. 1: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, Göttingen 1795, tab. II. Blumenbach-Online / SUB Göttingen.

The two skull types in between were transitional forms. The typology then enabled him to classify and subsume further skulls. The Georgian, Caucasian skull, representing the White ‘race,’ constitutes the middle and is for Blumenbach “in general, according to our judgement of symmetry, the most beautiful and well-formed facial form.” 39 The skull of the Georgian was not only the most beautiful for Blumenbach, it also formed the comparative standard to which he compared and evaluated the other skulls. 40 Symmetry and aesthetics were to become his central criterions, quasi-superior tertia. They served him to legitimize the middle position of the Caucasian skull and thus to assume the origin of humans in the Caucasus region since God as a perfect creator must have created the most beautiful humans. Finally, he ascribed certain physical characteristics to specific ‘races’ but nevertheless assumed that these physical characteristics were changeable, since climate, lifestyle, and diet had a significant impact on them. It is not least because of this typology and the coining of the term “Caucasian,” which are based on aesthetic characteristics, that some people still attribute him to the spread of racist categorizations. 41 Blumenbach had not only difficulties to bring the skulls into a wellfounded typology. Likewise, it was challenging to give scientifically precise 39 Translation of the author, Blumenbach (fn. 38), p. 178. Original: “In universum ea vultus species, quam ex nostratium de symmetria judicio maxime venustam et formosam censemus.” 40 Cf. Norbert Klatt: Kleine Beiträge zur Blumenbach-Forschung, Vol. 1. Göttingen 2008, p. 72 f. Klatt adds: The Caucasian ‘race’, however, takes only the position of a “primus inter pares”, see ibid. The unity of the human species is constantly the central point of his scientific treatise. 41 Also his colleague in Göttingen, Christoph Meiners, was responsible for establishing the Caucasian ‘race,’ see Christoph Meiners: Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit. Lemgo 1785; cf. Bruce Baum: The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race. A Political History of Racial Identity. New York / London 2006.

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designations to the division. The naming varies greatly in Blumenbach’s work. While in the Latin version the word – but not the meaning – of varietates was set, the word usage in his German and English texts and letters was much more diffuse. The terms Varietät, Spielart, variety, ‘Rasse’ or ‘race’ have been used so differently depending on the language and text that the respective meaning must always be worked out in context. Both Varietät and varietates could stand for ‘race’ or Spielart. What this shows, however, is how much the anatomist struggled with terminology to achieve an adequate founding of his theory. Only in his Handbuch der Naturgeschichte from 1797 did the Göttingen scientist adopt the concept of ‘race’ from Immanuel Kant. 42 There it says: Rassen and Spielarten (varietates) are those deviations from the original specific design of the individual genera of organized bodies, so these have suffered through the gradual degeneration. In a more precise sense, however, Rasse means such a character that has arisen through degeneration, which inevitably and necessarily perpetuates through reproduction, [. . . ] which, on the other hand, is not a necessary consequence in the case of Spielarten. 43

This differentiation is, at least in German, a scientific specification in his publications, which he had already used before in his notes. 44 The term ‘race,’ however, was not fixed for a long time and the professor struggled to find the most suitable terminology. Even though Blumenbach vehemently advocated the unity of the human species – his initial research interest – and spoke out vehemently against slavery, he introduced an aesthetic hierarchy and a European standard of comparison into his ‘race’ typology, which, however, was not intended to encompass the value of supposed individual ‘races.’ Whether Blumenbach nevertheless implicitly carried on a judgmental categorization is still the subject of much scholarly controversy. What can be clearly

42 Norbert Klatt: Zum Rassebegriff bei Immanuel Kant und Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Kleine Beiträge zur Blumenbach-Forschung, Vol. 3). Göttingen 2010. 43 Translation of the author, except the words in italics: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. Göttingen Fifth Ed. 1797, p. 23. Original: “Rassen und Spielarten (varietates) sind diejenigen Abweichungen von der ursprünglichen specifiken Gestaltung der einzelnen Gattungen organisirter Körper, so diese durch die allmählige Ausartung oder Degeneration erlitten haben. Rasse heißt aber im genauern Sinn ein solcher durch Degeneration entstandner Character, der durch die Fortpflanzung unausbleiblich und nothwendig forterbt, [. . . ] welches hingegen bey den Spielarten keine nothwendige Folge ist.” 44 Klatt (fn. 42) p. 32 f. The translations of Blumenbach’s works must also be read with care, as terminology was set according to the translator’s interest at the time. Thus, an exact tracing of the reception must be done in order to understand which contents were passed on by Blumenbach and on which terminology his following colleagues relied.

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pointed out is that Blumenbach did not compare neutrally. The allegedly neutral method of comparison did not free him from his own position in the colonial knowledge matrix as Walter D. Mignolo and Radhakrishnan postulated. He was unable to shake off the ideals of beauty that had their origin in the European power context and that have come from the Greeks, ever since. Blumenbach’s comparative practices scientifically confirmed the equality of all human beings and also the equality of their intellectual abilities. Nevertheless, he created powerful categories based on beauty and obtained his research ‘objects’ from contexts of injustice, which shows epistemic violence within the broad spectrum of coloniality. 45

Anders Retzius’ ‘Collecting’ of Skulls Some decades later the Swedish professor of anatomy as well as supervisor at the Karolinska Institutet, Anders Adolph Retzius (1796–1860), also established a huge collection of human skulls for his studies. The historian Olof Ljungström designates the collection as the “Swedish Golgotha.” 46 The extent and importance attached to this collection for anthropological studies in northern Europe are therefore huge. In contrast to Blumenbach, the collection of Retzius was the property of the Karolinska Institutet, therefore public. For him, as he stated several times, collecting and comparing were the key necessities for an exact examination of the classification of humans as well as nations – as they were for Blumenbach. 47 Retzius collected skulls in many ways. On the one hand, he received them through excavations in old churchyards and old graves. On the other hand, he received many skulls from professional medical anatomists. He wrote that skulls from churchyards also led to mistakes and that close 45 Without wanting to equate all historical constellations with this term, the concept of coloniality fits in the context of collecting and classifying skulls. The concept of coloniality or coloniality of power is understood as a structural pattern of power in modernity, which, in addition to forms of domination or the exercise of violence, also includes violence towards forms of knowledge and subjectivity in the sense of epistemic violence. Thus, coloniality consolidates asymmetrical geopolitical relations of knowledge and power and is at the same time embedded in this very geopolitics of knowledge, cf. Quintero / Garbe (fn. 32), p. 10; Mignolo (fn. 32). 46 Olof Ljungström: Swedish Golgotha. Anders Retzius’ Collection of Human Crania at the Karolinska Institutet According to an 1862 Manuscript. In: Lychnos: arsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoriska. Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society (2014), pp. 159–171. 47 Anders Retzius: Ueber die Form des Knochengerüstes des Kopfes bei verschiedenen Völkern. Transl. by W. Meves. In: Anders Retzius: Ethnologische Schriften. Nach dem Tode des Verfassers gesammelt, ed. by Gustav Retzius. Stockholm 1864, pp. 27–40, p. 28.

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attention should be paid in these cases because for example Sami, Swedes or Finns can be on one and the same cemetery. 48 He also committed grave robbery and desecration of corpses. One difference to Blumenbach, however, was that he had much greater opportunity to receive skulls from outside of Europe through shipments from colleagues. Because of the increasing popularity of craniology, about fifty years later there were far more skulls in circulation than in Blumenbach’s time. In addition, he visited collections in other countries and observed a lot on his travels. In this respect, Retzius also used living people for the confirmation of classification, if he did not have sufficient specimens. Political leaders, such as the Swedish Consul in Egypt, sent him desired skulls on request. In his writings, Retzius made clear from where and whom he received the skulls. He also received casts of skulls when the original was not available. 49 Ljungström made some important observations based on a review of an inventur manuscript from the 1862 collection. Retzius’ son, Gustav Retzius, compiled this list of his father’s skull collection after his death. What is striking here is that Retzius did not receive many skulls until the mid-1840s; shortly after his writing Om Formen af Nordboernes Cranier 50 received so much recognition. In 1826, the first skull of the collection was listed and it can be clearly seen that he reached the peak of his collecting activity in 1845 and continued to collect until the end of his life. 51 It is worth mentioning that his US-American colleague and skull collector, Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), was the second-largest skull supplier for Retzius. Morton was one of the leaders of the American School of Anthropology and also collected an enormous number of human skulls to prove different origins of humans. 52 In 1845 Retzius asked Morton for skull casts: “I take my the liberty humbly to ask if you would supply our collection with any Gyps copies or other duplicates of your collection.” 53 In exchange, Retzius also provided many skulls to the US-collection. 54 The

48 Anders Retzius: Ueber die Schädelformen der Nordbewohner. Transl. by F. C. H. Creplin. In: Id. (fn. 47), pp. 1–24, p. 16. 49 Retzius (fn. 47), p. 33–34. 50 Anders Adolph Retzius: Om Formen af Nordboernes Cranier. Stockholm 1842/43. Translation of the author: “About the skull forms of the northern inhabitants.” 51 Ljungström (fn. 46), pp. 167–168. 52 Cf. Paul Wolff Mitchell: The Fault in his Seeds: Lost Notes to the Case of Bias in Samuel George Morton’s Cranial Race Science. In: PLOS Biology 4 (2018), pp. 1–16, https://doi. org/ 10. 1371/ journal. pbio. 2007008 (last accessed September 9, 2021). 53 Retzius to Morton, July 12, 1845. In: Samuel George Morton Papers, 1832–1862, Box 1, fol. 71. Library Company of Philadelphia. 54 Cf. Retzius to Morton, July 12, 1845. In: Ibid.; Retzius to Morton, May 15, 1847. In: Samuel George Morton Papers, 1832–1862, Box 2, fol. 74. Library Company of Philadelphia.

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importance of the skulls from the distant continent, which he received from Morton, becomes clear in a letter of November 1847: “[. . . ] along with the six peculiar American aboriginal skulls sincerely to thank. These skulls now comprise the most precious part of my ethnographic collection.” 55 Precisely because American skulls were not the main focus of his investigations, but he described them as the most precious objects in his collection, it again shows the value that skulls from ‘foreign’ continents had as a treasure for scientists. Even from the collection originally created by Blumenbach, Retzius received three casts a few decades later. It is noticeable that the exchanged skulls were classified into other categories after their journey in the other researcher’s context, with different practices and concerns. 56 Retzius for example was more interested in ordering European ‘races’ and their differences, as they were not fully explored. 57 After Ljungström, the visual presentation of his collection did not make a clear statement about hierarchy and value; 58 one must also read his texts thoroughly in order to draw conclusions in this respect. Both in the collection and in his writings, there are some contradictions. It turns out that it was already becoming apparent for Retzius, who defined himself as “unprejudiced” and “thorough” 59, that clear statements about the origins of human beings, their differences and similarities as well as their hierarchization are difficult or even impossible to achieve. In 1844, he stated: On the one hand, the different races of human show such great differences that one is tempted to regard them as separate species of one genus, on the other hand, no applicable characters can be established that would justify such a procedure. 60

It is obvious, that Retzius searched for the right tertium which could have justified the theory of polygenism. He repeatedly emphasized that further ‘objects’ are necessary for more detailed investigations in order to explore the natural history of humans. For him, Blumenbach was the first to have 55 Translation of the author: Retzius to Morton, In: Ibid. Original: “[. . . ] nebst den 6 merkwürdigen amer. aborig. Schädeln ergebenst zu danken. Diese Schädeln machen nun das kostbarste partie meiner ethnographischen Samlung aus.” 56 Ljungström (fn. 46), pp. 169–170. 57 Retzius to Morton, April 3, 1847. In: Samuel George Morton Papers, 1832–1862, Box 2, fol. 74. Library Company Philadelphia. 58 Ljungström (fn. 46), pp. 163–164. He nevertheless mentions that visitors can of course read hierarchies from it. 59 Anders Retzius: Beurtheilung der Phrenologie von anatomisch-ethnologischem Standpunkte aus. In: Id.: Ethnologische Schriften. Nach dem Tode des Verfassers gesammelt, ed. by Gustav Retzius. Stockholm 1864, pp. 70–85, p. 76. 60 Translation of the author: Retzius (fn. 47), p. 27; three years later he wrote: “The whole human race belongs to a single species.” Translation of the author: Anders Retzius: Ueber Zeune’s Eintheilung der Menschenrassen. In: Id. (fn. 47), pp. 55–61, p. 55.

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embarked on this path, yet it continued to lag behind the other natural sciences. 61 A look at his comparative practices may reveal the ambivalences in his theses.

Comparing Long and Short Skulls The interpretation of Retzius’ theory of humankind contains fundamental ambiguities. 62 Retzius did not classify the skulls according to ‘races’ but assigned groups of people to four typical skull characteristics. For the skull shape: dolichocephalae (long) and brachycephalae (short) and for the jaw and face shape: orthognathae (“normal,” vertical) and prognathae (protruding). Each skull shape could be combined with both facial forms. In a letter to Morton in 1845, he justified his approach, even with a reference to Blumenbach aiming to confirm the validity of his research. It also explains why both anatomists compared differently. Based on his studies of European skulls, Retzius found out that the skulls of the Slavs were clearly different from those of the Germans, Scandinavians and Celts. The former was short-necked and the latter long-necked. The old class of the Caucasians therefore had to be split; he found the same in the other classes of Blumenbach: In consequence of this circumstances I have found that the best basis for a classification of the human tribes is the form of the Skulls, i.e. the form of the osseal envelope of the brain [. . . ], and the form of the face or cheekbones. I have therefore adopted four principal classes. 63

Hence, the four classes named are based on skull shape rather than racial designations. Retzius used many terms for the different ethnic groups: from “folk group,” “tribe” to “nation.” 64 He is not clear in his terms but used the word ‘race’ mostly in connection with other authors. Perhaps this is an indication that he did not want to inscribe himself in the discourse about naming. It could also be a conscious demarcation, since his aim was to differentiate between different skull types, to which he assigned

61 Retzius (fn. 47), pp. 27–28. 62 Some English-language websites describe Retzius as a polygenist and phrenologist. This cannot be determined so clearly from my study of his writings. Exactly to these two fields he behaved very ambivalently, which of course makes interpretations in exactly one direction possible. 63 Retzius to Morton, July 12, 1845. In: Samuel George Morton Papers, 1832–1862, Box 1 fol. 71. Library Company of Philadelphia. 64 In his original Swedish work “Om Formen av Nordboernes Cranier” his words are: “folkslagen,” p. 1; “folkstammar,” “nationer,” p. 14.

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different, much smaller, groups of people. 65 Another clear distinction that Retzius made is the separation of original and mixed skull forms. He was always interested in determining the “pure” and “unmixed” skull shape in order to be able to deduce national characteristics. 66 The arrangement in the collection also showed a clear distinction between historical and contemporary skulls, especially for the European ones. The Sami seemed for Retzius to be much more ‘ahistorical’, which can be deduced from the collection. Less is known about their origin. 67 In his main writing about Nordic people, one will see which important position the Sami had for his research. In this comprehensive presentation, it is striking how detailed he described the skulls of the different nations. But Retzius went further than Blumenbach and measured the representative skulls of the Swedes, Slavs, Finns, and Sami. 68 The attached tabular record of his measurement results shows fourteen different tertia. The length of the skull, the width of the forehead between the front temple pits, the height of the skull, the height of the upper jaw, the largest width of the skull, to name just a few. The measured numbers were then used to classify them into a skull type. The numerical comparisons allowed a higher degree of objectivity to be assumed. The many tertia then had to be assigned to both the facial and the skull form. These were complex comparative practices, which were supposed to prove a high degree of scientificity.

Comparing the Sami as the Significant “Other” Comparisons of skulls from tombs of their ancestors have shown that the Swedes living at that time had the same “beautiful” skull form as their ancestors, it has been “well preserved.” 69 After Retzius, the Swedes had long skulls and a vertical facial form. It turns out that for Retzius, it was the Sami skulls, in contrast to the Swedes, that were the initial interest of his craniology. Also, the arrangement of the collection shows the special position of the Sami as the “significant Other.” 70

65 He probably did not want to get involved in the discussion about the origin of humankind, which is strongly interwoven with this term. It is also important to mention that Retzius was especially well known for his skull index. 66 Retzius (fn. 48), p. 1. 67 Ljungström (fn. 46), pp. 165–166. 68 Anders Retzius used the word “Lappar.” In this text, I use the word of the Indigenous People, thus the self-designation “Sami.” 69 Retzius (fn. 48), p. 7. 70 Ljungström (fn. 46), p. 164. It is a long tradition in the classifications of naturalists and anthropologists that the Sami occupied a separate position. They were mostly

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This designation is confirmed in Retzius’ remarks on the Sami. He stated that by then little had been known about the shape of their skulls. Blumenbach had already described them but could only refer to two specimens. Retzius correctly mentioned the brevity with which Blumenbach described the skulls, which can also be generally seen in Blumenbach’s way of working. He also added that these short descriptions are not entirely correct. This shows once again the impact of practices of collecting for the theories, also as a point of reference for other researchers. Retzius was able to base his descriptions on sixteen Sami skulls. Overall, the Sami skulls were labelled as smaller than all the others described, which nevertheless also suggests the importance he attached to size, in contrast to Blumenbach. The negative presuppositions towards the Sami are also supported by language. The entire paragraph about them, which is supposedly neutral in its analysis, is consistently interspersed with negatively supported words: “little developed,” “rugged,” “smaller,” “blunt.” 71 Also noticeable are the constant comparisons with Finns and partly also Slaves. The Swedish skulls and the Sami skulls were seemingly incommensurable due to their difference but are compared if at all only where they differed extremely, to show the supposed large distance. This alone shows a clear hierarchy of the different ethnic groups, according to which the Sami rank the lowest and the Finns rank second from below of the Nordic people. He added descriptions of Greenlanders and Kalmyks in the text, since some anatomists, such as Blumenbach, have seen similarities with the Sami. Retzius also described them only in order to prove again the low “cultural ability” of the Sami by means of anatomical descriptions. The Kalmyks and Greenlanders do not appear on the measuring table. Contrary to the statement of several ethnologists, including Dr. Prichard 72, that the Finns and Sami belong to the same “tribe,” Retzius says: The formation of the skulls contradicts this, as does the diversity of the national characters. The Finns, as well as the Slavs and Scandinavians, seem to come from countries more favoured by nature, namely the Caucasus, while the Lapps, as far as legend or history can tell, inhabited the North. 73

excluded from the European class. While Blumenbach initially counted them among the Caucasian variety, he finally assigned them to the Mongolian variety. To the specific position of the Sami, see Andreas Becker in this volume. 71 Retzius (fn. 48), pp. 18–19. 72 James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) was a British physician and ethnologist who advocated the unity of the human ‘race’ and published well-known works in this field. 73 Translation of the author: Retzius (fn. 48), p. 19.

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The reference to the Caucasus, where Noah’s ark settled, and Blumenbach’s Caucasian ‘race’ is quite clear here, even if this is hardly taken into account in his remarks elsewhere. The fact that this comes very surprisingly at this point shows how widespread and accepted the assumption of the origin of the European “tribal” variety in the Caucasus has become. 74 What is important here again is the special position that Retzius attached to the Sami. He expressed this further by saying that they have always been at a low “cultural level.” Contrary to the argumentation of other ethnologists that the Sami also inhabited other parts and were partly more developed than Retzius described it, Retzius said that this ethnic group consisted of many “tribes” and of course had different customs. For this reason alone, there must have been a difference in the skull formation. More skulls from Nordic natives could verify his assumption. The native skulls examined so far would confirm his conclusion. 75 Retzius once again made clear how much the empirical basis and thus collecting can (theoretically) change the theory. Here, too, comparisons are a search for one’s own identity and, as Mignolo and Radhakrishnan have emphasized, show a special, subjective interest in science that operates within the colonial matrix of knowledge. Through all his descriptions, the concern to relate the shape of the skull to morality and culture is clearly expressed repeatedly. In Europe, he found two combinations of his four-part skull schemata: the “dolichocephale orthognathae” and the “brachycephalae orthognathae” form. The former could be found mainly in Western Europe with a supposedly “higher” culture. The second variant is found more in Eastern Europe, which was labeled on a “lower” cultural level. 76 How he measures culture or what he understands by it is not indicated in any place. Since Retzius made connections between the shape of the head and the cultural abilities of people, he had to position himself to phrenology. He expressed himself ambivalent towards this field. On the one hand, he dismissed phrenology as unscientific, on the other hand, he believed to have reason that the traits of the soul can be read from the skull, which is in clear contradiction to Blumenbach. But Retzius doubted that phrenology, as a science in its own right, would be able to prove soul traits. He tended to associate general national characteristics with the shape of the skull. The crucial factor for him was the connection to ethnology, which was lacking in phrenology. 77 Therefore, Retzius classified ethnographically and

74 On the religious influence that accompanied racial theories, cf. Terence Keel: Divine Variations. How Christian Thought became Racial Science. Stanford 2018. 75 Retzius (fn. 48), p. 20. 76 Retzius (fn. 47), p. 33. 77 Ibid., p. 28.

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more general according to cultural levels, which are not to be equated with individual soul traits. These partially contradictory statements and his indecisiveness are particularly evident in his separation of the face and the skull bone – but exactly this differentiation may explain them as well. At the beginning, he classified the latter as more important for the determination of humankind, but in his final explanation regarding higher degrees of culture, he nevertheless used the facial form as a marker. 78 Retzius attributed the prognathic facial form to the particularly “wild” and “raw” peoples outside Europe. This face form was supposed to be found in all parts of the world, except in Europe. Here it could at best be regarded as a “deviation” from the “normal type” or as an “intermediate” or “bastard” form. This facial formation would form the transition between the animals, i.e., the monkeys and the “nobler” humans. 79 He probably could not detach himself from the brain shell with the seat of the brain to attach a higher importance to it, in order to conclude on national qualities and abilities, even if the face form offered him scientifically comparative greater cause for it. This may be the reason why he did not promote the idea of different origins of the so-called ‘races,’ because the brain shell did not provide sufficient evidence, even if according to his texts one has reason to attribute this to him. The importance of the facial form may also be an indication of why he did not fully acknowledge phrenology. Nevertheless, to name the skull form as the most important marker becomes obvious, if one considers his initial interest, the difference to the Sami: these are short skulls according to his scheme but the same in the facial form as the Swedes.

‘Race’ and Practices of Comparing – The Interconnectedness of Difference and Sameness Both Blumenbach and Retzius classified and categorized people based on skull comparisons. They had the same ‘object’ of investigation and proceeded in a comparative way but differed slightly in their practical approach and their making of comparisons, depending on their scientific concerns and convictions. These practical differences had a significant impact on their theories. Blumenbach’s goal was to categorize and order the skulls into a ‘race’ typology, while Retzius assigned different nations to skull forms, with a special interest in the northern population of Europe. Blumenbach used the skulls to confirm his theory, to consolidate it

78 Ibid., p. 40. 79 Ibid., p. 32.

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empirically, as a means to an end; 80 Retzius used the skull shapes as an end or as a possible derivation of national characters. He connected his scientific, craniological research with cultural and national characteristics, but remained undecided regarding the discipline of phrenology. His comparative practices show a clear hierarchization of cultural attributions. The Swede had a different starting position and a different research interest in contrast to Blumenbach, who wanted to find answers to questions of an ‘ever-expanding’ world in mainly solving the question of the origin of humankind. Blumenbach left it at morphological and aesthetic differences according to which he divided people into so-called ‘races.’ While both researchers performed many small-scale comparative practices on the entire skull, for Retzius the main tertia were the length of the skull and the shape of the face. For Blumenbach, it was symmetry and beauty. While Blumenbach thus introduced an aesthetic hierarchy and established the Caucasian skull as the standard of comparison, he insisted that all ‘races’ have the same intellectual abilities and spoke out loudly against slavery. Retzius used skull comparisons to scientifically explain cultural differences and the subordination of the Sami. Retzius based his approach and theory on the founder of comparative craniology – Blumenbach. The flexibility of the concept of ‘race’ is the result of different practices, especially because different actors choose different tertia and comparata. ‘Race’ was therefore an inherently inconsistent concept since there was no fixed methodology of its determination. Not to say that it has nowadays been completely delegitimized as a biological concept. There are no ‘races.’ The tension between this inconsistency and the search for clear categories, can be traced to the following points: 1) supposed ‘races’ and skull types were determined by difference as well as by similarity; 2) different research interests and practices led to different results, consequently the practicetheoretical perspective shows that 3) even in natural science the concept of ‘race’ was not fixed or stable. The collecting and comparative practices cannot be imagined without the colonial context, which shows the ‘claim to superiority’ of the colonial powers and the audacity with which they robbed the skulls and classified them in their colonial knowledge horizon. Craniology contributed considerably to the processes of racialization in science. The search for identity shows in both cases the connection between similarity and difference and makes clear that the latter is considered necessary to secure one’s own allegedly ‘higher’ place in the world.

80 It is important to mention again that Blumenbach’s racial typology was created before he had a considerable number of skulls, cf. Böker (fn. 25) pp. 8, 17 f.

Gärtner, Julian T. D.

A Sentimental Science: Comparisons to Plants and Slavery in George Sand’s Indiana

1. Introduction In her seminal study literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt pointed out the complementary and converging relation of scientific and sentimental travel narratives between 1780 and 1840. 1 According to Pratt, in times of colonial crises, a sentimental variant of travel writing emerges, which negotiates topics such as sexuality and slavery in narratives of marital love as alternatives to colonial domination. Abolitionist novels also have a part in the sentimental dramatization of the contact zone as well as the metropolitan knowledge production for the ‘center.’ 2 Regarding British and French romanticism especially the importance of “slave narratives” 3 and “abolitionist imagination” 4 for the negotiation of social and ethnic differences was highlighted. Particularly ‘race,’ class and gender become important categories for the analysis of orders of the societies in the 19th century, whose contingencies and contradictions they fathom. Historian Ann Laura Stoler claims in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power that the policies of colonial domination can also be found in the private, 1 This paper has been written within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing. Changing and Ordering the World,” Bielefeld University, Germany, funded by the German Foundation (DFG), subproject B03, Comparing and knowing the world: European world travel narratives from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. 2 Mary Louise Pratt: Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York / London pp. 86–111. For a critical reflection of Pratt’s work see Claire Lindsay: Beyond Imperial Eyes. In: Justin D. Edwards / Rune Graulund: Postcolonial Travel Writing. London 2011, pp. 17–35. 3 Cf. Helen Thomas: Romanticism and Slave Narratives. Transatlantic testimonies. Cambridge 2004, pp. 82–124. See also Elahe Haschemi Yekani: Feeling Modern: Narratives of Slavery as Entangled Literary History. In: Hans G. Kippenberg / Birgit Mersmann (eds.): The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity. Berlin / Boston 2016, pp. 117–134. 4 Cf. Andrew Delbanco: The Abolitionist Imagination. Cambridge, MA 2012, pp. 1–19.

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domestic and intimate relationships between Europeans and the native population. Conjugal as well as promiscuous relationships would pose a potential threat to colonial rule. Very often this issue would be addressed as a question of ‘race’ and evoke a rigid catalog of racial classification that would determine life in colonial societies. 5 Abolitionism belongs to the conundrums of colonialism: while proponents of slavery and the slave trade would often support economic considerations, racial arguments can also be found among abolitionists: 6 “Put blunty, Abolition advances racism hand in hand with freedom, or rather freedom as a form of racism.” 7 Research has indicated that abolitionism is a sentimental response to colonial crises. It forms narratives that champion the physical and emotional sufferings of the individual over artificial tropes and that also draws on scientific theories. 8 In other words, abolitionism can be understood as a “community of practice”, 9 notably, movements in England, France and the USA that have developed their own ways of observing, comparing and narrating. Global events such as the Haitian Revolution had a notable impact on European societies and inspired abolitionism: “the Saint Domingue (never called the Haiti) uprising, was mentioned only rarely and obliquely in legislative debates. Slave revolution was treated as an event so savage as to need no elaboration.” 10 At the same time, abolitionist practices such as comparing were also appropriated by marginalized groups as a decolonial means in the struggle against colonial domination. Such measures could, however, also introduce new power relations, conflicts and violence as the

5 Ann Laura Stoler: Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley 2007, esp. pp. 1–21, 41–78; Ann Laura Stoler: Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham 2004. Concerning comparing please see Ann Laura Stoler: Tense and Tender Ties. The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies. In: The Journal of American History 88 (2001) No. 3, pp. 829. 6 Cf. Peter Kitson: ‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century. In: Brycchan Carey / Ellis Markman / Sara Saliha: Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. London 2004, pp. 11–25. 7 Paul Youngquist: Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Farnham 2013, here p. 12. See also Marlon B. Ross: The Race of / in Romanticism: Toward a Critical Race Theory. In: Paul Youngquist (ed.): Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, pp. 24–58. 8 Cf. Brycchan Carey: British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility. Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke 2005, pp. 18–72. 9 Cf. Angelika Epple / Antje Flüchter / Thomas Müller: Praktiken des Vergleichens: Modi und Formationen. Ein Bericht von unterwegs. Working Paper of SFB 1288, No. 6, esp. pp. 8–11. 10 Cf. Seymour Drescher: Abolition. A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge 2008, p. 177.

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example of Haiti illustrates. 11 Rather than a mere sentimental rhetoric, practices of comparing were used to examine and challenge societal phenomena. The narrative structure of George Sand’s novel Indiana 12 (1832) for instance, can be regarded as an arrangement of a scientific experiment. There are two interconnected practices of comparing in the center of the work: plant-comparisons and slavery-comparisons which are integral for the novel’s specific social analysis. These comparisons forge the connection between French aristocratic society and the plantation society on La Réunion, the former colony of Île Bourbon. 13 It is through these comparisons to allochthonous plants that the narration discusses the aesthetic, erotic and exoticizing dimensions of gender relations. This is one of the ways also colonial relations are transmitted. By telling sentimental love stories the narration analyzes social and ethnic tensions in French and colonial society, that are rooted in an underlying ‘racial struggle.’ Further, the narration suggests a sentimental science that deals with the societal and cultural conditions of inner feelings, sensations and passions. The narrator herself is a naturalist and traveler who examines botanic and sentimental phenomena in a comparative manner. Comparisons concerning plants as well as slavery refer to colonialism since plantation economy was essentially based on slave labor, e. g. the harvest of crops and other colonial commodities. Beyond slavery and the slave trade, such comparisons critically examine gender relations in European or French society. George Sand’s abolitionist novel negotiates the topics of sexuality and slavery, gender relations and ethnic relations, in a narration of marital love, less as an alternative than a continuation of colonial hegemony. In the novel gender relations are presented as a continuous reciprocal process of dominance and submission. Actors equally draw comparisons to slavery to stabilize established power relations as well as to sabotage them. Slavery-comparisons are therefore also a counter-practice that allows the narration to speak of abolition and liberation from colonial power relations. However, these practices often fail due to idealized imaginaries and material conditions and because they reintroduce new power relations. 11 Cf. Robin Blackburn: The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London 2011; David Patrick Geggus: The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia 2011. 12 In the following I will refer to the English translation: George Sand: Indiana. Transl. Sylvia Raphael. Oxford 2008. For latest research on George Sand please consult: Pratima Prasad: Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination. New York 2009; Pratima Prasad: Intimate Strangers: Interracial Encounters in Romantic Narratives of Slavery. In: L’Ésprit Créateur 47 (2007) 4, pp. 1–15. 13 Cf. Frédéric Régent: La France et ses Esclaves. De la Colonisation aux Abolitions (1620–1848). Paris 2008.

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2. Pale Flowers, or Society as Greenhouse In George Sand’s novel Indiana comparisons to plants hold a central position. At the beginning of the narration, Indiana is introduced through a comparison “like a newly-opened flower in an antiquated vase.” 14 Indiana (comparatum) is compared to a fresh flower (comparatum) in reference to her age (tertium) but also to her youthfulness and light-heartedness. In the same way a new flower contrasts with an old vase, nineteen-year-old Indiana (comparatum) contrasts with her environment (comparatum) in regard to her age (tertium). In this manner the auctorial narrator establishes the spatial and material but also the interpersonal circumstances of the novel in the opening scene. Even though Indiana is the main protagonist and her name lends the title to the novel, she is introduced in the most incidental fashion: she is narrated as a part of the ornament and decorative attachment to the Lagny mansion and Mister Delmare. Not only does the comparison characterize the relationship between Indiana and Mister Delmare as a marriage of convenience but also a relationship of property and ownership, in which Indiana is allotted a decorative supporting role at best. However, the tertium of age is not exclusively to be understood temporally. It also marks a difference in habitus, family background, political views and interests between both the characters. Every time a flower is prepared for a vase, a violent act is committed: the plant is taken out of its natural environment, it is cut and eventually left to wither in the vase. In this sense its appropriation is also a violent procedure that contrasts with a fragile flower. While Colonel Delmare is portrayed as a disciplined military man and insensitive ruffian, Indiana is introduced as a sentimental and frail person. The comparison establishes a connection to plant kingdom: moreover, it transforms lady Indiana into a plant and outlines essential trades of her character. Like a plant, Indiana suffers from a change of environment. The plant-comparison marks the transition from the context of nature on Île Bourbon to the culture of French society by its selection of the comparata ‘flower’ and ‘vase.’ Beside the decorative dimensions, plantcomparisons highlight the sexual and invasive side to Indiana’s and Delmare’s relation. When local aristocrat Raymon Ramière climbs over the wall and gains unauthorized access to the estate, Mister Delmare sees his property endangered as well as his sexual entitlements: “he blamed the intentions of a man who gets into private property at night by climbing over a wall.” 15 Delmare isn’t primarily anxious about the financial damage 14 Sand (fn. 12), p. 16. 15 Ibid., p. 28.

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of the burglary. He suspects Ramière to be his wife’s lover. Delmare is unaware of the love affair between Ramière and handmaid Noun. The gardener reports Delmare: “I saw a woman in white coming out of the orangery.” 16 Delmare replies that he had met Indiana there himself and he suggests economic reasons for the burglary: “You must realize that I have some rare plants there that Madame values highly and that there are plantlovers crazy enough to come and rob their neighbours’ greenhouses.” 17 Delmare draws this comparison in order to not lose his reputation in front of his employees, because otherwise he would have to admit that he is without knowledge about the proceedings in his very own garden. But more importantly, by drawing this comparison Delmare intends to cover his sexual insecurities regarding his wife, towards whom he is jealous and distrustful. Under this allusive pretext he compares Indiana (comparatum) to an exotic plant (comparatum) in regard to her rarity (tertium) as well as the financial benefits and the social status such precious belongings entail. The supposed lover Ramière (comparatum), however, is compared to a flower admirer (comparatum) with respect to his equal interest in plants as well as women (tertium). Through this comparison Ramière is characterized as a womanizer, who is merely interested in the aesthetic and sensual dimensions of love affairs but not in any kind of binding relationship. Ramière searches for sexual experiences with the diligence of a collector. Ramière would only consider conjugal love to improve his social reputation: “That beautiful exotic flower has made a pretty stupid marriage, I believe, but her aunt is in favor at court.” 18 The seducer compares Indiana (comparatum) to a foreign plant (comparatum) in the way he would capture her (tertium). For Ramière, Indiana is only another flower meant to be collected in order to possess her. Both Mister Delmare and Raymon Ramière deliberately draw plant-comparisons to achieve their sexual goals, i.e., a relationship in the sense of property and ownership. While Delmare can exercise his restrictive entitlements, Ramière can fully satisfy his promiscuous desires. But Indiana is only seemingly an object of comparison without any agency: “I never really thought you would abandon me alone to the consequences of such dangerous decisions, and would let me harvest its bitter fruits.” 19 While Delmare and Ramière can pursue their goals without any disturbances, Indiana has to bear and deal with their social and emotional consequences. But Indiana, too, compares the consequences (comparatum) of her secret love affair with Ramière to 16 17 18 19

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 189.

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the bitter fruits (comparatum) she has to bear or harvest (tertium) alone. Indiana herself is a comparing actor with her own goals. It is through plantcomparisons that the narration discusses aesthetic, erotic and exoticizing dimensions of love affairs as relationships of ownership and property. Moreover, the narration presents social relations as gendered power relations shaped by asymmetries, injustices, and dependencies. Further, plant-comparisons in George Sand’s Indiana serve the purpose of connecting French aristocratic society in Lagny to plantation society on La Réunion, formerly known as Île Bourbon. Delmare’s greenhouse is the dispositive place where sexual and colonial power relations meet. Therefore, the burglary of the greenhouse is also a representation of a colonial fear of loss and expression of colonial desire. It is a cultural and natural space at the same time. The greenhouse (comparatum) and Île Bourbon (comparatum) have in common that a variety of tropical and decorative plants, fruit and spice plants, can flourish there (tertium). Coffee, sugar cane, vanilla, cloves, and many other plants that are autochthonous, or in other words, foreign in France and wouldn’t grow there under natural circumstances, can be grown in the greenhouse. Lagny mansion (comparatum) is the same to Indiana as the greenhouse (comparatum) is to the plants insofar as it provides a secure and comfortable yet secluded and isolated environment (tertium). Indiana is described as a repotted plant that comes from a foreign land and is ailing in its new habitat: “it was too violent a storm for so tender a plant. She turned pale, and putting her hand to her heart she fainted.” 20 Indiana is overwhelmed like a thin branch or frail flower: Ramière’s passionate advances (comparatum) are being compared to a storm (comparatum) that Indiana experiences like a force of nature (tertium). Concerning Indiana’s social origin, it is stated “she was born in a burning-hot climate and was nineteen years old; and nineteen years old in Bourbon Island is the equal of twenty-five in our country.” 21 Just like a plant, Indiana’s origin is discussed in regard to the geographical distance but also the climatic circumstances of a far-away place. 22 The comparison, however, lays between Île Bourbon (comparatum) and France (comparatum) in regard to age (tertium). This climatological comparison refers to Indiana’s physical constitution as well as the affect modeling of her character. But it further bespeaks the significance, the age of a woman

20 Ibid., p. 58. 21 Ibid., p. 47. 22 Cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History: Four Theses. In: Critical Inquiry 35 (2002) No. 2, pp. 197–222. See also Franz Mauelshagen: Ein Neues Klima im 18. Jahrhundert. In: Romantische Klimatologie. Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaft 10 (2016) No. 1, pp. 39–57.

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holds in French society. Indiana is perceived as sexually available, ready for courtship and marriage. Additionally, Indiana is described as “a nervous Creole in poor health.” 23 Plant-comparisons also have an ethnic or ‘racial’ importance. Indiana as a plant (comparatum) and a Creole (comparatum) becomes comparable in regard to her weak condition (tertium). Plantcomparisons go beyond the exotic by transmitting colonial relations. In this regard all comparisons between France and Île Bourbon are statements about French society, too. The greenhouse is the paradigm of George Sand’s comparative social analysis. In a figurative sense, the narration itself is a kind of greenhouse that provides a simulation or fiction. But rather than geographic or climatic conditions, the narration recreates cultural and social dynamics. An evening ball is the epitome of French aristocratic society in Paris. The event is presented as a social experiment. While the Parisian ladies (comparatum) dress in expensive ball gowns, Indiana (comparatum) surpasses them with the simple elegance of her wardrobe (tertium): “The simplicity of her dress would have been enough to make her stand out in the midst of the diamonds, feathers, and flowers, which adorned the other women.” 24 The ballroom (comparatum) is compared to a greenhouse (comparatum) as a space with a humid ambient (tertium): “the warmth of the rooms had barely managed to bring to her cheeks a delicate hue like that of a Bengal rose flowering in the snow.” 25 While the Parisian ladies have to decorate themselves with artificial flowers, Indiana’s character of a plant is ornament enough. Besides exterior adornment and appearance also Indiana’s ethnic identity and social origin is negotiated in this scene. The color of her cheeks (comparatum) is compared to Bengal or Chinese roses (comparatum) in respect to their redness (tertium). Indiana is marked as ‘exotic’, foreign or ‘oriental’. But plant-comparisons also have an ethnic dimension: the light complexion (comparatum) of the surrounding ladies is compared to snow (comparatum) in regard to their whiteness (tertium). Indiana’s cheeks and dark complexion (comparatum) contrast with the white skin color (comparatum) of the Parisian ladies regarding the intensity of color (tertium). The narration introduces Indiana through plant-comparisons as a person whose physiological appearance supposedly differs from her ethnic identity or social background. This is a common trope in abolitionist literature of the time. 26 Indiana’s participation in the evening ball is a

23 24 25 26

Sand (fn. 12), p. 24. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid. Cf. Julian T. D. Gärtner: ‘Whiter than a lily’: Slavery and Racial Comparisons in the Preface of Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie or Slavery. In: Julian Gärtner / Mar-

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spectacular event, because a person from the colonies commonly perceived as ‘Black’ gains access to the highest circles of French aristocratic society. 27 Indeed, the evening ball can also be understood as a superficial display of vanities, of social status and ethnic origin (‘race’) while the narration presents the deep-rooted family histories and conflicts in a narrative flashback. Despite the splendor of the ball-scene, the economic and political interests of the protagonists are presented. Between Mister Delmare and Misses Carvajal for instance, there is a social tension and imbalance that could also be understood as a ‘racial’ struggle. While Delmare comes from a low-class family and owes his reputation to his military service under Napoleon (noblesse de robe), Misses Carvajal has regained her wealth under the government of the restauration. In any case, her family belongs to old aristocracy (noblesse de race) and therefore she surrounds herself with old Franconian nobles that are depicted as “antediluvian creatures” with “sixteen quarters of nobility” 28. In comparison between Delmare (comparatum) and Misses Carvajal (comparatum) both differ in regard to their social origin or ‘race’ (tertium). 29 Carvajal’s Spanish origin can also be seen as a reference to limpieza de sangre in the Spanish colonies. 30 Further, Delmare (comparatum) and Carvajal (comparatum) also diverge concerning their political standpoints (tertium). These are also opposing opinions regarding slavery: while Delmare supports the re-introduction of slavery by Napoleon Bonaparte on the one hand, Misses Carvajal is a

27

28 29

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ius Littschwager (eds.): Traveling, Narrating, Comparing. Travel Narratives of the Americas from the 18th to the 20th Century. Göttingen 2022 [forthcoming]. Further works of the same time-period are Claire Duras Ourika (1824), Victor Séjour Le Mûlatre (1829), Alexandre Dumas Georges (1843), Prosper Mérimée Tamango (1829), Alphonse de Lamartine Toussaint L’Ouverture (1850). Cf. Susan Peabody: There are no Slaves in France. The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime. New York 2002; Susan Peabody / Stovall Tyler Edwards (eds.): The Color of Liberty. Histories of Race in France. Durham 2003; William B. Cohen: The French Encounters with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington 2003. Sand (fn. 12), p. 49. Cf. George Fredrickson: Racism. A Short History. Princeston 2003. Frederickson and other historians argue that the term ‘race’ has already been present in France in the early modern period. While lower nobility and other underprivileged groups were increasingly rising to official positions in 17th century France a distinction was introduced between noblesse de robe and noblesse de race. In the struggle of the different estates higher nobility made reference to their ancestry in the sense of a ‘secret’ or ‘arcane’ knowledge. While higher nobility’s political positions and privileges were secured by the grace of birth and descent, the other estates’ demands relied on personal efforts and achievements. Cf. Aubert Guillaume: ‘The Blood of France’. Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World. In: The William and Mary Quarterly 61 (2004) 3, pp. 439–478; Aline Helg: Slave but not Citizen: Free People of Color and Blood Purity in Colonial Spanish American Legislation. In: Millars: Espai i Història 42 (2017), pp. 75–99.

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proponent of a liberal abolitionism on the other hand. 31 She is Indiana’s advisor and aunt, but it is also her who supports Indiana’s marriage with Delmare out of financial consideration and in this sense sells her niece into slavery. Thus, the ethnic and social relations of the colony also continue in French society. Indiana’s origin is further tied to colonialism and slavery, since she is the daughter of a French aristocrat and an African slave. Mister Carvajal is the brother of Miss Carvajal and Indiana’s father. One learns about him that “Indiana’s father had taken refuge in the French colonies” 32 and also “M. Carvajal, inflamed by political passions and tortured by regrets for his ambition, had become the most brutal of planters and troublesome of neighbours.” 33 For Indiana, the world of plants is also a reference to colonialism and slavery. She is the daughter of a French aristocrat and planter and a supposedly African, Indian or Madagascan slave whose name remains unknown. In other words, Indiana has aristocratic roots but also slaves among her ancestors. Plant-comparisons revoke the cultivation and farming of plants as well as the force and suffering connected to colonial exploitation and slavery. Plant-comparisons indicate the contradictions and contingencies of colonial relations for which Indiana is the living proof in the novel.

3. A Sentimental Science: Love as Natural History Rather than harmless rhetoric ornaments, plant-comparisons reproduce colonial power relations. Noun is Indiana’s childhood friend and maid at the same time. Contrary to Indiana, she is described as “sparkling with health, lively, brisk and over-flowing with the full blooded ardour and passion of a Creole.” 34 In comparison between Noun (comparatum) and Indiana (comparatum) in regard to her ethnic origin (tertium) Noun is introduced as a native Creole. 35 Contrary to Indiana, Noun is associated

31 For a historic overview of French abolitionism I suggest Lawrence C. Jennings: French Anti-Slavery. The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1842. New York / Cambridge 2000, pp. 1–23, 24–47. 32 Sand (fn. 12), pp. 47, 48. 33 Ibid., p. 51. 34 Ibid., p. 25. 35 Cf. Dorris Lorraine Garraway: The Libertine Colony. Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham 2005. Virginia R. Domínguez: White by Definition. Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick 1994, pp. 1–20, here p. 14: “born in, native to, committed to the area of living for whites and slaves.” Domínguez explains that the Spanish term criollo was invented by Spanish conquistadores and introduced

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to attributes such as vital, hardy, or robust, but she is never compared to a wildflower. Noun is the daughter of slaves from Île Bourbon. Initially, Ramière is Noun’s lover but a more binding relationship never comes about for social and ethnic reasons: a conjugal connection of an aristocrat on the one hand and a chambermaid on the other hand would be considered a mésalliance due to their different social statuses and Noun’s ethnic background. More importantly, however, Noun must succumb to Indiana in a plant-comparison. While Noun is in love with Ramière, he only seeks sexual satisfaction: through the relationship to Noun, Ramière is trying to gain access to Indiana. Even when he is with Noun he thinks of Indiana. All preparations Noun makes remember Ramière of Indiana. Noun meets him in the garden, but “Raymon felt an extreme repugnance to enter Madame Delmare’s house as her maid’s lover.” 36 This aversion and repulsion that Ramière feels while entering the mansion is provoked by the plants that constantly evoke memories and comparisons to Indiana. Noun decorates the whole mansion (comparatum) as a kind of greenhouse (comparatum) by using flowers (tertium): “[s]he [. . . ] decorated the mantelpiece with the most beautiful flowers she could find in the hot-house” 37 or “flowering orange-trees were emitting their sweet fragrance.” 38 Noun even goes so far as to embellish herself (comparatum) like the decoration of the house (comparatum) with flowers (tertium): “she decorated herself with camellias.” 39 She even enters into a competition with the plants: “she did herself justice in thinking herself prettier than the flowers with which she tried to enhance her beauty.” 40 Noun compares herself (comparatum) to the flowers (comparatum) in regard to beauty (tertium). Nevertheless, Noun succumbs to her friend and mistress in this comparison. Opposed to Noun’s intentions, the fragrances of the flowers and their beauty only remind Ramière of Indiana: “Noun had scattered Bengal rose petals on the floor; the couch was strewn with violets.” 41 She fills her lady’s rooms with precisely those Bengal or Chinese roses that Indiana was connected and compared to earlier: “the pieces of fruit which coquettishly showed

36 37 38 39 40 41

in the West-Indies. It refers to people who were born on the island, descendants of European as well as African parents. Cf. Nina Möllers: Kreolische Identiäten: Eine amerikanische “Rassengeschichte” zwischen Schwarz und Weiß. Die Free People of Color in New Orleans. Bielefeld 2008; Carolyn Vellenga Berman: Creole Crossings. Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery. Ithaca 2018. Sand (fn. 12), p. 61. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 61.

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of their rosy cheeks against the green moss of the basket.” 42 The skin of the fruits (comparatum) is compared to the redness of the cheeks (comparatum) in respect to their color (tertium). Above all, Indiana’s skin color was previously compared in the same manner during the ball-scene that also detailed her social and ethnic origin. Noun is not a plant-like being as Indiana: ontologically, Noun is not an ‘exotic’ flower but limited to her ethnic origin. As a Creole the floral decoration remains an exterior accessory to Noun and also plant-comparisons can’t change her status. Due to the comparisons evoked by the plants, Ramière is under the illusion of sensually perceiving Indiana everywhere in the house. This is the reason why Noun’s advances must necessarily fail: “He became intoxicated by the gentle fragrance left by her presence [Indiana’s; J. G.].” 43 Noun is disappointed and tears down her flowers: “Noun was choked with tears. She had ripped the flowers from her hair” 44, which also anticipates her near end. Plant-comparisons have a beguiling and seductive yet unsettling effect: Ramière takes advantage of Noun’s love for him. He adds her to his kiss-and-tell stories as a plant-lover would collect a flower for his collection. But also, Ramière’s masculine over-confidence is unsettled by Indiana’s influence on him. Ultimately, it is the comparison to Indiana that disappoints Noun’s expectations and kills her in the end. Indiana finds her dead in the reed of the garden’s water ditch. In fact, Noun’s death correlates with the almost complete disappearance of plant-comparisons from the story. Bankruptcy forces Mister Delmare to sell his factory and move to Île Bourbon. This can be understood as an abandonment of French society’s culture and devotion to nature. Indiana discovers her love to her childhood friend Ralph Brown, who accompanies her to Île Bourbon. He is Indiana’s confidant and has intimate knowledge of her feelings: “Ralph, who had no other home than theirs [. . . ] was busy with natural-history study or supervised work on the plantation.” 45 Ralph Brown is the antagonist to Delmare and Ramière, the military man on the one hand and the womanizer on the other hand. Ralph Brown is both naturalist and planter, who dedicates his time to scientific studies and the cultivation of the plantation alike. Contrary to his opponents, Ralph Brown is a true expert for flowers, who is also endowed with sensitive compassion: “one would have said he was a naturalist hunter absorbed in his innocent passion and completely detached from the emotional inter-

42 43 44 45

Ibid. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 193.

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ests all around him.” 46 Here the narration draws a comparison between naturalist research (comparatum) and sentimental passions (comparatum) in regard to the scientific and systematic vigor (tertium) that Ralph dedicates to both, the exploration of nature and affairs of the heart alike. Eventually, Ralph Brown and Indiana become a love couple and plantcomparisons play a key-role in his love confession: “You were the young plant that I was cultivating, the bud that I was impatient to see flower.” 47 Ralph uses plant-comparisons in order to make a point about Indiana’s and his shared childhood. He compares Indiana (comparatum) to a young plant (comparatum) in respect to her age (tertium). But he also compares his admiration (comparatum) with the necessary care and cultivation (comparatum) given to a plant. The quality of the relationship (tertium) changes: Ralph changes from the brotherly friend to Indiana’s lover. He is the sentimental juxtaposition to Delmare and Ramière. While the former marries for economic reason, the latter chases women for the sake of sexual affirmation. Ralph, however, takes love as serious as a scientific discipline. In the narration the story of Indiana’s and Ralph’s childhood entangles the exploration of nature with the gathering of their first sexual experiences: “When I saw we were leaving the vegetation behind us [. . . ] where maidenhair fern grows, we found lots of strawberry plants, and you were busy filling your baskets with their fruits,” Ralph tells and further elaborates, “I picked pomegranates for you but was content to quench my own thirst with creeper.” 48 Picking flowers and fruits (comparatum) is compared to gathering first erotic experiences (comparatum) in regard to its explorative character (tertium). As children and adults alike Indiana and Ralph flee into the “wild woods of Bourbon island” 49 to live out their love free from society. However, George Sand’s novel Indiana is less about an escape from society or a naïve enthusiasm for nature than a sentimental science, i.e., a comparative analysis of the social and cultural conditions of intimacy, affections, and passions. The inner world and the world of emotions shall be described in the same manner as natural phenomena. The novel closes with a fictitious correspondence between the author and botanist Jules Néraud: “I thought of you, my friend. These virgin forests had retained from me the memory of your expedition and your studies.” 50 This frame story is a comparative narration that presents the whole novel as 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid.

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an ethnographic or botanic travel account in hindsight. 51 Above all the narrator reveals herself as being a naturalist traveler and botanist herself: “I found everywhere the marvelous tales with which your magical tales had charmed my evenings in the past.” 52 Literary narration and scientific endeavor go hand in hand: indeed, the narration possesses a vast amount of botanic knowledge. Over the course of the story a vast variety of plants and plant species occurs like the Bengal or Chinese rose (Rosa chinensis), orange trees (Citrus sinensis), camellia (Camellia japonica), strawberries (Fragaria), pomegranates (Punica granatum) or Virginia creeper (Vitis vinifera). The narrator takes up the gesture of celebrated naturalists like Carl Linné, Georges-Louis Buffon or Georges Cuvier to promote the sentimental science of her narration. 53 It is the narrator who tells the story like a social experiment, who conducts a comparative analysis of French society through the novel. In the frame story, she presents the results as empirical observations and first-hand experiences that she gathered during a research expedition. It is only in this epilogue she admits instead of being a heterodiegetic narrator to be a homodiegetic narrator. In other words, the narrator is part of the fictional world. She meets Indiana and Ralph in the woods: “In the evening we went for a walk.” 54 The narrator talks about barren mountains that start blooming again, birds and insects that recover again, flowers forming buds again and rivers that fill with water again. Towards the end of the novel a comparison is drawn between the narration (comparatum) and spring (comparatum) with regard to their form (tertium). The narration merges into the cycle of seasons. The emotional sufferings of the individual (comparatum) are compared to seasons (comparatum) as an iterative event (tertium) that constantly repeats: “Everything was turning to life, happiness and health.” 55 This comparative assumption can count as the first law of George Sand’s sentimental science. Therefore, the narration has a cyclical structure that refers back to the beginning of the novel. In this manner the novel’s recursive ending postulates the return of social and gender-specific processes as a cycle. 51 Cf. Kirsten Kramer: Between Nature and Culture: Comparing, Natural History, and Anthropology in Modern French Travel Narratives around 1800 (François-René de Chateaubriand). In: Eleonora Rohland / Angelika Epple / Antje Flüchter / Kirsten Kramer: Contact, Conquest, and Colonization: How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism around the World. New York 2021, pp. 198–224. 52 Sand (fn. 12), p. 261. 53 See the contributions of Andreas Becker, Devin J. Vartija and Sophie Bitter-Smirnov in this volume. Concerning the importance of comparing for Linné please consult Michael Eggers: Vergleichendes Erkennen. Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie des Vergleichs und zur Genealogie der Komparatistik. Heidelberg 2016. 54 Sand (fn. 12), p. 267. 55 Ibid.

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Social and gender-specific struggles, tensions and conflicts of gender, class, ethnicities or ‘races’ continuously repeat.

4. Torturous Love: Love Affairs as Slavery George Sand’s novel Indiana negotiates the topics sexuality and slavery, gender relations and ethnic relations in a narrative of conjugal love as a continuation of colonial domination. Comparisons to slavery come from the context of colonial crises of plantation societies e.g., on Île Bourbon, where the relation between master and slave is also an ethnic or ‘racial’ relation. Plant-comparisons and slavery-comparisons, the cultivation of plants by settlers on the one hand, and unfree labor of slaves and suffering under inhumane and abysmal circumstances on the other hand, are very intimately related. Rather than an alternative sentimental love narrative represent a continuation to colonial domination. Plant-comparisons as well as slavery-comparisons connect French aristocratic society with the plantation societies of the colonies. They also draw attention to gender specific as well as social and ethnic asymmetries, dependencies and violence in the power relations of European respectively French society. In the novel Indiana sexuality and slavery are tightly connected to Mister Carvajal’s exile – he is planter and slave owner at the same time. He had to abandon France for political reasons and decided to settle on Île Bourbon. There he continues suffering from the circumstances and consequences of his exile. He is described as “tortured by regrets for his own ambition.” 56 Instead of becoming a successful politician in France Mister Carvajal has to earn a living as planter on Île de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean. The career that he missed (comparatum) becomes comparable to a torture (comparatum) that continuously torments him (tertium). Consequently, Mister Carvajal not only becomes slave owner but the most violent among them. Indiana results from the marriage of Mister Carvajal and an unknown slave woman. He passes on his trauma and the rage about his destiny to his daughter. Indiana grows up in the privileged position of the slave-owner’s daughter yet “neglected by her father, and living surrounded by slaves”. 57 In this way the narration establishes a connection between Carvajal’s negligence and withdrawal of affection (comparatum) on the one side and slavery (comparatum) on the other side that become comparable to Indiana in regard to the endured suffering (tertium). According to her social status Indiana

56 Ibid., p. 51. 57 Ibid.

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is free, but she continuously has to relive the “ills of slavery and enduring the vexation of solitude and dependence.” 58 The connection of affection and slavery also continues in Indiana’s marriage. The narration describes the transition from her father’s home to marriage with Colonel Delmare as a continuum: “In marrying Delmare she had only changed masters; in coming to Langny she had only changed prisons.” 59 Her relationship to Delmare (comparatum) is compared to the ties between master and slave (comparatum) regarding the kind of subjecting relationship (tertium). Also a connection to France is established: the move to Langny (comparatum) is compared to a change of prisons (comparatum), where Indiana has to endure similar bondage, dependence and violence (tertium). More than the unhappy love affair between Indiana and Delmare slavery-comparisons negotiate gender relations. Their marriage of convenience is described as the relation between master and slave: “She did not love her husband, perhaps only because it was her duty to love him.” 60 Indiana compares her relationship to Delmare (comparatum) to a task and burden (comparatum) that she sees as a duty (tertium) society expects and forces her to fulfill. Mister Delmare is introduced as a “retired army officer” 61 – over the course of the novel he stays with rank but without first name. He is characterized as a domineering person: “he was an excellent master who made everyone tremble, wife, servants, horses, and dogs.” 62 In this numeration of almost incommensurable objects of comparison colonel Delmare is characterized as a man who doesn’t know any other interpersonal relationship than that between master and slave. Whether it is soldiers subordinated by rank, domestic servants that serve him at home, pets or other beasts of burden and even family members such as his wife, Delmare treats them like slaves. His domineering demeanor as head of the household (comparatum) is similar to that of a slaveholder (comparatum) in regard to his interactions (tertium) without the people around him – even though the narration never compares him this way. Delmare takes the position of Indiana’s father who used to be a slave owner and accordingly also the relationship to his wife is characterized by paternalism: “Indiana obeyed, and the Colonel [. . . ] with the playful look typical for an elderly, jealous husband: ‘Since you’ve worked well today and are very good, I’ll tell you something that will please you.’” 63 The relationship of Delmare

58 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid. Ibid., p. 77.

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and Indiana (comparatum) becomes comparable to that of master and slave (comparatum) regarding the difference in power and scope of possible actions (tertium). The comparisons, however, are suggested by the narration, but they can be traced back to Indiana’s perception: “slavery had undoubtedly made her feel a kind of dumb, virtuous aversion for him which was not always fair.” 64 In this comment the narrator dissociates from Indiana and puts her emotions in perspective. The experience of slavery has changed Indiana and it is influencing her ability to judge: “Madame Delmare had too many doubts about her husband’s heart; he was only hard and she thought he was cruel.” 65 Indiana misjudges Delmare. When Colonel Delmare learns about his wife’s affair with Raymon Ramière the conversation culminates in an argument. Delmare’s and Indiana’s marriage is openly discussed as the relationship between master and slave but also gender relations are negotiated. Indiana’s affair endangers Delmare’s sexual and colonial entitlements. He asks: “Then who is the master here, you or me?” 66 Delmare draws a comparison to slavery in order to stabilize his position and claim to power. He compares himself (comparatum) to Indiana (comparatum) in regard to who holds the position of lord and master (tertium) in their relationship. Further, Delmare unsuccessfully tries to support his accusations with gender-specific stereotypes: “Then who wears a skirt and ought to be working a distaff? Do you claim the right to take the beard off my chin?” 67 Delmare compares male (comparatum) and female individuals (comparatum) in regard to heteronormative standards such as clothes, occupations and body care. These tertia are meant to deliver the arguments to determine gender relations as the colonial relation of slave and master. Indiana replies: “I know I’m the slave and you’re the lord.” 68 She compares herself (comparatum) to a slave while equating Delmare (comparatum) to a slaveholder (comparatum) at the same time to determine their positions in the relationship (tertium). Delmare’s and Indiana’s marriage is a relationship of reciprocal dependency that is characterized by the desire of recognition – both, Delmare and Indiana compare. Indiana pretends to adopt to the practice of comparing that Delmare defines. But she relativizes his claim to power socially and culturally: “The law of the country has made you my master. [. . . ] You have the right of the stronger and society affirms you in it.” 69 However, there is also a space or reservoir

64 65 66 67 68 69

Ibid., p. 89. Ibid. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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that Delmare has no access to: “You can tie my body, bind my hands, control my actions. [. . . ] But over my will, Monsieur, you have no power.” 70 Indiana compares the verbal assaults and humiliations (comparatum) she had to suffer from Delmare to the torture measure (comparatum) known from slavery and the slave-trade which might show effects (tertium) on her body but which cannot compromise Indiana’s integrity as a person. Delmare will never be able to take control over her will, thoughts or feelings: “Indiana’s submission was stiff and haughty. She always obeyed in silence. But it was the silence and submission of a slave who has made a virtue of hatred and merit of misfortune.” 71 The narrator compares Indiana’s obedience to her husband (comparatum) to the ways slaves have to endure humiliation, injustice and violence (comparatum) in regard to the revolt and resistance it inspires (tertium).

5. Imagined Slavery: Comparing as an Abolitionist Counter-Practice In George Sand’s novel Indiana the sentimental provides a place of refuge and retreat where integrity, dignity and self-determination of a person are preserved. But also, revolutions, insurrections, revolts and other decolonial and decentering counter-practices are generated there. Comparisons to slavery are a part of a complex strategy in undermining of hegemonial power relations but they can also become manipulative and oppressive. 72 Noun for instance draws on slavery-comparisons to win or rather force Raymon Ramière’s affection: “You’ll stay with me still today; you’re my prisoner.” 73 Noun deprives Ramière of his physical freedom. This is accompanied by a comparison: Noun compares Ramière (comparatum) to a prisoner (comparatum) in regard to the control (tertium) she can exercise over him. Even though Noun puts herself in a favorable position she doesn’t succeed in winning Ramière’s love. She succumbs to her friend Indiana in a comparison: “If, as an aid to her beauty, Madame Delmare

70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 154. 72 These dynamics are already examined in Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture. London / New York 2000, esp. p. 86. Bhabha’s conception of colonial mimicry already points out the subversive strategies of the colonized to imitate hegemonial powers. According to Bhabha rather than complete assimilation, mimicry is characterized by an ironic ambivalence of similarities and differences. In my opinion, Bhabha’s concept of mimicry itself is based on comparisons to flora and fauna in a problematic manner. Comparisons to animal’s strategy of defense and attraction, e.g., that of wasps, bees or hoverflies are animal-comparisons that can also be appropriated by colonial forces. 73 Sand (fn. 12), p. 66.

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had not her lack of freedom and her suffering, Noun would [. . . ] have far surpassed her mistress in beauty.” 74 The narration compares Indiana (comparatum) and Noun (comparatum) in respect to their beauty (tertium). 75 According to this heteronormative standard Noun would win over Indiana, but another comparison prevents her success. Indiana (comparatum) and Noun (comparatum) are being compared regarding their social status and stance towards slavery (tertium). According to her social status Noun comes closest to being a slave. She is the daughter of slaves from Île Bourbon. Moreover, as a handmaid she must serve her own childhood friend Indiana in the most humiliating manner. Indiana might be the daughter of a slave woman but also of a French aristocrat and planter – insofar she collaborates with the colonial power. Compared to her friend Noun, Indiana lives the privileged life of the lady of the manor. Among Indiana’s privileges is her imagined slavery, which she reads about in books, while her friend Noun lives under materially poor conditions. Even between Indiana and Noun the colonial relation of the lady of the house and the housemaid are reproduced that are founded in their different social and ethnic origin. Indiana’s and Ralph Brown’s refuge into the woods of Île Bourbon can be understood as a marronage and turn from plantation society, but patterns of colonial dominance repeat even in their resistance. Ultimately, they fail to break free from society: even though the community they build represents a counter-model it still refers to plantation society. Also, they remain in trading contact with plantation society of Île Bourbon throughout the narration. Indiana and Ralph participate in buying the freedom of slaves: “The major portion of our income is devoted to buying the freedom of poor, infirm blacks. That’s the main reason for the bad things the colonists say about us.” 76 Indiana and Ralph use their wealth to effect the manumission of slaves. However, the manumission only equals the transition into a new relationship of ownership and property: “If only we were rich enough to free all who live in slavery! Our servants are our friends; they share our joys, we tend their ills.” 77 Even after manumission a new dependency emerges. Instead of rejecting any kind of hierarchical

74 Ibid., p. 63. 75 Cf. Angelika Epple: Inventing White Beauty and Fighting Black Slavery. How Blumenbach, Humboldt, and Arango y Parreño Contributed to Cuban Race Comparisons in the Long Nineteenth Century. In: Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart / Johannes Grave (eds.): Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld 2020, pp. 295–328; Ezra F. Tawil: The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. Cambridge 2006. 76 Sand (fn. 12), p. 270. 77 Ibid.

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relationship, Indiana compares the employment relationship (comparatum) of former slaves with friendship (comparatum) when it comes to the sentimental attachment and quality of the relationship (tertium) to their past and future superiors. A new relationship of dependencies is established based on servile gratefulness, devotion, and moral obligation. New power relations are introduced that can be described as emotional or sentimental slavery. The narration discusses abolition and the liberation from slavery through Indiana’s and Ralph’s extramarital affair. Among slavery-comparisons are also those comparisons to tyrants, autocrats, and other unlawful rulers. For Indiana it is Ralph who liberates her from slavery under Mister Delmare. She compares her romance with Ramière (comparatum) to a battle (comparatum) as the murder of a tyrant (tertium): “a fight to the death with her tyrant.” 78 In this battle Indiana stands idly by and enjoys her role as damsel in distress. She accuses Ramière but moreover the whole of the male gender: “You think yourselves masters of the world; I think you are only its tyrants.” 79 Indiana compares men (comparatum) to rulers (comparatum) in regard to their all-encompassing claim to power (tertium). At the same time she refutes her own comparison with a counter-comparison that equates men (comparatum) to tyrants (comparatum) in regard to their position (tertium) in the world. In this, past and negative experiences with male figures play a crucial role: “She remembered only [. . . ] her tyrannical masters.” 80 Indiana’s conception of men is closely related to memories of toxic male figures such as her father, Delmare or Ramière. In this sense, also her comparisons are not unbiased when she compares men, and compares the total of the male gender (comparatum) to tyrants (comparatum) regarding their dominating, manipulative and violent behavior (tertium). However, Raymon Ramière’s comparisons should be regarded exactly as such. He advises Indiana to leave her husband: “Say that you are horribly afraid of him, for the tyrant has broken your heart.” 81 Ramière appropriates Indiana’s practice of comparing in order to convince her to leave her husband. Ramière compares his opponent Delmare (comparatum) to a tyrant (comparatum) who conducts his married life like a reign of terror (tertium). It’s just like Ramière is trying to warn Indiana from all the things he intends to do to her. Therefore, also counter-practices such as comparisons to slavery and tyranny can be undermined by hegemonial and colonial powers in turn. 78 79 80 81

Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 55.

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Through slavery-comparisons in the relationship between Indiana and Raymon Ramière the narration negotiates gender relations as a reciprocal process of submission and domination. Indiana fancies herself an imagined slave and damsel in distress waiting for a hero: “Was she not born to love him, this enslaved woman who was only waiting for a sign in order to break her chains [?]” 82 This kind of self-fashioning serves Indiana to execute a staged self-enslavement that allows Ramière to take advantage of her in the first place. Indiana compares herself (comparatum) to a slave (comparatum) who is determined to a certain, dreadful destiny by birth or social origin (tertium) that in fact she does not share. Love confessions between Indiana and Ramière are repeatedly uttered in the form of comparisons to slavery, in which both offer their services as a slave to each other or emphasize their readiness to suffer. Ramière for example requests: “Command me, now, Indiana! I am your slave, you know that very well” 83 and he promises, “I shall be gentle, I shall be submissive, I shall be unhappy and enjoy my tortures.” 84 But also Indiana pleads: “Recognize me, then [. . . ] [i]t’s me; it’s Indiana, it’s your slave.” 85 Both, Ramière and Indiana compare themselves (comparatum) to a slave (comparatum) regarding the social status (tertium) to make a statement about their status in the relationship. These comparisons to slavery aim at winning or winning back the respective partner through a gesture of self-humiliation. Such slaverycomparisons, however, can also be used to renounce one’s relationship. Ramière for example proclaims his independence from Indiana by saying “I am no longer your slave or your ally” 86, whereas later “[h]e still wanted to dominate her after rejecting her.” 87 Raymon Ramière ostentatiously fails at renouncing his relationship to Indiana through comparisons. He compares himself (comparatum) to a slave (comparatum) in relation to Indiana (tertium) and even though he rejects staying her subordinate, the bond remains active. Once a comparison is drawn, it establishes the same connections, perpetually and stabilizes power relations between men and women, master and slaves, etc. The problematic ambiguity of comparison shows when Ramière swears “[w]hen your master wants to oppress you, I’ll also protect you against him” 88 and at the same time he wants to be “guarding you as a slave.” 89 On the one hand, Ramière wants to replace 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid. Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 56.

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Indiana’s master and be her lover, and on the other hand, he also wants to be her slave and compliant servant in love matters. Ramière compares himself (comparatum) as master and servant (comparatum) at the same time in respect to his relationship with Indiana (tertium). Indiana is the initiator of comparisons to slavery: she becomes a slaveholder herself by demanding confessions and promises of her male partners, they can’t possibly keep or live up to. She binds them in love relationships like adhesion contracts. She asks of Ramière unconditional love: “I must be loved absolutely, eternally, unreservedly. You must be willing to sacrifice everything for me.” 90 Indiana hopes for a love affair with Raymon Ramière and informs him about her wishes, desires, and worries. But she also raises expectations that are impossible to meet. The narration renders Indiana (comparatum) comparable to a slave owner (comparatum) who demands unconditional obedience (tertium). By the same token, Ramière doesn’t take Indiana seriously and never plans on keeping his promise: “Raymon saw a woman take love seriously [. . . ] he was not frightened by Madame Delmare’s demands. [. . . ] She was so beautiful [. . . ] as she laid down her rules.” 91 Instead of love confession Ramière only pays lip service, which also shows in the narrative style: while Indiana’s words are presented in direct speech, Ramière’s thoughts are reported by the narrator. Indiana forces Raymond Ramière into a relation characterized by dependencies by rendering him (comparatum) comparable to a slave (comparatum) in regard to his obligations (tertium). Despite his false promises, Ramière cannot escape from the comparison: “He was frightened by such fierce determination and it almost turned him against Madame Delmare.” 92 While he still didn’t take the promise seriously, the prospect of having to live up to it causes Ramière fear. Fulfilling the promises, i.e., freeing Indiana from her relationship with Delmare, is impossible for Ramière. It would mean the danger of losing his social reputation and, above all, his status as bachelor: “Raymon, who, nevertheless was a little afraid that she would fulfill her promises if he did not skillfully undermine her resistance plan she had formed, persuaded her to feign submission [. . . ] until she would declare open rebellion.” 93 The promise between Indiana and Ramière becomes active the moment Delmare decides to settle on Île Bourbon. However, in case Indiana refused to follow her husband, would require Ramière to openly confess to his affair with Indiana – this prospect only causes Ramière panic. He compares Indiana’s refusal (comparatum) to a resis90 91 92 93

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 153.

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tance plan (comparatum) and her divorce from Delmare (comparatum) to a slave insurrection (comparatum) in respect to the social consequences (tertium) of such measure. Ramière fears a binding love relationship the same way colonists fear a slave revolution. This way the narration forges a connection to slavery in plantation societies. The heroine wins over the womanizer through comparisons to slavery that are counter-practices which, however, reproduce colonial power relations between genders anew.

6. Conclusion Comparisons to plants and slavery are two crucial and inter-related practices in George Sand’s novel Indiana. Often plant-comparisons consist of comparata such as ‘women’ or ‘flowers’ that are compared in regard to tertia like age, beauty or color. They serve the characterization of protagonists but also the transformation of their status. Not only does the narration negotiate exoticizing or oriental perceptions of alterity but rather it presents a gendered and ethnic analysis of society. George Sand’s narration utilizes plant-comparisons in order to point out gender-specific and origin-related asymmetries and power relations that are presented as a narrative of ‘race struggle.’ The greenhouse is the paradigm of a sentimental science that explores the social and cultural conditions of emotional phenomena on the same level as the natural world. The narrator herself is a traveling explorer and botanist who studies the world through comparisons. Natural processes are repeatedly translated into the narrative presentation of the story: the narration itself can be regarded as the scientific set-up of a social experiment. Both, comparisons to plants and slavery, draw the connection between French aristocratic society and plantation society on Île Bourbon. Gender relations are presented as the continuation of colonial power relations. Love relationships are presented as processes of constant submission and dominance. Comparisons to slavery, however, can be drawn by marginalized groups as an abolitionist counter-practice and by hegemonial forces alike. This also concerns the gender-specific ways of collaboration with colonial rule. Actors of all genders compare from different positions and with different goals. Also, comparisons to slavery point to the unfree and oppressive dimensions of European or French society. Comparing as an abolitionist counter-practice fails when it doesn’t take into account the privileged or poor positions of the comparing actors. Imagined slavery and material dependencies of slaves according to their social status are hardly commensurable, so that colonial power relations are rather reintroduced through comparison.

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White Identity Politics in the United States

Introduction In a controversial opinion piece published after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political theorist Mark Lilla blamed the Democratic Party’s election loss on its commitment to “identity liberalism.” Lilla argued that Democrats had neglected the proud liberal tradition of universal ideals and shared goals in favor of narrow identity groups associated with race, gender, and sexual orientation. Lilla was particularly disturbed by the Democratic Party’s apparent neglect of white voters. “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.” 1 But in the rest of the essay, Lilla did not “mention all of them.” Instead he argued against mentioning any of them. And in his subsequent book-length treatment of the topic, Lilla offered a whitewashed history of American politics that ignored the fundamental role of racial injustice in shaping dominant structures and institutions. 2 Nonetheless, Lilla was right about one thing: a complete understanding of identity politics needs to address all identity groups, including white people. At its best, identity politics is political action that articulates and transforms social identities, while also going beyond them. Women, people of color, LGBT people, and other groups have articulated shared experiences of oppression and resistance as part of broader efforts to mobilize and organize on behalf of broad social goals. The heated debates over identity politics in the U.S. and Europe cannot be discussed here, except to note that critics often equate identity politics with its most narrow, dogmatic, sectarian versions. 3 Most political efforts to invoke group identities have taken a 1 Mark Lilla: The End of Identity Liberalism. In: The New York Times (November 18, 2016). 2 Mark Lilla: The Once and Future Liberal. After Identity Politics. New York 2017. 3 Eric Kaufmann: Whiteshift. Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. New York 2019; Kenan Malik: Beware the Politics of Identity. They help legitimize the toxic far right. In: The Guardian (February 23, 2020).

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more pragmatic approach, which links group identities and interests with the public interest. For example, the 1977 Statement of the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a founding document of identity politics, emphasized the authors’ commitment to shared values of social justice, and it explicitly called for coalition building among different groups. 4 Critics of identity politics usually ignore white identity, and until recently, the phrase white identity politics sounded like an oxymoron. But political leaders in the U.S. and other countries have long appealed to white people’s group identities and interests. In recent decades such appeals have usually been implicit. Politicians both stimulate and respond to white racial anxieties by using “dog whistles” or code words – “law and order,” “war on drugs,” etc. – to subtly reference negative stereotypes about people of color as dangerous, lazy, and so on. 5 Such rhetoric trades on a long history of racialization, without any explicit mention of race. Indeed, ever since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement abolished the most obvious instances of legally established white supremacy, most white people in the U.S. have tended to see themselves as “normal” and racially unmarked individuals, rather than as members of a racial group. 6 White identity politics has thus remained largely hidden. The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought white identity politics into the open. 7 Donald Trump repeatedly presented himself as a defender of white people against perceived threats by people of color. In response, Lilla and many other white liberals reiterated their support for universal principles of tolerance, inclusion, and equal opportunity. More broadly, liberals in the U.S. today usually express support for historically marginalized groups, but they are either hostile toward or wary of “identity politics,” and they generally aspire instead to colorblindness. And both conservatives and liberals, despite their differences, usually equate “white identity politics” with conservative efforts to defend the cultural and political

4 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.): How We Get Free. Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago 2017, see pp. 15, 19, 27, 62–65. 5 Ian Haney López: Dog Whistle Politics. How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford 2014. 6 Linda Martín Alcoff: Visible Identities. Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford 2006, p. 219; Charles W. Mills: White Ignorance. In: Shannon Sullivan / Nancy Tuana (eds.): Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany 2007, pp. 11–38; Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People. New York 2010. 7 Ta-Nehisi Coates: The First White President. The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy. In: The Atlantic (October 2017), pp. 74–87; Nell Irvin Painter: What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era. In: The New York Times (November 12, 2016); Michael Scherer: White Identity Politics Drives Trump, and the Republican Party Under Him. In: The Washington Post (July 16, 2019).

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dominance of white people. Some radical white racial justice activists, in contrast, rather than rejecting white identity, have sought to transform it. They have tried to confront systemic racism, not just as individual citizens or human beings, but as self-identified white people. 8 In this respect, they suggest the possibility of an antiracist version of white identity politics. The field of critical whiteness studies is often said to have started in the 1990s, when white scholars began devoting increased attention to white racial identities. 9 But the psychology and politics of whiteness had already long been a topic of research by nonwhite authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and many others. Indeed, for Black people and people of color, studying white people has long been a key element of practices of survival and resistance. 10 Research in critical whiteness studies shows that, like race itself, whiteness is a distinctly modern and political category, constructed to justify slavery and colonialism. White racial identity has no genetic basis, but it still has powerful social effects. The boundaries of white identity have changed over time to include many groups once considered nonwhite. 11 Poor whites have often been treated as “not quite white,” and middle-class white liberals have frequently defined themselves as “good white people” in opposition to “poor white trash.” 12 In short, as with other social identities, there is no single essence of whiteness. My focus here is on the United States, but it is worth noting that the politics of white identity has also been a topic of inquiry and debate in many other countries. People of color in Europe, for example, have long had to contend with white racial identities, even if white Europeans did not see themselves as having a racial identity. Recent victories by rightwing populists in Europe have depended in part on either implicit or explicit appeals to white racial identities. European liberals seem at least 8 Linda Martín Alcoff: The Future of Whiteness. Cambridge 2015; Shannon Sullivan: Good White People. The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism. Albany 2014. 9 Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race. New York 1994; Ruth Frankenberg: White Women, Race Matters. The Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis 1993; David R. Roediger: Towards the Abolition of Whiteness. New York 1994. 10 Shannon Sullivan: Critical Whiteness Studies. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Communication. Oxford 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013. 652 (last accessed September 9, 2021); W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of White Folk. In: Darkwater. Voices from Within the Veil. New York / London 1920/1999, pp. 17– 29; David R. Roediger (ed.): Black on White. Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York 1998; Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA 1992. 11 Noel Ignatiev: How the Irish became White. New York 1995; Karen Brodkin: How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. New Brunswick 1998. 12 Sullivan (fn. 8).

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as reluctant as white liberals in the U.S. to embrace “identity politics” or to identify as white. Liberals in both contexts tend to assume that the best way to fight racism is to attempt to be colorblind. To be sure, numerous European scholars have published studies on white racial identities and white privilege. 13 But as far as I know, white Europeans who support antiracist initiatives have generally not developed the sort of radical white identity politics that one sometimes sees in the U.S. Given the major historical and cultural differences between Europe and the U.S., and among European countries, the comparative study of white identity politics is clearly a difficult task. This chapter does not take up that task, but it may provide a contribution to it. This chapter examines the politics of white identity in the United States with regard to three ideal-types: 1) the conservative white identity politics of those who seek, either implicitly or explicitly, to maintain the political and cultural dominance of white people; 2) the colorblind antiracism of white liberals; 3) the radical white identity politics of those who both identify as white and seek to repair and abolish systemic racial injustices. Before examining these three types of white identity, the next section examines some of the historical and conceptual background of today’s white identity politics.

White Supremacy and White Privilege In an important sense, modern liberal-democratic politics has always been white identity politics. This is true not only with regard to the obvious point that those socially defined as white have had systemic advantages over people of color with regard to economic, cultural, and political power. It also applies in the more fundamental sense that the basic institutions and values of liberal democracy have been constituted in ways that reflect and enable white supremacy, intersecting in complex ways with class, gender, sexuality, gender identity, and others forms of identity and difference. The term white supremacy, as I use it here, includes more than racist ideologies, such as those promoted by right-wing extremists, Neo-Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan. It also goes beyond legally established privileges for white people, such as those that long existed in the United States and South Africa.

13 Ulrike Anne Müller: Far Away So Close. Race, Whiteness, and German Identity. In: Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power 18 (2011) No. 6, pp. 620–645; Maureen Maisha Eggers / Grada Kilomba / Peggy Piesche / Susan Arndt (eds.): Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland. Münster 2005; Gloria Wekker: White Innocence. Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham 2016.

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In addition to these explicit forms of racism, white supremacy is also a de facto system of institutionalized cultural, economic, and political power, embedded in a wide range of institutions and practices. 14 At the structural and institutional levels, the history of capitalism and modern democracy is closely intertwined with slavery, colonialism, and the plunder and exploitation of racialized populations around the world. 15 Moreover, many of the key concepts associated with liberal democracy – liberty, property, autonomy, privacy – were shaped by the context of racial exploitation in which they emerged. From Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, the ideal of a freely contracting sovereign individual has helped obscure the real conditions of oppression and exploitation under which the vast majority of people have lived. 16 Similarly, the liberal concept of citizenship as a matter of social status, rather than practices of collective selfgovernment, arose in the United States in direct contrast to those who lacked such status, primarily women and Black people. In a context where race and gender determined who enjoyed civil and political rights, merely having those rights became more important than exercising them. 17 In this respect, liberal democracy has not merely suffered from a gap between its ideals and its practices; the ideals themselves have been shaped by, and helped perpetuate, racial inequalities. At the individual level, at least until the mid-twentieth century, most white people in the United States openly embraced racial prejudices toward people of color, and many white people committed acts of racial violence with impunity. Until the legal victories of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, white supremacy was explicitly protected by law and public policy. Like South Africa under apartheid and Germany during the Nazi period, the United States – especially but not only in the south – was an “overtly racist regime.” 18 Dominant political actors thus often engaged in a narrow form of white identity politics, in the sense that they openly promoted the group interests and identities of white people. During the past fifty years, in contrast, racial equality has become a legal mandate, and mainstream public discourse has generally condemned obvious instances of interpersonal racism or advocacy of white supremacy. Although interpersonal racism remains common, it is officially frowned upon – 14 Charles W. Mills: Revisionist Ontologies. Theorizing White Supremacy. In: Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca / London 1999, pp. 97–118. 15 Charles W. Mills: The Racial Contract. Ithaca 1997; Sven Beckert: Empire of Cotton. A Global History. New York 2014. 16 Carole Pateman / Charles W. Mills: Contract and Domination. Cambridge 2007. 17 Judith N. Shklar: American Citizenship. The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA 1991; Joel Olson: The Abolition of White Democracy. Minneapolis 2004. 18 George Fredrickson: Racism. A Short History. Princeton 2002, p. 1.

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with important exceptions, including President Trump. Practices of overt racism have been mostly replaced by microaggressions, dog whistles, gas lighting, and other more subtle practices of racial domination. 19 White identity politics has thus become more difficult to see, at least for many white people. The liberal individualism that pervades American culture portrays economic status as a result of personal virtue and effort, obscuring the many ways that white people continue to benefit from past and present racism. 20 White supremacy today thus often takes the form of a structural injustice, in the sense that racial inequalities, while clearly the result of a long history of racism, often cannot be directly traced to the racist actions or attitudes of particular individuals. Indeed, white supremacy today often amounts to institutional and structural racism, sometimes called “racism without racists.” 21 Nonetheless, white supremacy still provides individual benefits, in different ways and to different degrees, to people socially defined as white. These benefits are often called white privilege, a term that frequently generates confusion and dismay. This is partly because it combines three distinct kinds of benefits. First, white privilege consists of various material benefits that result from centuries of racist government policies and cultural practices, continuing into the present: chattel slavery, colonial domination, social exclusion, and state-sanctioned violence, as well as racist policies on housing, education, crime, and many other areas. As a result of this history, white people on average have unjust advantages over other racial groups with regard to income, wealth, health, employment, incarceration rates, and many other indicators. Many white people are vaguely aware of these unjust advantages, but they often underestimate their extent. A recent survey found that white people in the U.S., on average, estimate that African Americans hold about 85 percent as much family wealth as white people, when the actual figure is about 5 percent. 22 19 As noted previously, “dog whistles” are subtle rhetorical appeals to white racial prejudice, which are meant to be heard only by white people. They are often combined with an agressive rejection of any allegations of racism, as well as the claim that anyone alleging racism is the real racist. Microagressions are comments, questions, or nonverbal behaviors that implicitly, and often unintentionally, denigrate people of color. Racial gaslighting is discrediting or downplaying the personal experience and testimony of people of color regarding interpersonal or structural racism. See López (fn. 5); Tehama Lopez Bunyasi / Candis Watts Smith: Stay Woke. A Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter. New York 2019, Chapter 2. 20 George Lipsitz: The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia 1998. 21 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: Racism without Racists. Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, Md. Fifth Ed. 2018. 22 Emily Badger: White People Have Huge Wealth Edge Over Blacks (but Don’t Know It). In: The New York Times (September 18, 2017).

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Second, for many white people, the institutions and practices of white supremacy provide a privileged social status. W. E. B. Du Bois called it “a public and psychological wage” that offers compensation for white workers’ lack of fair wages under capitalism. 23 More broadly, white privilege in this sense consists of various subtle forms of special treatment. Those socially perceived as white are consistently, though not universally, given the benefit of the doubt by police officers, schoolteachers, government bureaucrats, and other people in authority. Although this form of white privilege benefits poor white people to some extent, it is most available to middle-to-upper-class white people. In that respect, Shannon Sullivan argues, “white privilege is best thought of as white class privilege.” 24 Third, white privilege is sometimes said to include the protection of social and political rights (right to vote, right to housing, education, health care, etc.) that are often denied to people of color. Unlike other kinds of white privilege, the protection of such rights for white people should not be eliminated. Instead, the protection of rights should be extended to all. 25 In this respect, because rights are not privileges, the term white privilege is misleading, as Peggy McIntosh pointed out in the article that popularized the term. 26 Nonetheless, as long as rights are protected for white people but not for others, they effectively become unjust advantages. 27 More precisely, they amount to an absence of the many disadvantages associated with racial prejudice and discrimination. White people generally do not need to fear racial bias and abuse, and they do not suffer from the self-doubts generated by a lifetime of racist treatment. To be socially defined as white means to not worry about being harassed and mistreated by police, followed by security guards in a clothing store, or expected to speak and act as a representative of your racial group. Moreover, being (seen as) white means to avoid, not just the actual experience of racial discrimination, but the worry about possible discrimination. Perhaps in part because this form of white privilege consists of an absence, it is difficult for many white people to see. There is a second way in which the term white privilege is misleading, also noted by McIntosh. The term privilege suggests something desirable, but for many white people, white supremacy generates moral and psychological harms, including racial ignorance, guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, and 23 Olson (fn. 17), pp. 13–17. 24 Shannon Sullivan: White Privilege. Cambridge 2019, p. 17. 25 One might argue that such rights should be restricted for white people until they are extended to all. The point here is only that such rights are not properly understood as privileges. 26 Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege. Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. In: Peace and Freedom Magazine (July / August 1989), pp. 10–12. 27 Sullivan (fn. 24), p. 14.

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social and political isolation. James Baldwin thus described white people as “the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing,” and he frequently noted that “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” 28 As Charles Mills writes, white supremacy produces “white ignorance,” which is a “groupbased cognitive handicap” that includes both false beliefs and the absence of true beliefs about the myriad ways white supremacy shapes white people’s empirical knowledge, social practices, and embodied perceptual habits. 29 Mills also notes that white supremacy has systematically distorted entire academic disciplines by excluding the perspectives and insights of people of color. White ignorance is not uniform or fixed, “and some white people will, because of their particular histories (and / or the intersection of whiteness with other identities), overcome it and have true beliefs on what their fellow white people get wrong.” Indeed, the goal of analyzing the processes that produce white ignorance is to discover how to “do one’s part in undermining them in the broader cognitive sphere.” 30 As I discuss in the section on radical white identity politics, small numbers of white people have long sought to do their part in this sense.

Conservative White Identity Politics The most obvious and extreme version of white identity politics with a conservative or right-wing orientation appears among white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and others explicitly committed to promoting political and cultural domination by white people. Intensely racist, antisemitic, and misogynist, in recent years they have drawn on a wide range of ideologies and conspiracy theories, including the notion that white people are threatened by “white genocide” and a “Great Replacement” by nonwhites. Over the past decade, there has been an alarming increase in the membership and activity of such groups, linked together in global online networks. They have played a central role in many acts of violence, especially against Jews, Muslims, Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color, including several mass shootings and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. 31

28 James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time. New York 1963/1993, pp. 102, 83, original italics. 29 Mills (fn. 6), p. 15; see also José Medina: The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford 2013. 30 Mills (fn. 6), p. 23. 31 Vincent A. Auger: Right Wing Terror. A Global Fifth Wave? In: Perspectives on Terrorism 14 (2020) No. 3, pp. 87–97; Hakeem Jefferson: Storming the U.S. Capitol Was about Maintaining White Power in America. In: Five-Thirty-Eight (January 8, 2021),

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There are clearly important differences between violent white supremacists and mainstream white conservatives, but the continuities are equally important and too often ignored. After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many early assessments explained Trump’s victory with reference to the economic anxieties of the white working class. But numerous studies have since shown that white group identity and white racial resentment were the strongest predictors of white voter support for Trump. 32 More broadly, in recent years a significant percentage of white people in the U.S., especially those who identify as politically conservative, have come to define themselves as members of a beleaguered white identity group. Adopting the rhetoric of historically marginalized groups, many white people portray themselves as victims of immigration, demographic change, “political correctness,” and policies to address racial inequality. 33 A 2017 study found that 55 percent of white people in the U.S. believe there is at least some discrimination against their racial group. 34 According to a 2016 study, nearly 18 percent of white people believe that white people face either “a great deal” or “a lot of” discrimination. 35 While the mainstream media was initially reluctant to use the term white identity politics, it gradually became common to apply the term to Trump’s presidency. 36 In her study White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina finds that between 30 and 40 percent of white Americans say that being white is either “very” or “extremely” important to them. About 20 percent of white people also exhibit

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https://fivethirtyeight. com/ features/ storming- the- u- s- capitol- was- about- maintaining-white-power-in-america (last accessed September 9, 2021); Kyler Ong: Ideological Convergence in the Extreme Right. In: Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 12 (2020) No. 5, pp. 1–7; Soufan Center: White Supremacy Extremism. The Transnational Rise of the Violent White Supremacist Movement (September 2019), https:// thesoufancenter. org/ research/ white- supremacy- extremism- the- transnational- riseof- the- violent- white- supremacist- movement (last accessed September 9, 2021). John Sides / Michael Tesler / Lynn Vavreck: Identity Crisis. The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Princeton 2018; Zach Beauchamp: White Riot. How Racism and Immigration Gave Us Trump, Brexit, and a Whole New Kind of Politics. Vox (January 20, 2017), https://www. vox. com/ 2016/ 9/ 19/ 12933072/ far- right- white- riot- trump- brexit (last accessed September 9, 2021). Arlie Russell Hochschild: Strangers in Their Own Land. Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York 2016. Don Gonyea: Majority of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination. NPR News (October 24, 2017), https://www. npr. org/ 2017/ 10/ 24/ 559604836/ majority- of- white- americans- think- theyre- discriminated- against (last accessed September 9, 2021). Ashley Jardina: White Identity Politics. Cambridge, MA 2019, pp. 144–145; see also Michael I. Norton / Samuel R. Sommers: White People See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing. In: Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (2011) No. 3, pp. 215–218. Scherer (fn. 7).

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what Jardina calls “white consciousness”: they not only identify as white but also feel that white people need to work together to protect their interests. 37 Both white identity and white consciousness are reactive, arising in response to perceived threats to the social status of whites. However, people who identify as white do not always score high on measures of racial prejudice. Indeed, white identity and white consciousness are not strongly correlated to white prejudice toward people of color. They are also not strongly correlated to white attitudes toward affirmative action, welfare, and other policies seen as benefiting other groups. Instead, white people who score high on measures of white identity and white consciousness are more likely to support policies they perceive as disproportionately benefiting their own group, such as restrictions on immigration and support for Social Security, Medicare, and “legacy admissions” to college based on an applicant’s family relationship to alumni. Put simply, white people who identify as white do not necessarily have negative feelings toward people of color, but they want to protect themselves. Explicit racial prejudice has slowly declined over the past few decades, but most white people who identify as such remain intent on protecting their dominant status. This means that conservative politicians can appeal to white identity and group interests, without necessarily appealing to white racial prejudice. 38 Moreover, although a majority of white people who identify as white see their group as privileged over other groups, most of these whites are more inclined to defend white privilege than to question it. Most whites who identify as white are proud of their group, and they want to celebrate their group identity like other groups do. 39 As well they should, argues Eric Kaufmann in his recent book Whiteshift. 40 For Kaufmann, white people have as much right as people of color to identify with their “ethno-traditional” group and to defend their group interests. He blames cosmopolitan “left modernism” and its “religion of antiracism” for shaming white people and invigorating the populist right. 41 “Repressing white identity as racist and demonizing the white past adds insult to injury of this group’s demographic decline. This way lies growing populist discontent and even terrorism.” 42 Kaufmann shares the critique of liberal colorblindness discussed in the next section. But he defines racism in a way that restricts its meaning to individual attitudes and behavior, thereby ignoring the massive empirical evidence for institutional and

37 38 39 40 41 42

Jardina (fn. 35), p. 90. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., pp. 131–136, 260–263. Kaufmann (fn. 3). Ibid., pp. 295–385. Ibid., p. 537.

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structural racism. Kaufmann also reduces identity politics to the defense of group interest, and he adopts a narrow view of group interest as inherently opposed to the public interest. Kaufmann thus equates white interests with limits on immigration, rejection of affirmative action, and other efforts to maintain white people’s social and political dominance. 43 Kaufmann does not discuss whether such policies might actually support white people’s broad interests as community members and democratic citizens, as opposed to their narrow group interests. Indeed, as Jardina makes clear, there is nothing benign about white people who “merely” aim to protect their own group without attacking other groups, because they effectively seek “to reinforce and maintain a system of racial inequality where whites are the dominant group with the lion’s share of power and privileges.” 44 Moreover, Kaufmann treats white identity politics as a primordial force that will find an outlet one way or another. 45 He thus neglects the political processes whereby group identities and interests are constructed. 46 Like other group identities, white racial identity is not best understood as a prepolitical foundation for political activism. White identity has been actively constructed in particular ways by centuries of racist laws, policies, and social practices. Right-wing media outlets, pundits, and demagogues like Trump have relentlessly promoted an image of white people as the socially excluded victims of the mainstream media, nonwhite immigrants, affirmative action, anti-Christian bigotry, and left-wing professors. To be sure, conservative white identity politics draws on widespread experiences of racial fear and anxiety, which are no less real for being socially constructed. But these experiences are driven in part by sensationalized media reports, fear-mongering politicians, and other sources of misinformation. This also means, however, that other constructions of white identity are possible, and in fact, they already exist.

Liberal White Antiracism Recent surveys find that the rise of conservative white identity politics in the U.S. has been accompanied by an increase in liberal views on racial issues among self-identified liberals and progressives. 47 Between 2011 and 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., p. 520. Jardina (fn. 35), p. 268. Kaufmann (fn. 3), pp. 355–385. Iris Marion Young: Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford 2000. Matthew Yglesias: The Great Awokening. Vox (April 1, 2019), https://www. vox. com/ 2019/ 3/ 22/ 18259865/ great- awokening- white- liberals- race- polling- trump- 2020 (last accessed September 9, 2021).

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2016, for example, the percentage of white Democrats who agree that “Slavery and past discrimination still hold back black people today” rose from 48 to 62 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of white Democrats who agree that “Over the past few years, black people have gotten less than they deserve” went from 27 to 55 percent. 48 Of course, many of these white liberals do not see being white as an important part of their identities. Their liberal views on race probably depend more on universal egalitarian principles than any sense of their particular obligations as white people. They do not aspire to greater racial consciousness, but to colorblindness. In this respect, white liberals are not explicitly engaged in white identity politics. Nonetheless, their antiracist views have significant political effects. Unfortunately, these effects are often not what they intend. White liberals condemn the racist attitudes of white conservatives, and they largely avoid explicit expressions of racial prejudice in daily life. But they are often poorly informed about the systemic impacts of white supremacy, and they frequently fail to demonstrate significant commitment to ending it. Indeed, there is a long history of white liberals, despite the best intentions, effectively undermining efforts to promote racial justice. 49 In the early 1960s, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other Black leaders were committed to building an interracial movement for racial justice. Many white liberals became involved, and some made significant contributions and took serious risks, in some cases suffering injury and death. 50 But by the mid-1960s, many white liberals had proven to be unreliable allies. While voicing superficial support, they often echoed the white liberal ministers who pleaded with King to moderate his demands during the 1963 campaign for racial justice in Birmingham. As King wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” 51 In a similar vein, Baldwin argued that the long history of crimes committed by white racists is less troubling than the fact that most white people, including white liberals, “do not know it and do not want to know it.” 52 Despite their good intentions, many white liberals maintain a child-like innocence about the history of racism. And as Baldwin went on to explain, “It is the innocence which constitutes the

48 Sean McElwee: The Rising Racial Liberalism of Democratic Voters. In: The New York Times (May 3, 2018); see also Sides / Tesler / Vavreck (fn. 32), p. 210. 49 Alex Zamalin: Antiracism. An Introduction. New York 2019, pp. 36–43. 50 Drick Boyd: White Allies in the Struggle for Racial Justice. Maryknoll, NY 2015. 51 Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail. In: Why We Can’t Wait. New York 1963/2000, pp. 85–112, here p. 97. 52 Baldwin (fn. 28), p. 5.

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crime.” 53 White liberals acknowledge that racism exists, but they often deflect from the topic by pointing out that many white people also suffer injustice, or by highlighting success stories of individual Black people, or by insisting that racism is much worse somewhere else – either the distant slave-owning past or the demonized American South. 54 White liberals also constantly emphasize their individual good intentions, apparently assuming that Black people “will take the will for the deed.” 55 The criticisms of white liberals voiced over fifty years ago by King and Baldwin (and many others) remain applicable today. Many white liberals assume that the best way to address racial injustice is with various programs and practices based on a colorblind ideal of universal equality, which easily obscures the social reality of race. 56 Some take on the role of white saviors who try to help people of color to meet the standards of the dominant society. Many sporadically attend marches and demonstrations to denounce racism, which often does more to confirm their liberal self-image than to build sustained movements for racial justice. And many white liberals promote optimistic programs of diversity and multiculturalism, which tend to portray white people as merely one group among others, thus obscuring power differences between racial groups. 57 Such programs also generally focus on increasing the racial diversity of the professional class, which leaves most poor people of color behind. 58 One of the most common and problematic responses of white liberals to racial injustice is to express personal feelings of guilt and shame. Expressions of guilt and shame do nothing to remedy racial injustice, and they often lead white people into a narcissistic emphasis on seeking forgiveness from people of color. Moreover, the public expression of white guilt often functions as a marker of middle-class status, allowing “good white people” to distinguish themselves from poor and working-class whites. For the latter, reveling in racial guilt does not provide moral self-assurance and cultural capital, as it does for middle-class white people. 59 Some studies suggest that feelings of shame and guilt have sometimes motivated effective political activism. 60 But in most cases, shame and guilt are counter-

53 Ibid., pp. 5, 6. 54 James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption. Uncollected Writings. Ed. by Randall Kenan. New York 2010, p. 97. 55 Ibid., p. 16. 56 Bonilla-Silva (fn. 21). 57 Olson (fn. 17), pp. 105–110. 58 Walter Benn Michaels: The Trouble with Diversity. How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York 2006/2016. 59 Sullivan (fn. 8), pp. 137–138; 2019: 56–60. 60 Alcoff (fn. 8), p. 138.

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productive, sometimes even leading white people to lash out with rage and violence. 61 Unfortunately, many white liberals lack the fortitude and persistence to move beyond guilt and become involved in sustained antiracist work. Robin DiAngelo thus argues that white people’s relative insulation from racial injustice produces a lack of “psychosocial stamina,” which she calls “white fragility.” 62 Many white people, including white liberals, respond to any effort to directly address questions of race and racism with “emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.” 63 White liberals who know at least something about systemic racism often seek to insulate themselves by claiming they already know enough. They position themselves as humans or individuals, rather than as members of a socially defined racial group. They insist that when people of color talk about race, including their own experiences of racism, that they adopt a polite and civil tone. They seek above all to preserve their own moral reputations and self-image. 64 Echoing King and Baldwin, DiAngelo notes that white liberals, including herself, often cause more daily stress for people of color than right-wing white racists, “because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.” 65 To counteract such tendencies, DiAngelo argues, white people need to work on building their social stamina for explicitly engaging with racial issues, especially their own racial attitudes and habits. White people need to learn to listen more carefully and less defensively to testimony from people of color, and they need to “take action to address our own racism, the racism of other whites, and the racism embedded in our institutions.” 66 For DiAngelo, taking such action does not require an antiracist version of white identity. Nor should we see white people’s engagement in antiracist practices as generating antiracist white identities. On the contrary. DiAngelo insists that “a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.” 67 At the same time, she says, to stop identifying as white would amount to denying the reality of racism. So she concludes with the self-mortifying claim, “I strive to be less white. To be less white 61 Sullivan (fn. 24), pp. 53–54. 62 Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility. Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston 2018, p. 101. 63 Ibid., p. 103. 64 Ibid., pp. 108–109. 65 Ibid., p. 5. 66 Ibid., pp. 113, 148. 67 Ibid., p. 149.

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is to be less racially oppressive.” 68 By claiming that white identity is “inherently racist” – or as she says elsewhere, “all white people are racist” 69 – DiAngelo seeks to emphasize the systemic dimensions of racism. White supremacy inevitably shapes white people’s attitudes, behaviors, and life opportunities. And racism involves not only interpersonal prejudice and discrimination, but also institutional power that operates independently of people’s intentions and attitudes. 70 These are important points. But DiAngelo’s language suggests an essentialist view of white racial identity. She thus discounts the historical changes in the meaning of whiteness, as well as the self-understanding of many white antiracist activists. And by portraying her white identity in a confessional mode, as something that she seeks to minimize, DiAngelo seems to exemplify the white liberal guilt that she rightly criticizes elsewhere. 71

Radical White Identity Politics DiAngelo is not alone in her claim that white identity is inherently racist. In light of the many deficiencies of white liberal antiracism, some racial justice advocates have long opposed any effort to construct an antiracist white identity politics. Echoing the nineteenth-century campaign to abolish slavery, they call for abolishing white identity entirely. 72 Just as abolishing feudalism ended the inherited privileges of the aristocracy, abolishing whiteness would end the racial privileges of white people. Abolishing whiteness, and race itself, is an important long-term goal. But by portraying white identity as inherently racist, these authors indirectly endorse the white supremacist view of white identity. And while these authors acknowledge that the boundaries of whiteness have shifted over time, they often neglect how the subjective meaning of white identity varies with class, gender, sexuality, and other categories. 73 Moreover, although racial identities are not natural, they are socially embedded and physically embodied, and for the foreseeable future white people will continue to be treated as white, whether they (we) like it or not. The notion of abolishing whiteness thus risks reducing white people’s awareness of white privilege. 74 68 69 70 71 72

Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., pp. 19–24. Ibid., pp. 148–149. Olson (fn. 17); Noel Ignatiev / John Garvey: Race Traitor. New York 1996; Roediger (fn. 9). 73 Alcoff (fn. 8); Painter (fn. 6). 74 Alcoff (fn. 6), p. 215.

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In the immediate future, therefore, it seems more promising to develop practices that reconstruct white identity in a manner opposed to white supremacy. An antiracist version of white identity politics depends on a distinctly political account of white identity, with no basis in biology, ethnicity, or culture. It also depends on distinguishing between the white supremacy of political systems and the white identity of individuals, which are often conflated in the ambiguous term whiteness. White identity and white supremacy are intertwined in practice, but distinguishing them analytically creates conceptual space for multiple white identities. From this perspective, people who are socially defined as white cannot entirely avoid the unjust benefits they receive from white supremacy, but they can attempt to take responsibility for those benefits, in part by working to promote racial justice. 75 Efforts to construct a radical version of white identity politics appear among white antiracist activists who see themselves as fighting white supremacy, not just as individuals or as human beings, but as self-identified white people. 76 According to a long-standing version of this view, white people should work as “allies” to people of color. 77 More recently, some have argued that the term “ally” suggests mostly passive support for racial justice movements, often expressed through social media. From this perspective, so-called allies tend to focus on personal self-validation, fail to recognize the need for systemic change, and remain unwilling to take the risks associated with sustained political engagement. Some have proposed instead using the terms “accomplice” or “co-conspirator” to suggest a form of white antiracism that cultivates genuine cross-racial solidarity and seeks to dismantle systems of oppression. 78 Regardless of terminology, most agree that one key way for white people to become involved in struggles for racial justice is to use their white privilege to challenge white privilege. 79 At 75 Mark B. Brown: James Baldwin and the Politics of White Identity. In: Contemporary Political Theory 20 (2021) No. 1, pp. 1–22. 76 Boyd (fn. 50); Becky Thompson: A Promise and a Way of Life. White Antiracist Activism. Minneapolis 2001; Tim Wise: White Like Me. Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. New York 2011. 77 Frances E. Kendall: Understanding White Privilege. New York 2006, pp. 139–160; Paul Kivel: Uprooting Racism. How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, Gabriola Island Fourth Ed. 2017, pp. 131–175. 78 Colleen Clemens: Ally or Accomplice? The Language of Activism (June 5, 2017), https://www. tolerance. org/ magazine/ ally- or- accomplice- the- language- of- activism (last accessed September 9, 2021); Rose Hackman: ‘We need co-conspirators, not allies’. How White Americans can Fight Racism. In: The Guardian (June 26, 2015), https://www. theguardian. com/ world/ 2015/ jun/ 26/ how- white- americans- can- fightracism (last accessed September 9, 2021). 79 Sullivan (fn. 24), pp. 69–90.

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a business meeting, for example, white antiracists challenge racist stereotypes expressed by other white employees, especially when it is risky for people of color to do so. At a street protest, white antiracists physically shield people of color who are more likely to be injured by police, as did some white protesters during the historic racial justice protests in summer 2020. 80 Commentators often note that white antiracism must go beyond heartfelt expressions of sympathy or support. It requires serious and sustained engagement, a willingness to become informed and make ongoing sacrifices of time and resources. It also requires introspection and self-criticism to guard against becoming involved out of a need for moral absolution or a patronizing desire to display competence or single-handedly fix problems. Indeed, for the long-time white antiracist educator Paul Kivel, “Ally is not an identity, it is a practice.” 81 To put it somewhat differently, antiracist identities should not first be affirmed and then somehow implemented; they should be gradually created through concrete antiracist practices. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, an antiracist is someone “who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” 82 A racist is someone who does the opposite. From this perspective, the terms “racist” and “antiracist” are “like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos.” 83 Kendi does not discuss the idea of an antiracist white identity, but in contrast to DiAngelo’s insistence that white identity is “inherently racist,” Kendi’s definition of racism offers a potential route for white people to redefine their racial identities through their actions and practices. Most writers on white antiracism argue that the primary task for white antiracists is to educate and organize other white people. 84 To the extent that white people become involved in multiracial organizations, they should restrict themselves to a supportive role. Echoing arguments of the 1960s and 70s, many authors argue that racial justice organizations should be led by people of color, with white people contributing money, labor,

80 Savannah Eadens: Viral Photo shows Line of White People between Police, Black Protesters at Thursday Rally. In: Louisville Courier Journal (May 29, 2020), https:// www . courier - journal . com / story / news / local / 2020 / 05 / 29 / breonna - taylor - photo white- women- between- police- black- protesters/ 5286416002/ (last accessed September 9, 2021). 81 Kivel (fn. 77), p. 133. 82 Ibram X. Kendi: How to Be an Antiracist. New York 2019, p. 13. 83 Ibid., p. 23. 84 Kivel (fn. 77), p. 145.

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and other resources. 85 The reason for such restrictions, Kivel writes, is that people of color “take the most risks and pay the most severe costs,” and they are “the most knowledgeable about racist oppression and how it works, and therefore they should be in leadership.” 86 To be sure, white people “don’t need to believe or accept as true everything people of color say.” But white people “need to listen carefully to many voices – particularly those on the front lines of the struggle, so we understand and give credence to their knowledge and experience.” 87 Similarly, Sullivan writes that “white people who care about racial justice should not sit back and wait for people of color to clean up the mess that white people have made. White people need to make a positive contribution to racial justice, even though their contributions will be secondary to those of people of color.” 88 This sort of radical white identity politics depends on interracial solidarity, which requires that white people go beyond their narrow group interest to recognize their broad, long-term interest in dismantling white supremacy. 89 Efforts to build interracial solidarity thus reject a simplistic view of identity politics – such as Kaufmann’s, discussed previously – which assumes that identity politics promotes a narrow view of group interest and grants exclusive authority to victims of oppression. As KeeangaYamahtta Taylor puts it, “Solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression.” 90 Rather than shared experience, solidarity is based on the recognition of shared interests. Fostering interracial solidarity is the avowed goal of the white-led antiracist group Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). According to its website, “SURJ believes that we must ground our organizing in a framework of ‘mutual interest’. . . When those of us who are white realize that racial justice is core to our liberation as well, then masses of white people will withdraw support from white supremacy.” SURJ also notes that racial justice is not about paternalistically helping people of color. “The system of white supremacy harms all of us – including white people, though in very different ways than people of color.” Moreover, SURJ rejects “the harmful stereotypes and the analysis that poor and workingclass white people are responsible for racism,” because those “who benefit 85 Kendall (fn. 77), p. 152; Kwame Ture / Charles V. Hamilton: Black Power. The Politics of Liberation in America. New York 1967/1992, pp. 81–84; Sullivan (fn. 8), p. 2. 86 Kivel (fn. 77), p. 133. 87 Ibid., p. 134. 88 Sullivan (fn. 8), p. 2. 89 Juliet Hooker: Race and the Politics of Solidarity. Oxford 2009; Sullivan (fn. 24), pp. 91–115. 90 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago 2016, p. 215.

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most from racism and white supremacy are the very wealthy – not poor or working-class white people.” 91 Does building interracial solidarity require that white people identify as white? Not necessarily. Many white people who take action against racism and white supremacy do so without affirming a white identity. Some act on the basis of universal ideals of social justice. Some act with the aim of rectifying past injustices or defending their family, friends, and community. And whatever motivates someone’s racial justice activism, it is best pursued as part of campaigns against economic exploitation, sexism, heteronormativity, and other forms of injustice. Building such campaigns requires that people reach beyond their group identities to generate broad forms of solidarity. Nonetheless, significant numbers of white people in the United States have found that taking action to promote racial justice has led them to develop an antiracist version of white identity, which in turn has been a valuable resource for further political action. 92 In a recent study, Deborah Schildkraut found that between 14 and 24 percent of left-leaning white people said their racial identity matters either “a lot” or “a great deal” for how they think about politics. When asked to choose a description of the relation between being white and their political views, 49 percent of left-leaning white people chose the statement: “As a white person, it is important for me to vote for politicians who aren’t racist. Whites are in a position of power, so I should do what I can to help keep racists out of office.” 93 In her history of white antiracism in the United States, Becky Thompson writes, “For the white activists I know, becoming activists has gone hand in hand with accepting themselves as white people.” 94 Unlike white nationalists and other proponents of conservative white identity politics, white antiracists of this sort do not take pride merely in being white. Nor do they base their racial identities on biology, ethnicity, or culture. Instead, they partly identify themselves with their efforts to take political responsibility for how they are defined as white by others. They do so not only by reflecting on white privilege or by talking with friends and colleagues, and not only by joining protests and demonstrations. They go beyond such sporadic activities to develop habits of challenging racism and white privilege in daily life. Most importantly, they work with organiza-

91 Showing Up for Racial Justice: SURJ Values, https://www. showingupforracialjustice. org/ surj- values. html (last accessed September 9, 2021). 92 Alcoff (fn. 8), pp. 18–19, 188–204. 93 Deborah Schildkraut: The Political Meaning of Whiteness for Liberals and Conservatives. In: The Forum 17 (2019) No. 3, pp. 421–446. 94 Thompson (fn. 76), p. xxi.

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tions and initiatives to develop long-term policies and programs that foster antiracist practices and undermine white supremacy and other forms of injustice.

Conclusion White identity politics, in all its varieties, clearly differs in key ways from the identity-based political work of historically marginalized groups. Among other things, identity politics has usually involved efforts to promote both broad social goals and the immediate, existential interests of disadvantaged groups, often related to matters of bodily safety and integrity. In contrast, conservative white identity politics focuses on the narrow interests of white people alone. It either ignores societal interests or equates them with those of white people. Radical white identity politics aims to promote both general social interests and white people’s group interest in racial justice, but white people’s interest in racial justice is far less immediate and existential than it is for people of color. Additionally, conservative white people are trying to protect an existing group identity, and white radicals are attempting to transform that group identity. People of color, in contrast, have had to work hard just to establish group identities in opposition to political powerlessness and cultural images of inferiority. As more white people begin to define themselves as a racially self-conscious identity group, they need something to define themselves against. White conservatives often define themselves in opposition to Black people, people of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and other historically disadvantaged groups. White liberals resist identifying as white, and they define themselves in part through their denunciation of conservative white identity politics. More broadly, by embracing a universal ideal of colorblindness, white liberals define themselves against the particularism of identity politics itself. White radicals define themselves in opposition to both liberal and conservative white identity politics, and also in opposition to white supremacy. This self-definition does not prevent white radicals from continuing to benefit from white supremacy. Radical white identity politics thus inevitably leads to accusations of hypocrisy. 95 But benefiting from something you condemn does not by itself make you a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is not merely a contradiction between a person’s actions and his or her professed beliefs. It also involves an attempt to conceal or deny the contradiction, to present oneself as morally better than one really

95 Brown (fn. 75), p. 16.

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is. Radical white identity politics, as described previously, seeks to avoid hypocrisy by acknowledging and attempting to take responsibility for the many ways that everyone socially defined as white, including white antiracists themselves, benefit to some degree from white supremacy. Accusations of hypocrisy may be mistaken, but debates about different versions of white identity politics should be welcomed, because they effectively politicize white identity. They make white identity into a topic of politics, rather than an invisible social standard with only one possible meaning. The liberal approach of denouncing whiteness and white identity, in contrast, effectively accepts and reinforces the conservative view of white identity. Moreover, liberal denunciations of whiteness tend to assume a view of racism as primarily a matter of ideas and ideology. But racism and racial identities are also manifest in various everyday practices, attitudes, and dispositions. By developing antiracist practices, white people may be able to politicize and partly redefine white identity. They may also become more dependable members of collective efforts to dismantle white supremacy and create a more just and democratic society.

Ragunathan, Sheila

Institutional Racism and Classroom Dynamics in German Higher Education

Introduction Over the past years, student resistance and an increasing number of conferences and publications have turned attention to institutional racism in German higher education. 1 Student initiatives such as #CampusRassismus (campus racism) at Frankfurt and Mainz University in 2015 or Ich bin da! (I am here) at Alice-Solomon-Hochschule Berlin in 2019 called out institutional practices of discrimination and exclusion of Black students, Students of Color and migrant students and criticized their underrepresentation in academic higher-ranked positions. 2 The stories shared within the framework of #CampusRassismus highlight the different ways, institutional practices of discrimination operate, and teach us to understand racism in higher education as an everyday reality. The students’ stories varied from addressing classroom experiences “when you are explicitly asking for articles written by PoC 3 & the answer is there are none of academic relevance #campusracism” 4 to challenging racialized disciplinary shortcomings “#campusracism, when they say in economic psychology ‘the African race always performs more poorly in IQ tests than we do’”. 5 Both of the initiatives publicly demanded from their universities to take 1 I thank Taveeshi Singh for her brilliant commenting on this piece. My appreciation also goes to the group of students at Frankfurt University who shared their experiences with me. 2 For more information in German, see: https://asta- frankfurt. de/ aktuelles/ campusrassismus- online- kampagne and https://www. ash- berlin. eu/ hochschule/ presseund- newsroom/ veranstaltungen/ news/ veranstaltung- des- studentischen- projektsich- bin- da/ (last accessed: January 29, 2021). 3 People of Color. 4 Belinda Grasnick: Twitter-Aktion #CampusRassismus. Die ganz alltägliche Diskriminierung (14. 12. 2015), https://taz. de/ Twitter- Aktion- CampusRassismus/ !5261428/ (last accessed: January 29, 2021). 5 Grasnick (fn. 4).

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up responsibility for academic teaching and learning atmospheres and, as a consequence, commit academic teachers to a critical understanding of racism and an anti-racist framing of their seminars. 6 The conversation around to what extent such demands can be implemented and the implications of institutional racism has been at the center of conference debates and publications (not only, but especially) within the Social and Education Sciences. These debates highlight the different dimensions of institutional racism and illustrate how institutional racism plays a significant structural role in German higher education. Analyzing institutional racism in higher education thus raises questions in regard to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In theorizing colonial racism not solely as the past but as an ongoing living present, Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (2015) argues that these mechanisms derive from a colonial pattern of thinking, 7 producing hierarchies through racialization. From this perspective, racial stratification is not explicitly imposed by the university administration. Rather, it is recreated through subtle institutional practices favoring the access of the white national affluent population to leading economic, political and cultural positions. 8 The literature on institutional racism illustrates that racialization processes cannot be understood without reference to economic and political factors related to developments and changes in national and global capitalism. 9 For instance, Thompson / Vorbrugg claim that gender mainstreaming and diversity programs – by now dominant strategies of equal opportunity policies in higher education – often become symbolic obligations that actually mask the mechanisms of institutional racism and intersectional social inequalities. Instead of working towards social transformation to foster the destruction of institutional discrimination, such policies result in institutions profiting from the inclusion of individual subjects from marginalized groups, whose ascribed social differences from the faculty body are transformed into commodifiable assets for the institution. 10 The discussion on institutional 6 Pressemitteilung ASH Berlin: Veranstaltung des studentischen Projekts “Ich bin da!” (2019), https://www. ash- berlin. eu/ hochschule/ presse- und- newsroom/ veranstaltungen/ news/ veranstaltung- des- studentischen- projekts- ich- bin- da/ (last accessed: January 29, 2021). 7 I elaborate on the meaning of ‘colonial pattern of thinking’ in the following section. 8 Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez: Sensing Dispossession. Women and Gender Studies between Institutional Racism and Migration Control Policies in the Neoliberal University. In: Women’s Studies International Forum 54 (2016), p. 167–177. 9 Mike Cole: Race Theory and Education. A Marxist Response. London 2009, pp. 91– 92. 10 Vanessa E. Thompson / Alexander Vorbrugg: Rassismuskritik an der Hochschule. Mit oder trotz Diversity-Policies. In: Mike Laufenberg / Martina Erlemann / Maria Norkus / Grit Petschick (eds.): Prekäre Gleichstellung. Geschlechtergerechtigkeit,

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racism reveals how historical mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion reemerge into contemporary structures of higher education as colonial continuities within German academia. Using this observation as a point of departure, I argue that in order to analyze contemporary formations of institutional racism in higher education, there is a need to be attentive to how prevailing epistemological frameworks, the discursive and managerial politics of universities and pedagogical practices in German higher education have historically shaped the way racially marginalized subjects move through academic spaces. This paper is an initial exploration in this direction. In 2018, I conducted a group interview with the organizers of the #CampusRassismus initiative at Frankfurt University. I wanted to learn from the students’ stories and actions how we produce, resist and transform ideas about race, gender and difference in higher education classrooms. In this paper, I share two of the students’ classroom experiences to explore how race and racism shape academic teaching and learning dynamics. Before doing so, I first draw on antiracist feminist debates on dismantling and transforming institutional racism in German higher education and outline three focal points in the discussion on institutional racism to give a brief overview of the discussion from a feminist postcolonial perspective. A feminist postcolonial perspective problematizes and deconstructs imperial and universalistic feminist strategies and methods as well as criticizes postcolonial theorizing that decenters gender. Postcolonial feminism, with its different variations, aims to radicalize knowledges and practices of resistance by productively thinking international feminist theory and practice through a postcolonial perspective. 11 Analyzing institutional racism from a feminist postcolonial perspective enables me to think racial power / knowledge relations within a gendered and intersectional theoretical framework. The three focal points I elaborate on are (i) colonial knowledge production and the project of modernity, (ii) the university as a site of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic knowledge production and (iii) the effects and pitfalls of gender mainstreaming and diversity policies. I understand these focal points as part of discursive and managerial practices of universities that shape teaching and learning experiences, and the way we address ‘difference’ in the classroom. As Talpade Mohanty pointed

soziale Ungleichheit und unsichere Arbeitsverhältnisse in der Wissenschaft. Wiesbaden 2018, pp. 79–99, here p. 79. 11 María do Mar Castro Varela / Nikita Dhawan: Postkolonialer Feminismus und die Kunst der Selbstkritik. In: Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez / Hito Steyerl (eds.): Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik. Münster 2012, pp. 270–290, here p. 271.

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out, these practices often produce, codify, and even rewrite histories of race and colonialism in the name of difference. 12 Methodologically, I am interested in bringing the discussion on institutional racism in conversation with higher education classroom dynamics to give insights into racialized mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in German higher education. I conclude this paper with sharing my observations as a teacher within the Social Sciences and address the (im)possibilities of antiracist teaching in higher education.

Three Focal Points in the Discussion on Institutional Racism in Higher Education (i) Colonial Knowledge Production and the Project of Modernity The first focal point in the discussion on institutional racism points to the significant role of European-Western research tradition in the production of racist theories and imperial methodologies to realize the project of modernity. Studying the process of Eurocentrification of the new world power from a Latin American perspective, decolonial theorist Aníbal Quijano claims that a “coloniality of power” 13 was conceived together with America and Western Europe, and with the social category of ‘race’ as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers. According to Quijano, European colonial domination was consolidated through a cultural complex known as “European modernity / rationality”: The intersubjective universe produced by the entire Eurocentered capitalist power was elaborated and formalized by the Europeans and established in the world as an exclusively European product and as a universal paradigm of knowledge and of the relation between humanity and the rest of the world. Such confluence between coloniality and the elaboration of rationality / modernity was not in anyway accidental, as is sown by the very manner in which the European paradigm of rational knowledge was elaborated. 14

12 Chandra Talpade Mohanty: Feminism without Borders. Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham 2003, p. 194. 13 Aníbal Quijano: Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality. In: Cultural Studies 21 (2007), pp. 168–178, pp. 171–172. 14 Quijano (fn. 13), pp. 171–172.

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As the “back bones of coloniality and patriarchy” 15, Western universities played a constitutive role in developing disciplinary knowledge and theoretical discourses that formally constructed racialized groups as the inferior ‘Other’, placing them in absolute subordination to the white subject. 16 Within the process of establishing a modern concept of society in the Europe of the 18th century, racism (and antisemitism) presented itself not as a dismissive ethical attitude, but was approached and recognized as enlightened modern science with an absolute claim of truth. 17 In the era of the Enlightenment, a universalistic thinking was enforced by implementing local (European) standards to societies outside of Europe. The Enlightenment claim of emancipation through the exercise of reason was forged onto colonialized societies by epistemic, physical, discursive and material processes of violence, with the effect of producing inside as well as outside of European nations, social differences and inequalities in the form of structural hierarchies. 18 In the Europe of the Enlightenment, the categories of ‘humanity’ and ‘society’ did not extend to the non-Western people, or only in a formal way, in the sense that such recognition had no practical effects. 19 From the perspective of the European paradigm of rationality, the ‘other’ is totally absent, or is present only in an ‘objectivized’ mode. The radical absence of the ‘other’ thus made it possible to omit every reference to any other ‘subject’ outside the European context; at the same moment as the very idea of Europe was establishing itself precisely in relation to the rest of the world being colonized. 20 As pointed out by both scholars of Postcolonial Studies as well as Holocaust Studies, the Enlightenment promise of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason has ironically resulted in domination by reason itself. Along with progress and emancipation, it has brought colonialism, slavery and genocide. 21 Despite – or precisely because of – its ambivalent relationship to the theoretical foundation of Enlightenment, postcolonial theory highlights 15 Alisha M. B. Heinemann / María do Mar Castro Varela: Contesting the Imperial Agenda. Re-spelling Hopelessness. Some Thoughts on the Dereliction of the University. In: Decolonizing the University. Special Issue Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (TvG) 20 (2017) No. 3, pp. 259–274, p. 260. 16 Grada Kilomba: Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism. Münster 2008, p. 27. 17 Paul Mecheril / Claus Melter: Gewöhnliche Unterscheidungen. Wege aus dem Rassismus. In: Sabine Andresen / Klaus Hurrelmann / Christian Palentien / Wolfgang Schröer (eds.): Migrationspädagogik. Weinheim / Basel 2010, pp. 150–178, here p. 159. 18 Thompson / Vorbrugg (fn. 10), p. 84. 19 Quijano (fn. 13), p. 176. 20 Quijano (fn. 13), p. 173. 21 Nikita Dhawan: Introduction. In: Nikita Dhawan (ed.): Decolonizing Enlightenment. Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World. Leverkusen / Opladen 2014, p. 9.

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the constitutive role that Western universities played in the violent interplay of colonialism, modernity and imperialism. 22 Centering Eurocentrism as an epistemological paradigm in the analysis of institutional racism can teach us about the histories of race and racism and their enduring legacies. A postcolonial feminist understanding of racism as a practice of modernity is interested in criticizing, deconstructing and abolishing the gendered colonial discourse. In order to re-orient the intellectual core of colonial power on the global landscape of knowledge relations and production, a postcolonial self-reflective perspective focuses on the epistemological foundations of colonialism but also on current practices of academic disciplines. 23

(ii) The University as a Site of Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge Production The second focal point in the discussion on institutional racism illustrates deep contradictions in the relationship between the university as an important site of postcolonial, anti-racist and feminist knowledge production on the one hand, and the institutional strategy of gaining and staying hegemonic by a methodological silencing and appropriating of critical research and counter-hegemonic perspectives on the other hand. In comparison to other education institutions, the university, with its commitment to epistemological interest, is a privileged site that is constantly re-thinking, redefining and re-imagining insights and terminologies. As sites guaranteeing the institutionalization of knowledge production, universities function as strategic loci for the establishment of a cultural hegemony and therefore deeply reflect the inherent social inequalities within the nation state. 24 Here, hegemony refers to the ability of dominant groups in society to establish ‘common sense’ of society, “the fund of self-evident descriptions of social reality that normally go without saying”. 25 Hegemony is both

22 Nikita Dhawan / María do Mar Castro Varela: Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung. Bielefeld 2020, p. 39. 23 Shalini Randeria / Regina Römhild: Das postkoloniale Europa. Verflochtene Genealogien der Gegenwart. Einleitung zur erweiterten Neuauflage. In: Sebastian Conrad / Shalini Randeria / Regina Römhild (eds.): Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt a. M. 2013, p. 13. 24 Gutiérrez-Rodriguez (fn. 8), p. 3. 25 Michael W. Apple: The State and the Politics of Knowledge. In: Michael W. Apple / Petter Aasen (eds.): The State and the Politics of Knowledge. New York 2003, pp. 1– 24, p. 6.

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discursive and political; it includes the power to establish the ‘legitimate’ definitions of social needs and authoritative definitions of social situations. It further involves the power to define what counts as ‘legitimate’ areas of agreement and disagreement and it points to the ability of dominant groups to shape which political agendas are made public and to be discussed as ‘possible.’ 26 According to Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, the racial stratification of society must not explicitly be imposed by an administration or jurisdication in contemporary societies, it is however recreated through subtle institutional practices favoring the access of the white national affluent population to leading economic, political and cultural positions. The literature on institutional racism has posed some crucial questions on who the thinking subject of history is and who has been excluded from intellectual labor for centuries. 27 While the university needs to be understood as an elitist and exclusive institution, it is important to acknowledge that the university has also always been a place where liberal, emancipatory, and transformative ideas are produced. Academic education is thus providing the relevant tools for those who are writing and formulating ideas to resist the university intellectually. At the same time, as Castro Varela / Alisha Heinemann point out, one strategy through which Western academia gained hegemony and stays hegemonic, is a methodological silencing and appropriating of critical research and counter-hegemonic perspectives. 28 Accordingly, more and more critical knowledges, like queer, feminist, antiracist and post- and decolonial, indigenous studies are disqualified as ideological while the curricula are overflowing with mainstream theories that tend to stabilize the hegemonic status quo. Centering a neoliberal recomposition of power alignments between state, capital, and academy, Bilge highlights that the operations of state and capital are deeply implicated in the process of allowing the emergence of counter-hegemonic minoritarian knowledges. 29 She thus claims that even though initially insurgent formations of fields such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, gay and lesbian studies, and postcolonial studies were driven in part by the

26 Ibid. 27 See for example: Emily Ngubia Kessé: Eingeschrieben. Zeichen setzen gegen Rassismus an deutschen Hochschulen. 2015; Karima Popal: Akademische Tabus. Zur Verhandlung von Rassismus in Universität und Studium. 2016; Gutiérrez Rodríguez et. al.: Rassismus, Klassenverhältnisse und Geschlecht an deutschen Hochschulen. Ein runder Tisch, der aneckt. In: sub\urban. Zeitschrift für Kritische Stadtforschung 4 (2016) No. 2/3, pp. 161–190. 28 Heinemann / Castro Varela (fn. 15), p. 264. 29 Sirma Bilge: Intersectionality Undone. Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies. In: Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10 (2013) No. 2, pp. 405–424, p. 409.

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desire to disrupt scientific conventions and decolonize methodologies and epistemologies; one of the effects of the neoliberal strategy of valorizing difference without consequences is that their radical critiques are tamed through their institutionalization. From this perspective, institutionalizing minority perspectives created by counter-hegemonic fields of inquiry works towards their re-articulation and incorporation into an ever adaptive hegemony without altering its structure. 30 The next focal point in the discussion explores how this interplay of the university as a site of structural exclusion, intellectual resistance, critical knowledge production as well as a site of appropriation expresses itself on the level of higher education policy debates.

(iii) The Effects and Pitfalls of Gender Mainstreaming and Diversity Policies Another issue that has been at the center of the discussion on institutional racism is the relationship between institutional racism and the increasing implementation and institutionalization of gender mainstreaming and diversity programs and concepts in German higher education since (at least) the 1990s. German universities have increasingly chosen to commit to the goal of attaining a more socially heterogeneous faculty, student, and administrative body: that is, more and more universities have issued diversity mission statements and appointed diversity officers or even created equal-opportunity offices. 31 Despite the hype surrounding diversity, scholars who critically engage with restructuring processes of the neoliberal university claim that diversity speech promotes a staging of difference for the benefit of institutional public relations. For instance, Dhawan / Castro Varela argue in reference to Sara Ahmed’s groundbreaking work on institutional diversity speech, that the rhetoric of diversity and equality has been instrumentalized to circumvent the accusation of racism and discrimination instead of actually diversifying the institution. 32 Examining institutional commitments to social change through implementation

30 Ibid. 31 Mahmoud Arghavan / Nicole Hirschfelder / Katharina Motyl: Who Can Speak and Who is Heard / Hurt? Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany: A Survey of the Issues at Stake. In: Mahmoud Arghavan / Nicole Hirschfelder / Luvena Kopp / Katharina Motyl (eds.): Who Can Speak and Who is Heard / Hurt? Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany. Bielefeld 2019, pp. 9–42, here p. 18. 32 Nikita Dhawan / María do Mar Castro Varela: What Difference Does Difference make? Diversity, Intersectionality, and Transnational Feminist Politics. In: Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 16 (2016), pp. 9–43, here p. 22.

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of diversity and equality programs, Ahmed identifies an effect she calls “non-performativity of diversity speech”. 33 According to Ahmed, to use a word like ‘non-performativity’ is to reveal something about institutional mechanics: how things are reproduced by the very appearance of being transformed. 34 Ahmed writes that in her model of the non-performative, the failure of the speech act to do what it says is not a failure of intent or even circumstance, but is actually what the speech act is doing. 35 Speech acts are thus taken up as if they are performatives, such that the names come to stand in for the effects: “As a result, naming can be a way of not bringing something into effect”. 36 Drawing upon this understanding of diversity politics as lip service in academic and policy discourses, Dhawan / Castro Varela claim that it generates power effects, in that the non-performativity can be applied and used strategically: “The claim made by an institution or university that it is anti-racist or anti-sexist has the paradox effect, such that racism can no longer be criticized within such institutions”. 37 If the self-representation of being anti-racist and diversityfriendly makes it impossible to name institutional racism or sexism (“how can we be racist or sexist if we are committed to gender equality and diversity?”), it diminishes and silences those who experience it and makes it all the more difficult to contest. In the words of Dhawan / Castro Varela, it can be argued that the non-performative rhetoric prevents combatting that which it pretends to abolish. 38 From this perspective, the managerial paradigm with which German universities have operationalized diversity actually depoliticizes issues of ethnic difference and thus reproduces racialized power dynamics at the very same time as it nominally celebrates cultural pluralism. 39 As such, the discourse of ‘diversity’ disguises relations of power and stabilizes them through neoliberal inclusion of figures of difference in ways that make no difference, while simultaneously perpetuating and stabilizing social injustices within the realms of higher education. 40 Thompson / Zlabotsky insightfully show in their analysis of the diversity discourse in German

33 Ibid. 34 Sara Ahmed: On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. London 2012, p. 2. 35 Ahmed (fn. 34), p. 117. 36 Ibid. 37 Dhawan / Castro Varela (fn. 32), p. 22. 38 Ibid. 39 Arghavan / Hirschfelder / Motyl (fn. 31), p. 19. 40 Vanessa Thompson / Veronika Zlabotsky: Rethinking Diversity in Academic Institutions. In: Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 16 (2016), pp. 75–93, here p. 79.

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academia that what we are observing presently is a rhetorical shift towards managerial and humanitarian diversity schemes as a new hegemonic discourse in the German context. According to them, homogeneity is now recorded as an alleged cultural allegiance to values of tolerance and equality as a backdrop against which difference is sought to be neutralized through individual intimidation, cooptation, incorporation, and commodification according to the promise of value extraction for institutions, and the German national more broadly construed. 41 A bureaucratic-managerial approach to diversity, then, may render the population represented at a university more heterogeneous; it will not, however result in “a repolitication of difference as a matter of social justice”. 42 The naming and recognition of discriminatory and exclusionary structures is necessary in order to be able to even imagine equality and justice. 43 But it is also imperative to situate the mainstreaming of diversity management and rhetoric in its ambivalent relation between the political dimension of difference and its economic value. The three focal points outlined above give insights in (some of the) complex issues and questions discussed in the literature on institutional racism in higher education from a feminist postcolonial perspective. By examining the epistemological premise of European colonialism and the discursive and managerial practices of universities, I have illustrated how the traces of colonial racism continue to linger in familiar and unfamiliar ways in higher education; not only through Eurocentrism as an epistemological paradigm that informs racialized mechanisms of inclusion and exclusions, but also through the appropriation of counter-hegemonic minoritarian knowledges as a neoliberal effect of valorizing difference without necessarily altering its hegemonic structures. The higher education classroom has always been a site of significance when addressing the issue of institutional racism. In reference to Talpade Mohanty, I understand education as a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political spaces. This enables an interpretation of the academy and the classroom as political and cultural sites that represent accumulations and contestations over knowledge. 44 It further implies that educational practices are not merely transmitting already codified ideas of difference, instead they often “produce, codify and even rewrite histories of race and

41 42 43 44

Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 91. Dhawan / Castro Varela (fn. 32), p. 22. Talpade Mohanty (fn. 12), p. 195.

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colonialism in the name of difference”. 45 Having said that, I argue that the academic classrooms represent both some sort of ideological and political point of entry as well as a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. With the rise of student initiatives and interventions demanding the decolonization and diversification of syllabi in terms of subject matters, theories and methodologies taught in higher education, I believe it is important to ask as researchers and academic teachers, what can we learn from the students’ experiences, stories and actions?

Higher Education Classroom Experiences and Dynamics Addressing the different ways racism operates through institutional practices, Germany-wide student interventions highlight that racism on campus and in classrooms is a day to day reality. One way of responding to the students’ stories and actions is to ask how do they / or can they inform the way we address race and racism in academic classrooms and in our research. This question was central to my master’s thesis, the objective of which was to analyze how students produce, resist and transform ideas about race, gender and difference in the higher education classroom. In 2018, I conducted an interview with a group of Black and Students of Color who experience racial marginalization in higher education and organized the initiative #CampusRassismus at Frankfurt University. The group of six students I interviewed were peers on campus and students of the Social Sciences and Humanities with some of them majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies. Their familiarity with each other made it easier for them to ‘open up’ and to collectively reflect upon their classroom experiences. In the course of the interview, however, the students started to realize that their individual motivations for activism differed slightly from one another, depending on their family background and experiences. Following Ahmed’s assertion that “emotions matter” 46, my analytic practice was informed by questions such as: what role do emotions play in academic teaching and learning and how do accounts of race and racism in the classroom manifest via affect? To initiate the group discussion, I asked my interlocutors to share their experiences and to elaborate on how race, gender and difference were addressed / discussed in their classes. Here, I focus on two statements from the discussion. The first one is from Student B 47: 45 Ibid., p. 194. 46 Sara Ahmed: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York 2004, p. 12. 47 Based on the student’s seating order, I assigned each student a letter from A to F to anonymize and differentiate them from each other.

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When I sit in the classroom, a seminar on like anti-racist feminism or whatever, what I do is. . . I mean, some people get angry and can speak about stuff and can call people out on their racist statements, but for me, it is really hard to do that, and it has always been hard. So, my strategy or maybe my coping mechanism is to be quiet. I was kind of the invisibility that I knew was there, like I knew that I did not exist for some people in the room and I went into that invisibility even more by being quiet and by saying nothing and by really being tense. Because of course I listened to everything people were saying, and I was tense about it and I was holding my hands like this [grabbing a piece of paper and holding it with both of her hands while staring at the paper], because I was nervous and just waiting for that one or two racist arguments or expressions. I was just waiting for something to happen and I did not ask myself ‘does it happen?’, but more ‘when will it happen?’.

As a response to my initial question, Student B shares the coping mechanisms she developed to deal with the way issues of race are addressed in the classroom. Elaborating on the tension, she often senses in such classroom settings, the student describes a certain dynamic that made her feel like there is a need to get prepared for “something to happen.” The student does not specify how particular confrontations look or what “racist arguments or expressions” are usually made in the classroom. Instead, we get a glimpse into what a racial classroom atmosphere does to Student B, and what she does to protect herself. Student B describes the tensions she experiences in relation to the feeling of being non-existent to some people in the room and intentionally “going into that invisibility even more”. We might say that Student B is referring to the classroom as a space that is somehow always being mediated through race, as she feels like she is constantly being questioned in this space. What is it that makes her feel invisible and non-existent in these classroom spaces? Student B’s response opens up questions around normative understandings of who belongs in academic classrooms and who does not. While Student B was the first one to bring up the issue of institutional belonging in the interview, her statement was followed by other stories that highlighted why my interlocutors often feel out of place in their classes. They presented two reasons. First, because they do not feel like it is safe enough to contribute to the class discussion. Second, because they are told to have patience with fellow students in class when it comes to discussions around race. Student D responded to the groups’ stories shared by framing their experiences as key examples of the lack of recognition and engagement that racially and classed marginalized students in German higher education have to contend with every day: For me, all those incidents or like that this professor tells you that we should bring patience is for me the proof that we are not meant to be there. And then again it shows me that I am so fu***** proud to be there and that it is already resistance by sitting inside there, because they do not expect you to be there,

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they do not think about us while preparing the syllabus [. . . ]. 50 years ago, they would have never thought that there will be people like us [in] the university. And I think that is the main problem, because of course they say bring more patience like bring more labor, but actually they just want to ignore the fact that they do not think about us and that is for me the main problem.

Here, Student D argues that one of the reasons why some students in the group question their institutional belonging is because academic spaces were historically never established for this group of interlocutors to be part of it. As a Black woman who was never “meant to be there,” her mere presence can easily provoke irritation in others. Not surprisingly, she frames sitting in an academic classroom as resistance. She further illustrates how exclusionary practices such as preparing syllabi without reflecting on the student body composition, profoundly affects the way marginalized students move through academic spaces. For Student B to feel invisible, and as though her existence in the classroom is being questioned could be understood as an implication of the teachers’ or fellow students’ expectations of her, as a racialized subject, to not be part of the class in the first place. My interlocutors’ experiences of feeling out of place in higher education classrooms illustrate how the traces of ‘the past’ configure the uneven transmission and circulation of affect in contemporary academic teaching and learning. The history of race and racism and its enduring legacies expressed through epistemological frameworks and classroom dynamics, such as pedagogical practices and / or student comments, shape and hinder the learning experiences of my interlocutors as feelings of fear, anger and numbness indicate that they often feel themselves to be rendered invisible but also racially fetishized. One reason why they might not feel “at home” 48 in academia could be related to the structural barriers that racialized and socioeconomically disadvantaged students have to overcome to enter the university. According to Wayah, the exclusion of non-normative racialized bodies already begins in the German three-tiered secondary-school system of Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium, which encourages students from higher socioeconomic status to pursue a university education while preparing children from immigrant families / families of color, who are disproportionately affected by socioeconomic marginalization, for vocational

48 Achille Mbembe: Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. Lecture, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (2015), https://wiser. wits. ac. za/ sites/ default/ files/ private/ Achille% 20Mbembe% 20- % 20Decolonizing% 20Knowledge% 20and% 20the% 20Question% 20of% 20the% 20Archive. pdf (last accessed: January 29, 2021).

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training, leading to low-income job opportunities. 49 Moreover, the lack of recognition of racially and classed marginalized students indicates that pedagogical practices in the classroom and the discursive and managerial practices of the university outside of the classroom effect how students move through academic spaces. In this respect, education scholars Grözinger and Langholz-Kaiser emphasize two dimensions when it comes to ethnic diversity and the higher education classroom: first, including more teaching staff of color has an empowering impact on Black Students and Students of Color, because the former can serve through their visibility in higher positions as role models. Second, learning in ethnically diverse classrooms prepares students for a respectful and democratic conviviality in an increasingly diversifying German society and globalizing world. 50 However, as a teacher in higher education myself, I know that a diverse framing of a classroom setting alone – in which for instance the student body is expected to be diverse or the syllabi is diversified in terms of subject matters, theories, and methodologies – does not necessarily inform one’s own pedagogical practices in the classroom. Developing an anti-racist teaching approach that aims to critically engage with the epistemologies taught and developed within classroom by – for instance within the Social Sciences – helping students to translate theoretical concepts to make sense of their own experiences, is a long-term and challenging process. It involves time and careful self-reflection, a source that most of the more precarious mid-level faculty 51 often do not have. However, if we take my interlocutor’s statements seriously, there is a need to reflect on one’s own pedagogical practices in relation to the epistemological framework mobilized in the classroom, and the discursive and managerial practices of the university.

49 Ismahan Wayah: Kanak Academic: Teaching in Enemy Territory. In: Arghavan / Hirschfelder / Kopp / Motyl (fn. 31), pp. 153–176, here p. 155. 50 Gerd Grözinger / Marlene Langholz-Kaiser: Bewusste Anerkennung von Unterschieden. Diversität in der Wissenschaft. 2018. In: Forschung & Lehre 18 (2018) 3, pp. 198–200. 51 As mid-level faculty (akademischer Mittelbau) some of the members of this status group are still in the process of completing a PhD program (PhD candidates are not necessarily considered students in Germany), others are Post-Docs, and some are teaching or research fellows or coordinate research projects (Gallas 2018, 92).

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(Im)Possibility of Anti-Racist Teaching Universities are structured by differences and difference is addressed every day in explicit and implicit forms in the classroom and on campus. Therefore, one’s own teaching of literature and knowledges can have a tremendous impact on the student’s biography. In the literature discussed above, classrooms are often the first reference point for talking about institutional racism. University teachers, too, report that the classroom is an important site of initial confrontation with institutional racism. 52 Yet there are strikingly few contributions from the perspective of German academic teaching staff that discuss the challenges, effects and limits of teaching on and around gender, race and difference. Based on my experience, I know that embodying responsibility towards my students’ biographical processes in higher education means being mindful about the control one has over it, while at the same time, feeling discomfort in this position. According to Arens et al., university teachers often find themselves conflicted when having to teach the social construction and fluidity of difference while constantly being confronted with essentializing constructions such as ‘woman’ or ‘foreigner,’ because those constructions are part of the students’ reality and identity processes. 53 Framing this conflict as a feeling of unease and as being-in-trouble, they suggest that teachers who find themselves in this situation should consider adopting the following two interconnected approaches: first, part of a deconstructive approach to teaching is being mindful about one’s own desire for “pädagogische Lösungen” (pedagogical solutions, my translation). 54 Instead of establishing a catalog of pedagogical practices to ensure controllability of situations, critical teaching should be about practicing a reflexive and exploratory attitude in which one’s own actions are not predetermined. The second approach reflects upon the power position and responsibility of the teacher. According to them, pedagogy is compulsion and offer, invitation and imposition, which is why pedagogical actions are assigned to a particular responsibility. 55 Others such as Castro Varela / Heinemann follow a slightly different approach. They

52 See for example: Nadine Golly: Postkoloniale Schwarze deutsche Erfahrungswelten im akademischen Kontext. In: Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst / Sunna Gieseke (eds.): Koloniale und postkoloniale Konstruktionen von Afrika und Menschen afrikanischer Herkunft in der deutschen Alltagskultur. Frankfurt a. M. 2006, pp. 395–399. 53 Susanne Arens et al.: Wenn Differenz in der Hochschule thematisch wird. Einführung in die Reflexion eines Handlungszusammenhangs. In: Paul Mecheril et al. (eds.): Differenz unter Bedingungen von Differenz. Zu Spannungsverhältnissen universitärer Lehre. Wiesbaden 2013, pp. 7–27, here pp. 12–17. 54 Ibid., p. 21. 55 Ibid., p. 22.

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conceptualize the university not only as a site of education and critique but also as a site of imperial politics, formulating two challenges academic teachers are confronted with when teaching at the imperial university. The first challenge is to question how the production of imperial subjects as the enhancement of an individualistic self-realization can be interrupted. Building upon bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy (1994), they both emphasize in this regard that teaching and learning must be addressed and formulated “as collective and collaborative practices”. 56 A second challenge is teaching in heterogeneous spaces with class participants who experience discrimination differently. Castro Varela / Heinemann claim that education can be mobilized to destabilize hegemony, and argue for abstract thinking as an important tool in the production of critical subjects. This however implies that teachers need to recognize the impact of hegemonic knowledge production; if theory does not reflect upon our most painful experiences, then it will be envisaged by those who suffer under hegemonic knowledges only as boring and senseless. How then to rearrange the desire towards theory that will fine tune our resistance strategies? 57 Castro Varela / Heinemann emphasize that the need of the hour is an education that creates powerful spaces, where students not only get in touch with different knowledges and perspectives but get touched by the deeper understanding of the power relations they are nurtured by: We will have to create spaces where students who inhabit the margins of the teaching machine can dive into the history of violence, injustice, and where they are enabled to develop an enhanced imagination. 58

Calling for those powerful spaces implies for them at the same time a kind of non-cooperation with the neoliberal humanist university. Thus, they argue for challenging an understanding of academic labor in which professors spend more time in writing applications to get third party funding instead of rethinking their methods and teaching tools. 59 At the same time, as Kazeem-Kami´nski stresses, while Black Teachers and Teachers of Color and their teaching on radical knowledge archives are upheld as perfect examples for diverse teaching, they are often not supported by their faculty and the administration when being confronted with racial threats and / or sexual harassment. 60 This imbalance illustrates that history of race and racism and its enduring legacies cannot be overhauled in a powerful 56 57 58 59 60

Heinemann / Castro Varela (fn. 15), p. 267. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid. Ibid., p. 269. Belinda Kazeem-Kami´nski: Engaged Pedagogy. Antidiskriminatorisches Lehren und Lernen bei bell hooks. Vienna 2016, p. 12.

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space like the university with simply altering the curricula, or through pedagogical tricks to make the academic classroom more inclusive. The feminist postcolonial discussion on institutional racism in higher education reveals that in order to challenge the familiar and unfamiliar ways of the colonial past and racial violence in every day and institutional practices in the present, German higher education is in need of a broad-based repolitication of difference as a matter of social justice.

Fiocchi, João

No Negro Citizens: Slavery and Citizenship in Comparative Perspective

Introduction Frank Tannenbaum’s study Slave and Citizen 1 compares slavery in Anglo and Latin America and argues that a fundamental difference in these slave systems has generated extremely different race relations in these regions. 2 He defends the thesis that in the United States the enslaved had a harsher legal treatment that reduced them to the condition of property. In Latin America, on the other hand, the Iberian Legislation and the Catholic Church would have softened enslavement by providing a sort of moral personhood to the enslaved, treating them more equally. 3 For Tannenbaum, this would justify why slavery would have ended “peacefully” in Brazil, whereas emancipation required a war in the United States. Several twentieth century scholars followed this tradition, presenting similar arguments as crucial reasons for the different states of race relations in American and Brazilian post-slavery societies. Higher levels of segregation in the US and the supposed existence of a “racial democracy” 4 in Brazil would exemplify such a difference. 1 Frank Tannenbaum: Slave and Citizen. The Negro in the Americas. New York 1946. 2 Contact: João Fiocchi, [email protected], Ph.D. student, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania. 3 As the author states it: “It is not surprising, therefore, that the political and social environment in Latin America has proved different. Not only was the Negro encouraged to secure his freedom, but once he was free, no obstacles were placed to his incorporation into the society.” Tannenbaum (fn. 2), p. 53. 4 Racial democracy is a concept attributed to Freyre’s scholarship – while it is not certain whether he coined the term himself. “Freyre’s views became the basis of the belief, widely held by Brazilian of all classes, that Brazil is a racial democracy in which prejudice and discrimination based on race no longer exist.” However, this ideology is not supported by indexes such as social mobility, income, education attainment, and employment show a stark racial divide, placing Black Brazilians at a disadvantage when compared to white Brazilians. Carlos Hasenbalg / Suellen Huntington: Brazilian Racial Democracy. Reality or Myth? In: Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 10 (1982) No. 1, pp. 135–139.

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This narrative on the history of slavery has, however, been contested by several critical studies that have demonstrated the extremely violent character of enslavement in Latin America – notably in Brazil. They have demonstrated that lasting racial inequality is a foundational feature of these societies in the afterlife of slavery. 5 It is widely accepted today that modern enslavement was a violent regime anywhere it occurred. 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, who writes before Tannenbaum, had already put forth an argument that fundamentally shifts the framing regarding the history of state formation and race relations. Rather than entertaining the assumption that the state is formed and then race relations take place as a byproduct of said process, Du Bois proposes that the state is created in order to harness and propagate a certain kind of racial stratification. 7 I depart from Du Bois’s framework and contribute to this critical literature by revisiting the legal history of two slave societies (United States and Brazil) – emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between racial stratification translated into the law and the process of modern nation-state formation. 8 This comparative investigation provides an important analytical perspective towards understanding the creation of the modern world through colonialism and slavery. Comparison also illuminates how this phenomenon has fostered and relied on the social and economic exploitation of certain racialized human populations – i.e. racial capitalism. 9 The relationship between race and citizenship is analyzed through the legal 5 On this subject, see Marvin Harris: Patterns of Race in the Americas. New York 1964; Eugene Genovese / Laura Foner: Slavery in the New World. Engelwood Cliffs / Prentice-Hall 1969; Arnold Sio: Interpretations of Slavery. The Slave Status in the Americas. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (1965) No. 3, pp. 298–308; Herbert S. Klein: African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. Nova York 1986. 6 Keila Grinberg: Alforria, Direito e Direitos no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos. In: Estudos Históricos 27 (2001), pp. 63–83. 7 Du Bois discusses how the process of state formation is imbricated with the establishment of a racial hierarchy and the possibility of exploitation on the basis of racial lines by analyzing the condition of the Black worker and the white worker during the re-creation of the American state after the Civil War. “It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war to America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power.” W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York 1935/1998, p. 15. 8 Colonialism and slavery – and, consequently, immigration and forced displacement – have been central to understand the development of national racial hierarchies in forming nation-states. Vilna Bashi / Antonio McDaniel: A Theory of Immigration and Racial Stratification. In: Journal of Black Studies 27 (1997) 5, pp. 668–682. 9 The concept of racial capitalism is connected to the notion that capital accumulation has historically been attached to racialized exploitation. They cannot be analyzed separately as they are mutually constitutive. In the words of Cedrick Robinson, “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially

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systems 10 of the American and Brazilian slave societies as one aspect of the aforementioned symbiotic relationship. 11 The article shows how legal practices in the Unites States and Brazil have supported racial stratification during nation-state crafting. The paper demonstrates how race delimits the possibility of access to citizenship rights. While white settlers and European immigrants were full citizens or had a pathway to citizenship, Africans and Afro-Brazilians were either excluded or merely formally – and precariously – included. Moreover, this investigation highlights how the regulation of the national and international movement of different racial groups – slave traffic of Africans or state-sponsored policies that fostered European immigration – is connected to the economic and social development of these two slave societies.

A Silenced History of State Formation: Racial Colonialism and Slavery Sociological scholarship has often undertheorized the importance of racial colonialism and slavery in narratives of state formation. This has limited their explanatory ability for social phenomena. Political sociology, in particular, has extensively approached the formation of the modern nationstate as an issue of class. Some scholars analyze this phenomenon through the lens of revolution 12. Other academics have investigated this shift as a “natural” evolution. 13 In both revolutionary and evolutionary pathways

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racial directions, so too did social ideology.” Cedric Robinson: Black Marxism. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill 1983, p. 2. On the topic of racial capitalism, also see Cedric Robinson: Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography. In: History Workshop 23 (1987), pp. 122–140; Nancy Leong: Racial Capitalism. In: Harvard Law Review 126 (2013) No. 8, pp. 2151–2226. I classify the analyzed data as master documents. By master documents, I mean that they were produced by the master class for their own empowerment. These empower such a class as they undefine the humanity of the enslaved class. This is an important observation because it has important political, economic and social implications. These documents are part of a process that structures the nature of the state and defines the (racial) hierarchy of its members – the establishment of who gets defined in what way and what their rights in the society are. As master documents, they are produced by white settlers and are part of the process of establishing a racial hierarchy. People were not originally positioned in racial groups. Those racial groups were, nevertheless, made in a symbiotic relationship with the formation of the state. The analyzed data includes documentation starting from independence – 1776 in the United States and 1822 in Brazil – until the formal abolition of slavery in these countries, respectively in 1865 and 1888. See Barrington Moore: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston 1993; Theda Skocpol: States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, & China. New York 1979. See Josef A. Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London 1966.

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towards modernity, the focus rests on a certain formulation of class struggles as the main unit of analysis to determine social upheavals that lead to the formation of the modern state. However, these studies have largely overlooked the role of the color line, i. e. race and racialization, as central to understand the development of capitalism and the modern state. 14 Other researchers have also pointed out along similar lines that development of slavery in the Americas was intertwined with the development of capitalism in these societies. 15 Considering this context, my research contributes to the literature of state formation by centering racial colonialism and slavery in the explanation of state formation through a comparative project. Indeed, this investigation empirically traces certain legal aspects of the genealogy of nation-states, operationalizing critical race theory in an empirical project at large. 16 This investigation made use of archival data (legal documentation, slavery abolition collections, secondary literature) and sought to answer the following research questions: (i) How have the legal systems and judicial practices (in the US and Brazil slave societies) defined the racial boundaries of citizenship? What can these racial boundaries explain about the process of state formation under racial capitalism?; and (ii) How has the regulation of national and international movement for different racial groups been defined?; What can it explain about the process of state formation under racial capitalism?

“No Negro, whether slave or free, could ever be considered a citizen” 17 Different legal practices have been adopted in the United States and Brazil in order to delimit which groups can access rights of citizenship. An analysis of some of these core practices demonstrates the process through which (i) national state formation has been predicated upon racial stratification;

14 W. E. B. Du Bois: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638–1870. New York 1896/2007. 15 Dora Lúcia de Lima Bertulio: Direito e Relações Raciais. Uma Introdução Crítica ao Racismo. Master Thesis. School of Law, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (1989); Octávio Ianni: Escravidão e Racismo. São Paulo 1978; Suely R. Reis de Queiroz: A Abolição da Escravidão. São Paulo 1981. 16 Kimberlé W. Crenshaw: Mapping the Margins. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. In: Kimberlé Crenshaw / Neil Gotarda / Gary Peller / Kendall Thomas (eds.): Critical Race Theory. The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York 1995, pp. 357–383; Tukufu Zuberi / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (eds.): White Logic, White Methods. Racism and Methodology. New York 2008. 17 Statement made by Roger B. Taney, then Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, during the ruling of the Dred Scott v. Sandford case in 1857.

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and (ii) national political power has been built on the maintenance and propagation of racial inequality. “The words slave and slavery are studiously excluded from the Constitution. Circumlocutions are the fig-leaves under which these parts of the body politic are decently concealed.” 18 John Quincy Adams 19 utters these words as he speaks before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case in favor of an enslaved person. Justice McLean, in his dissent vote in the Dred Scott case, weighs in on why he believes the words “slave” and “slavery” were not included in the Constitution: “[W]e know as a historical fact, that James Madison, that great and good man, leading member in the Federal Convention, was solicitous to guard the language of that instrument so as not to convey the idea that there could be property in man.” 20 Higginbotham also notices that “almost everyone at the Constitutional Convention was anxious to avoid discussing the morality of slavery or noting on the public record their legitimization of slavery.” 21 By the aforementioned accounts, the hypothesis is that, even though slavery was a concrete reality at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century in the US, there was a deliberate attempt to avoid a record of the legitimization of that practice at the constitutional level. Nevertheless, constitutional “silencing” practices regarding the institution of slavery did not prevent the existence of provisions in the US Constitution to assure the possibility and regulation of slavery. One of these constitutional provisions that regulates slavery without mentioning its name can be found in Article 1, section 2, clause 3. It discusses the standard for taxation and political representation and states that: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The term “other Persons” here is a proxy for the enslaved and it repeats itself throughout the Constitution. The so-called “three-fifths compromise” was an agreement established at the 1787 US Constitutional Convention between northern and southern delegates. Population count affected direct

18 John Q. Adams, Argument of John Quincy Adams before the Supreme Court of the United States, Appellants, VC. Cinque, and Others, Africans 39 (New York, S. W. Benedict 1841). 19 John Quincy Adams was a United States president from 1825 to 1829. 20 Dred Scott v. Stanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 537 (1857) (McLean, J., dissenting). 21 A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.: Shades of Freedom. Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process. New York 1996, p. 69.

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taxation and representation in the House of Representatives as well as the number of electoral votes each state would possess for presidential elections. While northern delegates only wanted free persons to count, southern delegates wanted the entire enslaved population to count. As stated by Higginbotham, the “southern representatives had made it abundantly clear that they would not agree to a federal union that would tamper with any state’s maintenance of domestic slavery.” 22 Therefore, the agreement that was reached, for taxing and political representation purposes, was that an enslaved person would count as three-fifths of one. As a result, this agreement assured “each state the option of perpetuating slavery and that ultimately maximized the political power of southern slaveholders.” 23 This constitutional provision can be understood as a practice of silencing and exclusion that both fundamentally confirms the political marginalization of the enslaved and demonstrates that the stability of this forming federal union relied on the continuous exclusion and exploitation of this racialized population. Whereas the enslaved is pushed outside of the body politic, one could argue that free Black persons could, at least legally, be citizens. The Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, when ruling on the Dred Scott v. Sandford case (1857), states, however, that: “No Negro, whether slave or free, could ever be considered a citizen of the United States.” That ruling also signals to a process of race-making through a practice of exclusion of the judiciary. It strongly suggests that the denial of the possibility of becoming a citizen is a function of race, of a certain kind of racialization of human populations under racial capitalism rather than the institution of slavery itself. In other words, it is not merely the condition of being enslaved that prevents one’s membership to the political community. Rather, it is the dehumanizing feature of the oppressive history of the political construction of races that both prevents Blacks from full access to citizenship and has enabled and justified the institution of slavery. This also helps us understand the precarious status of Black free persons in slave societies. Although through different legal strategies, the Brazilian case also demonstrates how membership to the body politic has also been marked by racial lines. The first Brazilian Constitution, the 1824 Constitution of the Empire of Brazil, also enacted practices of silencing regarding slavery. This Constitution regarded as citizens everyone that had been born in Brazil, even if they were freed persons or “ingênuos.” 24 22 Ibid., p. 68. 23 Ibid., p. 69. 24 “Ingênuos” were the offspring of enslaved people that were born free.

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Art. 6. Brazilian citizens are: I. The ones that were born in Brazil, whether “ingenuos,” or freed people, even if the father is a foreigner, since he is not at the service of his Nation. II. The children of a Brazilian father, and the illegitimate children of a Brazilian mother, born outside of the country, that come to establish residence in the Empire. III. The children of a Brazilian father, that were in a foreign country at the service of the Empire, although they may not come to establish residence in Brazil. IV. Everyone born in Portugal and its Possessions, who were residents in Brazil by the time of the Proclamation of the Independence in the Provinces, where they inhabited, decided to adhere to them explicitly, or tacitly by continuing to establish residence. 25

Without mentioning slave or slavery, the Brazilian Constitution also denied citizenship to the enslaved Africans and their offspring that remained in bondage. Freed people and “ingênuos,” however, were citizens under the law. As Africans or descendants of Africans themselves, their access to citizenship could present a challenge to my argument that being enslaved was not the condition that defined political membership, but the processes of racialization that marginalize certain human groups. However, legal and social practices of exclusion support my assertion for the Brazilian case as well. Initially, it is important to notice that, although freed and “ingênuos” fell under the category of people born in Brazil, the constitutional text explicitly named them – and not other groups. The necessity to name freed people and “ingênuos” as citizens suggests that not being an enslaved is not enough for someone to be considered a regular member of Brazilian society. “[They] [w]ere Black and had to be referred in the constitutional provision as such: the reference is enlightening: it was not enough to be born in Brazil – the “ingênuos” and the freed people were also being contemplated.” 26 On the other hand, the same provision provided the Por-

25 Translation of the author. See the original version in Portuguese below: Art. 6. São Cidadãos Brazileiros: I. Os que no Brazil tiverem nascido, quer sejam ingenuos, ou libertos, ainda que o pai seja estrangeiro, uma vez que este não resida por serviço de sua Nação. II. Os filhos de pai Brazileiro, e os illegitimos de mãi Brazileira, nascidos em paiz estrangeiro, que vierem estabelecer domicilio no Imperio. III. Os filhos de pai Brazileiro, que estivesse em paiz estrangeiro em serviço do Imperio, embora elles não venham estabelecer domicilio no Brazil. IV. Todos os nascidos em Portugal, e suas Possessões, que sendo já residentes no Brazil na época, em que se proclamou a Independencia nas Provincias, onde habitavam, adheriram á esta expressa, ou tacitamente pela continuação da sua residencia. 26 Translation of the author. Emphasis added. See the original version in Portuguese: “Era negro e como tal teve que ser referido no dispositivo constitucional: a alusão é

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tuguese in Brazil by the time of the proclamation of the Republic a pathway to citizenship. This legal context nods to the racialized expectations the founding fathers of the Brazilian Empire had concerning who they viewed as part of this forming political community. Simultaneously, the early 19th century saw large numbers of Africans in Brazil that were no longer slaves, but never acquired full constitutional citizenship. 27 While former colonizers were allowed the constitutional right of citizenship, enslaved Africans were “forgotten” outside of the body politic. 28 These processes can be partially explained by the constitutional provisions regarding political rights. In this aspect, the citizenship of free Blacks and “ingênuos” was severely curtailed by practices of economic and racial exclusion. Regarding the right to representation, the Imperial Constitution of Brazil established indirect elections (article 90) and a series of restrictions. Art. 90. The nominations of Congressmen and Senators for the General Assembly, and of Members of the General Council of the Provinces, will be made through indirect Elections, in which the mass of active citizens in the Parochial Assemblies will elect the Voters of the Province, and those will elect the Representatives of the Nation, and Province. Art. 91. Able to vote in the Primary Elections: I. Brazilian citizens that can exercise their political rights. II. Naturalized Foreigners. Art. 92. Excluded to vote in the Parochial Assemblies: (. . . ) V. The ones that do not have a net income of one hundred thousand réis 29 through land property, industry, commerce or employment. Art. 93. The ones that cannot vote in the Parochial Primary Assemblies cannot be member, nor vote for the nomination of any National or Local elective Authority. Art. 94. Everyone allowed to vote in the Parochial Assembly are eligible to be voters and to vote in the elections of Congressmen, Senators and for Members of the General Council of the Province. Except:

esclarecedora: não era o bastante ser nascido no Brasil – ingênuos e libertos, também estavam sendo contemplados.” Dora Lúcia de Lima Bertulio: Direito e Relações Raciais. Uma Introdução Crítica ao Racismo. Master Thesis. School of Law, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (1989), p. 153. 27 Carlos Hasenbalg: Discriminação e Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil. Trad. Patrick Burglin. Rio de Janeiro 1979. 28 de Lima Bertulio (fn. 15). 29 “Réis” was the Brazilian currency at that time.

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I. The ones that do not have a net income of two hundred thousand réis through land property, industry, commerce or employment. II. Freed persons. 30

As aforementioned, the right to vote or run for office was selective on income. These constitutional provisions show a clear practice of obstruction on the basis of class. Immediately, the income threshold prevented the majority of the population to access that political right. This could appear as an exception to the argument I have laid out so far that race is central to understand the formation of the modern nation-state and that it is translated into racialized norms and legislation. I argue that this is an exception at a first glance only. In a slave society like the Brazilian, class legislation such as the one above cited is also racial legislation. In 19th century Brazil, the Black population made up, by and large, some of the most marginalized groups in the nation. Black citizens were no exception. As part of the lower social stratum of society, the majority of freed and “ingênuos” were prevented from exercising their political rights. 31 Moreover, article 94, II also explicitly prevented freed people from voting or running for office for the positions of Congressmen, Senator and Member of the Provincial Council even if they met the income threshold. The Constitution was written in such a way that it excluded Blacks from the exercise of political rights both for their economic and racial status. 30 Translation of the author. Emphasis added. See the original version in Portuguese below: Art. 90. As nomeações dos Deputados, e Senadores para a Assembléa Geral, e dos Membros dos Conselhos Geraes das Provincias, serão feitas por Eleições indirectas, elegendo a massa dos Cidadãos activos em Assembléas Parochiaes os Eleitores de Provincia, e estes os Representantes da Nação, e Provincia. Art. 91. Têm voto nestas Eleições primarias I. Os Cidadãos Brazileiros, que estão no gozo de seus direitos politicos. II. Os Estrangeiros naturalisados. Art. 92. São excluidos de votar nas Assembléas Parochiaes. (. . . ) V. Os que não tiverem de renda liquida annual cem mil réis por bens de raiz, industria, ommercio, ou Empregos. Art. 93. Os que não podem votar nas Assembléas Primarias de Parochia, não podem ser Membros, nem votar na nomeação de alguma Autoridade electiva Nacional, ou local. Art. 94. Podem ser Eleitores, e votar na eleição dos Deputados, Senadores, e Membros dos Conselhos de Provincia todos, os que podem votar na Assembléa Parochial. Exceptuam-se I. Os que não tiverem de renda liquida annual duzentos mil réis por bens de raiz, industria, commercio, ou emprego. II. Os Libertos. 31 de Lima Bertulio (fn. 15).

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Territorial Movement under Racial Capitalism Important legal practices sought to regulate the national and international movement of different racial groups. The social and economic formation of the United States and Brazil has largely relied on these legal practices. The American Constitution, regardless of its practices of silence concerning slavery, allowed states a great deal of independence in the regulation of the “movement” of enslaved persons – i.e. slave traffic. Article 1, section 9, clause 1 below discusses the “Migration and Importation of Persons.” It states that: The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

This provision, under the euphemism of “Migration and Importation of Persons,” allows states to engage in the traffic of enslaved persons and determines the maximum limit of tax or duty that can be imposed per each enslaved person forcibly brought into the United States. Furthermore, article 4, section 2, clause 3 grants slaveholders the right to capture runaway enslaved persons that had fled from one state to another – even if slavery were illegal in the latter. It reads as follows: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime. No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

The two aforementioned articles of the US Constitution demonstrate that slavery is regulated by constitutional law, regardless of it not being explicitly named. These practices have, thus, engaged in a specific process of race-making and nation building. The regulation of the forced removal of Africans from ancestral land to a new territory as exploitable property has reified the dehumanization of populations racialized as Black. Under these circumstances, the movement of enslaved persons can only be allowed as it is attached to the fulfillment of economic production and generation of wealth. This scenario in which movement under racial capitalism is regulated by legal practices has also been verified in Brazil. Slavery would only be formally abolished in Brazil in 1888 – the last place in the Western hemi-

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sphere to do so. 1850, however, marked the formal end of the slave traffic in the country. 32 The elites could already foresee that the formal end of slavery in Brazil was a matter of time. In order to adjust to that transition and foster the creation of a certain type of free workforce, 33 a bill called “Lei de Terras” (Lei 601/1850) was approved that same year, 1850: [This bill] [p]rovides over the vacant land of the Empire, (. . . ) and determines that, once the first lands are measured and demarcated, they should be transferred by onerous title to private companies, as well as for the establishment of colonies of nationals and foreigners in the form regulated. (. . . ) Art. 17. The foreigners that purchase lands and establish themselves in it, or if they use that land to exercise industrial activity in the country, will be naturalized if they so desire, after two years of residence (. . . ) Art. 21. The Administration is authorized to establish, with the necessary Regulation, a special Division that will be named – General Division of Public Lands – and it will be in charge of conducting the measurement, division and description of the vacant land, its conservation, and to supervise the sale and distribution of lands, and to promote national and foreign colonization. 34

This law changed the core of the agrarian economy of Imperial Brazil, inaugurating the decline of the slave economic system. Prior to the approval of this bill, the wealth of the producer was mainly measured by the number of enslaved persons he owned. After the law, the state artificially

32 The “Lei de Terras,” a law also known as “Lei Eusébio de Queirós” (Lei 581/1850), established the formal abolition of international slave traffic in Brazil. Its enforcement would be more concretely observed after the approval of a complementary law four years later, the “Lei Nabuco de Araújo” (Lei 731/1854). These two legal practices are approved after the promulgation of the Bill Aberdeen Act (1845) in the United Kingdom. This legislation aimed at suppressing the Brazilian slave traffic, allowing the British Royal Navy to intercept slave ships and arrest and prosecute slave traders. See Jane Adams: The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade. In: The Journal of Negro History 10 (1925) No. 4, pp. 607–637. 33 José de Souza Martins: A Imigração e a Crise do Brasil Agrário. São Paulo 1973. 34 Translation of the author. See the original version in Portuguese below: Dispõe sobre as terras devolutas do Império, (. . . ) e determinada que, medidas e demarcadas as primeiras, sejam elas cedidas a título oneroso, assim para empresas particulares, como para o estabelecimento de colônias de nacionais e de estrangeiros, autorizado o Governo a promover a colonização estrangeira na forma que se declara. Art. 17. Os estrangeiros que comprarem terras, e nellas se estabelecerem, ou vierem á sua custa exercer qualquer industria no paiz, serão naturalisados querendo, depois de dous annos de residencia (. . . ) Art. 21. Fica o Governo autorizado a estabelecer, com o necessario Regulamento, uma Repartição especial que se denominará – Repartição Geral das Terras Publicas – e será encarregada de dirigir a medição, divisão, e descripção das terras devolutas, e sua conservação, de fiscalisar a venda e distribuição dellas, e de promover a colonisação nacional e estrangeira.

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restricted access to land, that now had to be purchased. Enslaved persons could no longer serve as credit value for mortgage of real estate. 35 This law establishes a new practice in Brazilian society. It fosters white settler colonialism through European immigration to Brazil. Since land could no longer be acquired through work, Africans and Afro-Brazilians – either enslaved or earning low wages – were in profound disadvantage. The law inaugurated the possibility of land purchase from foreigners. Article 17 states that the foreigners who bought land in Brazil and established residence for a minimum of two years could become naturalized Brazilian citizens. Furthermore, the law disposed of governmental subsidies to foster the arrival of settlers in Brazil. “Foreigners” here is a proxy for white Europeans. Eugenic notions of “whitening” the nation were prevalent in Brazil and found support at the government level. 36 It was one of the first statesponsored “affirmative actions” enacted by the Brazilian state to foster the immigration of white Europeans. It is no wonder that the abolitionists’ speeches were deeply embedded with the concern of the substitution of the Black workforce for the white workforce. 37 In 1890, two years after the formal abolition of slavery in Brazil, the Black population amounted to about seven million people, while whites were about six million, three hundred thousand people. From 1872 to 1900, immigration added some seven hundred thousand people to the nation. These immigrants were mostly white Europeans. 38

Conclusion This investigation has demonstrated the imbricated character between racial stratification and the process of state formation for American and Brazilian slave societies. Through an analysis of core aspects of these legal systems, practices of silencing and exclusion from citizenship rights have been identified. The role of these systems and practices is emphasized as

35 José de Souza Martins: Capitalismo e Tradicionalismo. Estudos sobre as Contradições da Sociedade Agrária no Brasil. São Paulo 1975. 36 Joaquim Nabuco, a white Brazilian abolitionist leader, also shared eugenic beliefs. In his view, “slavery was an evil not just for having Africanized Brazil but also for having slowed Brazil’s progress by hindering the arrival of civilization and modernity through immigration from Europe and the resulting whitening of the population.” Sales Augusto dos Santos / Laurence Hallewell: Historical Roots of the “Whitening” of Brazil. In: Latin American Perspectives 29 (2002) No. 1, pp. 61–82, p. 67. 37 Thomas Skidmore: Preto no Branco. Raça e Nacionalidade no Pensamento Brasileiro. Trad. Raul de Sá Barbosa. Rio Janeiro 1976. 38 Ibid.

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they contribute to the process of race-making upon which the development of these states has depended. The findings have demonstrated the process of racialization translated in the legal systems as a justification for inequality and exploitation. This study has shown that the constitutional practices of silencing on slavery in both the North American and Brazilian slave societies have not meant a lack of regulation of this institution. The elites that crafted these legal systems have rather found ways not to nominate the institution of slavery while allowing and regulating it. Enslaved persons were not formal citizens either in the US or in Brazil. Freed persons and the “ingênuos” were formal Brazilian citizens. They did not, however, have access to core rights of citizenship – namely political rights. In the US, the three-fifths compromise or judicial practices have undermined Black people’s access to full citizenship. These practices of silencing and exclusion partake in the making of race as they undefine the humanity of the racially marginalized subject. Dehumanization, as a condition for chattel slavery, has placed the enslaved outside of the body politic. 39 Therefore, exclusion from the political community was not solely a function of being enslaved. It was rather the process of racialization – in this case, being racialized as Black – that enabled the denial of the membership to society. On the matter of movement under racial capitalism, the US Constitution regulated the possibility of slave traffic without explicitly acknowledging slavery. Through practices of silencing, the legal system empowered the slaveholder with the use of force to re-enslave a runaway enslaved person in a different state in which slavery was forbidden. Coupling that with the constant risk of re-enslavement of former slaves, it can be argued that territorial movement for Blacks in this slave society was a function of the capitalist needs of production and resource allocation 40. In Brazil, practices of exclusion were at play during the change in the agrarian relations in Brazil introduced by the 1850 “Lei de Terras.” Land acquisition solely through purchase virtually precluded the possibility of Black land ownership in imperial Brazil. On the other hand, this law has also intro-

39 See Oliver C. Cox: Caste, Class and Race. A Study in Social Dynamics. New York 1959; Sylvia Wynter: Unsettling the Coloniality of Being / Power / Truth / Freedom. Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument. In: CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003) No. 3, pp. 257–337; Lynn Hunt: Inventing Human Rights. A History. New York 2008. 40 On the risk of re-enslavement and the effort of the master class to control the movement of the enslaved as a function of resource allocation, see, respectively: Skidmore (fn. 37); W. E. B. Du Bois: Color and Democracy. Colonies and Peace. New York 1935/2007; Gunnar Myrdal: An American Dillema. The Negro Problem & Modern Democracy. New York 1972.

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duced practices of inclusion, through a set of the state-sponsored actions that fostered white European migration through subsidies, access to the land, and a pathway to citizenship – all unavailable for Blacks in Brazil. It can be argued, therefore, that the control over the movement of certain racial groups and the incentive towards the movement of another is part of a project of state formation in which racial stratification enables both economic exploitation and benefits on the basis of race. 41 Finally, these findings suggest the need of further data analysis that allows for deeper understanding as to how racialized populations have interacted with the legal system. That includes data such as autobiographies of enslaved persons, slave narratives and other proclamations, as well as documents that demonstrate how and when people establish spaces such as quilombos. 42 These data will better illuminate and address some of the foundational questions about citizenship and race across spaces put forth by this investigation. Moreover, the consideration of the many marginalized voices that participated in the process of state formation also points to other questions to be addressed by future research. Africans were not the only ones incorporated under the racial stratification system of these slave societies. The experience of the indigenous peoples is also central in order to analyze the constitutive relationship between nation building in the Americas and racial domination. The moment of creation of these master documents is contemporary to that in which Brazil and the United States begin the process of consolidating themselves as settler colonies. As settler colonies, they have incorporated the indigenous as well as the Africans. We have yet to better understand the experiences of these populations as they are included in the symbiotic relationship between racial stratification and state formation. 41 Ibid. 42 Here, a consideration regarding the comparison to the North American and the Brazilian cases is relevant: slavery in Brazil was a national phenomenon, there was no possibility of fleeing to a free state in order to escape from slavery – unlike in the US, where you had slave holding states and free states. Outside of the legal options through which an enslaved could become free – e.g. manumission – runaway enslaved persons in Brazil built self-organized communities inside the national territory – the quilombos. In these communities, the formerly enslaved created a space in which they were no longer in bondage. By breaking away from the state, these racialized subjects reasserted their humanity and challenged their position in the racial order. They even had organized military forces in order to defend their communities from eventual attacks from slave masters or imperial forces. The most famous and long lasting quilombo was Quilombo Zumbi dos Palmares (1605–1694). In these spaces, the formerly enslaved redefined their freedom and humanity. On quilombo and quilombismo, see, Abdias do Nascimento: O Quilombismo. Documentos de uma Militância Pan-africanista. Brasília / Rio de Janeiro 2002; Beatriz Nascimento: O Conceito de Quilombo e a Resistência Cultural Negra. In: Alex Ratts (ed.): Eu sou Atlântica. Sobre a Trajetória de Vida de Beatriz Nascimento. São Paulo 2007.

4. The Momentum of ‘Race’ in the Production of Knowledge

Hoffarth, Christian

Like Marvels, like Monsters: Experiences of Otherness and the Emergence of Racial Thought in Medieval European Travel Writing Introduction On the 2nd of June, 1537, Pope Paul III issued the encyclical Sublimis deus in which he famously declared that “the Indians are truly men and [. . . ] are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.” 1 The encyclical was directed towards a significant part of Spanish missionaries and conquistadores in South America who, according to the Dominican Bernardino de Minaya, held that the American natives were ‘brutish animals,’ incapable of being peacefully converted to the Christian faith, and thus considered it just to treat them with violence and strip them of their liberty and their possession. 2 About 15 years later, the papal intervention in the debate over the nature of the Amerindians should inform the position of another Dominican friar who would become known as the most rigid defender of the Indians in the 16th century, namely Bartolomé de las Casas. In the Valladolid debate of 1550–1551, Las Casas advocated the opinion that waging war against the natives was unjust, that they were endowed with reason and should and could be converted to Christianity without force and without being

1 Attendentes Indos ipsos, utpote veros homines, . . . licet extra Fidem Christi existant sua libertate ac rerum suarum dominio privatos, seu privandos non esse. America Pontificia primi saeculi evangelizationis (1493–1592). Documenta pontificia ex registris et minutis praesertim in Archivo Secreto Vaticano existentibus, ed. Josef Metzler. Città del Vaticano 1991, p. 365. Trans. Francis Augustus MacNutt: Bartholomew de Las Casas: His Life, Apostolate, and Writings. Cleveland 1909, p. 429. 2 Cf. Lewis Hanke: Pope Paul III and the American Indians. In: The Harvard Theological Review 30 (1937) 2, pp. 65–102, at 68–69.

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deprived of their human rights. 3 Widely transcending the question of the colonial conquest of America, Las Casas boldly stated in his Apologetica historia sumaria (c. 1560): All people in the world are humans and there exists only one definition for all humans and every single individual, namely that they are all rational; made in God’s image, they all have reason and free will. [. . . ] All the lineage of humanity is one and all human beings as regards their creation and natural existence are alike. 4

On the contrary, Las Casas’ chief opponent, philosopher and theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, explained that the only way to evangelize the Indians was through just war. Drawing on Aristotelian taxonomy, Sepúlveda argued that these savage Indians were determined by nature to be servants, whereas the civilized Spaniards were natural rulers. In a treatise drawn up in the run-up to the debate, he expounded that with perfect right the Spaniards reign over these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, which in prudence, ingenuity, virtue, and humanity are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as wild and cruel people to the most meek people, prodigious and intemperate people to composed and temperate people, and finally, I am about to say, as apes to men. 5

At its core, the entire debate was about opposing principles and practices of differentiation. ‘Principles’ in this context are to be understood as the ideological foundations on which the modes of differentiation were 3 On the Valladolid debate, see id.: All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb 1974. 4 . . . todas las naciones del mundo son hombres, y de todos los hombres y de cada uno dellos es una no más la difinicion, y ésta es que son racionales; todos tienen su entendimiento y su voluntad y su libre albredrío, como sean formados á la imagen y semejanza de Dios, todos los hombres tienen sus cinco sentidos exteriors y sus cuatro interiors . . . . Así que todo linaje de los hombres es uno y todos los hombres, cuanto a su creacíon y las cosas naturales, son semejantes . . . . Bartolome de las Casas: Apologetica historia sumaria. In: Bartolomé de las Casas: Obras completes. Ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado. Madrid 1992, pp. 536–537. Trans. Mariano Delgado: “All People have Reason and Free Will”: The Controversy Over the Nature of the Indians in the Sixteenth Century. In: Fabian Klose / Mirjam Thulin (eds.): Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present. Göttingen 2016, pp. 91–105, at 93. 5 . . . optimo jure Hispanis istos novi orbis et insularum adjacentium barbaris imperitare, qui prudentia, ingenio, virtute omni ac humanitate tam longe superantur ab Hispanis, quam pueri a perfecta aetate, mulieres a viris: saevi et immanes a mitissimis, prodigi et intemperantes a continentibus et temperatis, denique quam simiae prope dixerim ab hominibus. J. Genesii Sepulvedae Cordubensis Democrates alter, sive de iustis belli causis apud Indos, ed. & trans. Marcello Menéndez y Pelayo. In: Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 21 (1892), pp. 257–369, at 304.

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based. ‘Practices,’ on the other hand, can be defined as the procedures that finally produced a concrete differentiation. Las Casas and those behind the bull Sublimis deus differentiated between Europeans and Amerindians on cultural grounds, whereas Sepúlveda and his party assumed essential distinctions. 6 Neither of the two principles was based on the assumption of complete equality of Christian Europeans and pagan Indians. However, Las Casas’ side believed that the Indians were capable of advancement and assimilation to the allegedly superior cultural status of the Europeans (i.e., primarily of embracing the Christian faith); by contrast, the views of the opposing side were rooted in the conviction of a natural and thus inescapable inferiority and savagery of the natives. In the light of his defense of the Indians, Las Casas was described as the ‘father of anti-imperialism and anti-racism,’ 7 whereas Sepúlveda was bestowed with the uncomplimentary title ‘father of modern racism.’ 8 The matter is not that simple, at least on Las Casas’ side, considering that he extensively held the opinion that the replacement of enslaved Indians with black Africans was rightful; 9 however, what cannot be denied is the fact that Sepúlveda’s side put forward arguments that should permanently accompany European colonialism and the global racism of modern times. In a sense, one could say that the line of conflict between Las Casas and Sepúlveda ran along the imaginary border between the Middle Ages and modernity: if the humanist Sepúlveda held positions that were to become crucial for the scientific racism of modernity, the Dominican monk Las Casas relied at least to some extent on medieval beliefs and customs regarding the enslavement of Africans and seemed to have been heavily indebted to the medieval doctrine of the one origin of humankind in Adam and Noah. This idea is, of course, based on biblical history and was most prominently developed and canonized by Saint Augustine in the 5th century. 10 6 In this paper, by ‘cultural’ I refer to features which were thought of as acquired through environment and thus changeable. By ‘essential’ I mean features which were thought to be part of the essence of a person or a group of people and thus unchangeable. The opposing principles of differentiation based on these features I call ‘culturalistic’ and ‘essentialistic.’ 7 See, i.e., Gian Maria Annovi: “Call Me My Name”: The Iguana, the Witch, and the Discovery of America. In: id./Flora Ghezzo (eds.): Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies. Toronto / Buffalo / London 2015, pp. 323–355, at 329. 8 See, i.e., John C. Mohawk: Indians and Democracy: No One Ever Told Us. In: id. et al. (eds.): Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution. Santa Fe 1992, pp. 43–71, at 49. 9 Cf. Lawrence A. Clayton: Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas. Chichester 2011, pp. 135–150. 10 A detailed discussion of the origin of mankind in Adam as the first man and Noah as the progenitor of all peoples on Earth can be found, for example, in books 15 and

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As these observations suggest, not only the principles but the practices of differentiation employed by the two parties, too, are distinguishable into a medieval and a modern one. Las Casas’ practice can be described as ‘exegetical,’ as it was rooted in texts and occidental traditions of knowledge. In other words, Las Casas, when he was confronted with new information, namely about the existence and customs of the Amerindians, went back to traditional sources, which for him had universal validity, and used them to categorize the newly acquired pieces of knowledge. The practice of differentiation Sepúlveda employed, on the other hand, can be called ‘empirical.’ It seems to have been based not on traditional authorities but on new experiences and their interpretation. The notion of the Amerindians as brutes and barbarians emerged from direct encounters with them. Sepúlveda thus went the opposite way: he moved from the information to the superordinate principle. In doing so, however, his preconceived world view seems to have guided him no less than his did Las Casas. As I demonstrate shortly, drawing such a paradigmatic dividing line between the exegetical Middle Ages and an empirical modernity, between culturalistic and essentialistic principles in the history of racial thought in general can be extremely tempting. Yet even if the idea that global racism took on a whole new quality and reality with the European conquest of the Americas would be difficult to reject, as I attempt to demonstrate in the following sections, Sepúlveda’s essentialistic principle and empirical practice of differentiation did not appear out of nowhere in the 16th century. Rather, its conceptual foundations were gradually emerging throughout the late Middle Ages. To make my argument comprehensible, I recall in the first part of this paper some crucial questions and research positions that determine the debate about the existence of racist thought in the Middle Ages. In the second part, I examine selected documents of late medieval encounters of Europeans with groups hitherto unknown to them. In doing so, I attempt to trace the causes for the essentialization of distinctions, particularly focusing on a recurring configuration in medieval European travel texts: 11 the experience of otherness. In the process, some light will also be shed on how the transition from an exegetical to an empirical practice is related to

16 of Saint Augustine’s The City of God, a highly authoritative work for the Christian Middle Ages. 11 The common terms applied to the testimonies of medieval encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans – ‘travel texts,’ ‘travelogues,’ ‘itineraries,’ etc. – are somewhat misleading because the texts rarely focus on the experience and challenges of traveling, and quite often are less than accurate regarding routes and the difference between actual experience and tradition and hearsay.

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the transition from a culturalistic to an essentialistic principle of differentiation.

The Idea of Race and Medieval Principles of Human Differentiation In 2019, a search for the keyword ‘race*’ in the RI-Opac, one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date bibliographic databases in the field of medieval studies, produces over 280 hits. 12 Judging from the titles, a larger part of the literature written before the mid-1970s seemingly uses the word ‘race’ in its French sense as ‘dynasty’ or ‘lineage’ referring to noble families, but nearly all of the more recent works and well over half of the entries are concerned with the concept of race as a marker of difference between human groups. This finding stands in stark contrast to common narratives about the history of racism, according to which there could not have been any ideas of race and racial thought in the Latin European Middle Ages. 13 One widespread theory attributes the birth of racism to the early age of Colonialism, when white Europeans felt the need to justify the enslavement of blacks and their quest for world dominance. 14 Strongly biologically oriented definitions of racism even place its origins not before the age of Enlightenment 15 and often point to the works of natural scientists Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) or Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), who developed the first widely influential biologically informed typologies that divided the species of Homo into distinct classes. 16 According to these perspectives, central to the distinction between racism and other concepts of differentiation between groups of people is whether the assumed characteristics of a group of people are understood to be innate or acquired. 17 12 http://opac. regesta- imperii. de/ lang_ de/ suche. php? qs= race* (last accessed September 9, 2021). 13 For a critical examination of the omission of the Middle Ages in the history of racism, see Geraldine Heng: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge 2018, pp. 16–24. 14 See, for example, David Theo Goldberg: Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford 1993; Eric Williams: Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill 1944, p. 7; George M. Fredrickson: Racism: A Short History. Princeton 2002. 15 See, for example, Ivan Hannaford: Race: The History of an Idea in The West. D.C. / Baltimore / London 1996; Michael Banton: The Idea of Race. London 1977; Hannah Franziska Augstein (ed.): Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850. Bristol 1996. 16 See Hannaford (fn. 15), pp. 202–213. 17 Cf. David Nirenberg: Was there Race Before Modernity? The example of ‘Jewish Blood’ in Late Medieval Spain. In: Miriam Eliav-Feldon / Benjamin Isaac / Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge 2009, pp. 232–264, at 235.

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Concepts that postulate collective differences between groups of people and, often, the superiority of one group over the other, but do not justify this theory biologically, therefore would not be ‘racist.’ 18 Consequently, the markers of difference that Robert Bartlett in an often-cited assessment in his influential book The Making of Europe (1993) had identified as the dominant ones throughout the Middle Ages – descent, customs, language, and law – would bear little to no value in proving the existence of racial thought in this age. 19 However, it is not at all that the European Middle Ages had not known any principles of classification of human groups based on natural variation. A very common method in medieval Europe for differentiating between groups of humankind with a clear reference to the physical drew on climatological considerations. 20 Echoing ancient theory, Isidor of Seville in his widely influential encyclopedia of world knowledge, explained in the 7th century: People’s faces and coloring, the size of their bodies, and their various temperaments correspond to various climates. Hence we find that the Romans are serious, the Greeks easy-going, the Africans changeable, and the Gauls fierce in nature and rather sharp in wit, because the character of the climate makes them so. 21

Although Isidor did not further discuss how exactly the climatic conditions under which humans lived influenced their appearance and character, later authors of the Middle Ages, who closely followed Isidor, gave very concrete explanations. For example, the Franciscan Bartholomeus Anglicus wrote around 1240 that the Africans obtained their dark skin color by being exposed to strong sunlight. 22 Likewise, the English version of the famous “Travels of Sir John Mandeville” (c. 1400) explains that in Ethiopia chil18 See, e.g., Dinesh D’Souza: Is Racism a Western Idea? In: The American Scholar 64 (1995) 4, pp. 517–539, at 519–523. 19 Robert Bartlett: The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1250. Princeton 1993, p. 197. 20 See, for example, Marian J. Tooley: Bodin and the Mediaeval Theory of Climate. In: Speculum 28 (1953) 1, pp. 64–83; Suzanne Conklin Akbari: Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450. Ithaca, NY 2009, pp. 140– 154. 21 Etymologiae IX.2.105: Secundum diversitatem enim caeli et facies hominum et colores et corporum quantitates et animorum diversitates existent. Inde Romanos graves, Graecos leves, Afros versipelles, Gallos natura feroces atque acriores ingenio pervidemus, quod natura climatum facit. Trans. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. & trans. Stephen A. Barney / W. J. Lewis / J. A. Beach / Oliver Berghof. Cambridge et al. 2006, p. 198. 22 Bartholomaeus Anglicus: De proprietatibus rerum 15.50: . . . affrice regiones nam solaris estus adurens propter eius permanentiam super africos illos consumendo humores corpore breviores, facie nigriores, crine crispiores . . . . On Bartholomaeus’ application of

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dren were born yellow and turned black while growing up. 23 According to the notion reflected in these explanations, which was the dominant one in the Middle Ages, the climate-induced differences of peoples’ appearance and character were indeed not biologically inherent to them but acquired by their living conditions. Therefore, under the premises of a very narrow definition of ‘racism’ and ‘race,’ even the principal medieval concept of human diversity based on such apparently biological traits such as skin color and body shapes could not be considered ‘racist.’ 24 Meanwhile, a productive branch of medieval studies argues that the foundations of racial thought explicitly originated in the high and late Middle Ages. 25 Nevertheless, the definitions of race and racism on which this position is based are of a different nature than the ones just described. In her monumental study The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018), medievalist Geraldine Heng understands the concept of race as “one of the primary names we have . . . attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.” 26 Biological characteristics, Heng explains, can serve as a basis for this tendency, but they do not have to. 27 Fellow medievalist David Nirenberg considers it wrong, in view of the fact that race in the sense of a causal connection between biological and cultural characteristics is nothing but a phantasm, to absolve the premodern era from racist thinking altogether only because its phantasmal concepts were somehow different from the ones of modernity. As Nirenberg further explains, “comparing the mad certainties of different times and places” is an appropriate approach to a contemporary history of race. 28 Thus, even if is true that in the Middle

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climate theory see Akbari (fn. 20), pp. 143–146; ead.: From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation. In: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.): The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York 2000, pp. 19–34. See Mandeville’s Travels, translated from the French of Jean d’Outremeuse. Edited from ms. Cotton Titus C.XVI, in the British Museum, Vol. 1. London / New York / Toronto 1919, p. 104. Cf. Robert Bartlett: Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity. In: Thomas Hahn (ed.): Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001) 1, pp. 39–56, at pp. 46–47. Cf. first and foremost Heng (fn. 13); see also Hahn (fn. 24); Cord Whitaker (ed.): Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages. Postmedieval special issue 1 (2015). Heng (fn. 13), p. 27. Heng (fn. 13), p. 27: “[. . . ] the differences selected for essentialism will vary in the longue durée – perhaps battening on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic attributes in one location; perhaps on social practices, religion, and culture in another; and perhaps on a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere [. . . ].” Cf. Nirenberg (fn. 17), pp. 232–239 (quote at 239).

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Ages distinctions between groups of people where mostly based on nonbiological categories, while in the modern era biological categories gained predominance, this does not necessarily mean that the Middle Ages were any less radical in their distinctions. As convincing as Heng’s and Nirenberg’s argumentation for a relationship between pre-modern and modern discriminations on a conceptual level is, the very example that Nirenberg presents to demonstrate the value of a comparative approach to the history of racism signifies an important difference between the two on a substantial level. By focusing on the biologistic stigmatization of Jews in late medieval Iberia, Nirenberg inadvertently indicates that acts of social exclusion in the Middle Ages by and large targeted different groups than modern racism. 29 Notwithstanding a strong argument to be made that antisemitism is nothing but a form of racism, 30 the predominant form over the longest periods of the modern era was that of colonial racism. In other words, with the exception of the 20th century, the historically most potent manifestations of European racism in modern times were directed against non-European groups of people. By contrast, in the Middle Ages, predominantly people in Europe and above all Jews became victims of racist (or proto-racist) convictions and actions. 31 Hence, the establishment of a direct line of descent between modern and pre-modern racism in its major forms of expression seemingly remains difficult, at least on a substantial level. This realization raises the question whether those who hold that ‘real’ racism is a spawn of modernity are ultimately right. To get to the bottom of this question, attention must be turned to the margins of the medieval space of European imagination and experience. The groups of people who were to become the primary objects of racist convictions and racist European politics in the early modern period and beyond had been largely unknown in Europe until the late Middle Ages. Beginning only with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century and European Christian aspirations of mission, exploration, and expansion, which significantly intensified during this time, the peoples of East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and, finally,

29 Interestingly, even those who understand racism as a genuinely modern phenomenon often consider the politics of the limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) in 15th-century Iberia as a legitimate precursor or starting point of the biologically informed ‘scientific racism’ of modernity. 30 See, for example, Glynis Cousin / Robert Fine: A Common Cause. Reconnecting the Study of Racism and Antisemitism. In: European Societies 14 (2012) 2, pp. 166–185. 31 On medieval anti-Judaism in general, see Léon Poliakov: The History of AntiSemitism. From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, Vol. 1. Philadelphia 1975; David Nirenberg: Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York 2013, pp. 183–245.

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America gradually entered into the horizon of the European conception of the world. An ample amount of research has investigated the textual and pictorial sources that originated in this context in rich abundance, documenting and processing the encounters with foreign cultures, about which very little had been known in Europe thus far. Among other matters, scholars frequently ask how medieval European travelers, envoys, and explorers, and their recipients, described the foreign groups they encountered and which categories they used to distinguish between self and foreign, between ‘we’ and ‘them.’ 32 These studies provide interesting insights into the changing medieval concepts about the diversity of humankind revealing strategies of ‘othering,’ which sometimes seem not less strict than modern ones. 33 In addition, these strategies frequently use somatic, physical characteristics such as skin color, facial features, and nutrition. 34 However, as has been correctly pointed out by Philipps, among others, medieval ideas about who the Others were and what made them the Others were always up for negotiation and thus much less stable than in later times. 35 Moreover, although there is no denying that Europeans in the Middle Ages – no different from other eras – tended to elevate their own group above others, any institutionalized, permanent binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ were hardly existent 36 – with the exception of Jews within Europe.

32 See, for instance, Kim M. Phillips: Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510. Philadelphia 2014; Akbari (fn. 20); John V. Tolan: Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York 2002; Shirin A. Khanmohamadi: In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia 2014; Albrecht Classen (ed.): East meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World. Berlin / Boston 2013. 33 The postcolonial concept of ‘othering’ can easily be applied to medieval practices of constructing an ‘other,’ at least insofar as the contrived homogenization of a group of people as a counterfoil to the self is at its center. Furthermore, even if a general imperialist impulse cannot be assumed with regard to the Middle Ages, the mechanisms underlying instances of ‘othering’ in the Middle Ages often seem very similar to those of the colonial era. We may, indeed, argue that the colonial strategies of ‘othering’ draw on patterns of thought that were already widespread in previous eras as well. On the postcolonial concept, see Bill Ashcroft / Gareth Griffiths / Helen Tiffin: Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London / New York Second Edition 2007, pp. 156–158. 34 See, for instance, Michael Uebel: Ecstatic Transformation: The Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages. New York 2005, pp. 11–53; Volker Mertens: Katzenbart und Schlangenfraß: Der Körper der Chinesen in Reiseberichten des 13.–17. Jahrhunderts. In: Kerstin Gernig (ed.): Fremde Körper: Zur Konstruktion des Anderen in europäischen Diskursen. Berlin 2001, pp. 30–57. 35 Cf. Phillips (fn. 32), pp. 59–60. 36 Cf. Ibid.

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A racism that completely coincides with the racism of modern times, which is simultaneously the starting point and the product of inequality and violence on a global scale, cannot be found in the Middle Ages, from whichever perspective one intends to explore this subject. This conclusion should not come as a surprise, given that the definition of this very form of racism is based on the realities and mindsets of a globalizing modern world. Therefore, the question that must be asked to place the Middle Ages more precisely in a general history of racial thought cannot be focused on verifying whether racism in the modern sense existed in the Middle Ages. Rather, the appropriate question must confirm whether and how the medieval encounters with people of foreign cultures and their documentation in text and image may have contributed to the emergence of a principle that assumed essential differences and of specific practices of differentiation that furthered the establishment of this principle. Racist thought, which is characterized by hierarchizing groups of people and subordinating one under the other, is only possible on the basis of racial thought, that is, the conviction that humankind could be divided into distinctive groups by natural, inescapable features. Starting from these premises, I endeavor to identify in the subsequent sections specific configurations in the encounters of European travelers with non-European cultures, which may have functioned as impulses for the essentialization of differences. My focus will be on experiences of ‘being othered’ on the part of the European travelers themselves and thus on a constellation that has received little attention so far and that will reverse the usual perspective.

Experiences of Otherness In European eyes, the Mongol invasion of Europe in the first half of the 13th century was one of the most traumatic events in all of history. 37 The cruel onslaught by a power literally nothing had been known about up to this point evoked collective terror and apocalyptic expectations. 38 At the same time, the encounter with the Tartars, how Europeans called these people from the East, can be regarded as the point of departure for colossal changes of the European worldview, which among other things informed

37 An excellent synthesis of the late medieval encounter of Mongols and Europeans can be found in Peter Jackson: The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410. Harlow 2005. 38 Cf. Johannes Fried: Auf der Suche nach der Wirklichkeit. Die Mongolen und die europäische Erfahrungswissenschaft im 13. Jahrhundert. In: Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986) 1, pp. 287–332, at 290–298.

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the rise of geography and ethnology as scientific disciplines, paving the way for the Scientific revolution, and triggered the formation of a European sense of common identity. 39 Travelers from Europe to the East played a most vital role in this process: their oral and written reports not only shaped the picture of the Mongols in their homelands but also strongly influenced the ethnographic gaze for centuries to come. 40 One of the earliest of these travelers and one of the most famed in modern historiography was the Flemish Franciscan William of Rubruck who set out for the Mongol Empire in 1253. Rubruck’s ambition was to convert the Mongols to Christianity and, perhaps, to ask for their assistance for Western Christendom in the recapture of the Holy Land from the Muslims on behalf of the French King Louis IX. 41 William was unsuccessful in both respects. However, the report he presented to the King after his return was full of highly valuable information of a political, geographical, and anthropological nature. To this day, this report is acknowledged as one of the liveliest descriptions of travel and the most reliable ethnographic account of the Mongols of the entire Middle Ages. 42 By closely examining how Rubruck renders the relation of his own group to others, a process of negotiation between traditional knowledge and novel experiences can be observed, which illuminates the empirical backgrounds of epistemological shifts in the perception of human variation as well as in the practices of differentiation. 43

39 Cf. Felicitas Schmieder: Europa und die Fremden: Die Mongolen im Urteil des Abendlandes vom 13. bis in das 15. Jahrhundert. Sigmaringen 1994; ead.: Der mongolische Augenblick in der Weltgeschichte oder: Als Europa aus der Wiege wuchs. In: Das Mittelalter 10 (2005), pp. 63–73. 40 Cf. Joan-Pau Rubiés: Travel Writing and Ethnography. In: Id.: Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnography. Aldershot 1997, pp. 1–39. 41 On Rubruck’s journey and his Itinerarium, see The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255. Trans. Peter Jackson; introduction, notes and appendices by Peter Jackson with David Morgan. London 1990, pp. 39–47. Latin edition in: Voyage en Orient du Frère Guillaume de Rubruk de l’ordre des Frères Mineurs, eds. Francisque Michel / Thomas Wright. In: Recueil de voyages et de mémoires, Vol. 4. Paris 1839, pp. 205–396. There has been some debate about whether Rubruck really had been instructed to forge an alliance with the Mongols against Islam or if this rather was a misinterpretation by the Mongols of Louis’ letter Rubruck was carrying; see Jean Richard: Sur le pas de Plancarpin et de Rubrouck: la letter de saint Louis à Sartaq. In: Journal des Savants 1 (1977), pp. 49–61. 42 Cf. Phillips (fn. 32), p. 57. 43 On the relationship of tradition and experience in late medieval knowledge production, see Felicitas Schmieder: “Den Alten den Glauben zu entziehen, wage ich nicht . . . ”. Spätmittelalterliche Welterkenntnis zwischen Tradition und Augenschein. In: Elisabeth Müller-Luckner / Gian Luca Potestà (eds.): Autorität und Wahrheit: Kirch-

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In line with the common theory of his time, Rubruck connects the physical characteristics of certain groups of people to geography, when he alleges, for instance that the “Cataians are small people, who when speaking breathe heavily through the nose; and it is a general rule that all orientals have a small opening for the eyes.” 44 Of several central Asian peoples, he writes: “I saw persons among these people [Tibetans] who were seriously deformed. The Tangut people I saw were tall but swarthy. The Iugurs are of medium build like our own people.” 45 In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, he does not link those characteristics to climate. 46 And this peculiarity is perhaps no coincidence, as I would like to demonstrate. A pivotal episode in Rubruck’s report that has received little attention up to now occurs when he and his companions are invited to the court of the Mongolian Great Khan Möngke in the winter of 1253. As previously mentioned, William belonged to the Franciscan Order that subjected its members to a very strict set of rules regarding their clothing. 47 As a result, William and his brothers not only traveled in full habit but also approached the Khan on bare feet, despite the freezing December cold in Karakorum. He reports: People gathered round us, gazing at us as if we were monsters, especially in view of our bare feet, and asked whether we had no use for our feet, since they imagined that in no time we should lose them. 48

To the modern reader, the situation that William of Rubruck relates at this point certainly has a comic edge to it and may not command any further attention. However, if we attempt to assess the scenario from his

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liche Vorstellungen, Normen und Verfahren (13.–15. Jahrhundert). München 2012, pp. 65–78. Isti Catai sunt parvi homines, loquendo multum aspirantes per nares, et hoc est generale quod omnes Orientales habent parvam aperturam oculorum. Voyage en Orient, 291– 292. Trans. Jackson (fn. 41), p. 161. Jackson’s translation gives parvi homines as ‘small race,’ which is a misleading rendition, especially in our context. De istis hominibus vidi personas multum deformes. Tangut vidi homines magnos, sed fuscos. Ingures 〈sic〉 sunt mediocris stature, sicut nostri. Voyage en Orient, 289. Trans. Jackson (fn. 41), p. 159. Jackson’s translation gives De istis hominibus as ‘men of this race,’ which is a misleading rendition, especially in our context. This point is also highlighted by Phillips (fn. 32), pp. 181, 185. On the Franciscan dress code, see chapters 2 and 4 of the ‘Regula bullata.’ In: Kajetan Esser / Engelbert Grau (eds.): Die Opuscula des hl. Franziskus von Assisis. Neue textkritische Edition. Grottaferrata (Romae) Second Edition 1989, pp. 366–371. . . . et cum circumdarent nos homines et respicerent nos tanquam monstra, maxime quia eramus nudis pedibus, et quererent si nos non indigeremus pedibus nostris, quia supponebant quod statim admitteremus eos. Voyage en Orient, 300. Trans. Jackson (fn. 41), p. 173. Jackson’s translation gives monstra as “freaks” and thus in my understanding misses the point of the passage.

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viewpoint and carefully analyze the wording of the cited passage, an underlying deep significance emerges. Rubruck has left his homeland, Christian Latin Europe, which seems to him to be the center of the developed world, and traveled to the distant, foreign East to gather information about those strange folks, to get in touch with them and, very importantly, to missionize them. He is aiming to make the strangers part of his own fold, to convert the Others to brothers. Recent research on cultural contacts has repeatedly emphasized that the Other represented a relative category in medieval perception and that its conceptualization could considerably vary depending on the situation and the occasion. 49 This assessment is of course correct. However, the relativity of the concept of the Other usually reached its limits when it zeroed in on religion. 50 We should not be wrong in assuming that in the thought of the friar William of Rubruck, Latin European Christianity was the gauge by which the otherness of an individual or a group of individuals could be measured in absolute terms. In his perspective, otherness and sameness, or strangeness and closeness, were dependent on proximity or distance to the Christian faith. 51 The Mongols who surrounded him and his brothers gazed at them in disbelief, wondering in particular about their bare feet, which is about a sign of their religion; in William’s perception, they thereby severely violated this logic. The Mongols made him, the Latin European Christian, the Other, the stranger. The words with which William reports on this experience of ‘being othered’ reveal how he felt about it and how he processed it: “[. . . ] gazing at us as if we were monsters [. . . ]” – there is more to this phrase than meets the eye. To penetrate the core of it, we have to ask what Rubruck and his times understood by the term monstrum. In the Middle Ages, monstrum referred for one thing to humans, who were born with physical anomalies, 52 and for another thing to mythical creatures, which were believed to inhabit unexplored geographical areas of

49 Cf. Albrecht Classen: Introduction: The Self, the Other, and Everything in Between: Xenological Phenomenology of the Middle Ages. In: id. (ed.): Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages. New York 2002, pp. xi – lxxiii; Phillips (fn. 32), p. 59. 50 On the role of Christendom for the perceived unity in the medieval West, see Phillips (fn. 32), pp. 60–64. 51 This statement hardly needs any evidence, especially in relation to a Franciscan monk. That it had fundamental validity in medieval Europe, however, is confirmed, for example, by the fact that hated groups of people within the Christian community were regularly othered by denying them their faith. Cf. Heng (fn. 13), pp. 37–38. 52 Cf. John Block Friedman: The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Cambridge, MA 1981, p. 3.

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the earth, especially in the east. 53 Among them were people without heads and with their eyes on their chest, people with only one leg, which they lifted up over their heads to give shade, people with dogs’ heads and so on. 54 Most Europeans in the Middle Ages were convinced of the existence of these beings in foreign lands. 55 William of Rubruck, too, reported that he had asked the Mongols about these monsters and their whereabouts. However, when they replied that they had never met such creatures before, William, as one of very few medieval travelers, raised sincere doubts about the existence of the monsters at all. 56 Nonetheless, William had already found new monsters. When he explains that the Mongols were gazing at him and his brothers tanquam monstra, this means that he felt the Mongols were looking at him and his brothers in the same way as they would have been looking at such deformed creatures from the edge of the world. An important aspect to note at this point is that the monsters of the East were generally considered human by medieval scholars. Based on a sentence of Saint Augustine, the monsters were understood as part of the human kind, descending from Adam and Noah like all other human beings. 57 In contrast to people with dark or particularly light skin color for instance, their corporal features, however, were not explained by climatological theories. They were rather understood as given by God, and that means given by nature. The paradigms on the basis of which the group of ‘monsters’ was grasped thus come very close to modern, biologistic definitions of race insofar as both suppose a natural division of humankind into distinct groups, discernible by physical traits. 58 We shortly return to the issue of why this concurrence is of particular importance in the context of our question. 53 The literature on the medieval monsters of the East is vast. The central studies are Friedman (fn. 52); Rudolf Simek: Monster im Mittelalter: Die phantastische Welt der Wundervölker und Fabelwesen. Köln / Weimar / Wien 2015; Asa Simon Mittman: Maps and Monsters in Medieval England. New York / London 2006; Rudolf Wittkower: Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters. In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), pp. 159–197. 54 A formidable gallery of the ‘monsters’ is to be found, for example, in an 11th- or 12th-century British Library manuscript of the Marvels of the East: British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B V / 1, fol. 78 v–87 v (http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay. aspx? ref= Cotton_ MS_ Tiberius_ B_ V/ 1, last accessed September 9, 2021). 55 Cf. Vanita Seth: Europe’s Indians. Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900. Durham / London 2010, pp. 178–179. 56 Rubruck (fn. 41), XXIV, p. 46; Voyage en Orient (fn. 41), p. 327. 57 St. Augustine: De civitate Dei, XVI,8, ed. B. Dombart / A. Kalb (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 48). Turnhout 1955, pp. 508–509. Opposing voices emerged, such as Albert the Great (d. 1280), but by and large the monstra’s human nature was accepted. Cf. Friedman (fn. 52), pp. 178–196. 58 Cf. Debra Higgs Strickland: Monstrosity and Race in the Late Middle Ages. In: Asa Simon Mittman / Peter J. Dendle (eds.): The Ashgate Research Companion to

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William of Rubruck’s experience of otherness is not an isolated case. For example, a comparable episode can be found in a completely different type of European travelogue some 200 years later. In 1455–1456, the Venetian merchant Alvise Cadamosto undertook two journeys to explore the west coast of Africa on behalf of Henry the Navigator. His accounts of his travels, entitled Navigazioni atlantiche, not only had a strong influence on late medieval and early modern cartography. 59 By their inclusion into widely read collections of travel narratives by the likes of Francanzano Montalboddo and Giovanni Battista Ramusio and their early translation into several European languages, Cadamosto’s accounts of his travels also played an important part in shaping the early modern image of Africa and its people in Europe. 60 During his second voyage, Cadamosto spent several months in Senegal where, among other things, he visited the local markets to learn what goods were traded there. 61 He reports on his encounter with the natives: These negroes, men and women, crowded to see me as though I were a marvel. It seemed to be a new experience to them to see Christians, whom they had not previously seen. They marvelled no less at my clothing than at my white skin. My clothes were after the Spanish fashion, a doublet of black damask, with a short cloak of grey wool over it. They examined the woollen cloth, which was new to them, and the doublet with much amazement; some touched my hands and limbs, and rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh. Finding that it was flesh they were astounded. 62

59 60 61 62

Monsters and the Monstrous. Farnham / Burlington 2012, pp. 365–386. Strickland provides important insight into the ideological and historical relation between the medieval concept of monstrosity and the idea of race. Cf. Gerald Roe Crone: Introduction. In: The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century. Trans. & ed. by id. London 1937, pp. xi – xlii, at xxxiii – xvi. Cf. Patrizia Bettella: The Marked Body as Otherness in Renaissance Italian Culture. In: Linda Kalof / William Bynum (eds.): A Cultural History of the Human Body: In the Renaissance. London / New York 2010, pp. 149–181, at 166–167. Le Navigazioni Atlantiche del Veneziano Alvise da Mosto. In: Tullia Gasparrini Leporace (ed.): Il Nuovo Ramusio, Vol. 5. Rome 1966, pp. 67–68. Questi Negri, sì mascoli como femine, me vegnia a guardar per una maravelia, e parevali nova cossa a veder un Christian in simil luogo e mai per Avanti non visto; e non de meno se meraveliavano del mio habito che de la mia biancheza – el qual habito gieta a la Spagnola con un zupon de damascho negro e un mantelin de pano griso – e guardavano el pano de lana che lor non l’ano e guardavano el zupon, e molto se stupavano; e algun me tochava le man e la braza con spudaza me fregava, per veder se la mia biancheza giera tentura over carne; e vedando pur che giera carne biancha, stavano meraviliosi. Le Navigazioni, ed. Leporaca, 68. Trans. The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century. Trans. and ed. G. R. Crone. London 1937, p. 49.

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The word Cadamosto uses to explain how he felt the Senegalese saw him, maravelia, belongs in the same semantic field as the term monstrum. Saint Augustine very prominently formulated the view that the monstrous beings were a part of God’s divine creation and an expression of his omnipotence. On this basis, in the later Middle Ages the monsters were subsumed under the category of divine miracles or marvels, and there are numerous testimonies from this time in which fabulous creatures and the monsters of the East were generally referred to as maraviglia, mirabilia, and the like. 63 When narrating the Portuguese discoveries in Africa previous to his own travels, Cadamosto himself refers to “the lands of many strange races [generationi], where marvels abounded.” 64 Not unlike William of Rubruck, Cadamosto seemingly had to realize that the strangers regarded him as the radically different. Moreover, similar to William, Cadamosto integrated this experience with his Christian European pattern of thought about strangeness and closeness, about sameness and otherness. Tellingly, in the cited passage, Cadamosto identifies himself and his group as ‘Christians’ and directly correlates the peculiarities of his clothing to the fact of him being a Christian: he is dressed the way he is dressed because he is a Christian. 65 To call oneself a Christian in Cadamosto’s time was not primarily a confession of faith. Faith was taken for granted, and it usually did not require explicit articulation. Rather, being Christian meant belonging to a certain culture. Hence, the common principle of differentiation for Cadamosto at the time of his encounter with the Senegalese seems to have been a culturalistic one very similar to that which Bartolomé de las Casas would apply a century later. Of course, Cadamosto could clearly distinguish between ‘we’ and ‘them.’ However, 63 To give just two prominent examples, in Jordan of Sévérac’s Mirabilia descripta (first half of the 14th century), the monstrous creatures of the East are consistently subsumed under and referred to as mirabilia. Meanwhile, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the monsters of hell are labelled as maraviglia, and some of them are described with clear references to the wonders of the East. Cf. Brenda Deen Schildgen: Dante and the Orient. Urbana / Chicago 2002, pp. 37–39. 64 Voyages of Cadamosto (fn. 62), ed. Crone, p. 5. In the first edition of Cadamosto’s work in Montalboddo’s Paesi novamente retrovati (1507), the passage is worded differently. However, Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi (1550) made the text famous, and here we read: . . . & discoperte terre di diuerse generationi strane, fra le quali si trouavano cose marauigliose . . . . Giovanni Battista Ramusio (ed.): Delle Navigationi et Viaggi, Vol. 1, Venice 1550, p. 105. Note that the Ramusio version uses the corresponding noun form to describe Cadamosto’s experience at the Senegal market: . . . & questi Negri si mascoli come femmine veniuano à vedermi per marauiglia, p. 114. 65 In the Middle Ages, clothes were among the foremost markers of cultural identity and subjected to a multitude of social and legal regulations. The prevailing attitude was that a person’s social and economic status, their profession and nationality, as well as their religion had to be reflected by their clothing. Cf. Catherine Richardson (ed.): Clothing Culture 1350–1650. Aldershot 2004.

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the logic behind this differentiation was based on cultural traits, and thus it was not in itself essentialistic. For at least in principle, a conversion of the strangers to Christianity and, with that, the elimination of the cultural difference, was always in the realms of possibility. Against this background, it is not surprising that the way the strangers perceived him and his men seems to have irritated Cadamosto a great deal. As to William of Rubruck, his experience of ‘being othered’ seems to have met the highest possible extent. The sharpness with which the strangers defined him as the Other on the basis of his outward appearance, according to his feelings, corresponded to the sharpness with which monsters and marvels could be distinguished from ‘normality.’ Once again, a final somewhat different example vividly illustrates the consequences that experiences of this kind could have for the European perception and interpretation of human diversity. Jumping back about 100 years, we meet a Franciscan brother of William of Rubruck by the name of Odoric of Pordenone, who was a missionary in Southeast Asia in the mid-14th century. 66 Odoric’s Liber de mirabilibus mundi had a considerable impact on the European image of Asia as is reflected in the fact that it survived in an impressive number of over 100 manuscripts. As Folker Reichert has underscored, only a few examples of the direct use of the work in medieval geography and related sciences are available. 67 However, Odoric’s account was among the main sources for one of the most popular literary works of the late Middle Ages: the previously mentioned entirely fictional, but over a long time accepted as true, “Travels of Sir John Mandeville” from the second half of the 14th century. 68 Among the many pieces of information that Mandeville clearly borrowed from Odoric are some of his impressions of the Sunda Island of Sumatra and its inhabitants. 69 Odoric describes his encounter:

66 On Odoric and his journey, see Folker Reichert: Die Asienreise Odoricos da Pordenone und die Versionen seines Berichts. Mit Edition der Aufzeichnungen nach dem mündlichen Bericht des Reisenden. In: Xenja von Ertzdorff / Gerhard Giesemann / Rudolf Schulz (eds.): Erkundung und Beschreibung der Welt: Zur Poetik der Reiseund Länderberichte. Amsterdam / New York 2003, pp. 457–509. 67 Folker Reichert: Wirklichkeit und ihre Wahrnehmung im Itinerar Odoricos da Pordenone. In: Thomas Beck et al. (eds.): Überseegeschichte: Beiträge der jüngeren Forschung. Stuttgart 1999, pp. 42–55, at 43. 68 Cf. Shayne Aaron Legassie: The Medieval Invention of Travel. Chicago / London 2017, p. 79. 69 See The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts. Ed. and trans., with an Introduction, by Iain Macleod Higgings. Indianapolis / Cambridge 2011, pp. 110–111. The passage is also picked up by Arnold von Harff in the 15th century. See The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff: Knight. Trans. and ed. with notes and an introduction by Malcolm Letts. London 1946, p. 167.

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And in that country the heat is so excessive that all the folk there, both men and women, go naked, not clothing themselves in any wise. And they mocked much at me on this matter, saying that God made Adam naked, but I must needs go against His will and wear clothes. 70

Only a few sentences later, after some remarks on the communal life of the Sumatrians, Odoric follows up by explaining: “It is an evil and a pestilent generation, and they eat man’s flesh there just as we eat beef here.” 71 In this case, there is certainly no talk of monsters or marvels; Odoric does not describe his experience of otherness in terms with which Latin European Christianity marked the radically Other. That said, the story of his encounter with the strangers first seems very similar to the one of William of Rubruck. Like him, Odoric made the experience of being othered on the grounds of his religion. In a certain sense, however, Odoric’s goes beyond Rubruck’s experience, as the Sumatrians, unlike the Mongols in Rubruck’s case, deliberately and purposefully ostracize him on the basis of his faith. Furthermore, the Sumatrians mock the missionary by exposing an alleged inconsistency of the Christian beliefs. It may not be too farfetched to assume that Odoric may have drawn the conclusion from this that a peaceful evangelization of these strangers was impossible. Consequently, he reacted by applying one of the sharpest markers of difference to the Sumatrians available to Christianity of his time by declaring them habitual and incorrigible cannibals. 72 At this point it may not come as a surprise that cannibals in the European Middle Ages were counted among the one group of human beings which always had been regarded as essentially different: the monsters of the East. 73 In a 14th or 15th century manuscript from the German language area, the according chapter of Odoric’s work is reduced to only two fragments: first, the nudity of the Sumatrians and their mockery of Odoric’s clothes and second, immediately following from this, the accusation of cannibalism. 74

70 In hac vero contrata est immensus calor et in tantum quod omnes, tam homines quam mulieres, vadunt nudi, in nullo se cooperientes, hii de me multum truffabantur, quia dicebant Deum Adam fecisse nudum et ego me malo suo velle vestire volebam. Relatio de mirabilibus orientalium Tatarorum. Edizione critica, ed. Annalia Marchisio. Florence 2016, p. 161. Trans. Cathay and the Way Thither; being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China. Trans. and ed. Henry Yule, Vol. 2. London 1913, p. 147. 71 Hec autem gens pestifera est et nequam, nam carnes humanas ita comedunt illic sicut hic comeduntur bovine vel ovine. Relatio, ed. Marchisio (fn. 70), p. 162. Trans. Cathay, ed. Yule (fn. 70), p. 148. 72 On the symbolism and significance of cannibalism in medieval Western Europe, see Geraldine Heng: Empire of Magic. Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York 2003, pp. 21–35. 73 Cf. Simek (fn. 53), pp. 206–207. 74 Cf. Relatio, ed. Marchisio (fn. 70) p. 508.

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This may well be viewed as a confirmation that the late Middle Ages did indeed draw a connection between anthropophagous practices and insurmountable otherness and depravity. 75 Remarkably, it would be precisely this line of argument with which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and his faction should reason against the possibility of a peaceful cultural and religious assimilation of the Amerindians in the 16th century. 76 Their cannibalistic rites, they argued, were a clear sign of their inability to rise to a civilized Christian state without the use of force. 77 Here, then, the intellectual connection between practices of differentiation reflected in late medieval travelogues in the context of experiences of otherness and those used in the 16th century under racist auspices clearly come to light. Even more: what we can observe here is the transition from culturalistic to essentialistic principles and from exegetical to empirical practices of differentiation.

Conclusion The episodes described above demonstrate that late medieval reports of encounters with previously unknown groups of people often show a more or less subtle dialectic of othering and being othered. Medieval European travelers to distant regions of the world that were difficult to access at the time experienced that they themselves could be perceived as completely foreign, completely different. In their processing of these experiences in the form of written reports, the travelers transferred what they had experienced into the system of thought prevailing in their culture about the diversity of divine creation, thus initiating new, essentialistic categories of distinction. These shifts in perception manifested themselves most obviously in the fact that the authors of late medieval travelogues often used semantics to describe their experiences that had previously served to distinguish between standard and deviation, between normality and monstrosity. The distinction between the monstrous people at the edge of the world and other humans is an essentialistic principle of differentiation, which up to this point had been applied exclusively to the difference between the wondrous beings of the East and the rest of humankind. Rubruck, Cadamosto, 75 The idea that cannibalism at all times functioned as a marker of cultural otherness is one of the unquestionably correct conclusions in William Arens’ famous but highly controversial study The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (1979). 76 Cf. Chet Van Duzer: Hic sunt dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters. In: Mittman / Dendle (eds.): Companion, pp. 387–435, at 427–429. 77 Cf. C˘at˘alin Avramescu: An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Princeton / Oxford 2003, pp. 105–124.

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and others now experienced that, at least in their perception, the strangers they encountered applied this mode of differentiation to the difference between themselves and them. The fact that William of Rubruck does not explain the physical characteristics of Chinese, Tibetans, and others on climatological grounds can perhaps already be viewed as a direct response to these experiences. Under their impact, he rejects the traditional culturalistic principles of distinction between human groups. Accordingly, the practice of differentiation he employs is no longer based on the interpretation of traditional book knowledge, but on the processing of newly acquired information. However, this does not mean that the European racism of the early colonial period was merely a reaction to experiences of otherness that Europeans had made abroad. A considerable difference certainly exists between the situational astonishment at and othering of an individual person or a small group of persons in direct interaction, as happened, for instance, to Odoric of Pordenone, and the abstract othering and denigration of an entire ethnic group, as Odoric himself did by ascribing habitual cannibalism to the Sumatrians in toto. Moreover, the question of which processes informed the diffusion of racial thought in the age of European expansion requires the consideration of many other aspects which, by and large, have far more to do with economic interests than with the experiences and explanations of divine creation and the world. This can already be observed in the latest of our three examples: Cadamosto’s descriptions of the various groups of people he met in Africa frequently focus on physical characteristics and often identify them as deformities and monstrous deviations. 78 Although this, too, could surely be understood in connection with his own experiences of otherness, such a depiction of foreign peoples is most probably also based on very concrete intentions aiming to justify the commercial exploitation of the country and its people. 79 78 See, for example, the description of a certain people from the kingdom of Melli: . . . they were very black in colour, with well-formed bodies . . . . The lower lip, more than a span in width, hung down, huge and red, over the breast, displaying the inner part glistening like blood. . . . This form of the lips displayed the gums and teeth . . . : they had two large teeth on each side, and large black eyes. Their appearance is terrifying, and the gums exude blood, as do the lips. Cadamosto, ed. Crone (fn. 62), p. 24. This description of a group of humans which obviously practised lip plating closely resembles the classic image of one of the monstrous races of the east, the so-called Amyctyrae. Cf. Jean Michel Massing: The Image of Africa and the Iconography of Lip-Plated Africans in Pierre Decelier’s Map of 1550. In: Thomas F. Earle / Katherine J. P. Lowe (eds.): Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge 2005, pp. 48–69, esp. 62–69. 79 Economic intentions were the most important impulse for Cadamosto’s enterprise, and his text is undoubtedly shaped by them. Cf. Cadamosto, ed. Crone (fn. 62), p. 5, where Cadamosto explains how he decided to undertake the journey due to commercial promises.

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Nonetheless, even the testimonies of contacts with strangers which do not have such a tendentious coloring, such as the account of the extremely astute and largely unbiased observer William of Rubruck, contributed to the creation of an episteme that could underpin commercially motivated racist interpretations. This again is reflected in all its blatancy in the way Europeans reacted to the encounter with Native Americans starting already in the late 15th century. From the outset, their physical characteristics were hardly explained as acquired through climate, but they were understood as inherent and natural. Furthermore, the Native Americans were indeed often identified with the monstrous races of the Middle Ages. 80 In this context, however, the conviction formulated by Saint Augustine of the human nature of the monstra began to unravel. For Sepúlveda, there seemed to be no contradiction in questioning the humanity of the Indians on the one hand and putting them close to the monsters of the East on the other. 81 In addition, exactly this combination of dehumanizing and ‘monstering’ the Indians had seemingly informed the mindset of those to whom the bull Sublimis Deus had been addressed. At this point, the essentialization of differentiation that slowly emerged in the testimonies of late medieval cultural encounters had found its first climax. In the course of the modern era, essentialism was to make a steep career and grow into the patterns of thought and action that today are commonly subsumed under the term ‘racism.’ The perception of human diversity during the Christian Middle Ages was based on different ideological and epistemological premises. With the exception of the monsters of the East, medieval Europe did not permanently and irrefutably ascribe an essentialist otherness to any group of people. Likewise, the concrete practices used to differentiate between human groups, between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ were different ones in the Middle Ages. Whether the consequence from this observation should be the overall exclusion of the epoch from the history of racism is probably not ultimately decidable. However, what is certain is that in the encounters of individual medieval travelers with hitherto unknown groups of people, or rather in the processing of these encounters, powerful ideas emerged, which fertilized the breeding ground on which colonial racism was to flourish.

80 Cf. Peter Mason: Classical Ethnography and Its Influence on the European Perception of the Peoples of the New World. In: Wolfgang Haase / Meyer Reinhold (ed.): The Classical Tradition and the Americas. European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition, Pt. 1, Vol. 1. Berlin / New York 1994, pp. 135–172, at 157–159; Friedman (fn. 52), pp. 197–207. 81 For the transfer of the properties attributed in the Middle Ages to the monstra to the Native Americans by Sepulveda, see Friedman (fn. 52), pp. 206–207.

Vartija, Devin J.

Natural Equality and Racial Inequality: An Enlightenment Paradox?

The most famous naturalist of the French Enlightenment, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon held that it is only because human beings can compare that we can have any knowledge at all: “That which is absolutely incomparable,” he wrote, “is entirely incomprehensible.” 1 Using a comparative method, Buffon presented a vast panorama of the human species in the third volume of his best-selling masterpiece Histoire naturelle, the first volumes of which were published in 1749. His sketch is punctuated by self-congratulatory Eurocentric judgments, yet he refuses the fixity of any of the races he describes, as he is clear that races are malleable entities which exist in the flux of time, shading seamlessly one into another. 2 Present-day assessments of Buffon’s legacy are striking for their contradictions. For example, Louis Sala-Molins, a prominent historian of race in French history, maintains that racism lies at the core of Buffon’s thought and that of the Enlightenment more generally. By contrast, Pierre Rosanvallon, a leading political theorist and historian of political thought, argues that Buffon inaugurated a conceptual revolution in anthropology that established a material basis for our common humanity, thus making

1 Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére, Vol. 2. Paris 1749, p. 431, my translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, Vol. 3. Paris 1749, pp. 529–30. Scholarship on Buffon is vast. Particularly helpful on “race” in Buffon are: Phillip R. Sloan: The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. In: Harold E. Pagliaro (ed.): Racism in the Eighteenth Century. Cleveland 1973, pp. 293–322; Thierry Hoquet: Biologization of Race and Racialization of the Human: Bernier, Buffon, Linnaeus. In: Nicolas Bancel / Thomas David / Dominic Thomas (eds.): The Invention of Race. Scientific and Popular Representations. London 2014, pp. 17–32; Claude-Olivier Doron: L’Homme altéré: Races et dégénérescence (XVIIe–XIXe siècles). I have avoided placing “race(s)” in quotation marks because of the frequency with which I use the word, but my critical distance from the concept should be assumed.

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Buffon fundamental to the eighteenth-century origins of the modern egalitarian ethos. 3 We are thus faced with a paradox: the Enlightenment is cited as the wellspring of both modern scientific racism and its opposite, modern egalitarianism. The disagreement between Sala-Molins and Rosanvallon is one example of a much wider phenomenon concerning the nature of the Enlightenment and its legacy regarding such controversial topics as race and racism. In this essay, I would like to offer a potential solution to this paradox by closely analyzing race in the thought of the philosophes, namely Buffon and Denis Diderot, to show that the concept was tied to a wide range of questions in eighteenth-century thought; namely, the issue of humanity’s deep past in a world in which the Bible no longer held the final word, and the controversy surrounding generation and heredity. I suggest that the physical diversity of humanity was a real intellectual problem to which the philosophes responded and racial classification in the context of a novel natural history of the human species was one of their answers. 4 This is not meant to exculpate the philosophes from the charge of prejudice or racism, something which scholarship over the past forty to fifty years has amply demonstrated. 5 It is, rather, to try to understand how Enlightenment philosophes could simultaneously have contributed to both the emancipatory political tradition of human rights as well as the dark history of racial thought without brushing the issue aside as a case of cognitive dissonance or downplaying either side in the debate. While undoubtedly embedded in a Eurocentric worldview, race in Enlightenment thought touched upon broader questions of human origins, human relatedness, and reproduction that had been newly raised by novel experiments in heredity, the rise of microscopy, and the revival of materialist explanations of natural phenomena. 6 This is not to vindicate the naturalness of the “races” of the eighteenth century (or any century, for 3 Louis Sala-Molins: Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment. Trans. John Conteh-Morgan. Minneapolis 2006, pp. 10–36; Pierre Rosanvallon: The Society of Equals. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA 2013, chap. 1. 4 I develop a similar argument in Devin J. Vartija: Revisiting Enlightenment Racial Classification: Time and the Question of Human Diversity. In: Intellectual History Review (2020). DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2020.1794161 (accessed on 10 June 2021). 5 Among many examples, see: Winthrop B. Jordan: White Over Black. American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill 1968; Michèle Duchet: Anthropologie et Histoire au Siècle des Lumières. Paris 1995; William B. Cohen: The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington 1980; Arthur Hertzberg: The French Enlightenment and the Jews. The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism. New York 1968; Pierre Pluchon: Nègres et Juifs au XVIIIe siècle. Le Racisme au Siècle des Lumières. Paris 1984. 6 On heredity, see below. There are many works on materialism in the Enlightenment, but see especially Ann Thomson: Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth

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that matter), but rather to emphasize that understanding humanity as an animal species, perhaps a distinct one but an animal species nonetheless, within the fold of nature rather than as God’s special creation between angels and brutes was a significant Enlightenment intellectual revolution and this is one eighteenth-century context into which we can place race. While the materialist, transformist, and cosmological elements in the thought of Buffon, Diderot, and others have been thoroughly studied, the ways in which all of these issues were bound up with the question of human diversity and race has not been sufficiently highlighted and this paper seeks to underline these connections. I suggest that the tension between Enlightenment languages of equality and hierarchical racial classification can be solved by noticing that race was not yet the explanation for inequality for most Enlightenment thinkers, as it would later become in much nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial science. Inequality was most conspicuously bound up with conjectural history, a Eurocentric but non-racist discourse that held that all peoples could become the equals of Europeans under the “correct” environmental conditions, very broadly construed.

The Making of the “Modern” Idea of Race “Race” has obscure origins but was a word in many European vernaculars by at least the fifteenth century, originally referring to the lineage of a noble family or prized animals such as dogs and birds of prey. 7 It maintained its connection to the idea of noble blood well into the Enlightenment. By the eighteenth century, the word had come to incorporate both heredity or lines of descent and phenotypic similarity, though eighteenth-century thinkers often did not consistently distinguish it from related concepts like “species,” “variety,” “nation,” or “people.” 8 When I refer to the “modern”

Century: La Mettrie’s “Discours préliminaire”. Geneva 1981; Neven Leddy / Avi S. Lifschitz (eds.): Epicurus in the Enlightenment. Oxford 2009; and Alan Charles Kors: Monsters and the Problem of Naturalism in French Thought. In: Eighteenth-Century Life 21 (1997), pp. 23–44. 7 Charles de Miramon: Noble Dogs, Noble Blood. The Invention of the Concept of Race in the Late Middle Ages. In: Miriam Elav-Feldon / Benjamin Isaac / Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge 2009, pp. 200–216; Arlette Jouanna: L’Idée de Race en France au XVIème Siècle et au Début du XVIIème Siècle, 1498–1614. Paris 1976. 8 Bronwen Douglas: Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference. In: The Journal of Pacific History 40 (2005), pp. 331–38; see also Jean-Frédéric Schaub / Silvia Sebastiani: Between Genealogy and Physicality: A Historiographical Perspective on Race in the Ancien Régime. In: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35 (2014), pp. 23–51; Nicholas Hudson: From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classi-

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idea of race, I mean this latter, eighteenth-century sense when the word began to incorporate both lines of descent and phenotypic similarity. A number of developments came together in the early Enlightenment to place the issue of human physical diversity on the agenda of prominent European thinkers. One of the overriding intellectual concerns from the beginnings of early modern European expansion was to integrate the newly “discovered” peoples, plants, and animals into a Classical and Christian worldview, an increasingly difficult task by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. By way of example, when the botanical garden of Leiden University first opened in 1594, it contained 1,060 plants, while just 600 plants were known from ancient sources. 9 Early modern Europeans were primarily preoccupied with integrating previously unknown peoples into biblical and classical genealogies and one of the most heated seventeenthcentury controversies surrounding biblical authority and interpretation broke out upon the publication of Isaac La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae (Men Before Adam) in 1655. He postulated that the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 in fact told of two separate creations – one of humankind as a whole and the other of the Jews, which came much later. People had existed for millennia before Adam. With this polygenist hypothesis, many problems and inconsistencies in the bible could be solved; one could reconcile its relatively short chronology with the much longer ones of the Native Americans, ancient Egyptians, and Chinese and one could answer the question of where Cain’s wife came from. It was only later that La Peyrère’s thesis would be used to explain physical differences between human groups, as La Peyrère’s main concern was to defend the authority of the bible within his eschatological worldview. 10 It is this context that makes the 1684 essay “A New Division of the Earth” by French physician and traveler François Bernier so important. 11 Its principal significance lies in its nature as an intellectual experiment in which he moves beyond the parameters of religion and language imposed by scriptural history and uses physical features alone to classify humanity into a finite number of groups, as Siep Stuurman has argued. 12 Bernier, as a follower of Pierre Gassendi, had a more empirical turn of mind than

9 10 11 12

fication in Eighteenth-Century Thought. In: Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996), pp. 247–64. Erik Jorink: Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715. Trans. Peter Mason. Leiden 2010, p. 73. Richard H. Popkin: Isaac La Peyrère,1696-1576. Leiden 1987. François Bernier: Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par les differentes Especes ou Races d’hommes. . . In: Journal des Sçavans 24 (1684), pp. 133–40. Siep Stuurman: François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification. In: History Workshop Journal 50 (2000), pp. 1–21; Pierre H. Boulle: François Bernier and

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the Cartesians and wrote of human beings as possessing a dual nature – spiritual / rational and sensitive / irrational. He divided the human species into four races. His “first” race comprises the inhabitants of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, and America. The second race comprises sub-Saharan Africans, the third encompasses the East and Northeast Asians, and the fourth includes only the Sami, or “Lapps.” The first race is the standard by which he describes the other races. Bernier also considers the beauty of women from various regions, which is rejected by some as fanciful French writing but in fact fits with the sexualized male gaze that was so instrumental in the invention of the modern racial classificatory system. 13 In addition to the move from sacred to natural history, the human / animal divide gained renewed salience in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the wake of anatomical investigations of the higher primates by Nicolaes Tulp and Edward Tyson in the Dutch Republic and England, respectively. 14 As Justin Smith has demonstrated, race rose to prominence in the early modern period, particularly in the eighteenth century, once the Christian view of humans as rational beings endowed with a soul became less prominent and the view of humanity as a material, animal species that can and should be classified along with all other living forms gradually took its place. 15 These developments cannot be understood outside of the context of expanding European colonialism in the early modern period, illustrated, for example, by the fact that many chimpanzees came to Europe via the New World on slave ships. 16 At the same time, however, it is important not to reduce the invention of the concept of race to justifications for European hegemony alone, as this is both to misunderstand the intellectual world from which modern race emerged and to deny non-Europeans agency in the development of

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the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race. In: Sue Peabody / Tyler Stovall (eds.): The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham 2003, pp. 11–27. Londa Schiebinger: The Anatomy of Difference. Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science. In: Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990) No. 4, pp. 387–405. Nicolaes Tulp: Observationes Medicae libri tres [Medical Observations, in Three Books]. Amsterdam 1672 [1641]; Edward Tyson: Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie. London 1699; Gunnar Broberg: Homo sapiens – Linnaeus’s Classification of Man. In: Tore Frängsmyr (ed.): Linnaeus: The Man and His Work. Berkeley 1983, pp. 156–94; Raymond Corbey / Bert Theunissen (eds.): Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600. Leiden 1995, section 1; Silvia Sebastiani: A ‘Monster with Human Visage’: The Orangutan, Savagery, and the Borders of Humanity in the Global Enlightenment. In: History of the Human Sciences 32 (2019), pp. 80–99. Justin E. H. Smith: Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference. Race in Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton 2015. Sebastiani (fn. 14), p. 88.

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novel taxonomies. As Anthony Pagden has shown, given that the ideology of early modern European empire was predicated on the idea of Christianizing and “civilizing” the non-European other, the idea of fundamentally separate and inferior “races” of non-Europeans was inimical to this early modern ideology. 17 Additionally, Nancy Shoemaker has demonstrated that the label “red” for Native Americans was likely first used by Native Americans themselves and only belatedly adopted by Euro-American colonists. Native Americans had to fit Europeans into their worldview and reading meaning into observable bodily differences was one way of making sense of an increasingly complex world. 18 In the wake of the late eighteenthcentury Atlantic Revolutions, race would go on to become an all-encompassing category of being that entailed physical, moral, and psychological attributes and which often served a white-supremacist agenda, but we should be careful not to project this later history back into the eighteenth century. 19 The final element that went into making human diversity a prominent and controversial topic by the early Enlightenment was the debate surrounding epigenesis and preformationism. 20 The invention and improvement of the microscope in the seventeenth century had given impetus to fierce debates concerning the mechanism of inheritance, as male gametes had been viewed for the first time. William Harvey, famed for his discovery of the circulation of blood, also investigated the material aspects of reproduction in the mid-1600s. 21 Though Harvey had not seen the mammalian egg, a discovery that was not definitively made until 1827, he postulated the existence of eggs in all female animals, including humans, as

17 Anthony Pagden: The Peopling of the New World. Ethnos, Race, and Empire in Early Modern Europe. In: Miriam Elav-Feldon / Benjamin Isaac / Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge 2009, pp. 292–312; see also Joan-Pau Rubiés: Were Early Modern Europeans Racist? In: Amos Morris-Reich / Dirk Rupnow (eds.): Ideas of “Race” in the History of the Humanities. Cham 2017, pp. 33–88. 18 Nancy Shoemaker: How Indians Got to Be Red. In: American Historical Review 102 (1997), pp. 625–44. 19 Devin Vartija: Racism and Modernity. In: International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 7 (2019), pp. 1–15; Frank Dikötter: The Racialization of the Globe: Historical Perspectives. In: Manfred Berg / Simon Wendt (eds.): Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation. New York 2011, pp. 20–40; Nancy Stepan: The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Basingstoke 1984. 20 Joyce Chaplin: “Race.” In: David Armitage / Michael J. Braddick (eds.): The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Basingstoke 2002, p. 164. 21 William Harvey: On the Generation of Animals. In: The Works of William Harvey. Trans. R. Willis. London 1847, p. 170; Clara Pinto-Correia: The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation. Chicago 1997; Justin E. H. Smith (ed.): The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge 2006.

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a necessary part of reproduction, essentially inaugurating the modern controversy between epigenesis and preformationism. Preformationism is the theory that the embryo develops from a completely preformed version of the organism, and epigenesis is the now-accepted theory that the embryo develops from an undifferentiated egg cell after fertilization. Added to the preformationist theory was the “preexistence of germs” theory at the end of the seventeenth century, which held that preformed organisms existed “in germ” and that these germs were created directly by God at the time of creation, either in the female egg (the “ovist” variant of the theory) or in male sperm (the “animalculist” variant). 22 Preexistence was the dominant theory of generation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, being defended by some of the leading microscopists of the day such as Jan Swammerdam and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. 23 But if one follows the preexistence theory to its logical conclusion, one must be committed to polygenism, as it would mean that God created separate races of humankind that existed in the ovary of Eve that He caused to be born at a given point in time. 24 Additionally, this theory made it very difficult to account for even the most basic aspects of heredity, such as the likeness between parents and offspring. 25 Despite some of the awkward issues raised by preexistence theory, it fit into the dominant providential worldview of some strands of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Following the seventeenth-century improvements to the microscope, the most significant development in the study of generation occurred in the 1740s with Genevan naturalist Abraham Trembley’s observations of the polyp or fresh-water hydra. 26 The hydra defied easy classification in that it displays properties of both animals and plants and, most remarkably, it can generate an entire new organism after being sliced into any number of pieces – if the “head” of the organism is cut off, it generates a new

22 George Garden: A Discourse Concerning the Modern Theory of Generation. In: Philosophical Transactions 16 (1691), pp. 474–83; for the best discussion of these issues, which includes an explanation of the difference between preformationism and the pre-existence of germs theory, see Jacques Roger: The Life Sciences in EighteenthCentury French Thought. Trans. Robert Ellrich. Ed. Keith R. Benson. Stanford 1997, pp. 259 ff. 23 Elizabeth B. Gasking: Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828. Baltimore 1967, pp. 51–61. 24 Sloan (fn. 2), pp. 295–97. 25 Mary Terrall: Speculation and Experiment in Enlightenment Life Sciences. In: Staffan Müller-Wille / Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.): Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1800. Cambridge, MA 2007, p. 256. 26 Abraham Trembley: Mémoires pour servir a l’Histoire d’un Genre de Polypes d’Eau Douce, à Bras en Forme de Cornes. Leiden 1744.

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“tail” and if the “tail” is cut off, it generates a new “head.” This lent a major impetus to materialist philosophy, as Julien Offray de La Mettrie used the findings to advance a materialist, transformist view of nature and humanity in L’Homme machine (1748) which, in turn, had an impact on Buffon’s reflections on generation and on Diderot’s transition from deism to atheist materialism. 27

Buffon and the Natural History of Humanity It is no accident that the Enlightenment thinkers to contribute to racial discourse in the mid-eighteenth-century – Buffon, Diderot, and PierreLouis Moreau de Maupertuis most prominent among them – criticized pre-existence theories and sought an explanation for human physical differences in history using natural processes. 28 This is because the appeal to the divine in scientific explanation advanced by most of the leading seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naturalists was unacceptable to Buffon and many of his contemporaries. As Margaret C. Jacob has recently argued, regardless of whether or not eighteenth-century thinkers were philosophical materialists, materialism, understood to imply the absence of divine intervention, became the standard in the social and natural sciences from the late eighteenth century onwards as a result of what she has called the “Secular Enlightenment.” 29 Buffon is well-known for offering the first comprehensive and unapologetic treatment of humanity as a species that is firmly within the fold of nature, possessing a natural history just like every other species. He was at the center of a transformation in the understanding of nature during the eighteenth century in what Phillip Sloan has called the “Buffonian revolution.” Buffon revived Descartes’s interest in the deep history of the cosmos and the earth and, thanks in part to his work, “re-established [at mid-century] was the concept of nature as a substantive, causal agency.” 30 He made fundamental contributions to both the life and the earth sciences, performing experiments on the cooling of iron to determine the age of the earth. 31 In his published writings, his claim 27 Aram Vartanian: Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism. In: Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950) No. 3, pp. 259–86. 28 Charles T. Wolfe: Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s Biological Project. In: Ohad Nachtomy / Justin E. H. Smith (eds.): The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford 2014, pp. 181–201. 29 Margaret C. Jacob: The Secular Enlightenment. Princeton 2019, p. 105. 30 Phillip Sloan: Natural History. In: Knud Haakonssen (ed.): The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Vol. 2. Cambridge 2006, pp. 903–38. 31 Jacques Roger: Introduction to Les Époques de la Nature by Buffon. Paris 1988.

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that the earth was around 75,000 years old stretched the boundaries of the accepted biblical chronology by 69,000 years and even his most irreverent contemporaries would have found it difficult to accept Buffon’s privatelyformulated hypothesis that the earth is likely closer to 10 million years of age. 32 The change in the perception of time within naturalist explanations of human physical diversity is one of the most important elements for understanding the novelty of race in the Enlightenment. Naturalist explanations for human physical diversity go back to antiquity as part of climatic theory. What is remarkable is that the migration, both forced and voluntary, of an increasing number of people throughout the globe during the early modern period cast the main tenets of this theory into doubt. Already in the sixteenth century, George Best, in his A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discovery (1578), argued that blackness resides in the blood of Africans and is not a result of exposure to the sun, as he aimed to assuage the fears of potential English travelers to Africa that being exposed to the hot sun would turn them black. 33 Confusion about just how long it would take for light skin to darken in warmer climes or dark skin to lighten in colder climes was still common in the eighteenth century. There was a widely reported story of a colony of Portuguese in west Africa who had become entirely black over just a few generations without mixing with the indigenous population. 34 On the whole, however, mounting empirical evidence that skin color did not change as quickly as some had thought led to diverse conclusions among various thinkers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. New anatomical investigations revealed pigmentation to be a superficial part of human anatomy, yet, in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, many Europeans wished to fix blackness and understand its “nature” as a peculiarity. 35 What became clear is that the explanatory matrix inherited from antiquity required revision. For Buffon, this novel understanding of nature and its history had important implications for how he theorized human diversity. Humanity, for Buffon, is a single species, not because Scripture insists so but be-

32 Paolo Rossi: The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago 1984, chap. 15. 33 Tim Mc Inerney: Ham’s Curse and Genealogical Race in the Early Modern World. In: Michel Prum (ed.): Catégoriser l’autre. Paris 2017, p. 102. 34 See, for example, abbé Demanet’s Nouvelle Histoire de l’Afrique française (1767), cited in Ann Thomson: Issues at Stake in Eighteenth-Century Racial Classification. In: Cromohs 8 (2003), p. 4. 35 Craig Koslofsky: Superficial Blackness?: Johann Nicolas Pechlin’s De Habitu et Colore Aethiopum Qui Vulgo Nigritae (1677). In: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 (2018), pp. 140–58.

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cause human beings can produce fertile offspring with one another across whatever group divisions one makes. 36 Buffon postulated that each species contains a moule intérieur which can undergo changes as a result of environmental influences that may become hereditary over the centuries. He believed that the original moule intérieur at any given species’ creation is a species’ best form and still can be found in nature. Unsurprisingly, for Buffon, humanity’s original form was white and all non-European peoples have “degenerated” from this primeval homogeneity as a result of negative influences such as “hostile” climates and “uncivilized” lifestyles. 37 If one defines racism as hostility towards a group that is designated as permanently, inescapably “lesser,” 38 then Buffon was not a racist thinker, as environmental factors played a central role in his theorization of human diversity. 39 Interestingly, Buffon’s conception for the requisite length of time for changes to occur in the bodily form of a given “variety” of people increased throughout his career. In his initial reflections on the natural history of humanity, published in the third volume in 1749, Buffon had speculated that it would take between eight and twelve generations for “some negroes” to become “much less black than their ancestors” in northern climates. 40 The young Buffon thus imagined that it would take a maximum of about 360 years for significant changes in pigmentation to occur. 41 By the fourteenth volume of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, published in 1766, we find the section “Of the Degeneration of Animals” charting how climate, food, and lifestyle have acted across time to change living forms, including human beings. 42 He writes of how these elements have acted upon the human species to produce distinct varieties which are not permanent, but nonetheless require long periods of time to change. Here we see the impact of investigations into fossils and the earth’s deep history, perhaps

36 On Buffon’s concept of a species, see Paul L. Farber: Buffon and the Concept of Species. In: Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972), pp. 259–84; Phillip R. Sloan: From Logical Universals to Historical Individuals: Buffon’s Idea of Biological Species. In: Scott Atran, et al. (eds.): Histoire du Concept d’Espèce dans les Sciences de la Vie. Paris 1987, pp. 101–40. 37 Buffon (fn. 2), p. 528. 38 George M. Fredrickson: Racism: A Short History. Princeton 2002, p. 9. 39 Hannah Augstein (ed.): Introduction to Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850. Bristol 1996, p. xviii. 40 Buffon (fn. 2), p. 524. 41 Assuming that a generation is approximately thirty years. 42 On the ways in which naturalists like Buffon slipped between the social and the natural worlds and positioned themselves as competent interpreters of nature who could serve a useful social function, see E. C. Spary: Utopia’s Garden. French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. Chicago 2000.

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most notably that of Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, whose unpublished Les anecdotes de la nature had a great impact on Buffon. 43 Buffon maintains that white is the original color of humankind and speculates that it would take between five thousand and twenty thousand years for sub-Saharan Africans living in northern Europe to become white without any genetic mixing with the indigenous population. 44 The ambiguity of Buffon’s natural history of the human species is crystallized in his reception in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was appropriated by both abolitionists seeking to defend the common humanity and basic equality of black peoples with whites, and by racist apologists of slavery. 45 Partially for this reason, it is important to look beyond questions of ethnocentricity, equality, and inequality to what Buffon was doing when using the concept race. While Buffon’s division of humanity into “races” or “varieties” was clearly stained by self-congratulatory Eurocentric judgments, it was also an extension of methods and principles from natural history to the human species in order to advance an understanding of humanity’s origins and explain its characteristics. Among the central principles of Buffon’s natural history were that nature contains an innate causal agency and that life is a property of matter itself. As Buffon wrote, “the living and the animate, instead of being a metaphysical degree of beings, is a physical property of matter” 46 and that “only individuals really exist in nature [. . . ] genera, families, and classes only exist in our imagination.” 47 This means that human physical diversity is a product of environmental causes acting upon the human species across time to produce changes that are temporary. This strand of his thought was part of the Enlightenment’s engagement with humanity on a new explanatory axis that superseded a parochial biblical genealogical framework. Buffon used the concept of race to refer to peoples that share the same phenotype and a common origin, as when he explains the relationship between the Tartars, Chinese, and Russians: “This Tartar blood is mixed on one side with the Chinese and on the other with the eastern Russians. This mix did not make the traits of that race completely disappear, as

43 Roger (fn. 31), p. lxxvi. 44 Buffon: Histoire naturelle, Vol. 14. Paris 1766, p. 313. 45 On the egalitarian legacy of Buffon, see Nicholas Guyatt: Bind Us Apart. How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. New York 2016, pp. 22–26; on the role of Buffon in nineteenth-century (racist) physical anthropology, see Claude Blanckaert: Buffon and the Natural History of Man. Writing History and the ‘Foundational Myth’ of Anthropology. In: History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993) No. 1, pp. 13–50. 46 Buffon (fn. 1), p. 17. 47 Buffon: Histoire naturelle, Vol. 1. Paris 1749, p. 38.

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there are many Tartar faces among the Russians.” 48 But the meaning of race in the eighteenth century was very unstable, as authors often used it interchangeably with related but distinct concepts such as “people,” “nation,” or “species.” The slipperiness of Buffon’s use of the term “race” becomes clear when he writes that it is necessary to divide Blacks into two different “races,” the “Nègres” and the “Cafres,” and subsequently refers to “these two species [espèces] of black men.” 49 In general, it is a combination of physical and cultural resemblance attached to ideas of patterns of inheritance that lies at the basis of Buffon’s concept of race. Buffon’s concluding remarks to the chapter “Varieties in the Human Species” are worth reiterating: Everything thus contributes to proving that humankind is not composed of essentially different species; on the contrary, there was originally only one species of men, which, having multiplied and spread itself over the entire surface of the earth, underwent various changes resulting from the influence of climate, of differences in food, of lifestyle, of epidemic diseases, and also from the infinitely varied mixture of more or less similar individuals. 50

We see here the essential elements of Buffon’s natural history and anthropology coming together. There is only one human species, contrary to what some prominent polygenists had recently concluded, and the physical diversity of the species has resulted from “environmental” – both cultural and natural – factors acting upon humanity across time. Buffon thus advanced a renewed defense of monogenism grounded in the new science rather than in Scripture in which races are contingent and malleable entities.

Maupertuis, Diderot, and the Consequences of Materialism Diderot copied this quotation and much else from Buffon for his article on the human species in one of the most famous and influential undertakings of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, published in seventeen folio volumes of text between 1751 and 1765. 51 Another article from the Encyclopédie nicely captures the older paradigm of preformationism concerning human diversity that Buffon and Diderot rejected – the article “Nègre” by the Calvinist encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey. Born in

48 49 50 51

Buffon (fn. 2), p. 384. Ibid., p. 453, emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 529–30. Denis Diderot: Humaine (espèce). In: Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Vol. 8. Paris 1765, pp. 344–48.

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Berlin in 1711 to a family of French Huguenot refugees, Formey became the perpetual secretary of the Academy of Berlin and sought primarily to reconcile Enlightenment thought with Christianity by popularizing Christian Wolff ’s philosophy. 52 He directly attacked both Diderot and Rousseau in a number of works published from the 1740s onwards that were critical of a more radical strain within Enlightenment thought. It is thus perhaps surprising that he became a contributor to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie project. But this happened in a circuitous way, as Formey had begun writing his own dictionary of the arts and sciences already in 1742 and, having heard of the ambitious Encyclopédie publishing project, sold the 1,800 pages of his manuscript to Diderot and d’Alembert in 1749. 53 Many of his dictionary entries gleaned whole passages unacknowledged from Émilie du Châtelet’s Institution de physique. 54 In his article “Nègre,” Formey advances a preformationist view of reproduction, postulating that a white Eve contained all of the eggs for all future generations and that providence would have determined when more darkly pigmented peoples would be born. 55 The article is permeated by a language of difference, as Formey states that Africans differ from all other men [sic] not only by the color of their skin, but also by “all of their facial features, the large and flat nose, the big lips, and the wool instead of hair.” He states that they “seem to constitute a new species of men.” 56 He goes on to describe the skin color of all of the principal populations of human beings across the world, holding to the climatic explanation of physical difference and therefore partially contradicting the first part of his article. Upon seeing a Danish woman with white skin and blonde hair, Formey remarks that an observer “would not believe that the object he is seeing and the African he has just seen are both women.” 57 Formey emphasizes what he sees as the stark physical differences between human beings and fails to offer a coherent explanation for the origin of these differences, as

52 E. Marcu: Un Encyclopédiste oublié: Formey. In: Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 53 (1953) No. 3, pp. 296–305. 53 Frank A. Kafker: Gua de Malves and the ‘Encyclopédie’. In: Diderot Studies 19 (1978), pp. 93–102. 54 Glenn Roe: ‘A Sheep in Wolff ’s Clothing’: Émilie du Châtelet’s and the Encyclopédie. In: Eighteenth-Century Studies 51 (2018) No. 2, pp. 179–96. 55 Johan Heinrich Samuel Formey: Negre. In: Encyclopédie. Vol. 11. Paris 1765, p. 77; the construction of Blackness in the Encyclopédie is expertly analyzed in Andrew Curran: Diderot and the Encyclopédie’s Construction of the Black African. In: Frédéric Ogée / Anthony Strugnell (eds.): Diderot and European Culture. Oxford 2006, pp. 35– 53 and Andrew S. Curran: The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore 2011, pp. 149–57. 56 Formey (fn. 55), p. 76. 57 Formey (fn. 55).

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both divine providence and climate play a role, but exactly how they relate to one another remains unclear. He lifted significant sections from Maupertuis’s Vénus physique, the most popular philosophical investigation that responded to the sensational visit of an albino boy of African descent to Paris in 1744 and made an important contribution in support of epigenesis. 58 While Maupertuis was a monogenist who believed humanity’s original color to be white, Formey only quoted the parts of Vénus physique which can easily be interpreted as polygenist. 59 He alludes to the monogenist / polygenist debate when he writes, “All of the people that we have just seen, such a diversity of men, did they all come from the same mother? We are not permitted to doubt it.” 60 Formey seems to have been attracted to polygenism as an explanation for what he sees as the bewildering diversity of humankind and perhaps only stopped short of fully accepting it due to his Christian piety. 61 He also argued against universal education, postulating that some classes in society must bear the burden of producing food and other items for consumption and one would jeopardize these necessary structures of subordination if one were to educate people beyond their station; it is for this reason that he also accepted slavery. 62 Maupertuis’s Vénus physique, the text that Formey copied from, was a short philosophical treatise published anonymously in 1745 in Paris which became instantly popular among Europe’s leading intellectuals, including Buffon. 63 It elegantly brought together ancient and modern theories of generation and inheritance with a survey of human diversity. Maupertuis was able to point to the main shortcomings of preformationism – the theory’s inability to account for resemblance between parents and children principal among them – and speculate about how inheritance might work in the framework of epigenesis, displaying a typical Enlightenment rejection for the building of rigid philosophical systems. 64 Bringing together Formey’s article “Nègre” and Maupertuis’s Vénus physique, we see clearly the philosophical and religious issues raised by controversies surrounding generation and explanations of human diversity. Epigenesis could more easily account for human diversity within a monogenist perspective, but 58 59 60 61

Curran: The Anatomy of Blackness, p. 90. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis: Vénus physique. N.p., 1745. Formey (fn. 55), p. 77. Frank A. Kafker / Serena L. Kafker: The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the “Encyclopédie”. Oxford 1988, pp. 140–44. 62 Formey: Traité d’éducation morale. Liège 1773, pp. 22–3. 63 Mary Terrall: The Man Who Flattened the Earth. Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment. Chicago 2002, chap. 10. 64 Maupertuis (fn. 59), chap. 16.

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the theory raised thorny questions regarding whether motion and life can inhere in matter. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were prominent defenders of epigenesis who were not materialists, English naturalist John Needham most prominent among them, so we should not assume that epigenesis always went hand-in-hand with atheist materialism. 65 But the connection was strong, revealed by the acute concern that various eighteenth-century naturalists like Needham and his Swiss colleague Charles Bonnet had for combatting the potentially irreligious effects of materialist interpretations of experiments on generation. 66 Diderot backed Maupertuis’s theorization of epigenesis and extended Buffon’s reflections on humanity’s deep history. 67 Ann Thomson has shown that Diderot was fascinated by the connection between exterior form and inner character and intelligence on an individual and group level throughout his life. 68 But crucially, race never became a fundamental category or ordering principle in Diderot’s thought. Diderot’s race concept was part of his broader materialist view of nature and radical questioning of humanity’s supposedly separate and special status, a status that even his acquaintance and fellow materialist Buffon upheld. 69 Diderot broke with Buffon’s concept of a moule intérieur in his anonymously published materialist tract of 1753, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature [Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature]. He imagined species growing, mutating, and going extinct across very long stretches of geological time. 70 He wrote, Just as in the animal and plant kingdoms, an individual begins, so to speak, to grow, to endure, to wither and pass away, would it not be the same for entire species? . . . the philosopher, left to his speculations, can he not conjecture that

65 Renato G. Mazzolini / Shirley A. Roe: Science Against the Unbelievers. The Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, 1760–1780. Oxford 1986; more generally on the philosophical background of debates surrounding generation, see Shirley A. Roe: Matter, Life, and Generation. Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate. Cambridge 1981. 66 Mazzolini / Roe (fn. 65), chap. 4. 67 However, they disputed each other on many points. See Charles T. Wolfe: Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-Diderot Debate. In: Early Science and Medicine 15 (2010) No. 1–2, pp. 38–65. 68 Ann Thomson: Diderot, le Matérialisme et la Division de l’Espèce Humaine. In: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 26 (1999), pp. 197–211; Ann Thomson: Diderot, Roubaud et l’Esclavage. In: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 35 (2003), pp. 69–93; Thomson (fn. 34). 69 Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness, p. 111. 70 Lester G. Crocker: Diderot and Eighteenth Century French Transformism. In: Bentley Glass / Owsei Temkin / William L. Straus, Jr. (eds.): Forerunners of Darwin: 1745– 1859. Baltimore 1959, pp. 114–43.

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. . . the embryo, formed from these [material] elements, has passed through an enormous number of organizations and developments? 71

Diderot’s knowledge of new researches into fossils and speculations of great upheavals in the earth’s long history came together with his materialist worldview to give birth to what Aram Vartanian has called Diderot’s “evolutionary materialism.” 72 Whereas Buffon held that fairly radical change is possible within a single species across a vast stretch of time, there were clear limits to the extent of this change – it had to occur within the bounds established by the moule intérieure. 73 Specifically regarding the human species, Diderot’s wonderfully playful and provocative text D’Alembert’s Dream encourages the reader to think of the fundamentally unstable state of nature, including humanity’s form: “Who knows which moment in the succession of animal generations we are now at? Who knows if this deformed biped, who is only four-feet tall, whom in the regions of the pole we still call a man, and who would soon lose this name if he deformed a little more, is not the image of a species that is passing?” 74 The objectionable Eurocentric prejudice is obvious but this should not mask what Diderot was trying to do in this text: to work out the implications of a materialist worldview for humankind as a physical and moral species. Diderot expanded on these themes in one of his last works, the Elements of Physiology, composed between 1769 and his death in 1784 and published posthumously. 75 Joanna Stalnaker and Caroline Warman have argued that this work was a comprehensive account of humankind based on materialist philosophy that rejected any kind of theism or providentialism. 76 Diderot kept abreast of advances in experiments concerning heredity and generation and, as a result of Lazzaro Spallanzani’s influential experiments, admitted that his conception of epigenesis had to be modified. Spallanzani 71 Denis Diderot: Pensées sur l’Interprétation de la Nature. Ed. Colas Duflo. Paris 2005, p. 114. 72 Aram Vartanian: Diderot and Descartes. A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment. Princeton 1953, p. 97 and chap. 4; on the revolution in thinking about deep time, and specifically the importance of Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed, see Claudine Cohen: Science, Libertinage et Clandestinité à l’Aube des Lumières. Le Transformisme de Telliamed. Paris 2011. 73 Sloan (fn. 30), p. 922. 74 Denis Diderot: Oeuvres complètes de Diderot. Ed. J. Assézat. Vol. 2. Paris 1875, p. 133. 75 Paolo Quintili: introduction to Éléments de physiologie by Denis Diderot. Paris 2004, p. 12. 76 Joanna Stalnaker: Diderot’s Brain. In: Mary Helen McMurran / Alison Conway (eds.): Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives. Toronto 2016, pp. 230–53; Caroline Warman: The Atheist’s Bible. Diderot and the “Éléments de Physiologie”. Cambridge 2020.

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was a staunch preformationist who argued against spontaneous generation and epigenesis in an essay published in Italian in 1765 with results from experiments on microscopic organisms in infusions. 77 Diderot writes: “I admit the pre-existing germs, but having nothing in common with beings. It is a production consistent with development. A production which did not exist and which begins to exist and whose successive expansion forms a new being similar to the first.” 78 Diderot was here trying to accommodate Spallanzani’s findings while maintaining epigenesis, as he argues that although germs may exist, there is no proof that they resemble the entire organism that the germ will later become. And in the Elements, Diderot expresses his transformist ideas most explicitly, connecting them to the time revolution that he helped usher in: One must not believe that animals have always been or will always remain as we now see them. It is the effect of an eternal period of time, after which their colour and their form seem to maintain a steady state, but this state is only illusory. The general order of nature changes incessantly. In the midst of this vicissitude, can the duration of a species remain the same? No. 79

Diderot was acutely aware of the myriad philosophical, theological, and moral issues thrown up by new discoveries concerning generation and heredity and dared to follow a materialist interpretation of nature, including humanity’s place in nature, to its logical conclusion. In one of Diderot’s most imaginative texts, the Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage [Supplément au voyage de Bougainville], the tension between equality and inequality in his anthropology comes most clearly to the fore. Diderot was fascinated by the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s description of his encounter with Tahitians during the latter’s circumnavigation of the globe and wrote an imagined dialog between characters “A” and “B” with intervening sections that include a wise old Tahitian man, a French chaplain, and a young, perceptive Tahitian named Orou. 80 The text presents a strong anti-imperialist argument and explores many themes, the strictures of Christian sexual morality prominent among them. There is an inherent tension in how Diderot presents race in this text. After the chaplain has broken his vows by sleeping with one of Orou’s 77 78 79 80

Lazzaro Spallanzani: Dissertazioni due dell’abate Spallanzani. Modena 1765. Denis Diderot: Éléments de physiologie. Ed. Paolo Quintili. Paris 2004, p. 253. Ibid., p. 137. The text is available in English in Diderot: Political Writings. Trans. and eds. John Hope Mason / Robert Wokler. Cambridge 1992, pp. 31–76; on this text, see Dena Goodman: The Structure of Political Argument in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. In: Diderot Studies 21 (1983), pp. 123–37; Madeleine Dobie: Going Global: Diderot, 1770–1784. In: Diderot Studies 31 (2009), pp. 7–23.

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daughters, and after other French travelers have also slept with the libertine Tahitian women, Orou explains to the chaplain that this was part of a plan to increase Tahiti’s dwindling population and mix Tahitian genetic material with that of the French. Orou tells the chaplain, “While more robust and healthy than you, we saw at once that you surpassed us in intelligence, and we immediately marked out for you some of our most beautiful women and girls to receive the seed of a race superior to ours. We tried an experiment which may still bring us success.” 81 At first glance, it may seem that Diderot supported a hierarchy of races, with Europeans on top. But the fact that Diderot placed a trick in which the French were outwitted in the mouth of his imagined Tahitian Orou belies this point. This reading is reinforced by the fact that the main thrust of Diderot’s Supplement is to show the morally corrupt state of eighteenth-century Europe and the enlightened, rational ways of the Tahitians. In the world of Diderot’s Supplement, cultural relativism reigns supreme and our main task is to find a universal morality to bridge these differences, something that Diderot finds in the standard of “the general welfare and individual utility,” a standard that Tahiti upholds better than Diderot’s France. 82 We see here the tension between the egalitarian anthropological vindication of cultural pluralism and the inegalitarianism at the heart of conjectural history, where the French lie further ahead on the “arrow of time” that underlies Diderot’s (and many other Enlightenment thinkers’) interpretation of human history. 83 Crucially, Diderot’s text goes beyond the classic “noble savage” trope. Sankar Muthu has demonstrated that noble savage discourse was to a certain extent dehumanizing in that, while European thinkers used it to celebrate the virtuousness of various non-European peoples (usually Amerindians), it often promulgated an image of the “savage” as a less-than-fully rational human being who blindly follows nature’s laws. 84 Diderot was aware of this and although he presented the Tahitians as living in a society that is “closer to nature,” this is because of the Tahitians’ careful social planning. These wise policies ensure that human desires are more easily met than they might otherwise be in the “artificial” state that all human beings live in as a result of our nature as fundamentally cultural beings. 85 81 Diderot (fn. 80), p. 64. 82 Ibid., p. 61. 83 Siep Stuurman: The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. Cambridge, MA 2017, pp. 323–27; see also Diderot’s comments on “savages” in Diderot: Fragments Politiques Échappés du Portefeuille d’un Philosophe. Ed. Gianluigi Goggi. Paris 2011, pp. 141–46. 84 Sankar Muthu: Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton 2003, chap. 2. 85 Ibid., pp. 52 ff.

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Conclusion Race is a social construction. And because it is a social construction, many scholars have sought to find the origins of racial thinking in the workings of power alone. In this essay, I have attempted to show that while race is undoubtedly a social construction, the eighteenth-century world in which the modern idea of race emerged was bound up with questions that go beyond the issue of creating and maintaining group hierarchies. Indeed, the concept was used by thinkers, such as Diderot, who subverted the alltoo-common ethnocentrism that every culture possesses to a greater or lesser extent. The climatic theory that Europeans had inherited from antiquity to explain human physical variation came under increasing strain by the eighteenth century. Populations living in similar climes were found to have different features, including skin color, and groups who had emigrated and settled far from their native lands were found not to alter in appearance as quickly as many had thought. With the loss of the loose coherence provided by the Bible and a select number of classical authors and the literal expansion of the world for early modern Europeans, Enlightenment thinkers were attempting to provide new answers to thorny old questions regarding humanity’s place in nature and the relationship between the realm of nature and the realm of culture. 86 I have suggested that race was at least partially a response to these lacunas in the eighteenth-century human sciences – controversies surrounding the mechanisms of inheritance, humanity’s place in the natural world and within what we might call deep time. It is this perspective that helps to resolve the paradox of Enlightenment egalitarianism and racialism. The Enlightenment bequeathed to the modern world powerful discourses of inequality but what is arguably its most important legacy in the realm of social philosophy is that equality had gained the benefit of the doubt.

86 Georges Benrekassa: De Robert Antelme à Diderot. In: Sarga Moussa (ed.): L’Idée de ‘race’ dans les Sciences Humaines et Littérature (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles). Paris 2003, pp. 55–70.

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Arguing against Monogenism: Strategies in Polygenist Argumentation against the Unity of Humankind

Introduction This paper deals with arguments and discursive practices used in support of an anthropological theory that was popular in the 18th and 19th century: polygenism. 1 Polygenists held the belief that there are multiple origins of humankind and, hence, multiple species of man. Simply put, the dispute over the human origin was a controversy between those naturalists who saw the different human phenotypes as races and those naturalists who believed those races to be in fact actual species. It was not necessarily a debate between naturalists who defended slavery and those who condemned it or between naturalists fighting for human equality and those rejecting it. Instead, monogenists as well as polygenists were defenders and opponents of slavery, 2 very few believed in actual equality. Nancy Stepan summed this up as follows: “Faith in unity proved more lasting than faith in the equality of man.” 3 The question whether there is only one origin for all of humankind or whether there are multiple origins was asked for centuries and occupied the minds of naturalists until the end of the 19th century. In 17th century Europe it was mostly debated in a theological context and was linked to the name Isaac de La Peyrère and the practice of biblical exegesis. 4 In the

1 I would like to sincerely thank Malin Wilckens and Julian Gärtner for their constructive and helpful feedback on the primary versions of this article. Furthermore, I would like to thank Hannes Kriz for discussing this article with me. 2 Cf.: Christoph Irmscher: Louis Agassiz. Creator of American Science. Boston / New York 2013, p. 266 f. 3 Nancy Stepan: The Idea of Race in Science. Great Britain, 1800–1960. Basingstoke 1984, p. 2. 4 Cf. Adam Livingstone: The Preadamite Theory and the Marriage of Science and Religion. In: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82 (1992) No. 3, pp. I – X and 1–78, here p. 6 f.

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18th century the question about the origin of humankind was put into new contexts; it was no longer a discussion that focused mainly on the correct interpretation or the (un-)ambiguity of the bible, instead the focus of attention shifted to the diversity of humankind and the search of an explanation for this diversity. This was mostly due to the increasing encounters with other peoples with different phenotypes, different societal structures and beliefs. These encounters being the result of the devastating and racist practice and system of European colonialism and the prospering genre of travel literature. Even though the context changed Christian genesis was still the predominant view and so naturalists following the polygenetic theory inevitably challenged the dominant view that God created the first man and woman and that everyone that has ever lived or will ever live is a descendant of Adam and Eve. 5 While monogenism was the mainstream view in the 18th and first half of the 19th century, polygenism gained popularity around the middle of the 19th century while monogenism was in decline. This article wants to offer a possible answer to why the theory of multiple origins gained so much strength around the 1840s and 1850s. The rise of polygenism is oftentimes explained by changed political circumstances, 6 the weaknesses of monogenism and the eroding power of prichardian monogenism. 7 The historian of science Claude Blanckaert has pointed out that one of the reasons monogenists started to struggle around the middle of the 19th century was because one of their main arguments was on the verge of being invalidated: “[B]y around 1850, the monogenists had assumed a defensive posture. The Buffonian criterion of continuous intraspecific fecundity was under attack by numerous polygenists.” 8 Building on Blanckaerts research I would like to argue that it is productive to not only look at the context but also at the content and that one explanation for the rise of polygenism can be found by looking at the arguments themselves, by trying to understand what line of reasoning was picked up and how the explanatory power of an argument was increased. The rise of polygenism, as I would like to 5 This does not mean that polygenists in general forwent the possible reconciliation of polygenism and Christianity. Some tried to stay within the Christian framework with their polygenetic idea. Terence Keel discusses such an attempt by Josiah C. Nott, cf.: Terence D. Keel: Religion, Polygenism and the Early Science of Human Origins. In: History of the Human Sciences 26 (2013) No. 2, pp. 3–32. 6 Cf. Milford H. Wolpoff / Rachel Caspari: Race and Human Evolution. A Fatal Attraction. New York 1997, p. 66. 7 Cf.: Ian Law: Racism and Ethnicity. Global Debates, Dilemmas, Directions. London 2010, p. 30. 8 Claude Blanckaert: Of Monstrous Métis? Hybridity, Fear of Miscegenation, and Patriotism from Buffon to Paul Broca. In: Sue Peabody / Tyler Stovall (eds.): The Color of Liberty. Histories of Race in France. Durham 2003, pp. 42–70, here p. 48.

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argue, is not only due to the historical and political context or the weaknesses of monogenism but can also be traced back to the artful practice of argumentation the polygenists pursued in the middle of the nineteenth century. That is why I want to turn the attention to how the proponents of polygenism argued and more specifically how they altered and modified their argumentation and why these alterations led to a line of reasoning with much more persuasive power. As we shall see, this was partly because polygenists not only managed to dismantle one of the cornerstones of monogenist reasoning but at the same time revived an older polygenist argument which strengthened their position even further. Starting with Georg Forster, who was a prominent critic of the monogenist argument which was based on reproduction, we will move on to Samuel George Morton and Josiah C. Nott who picked up those objections and further developed this polygenist line of argumentation. Last but not least we will take a look at Paul Broca and his strategy in arguing for multiple origins as an example of how heavily Morton and Nott influenced the polygenist argumentation in the second half of the nineteenth century. But Broca not only relied on the argumentation of Morton and Nott but developed it even further, thus creating a still more persuasive argument for polygenism. Paul Broca broke the basis of monogenism down to a syllogism to explain how the usual monogenist argument worked. As Broca himself put it, there are two premises and one conclusion drawn from them on which the monogenetic view relied heavily: “1. All animals, capable of producing an eugenesic 9 progeny, are of the same species. 2. All human crossings are eugenesic. Therefore, all men are of the same species.” 10 These two premises are the building blocks of the species concept of Buffon. Although there existed reports throughout the eighteenth century which questioned the fertility of so called “mulattoes” 11 the mainstream opinion remained that

9 Broca’s definition of “eugenesic” is as follows: “Mongrels of the first generation entirely fertile. a) They are fertile inter se, and their direct descendants are equally so. b) They breed easily and indiscriminately with the two parent species; the mongrels of the second generation, in their turn are, themselves and their descendants indefinitely fertile, both inter se or with the mongrels of all kinds which result from the mixture of the two parent species.” Paul Broca: On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo. Edited with the Permission of the Author by C. Carter Blake. London 1864, Glossarial Note. 10 Broca (fn. 9), p. 64. 11 Two naturalists who denied the fertility of so-called “mulattoes” were Edward Long, cf.: Suman Seth: Difference and Disease. Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. New York 2018, p. 208 and Charles White, cf.: Werner Sollors: Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both. Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge / London 1997, p. 130.

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all humans are interfertile. 12 What we can witness by tracing polygenist texts through the 18th and 19th century is that already in the eighteenthcentury naturalists questioned the first premise, therefore challenging not only the species concept itself but also the monogenist theory based upon it. By 1850 this query was taken up by Samuel George Morton and transformed into a new theory on hybridity which also affected the dispute over the origin of humankind. During this time Josiah C. Nott began to fiercely and publicly challenge the second premise. By combining the criticism of the first and second premise Nott managed to cast serious doubt on the plausibility of monogenism. Furthermore, this argumentative practice kept part of the species concept of Buffon alive, which, ironically, helped them to strengthen their own line of reasoning, as will be explained in detail later on.

Background To understand the line of argument of those naturalists who supported polygenism we will have to look at the framework in which the arguments are embedded. This background will be provided in this chapter. Firstly, we are going to take a closer look at the concept of species and how it was dealt with in the 18th century. Secondly, we will examine how naturalists thought about the transformation of species. As Paul Farber has outlined in his book Finding Order in Nature a change occurred in the 18th century regarding the approach of naturalists to the natural world and the diversity it displays, and the new practices developed to deal with this diversity. Not least the increasing amount of information about new species that naturalists had to deal with called for new practices of classifying. Instead of listing the organisms and items alphabetically, they now tried to get to the underlying order of things. This new approach is usually subsumed under the term natural history and included the attempt “to group animals, plants, and minerals according to shared underlying features and to use rational, systematic methods to bring order to the otherwise overwhelming variation found in nature.” 13 But with the task of finding the underlying order of nature and classifying living organisms as well as minerals into taxonomies arose the difficulty to define the smallest unit of classification schemes. This was thought to be a species – but what exactly constitutes a species? Multiple 12 Blanckaert (fn. 8), p. 53. 13 Paul Farber: Finding Order in Nature. The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson. Baltimore / London 2000, p. 1 f.

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solutions were offered to this problem. Many of the concepts of species that were presented were based on morphological characteristics. However, in the 1750s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon introduced a species concept that was not based on the appearance, structure or form of organisms, but used genealogy instead and with doing so he historicized the species concept. 14 Species were thus defined by their inherent ability to reproduce themselves infinitely: Although all similar individuals that exist on the surface of the earth are regarded as composing the species of these individuals, it is neither the number nor the collection of these similar individuals that forms the species. It is the constant succession and the uninterrupted renewal of these individuals that constitutes it. 15

The outcome of the assumed constant perpetuation that happens in every generation through reproduction is a stable, demarcated and fixed species. The mixture of any two species is not intended in this concept, it is even made impossible by pure logic: two individuals that can produce a fertile offspring belong to the same species, according to Buffon. 16 Consequently, any two individuals, no matter how different they are, that produce a fertile offspring belong to the same species and any two individuals, no matter how similar they are, who fail to do so belong to different species. 17 Hybrid organisms were therefore branded as being infertile, otherwise they would not be hybrids. When Buffon introduced his species concept it had a huge impact on the debate on the origin of humankind because it changed the line of reasoning naturalists picked up on either side of the debate. Monogenists no longer based their arguments on the authority of the Bible but relied more heavily and increasingly on proof gathered from the observation of the natural world and especially on the species concept of Buffon. They argued that all humans, regardless of the “race” they “belong” to, can potentially 14 Buffon was not the first naturalist to think of species as individuals that keep perpetuating themselves and therefore establish a stable species. John Ray expressed a similar view over half a century earlier, cf.: Paul Farber: Buffon and the Concept of Species. In: Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972) No. 2, pp. 259–284, here p. 279, footnote 37. 15 Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon: L’Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière. Avec la description du Cabinet du Roi, Vol. IV. Paris 1753, pp. 384–385, quoted in and translated by: Farber 1972 (fn. 14) p. 266. 16 Cf. Ernst Mayr: The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, MA/London Twelfth Ed. 2003, p. 261 f. 17 This does of course only apply if the failure to produce a fertile offspring is not due to an accidental infertility of one of the parties involved. The absurdity of this characteristic of Buffon’s species concept was already outlined by Susan M. Shell, cf.: Susan M. Shell: Kant’s Conception of a Human Race. In: Sara Eigen / Mark Larrimore (eds.): The German Invention of Race. Albany, NY 2006, pp. 55–72, here p. 59.

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procreate and have fertile offspring with each other, so all of humankind must only constitute one single species. This was something that could be demonstrated in the natural world and “biracial” children were the omnipresent proof of this conclusion. 18 While the fertility and health of biracial children became one of the main strengths of monogenism it created major difficulties for those who believed in multiple human origins at the same time. Polygenists were confronted with the question why human races, which they perceived as being actual species, could interbreed. This became one of the biggest weaknesses of polygenism. Proponents of the theory of multiple human species struggled with this apparent difficulty for a long time, either resorting to denying the health and fertility of biracial children or raising concerns over the universal validity of the species concept of Buffon. Before diving into the discussion, we are going to take a look at the terms “hybridity” and “race” and how they are used in this paper. The term hybridity and hybrid respectively were used very differently by the various authors and could even change meaning within a text. Mostly it was used to describe the mixture of two different species but sometimes it just characterized the intermixture of two different “races.” In addition, the term was usually meant to imply infertility, but the close relationship between hybridity and fertility loosened in the middle of the 19th century with Samuel George Morton and others pointing out examples of fertile hybrids. No general definition of the term hybridity can therefore be given for this paper. However, the specific meaning of the term usually becomes clear if one takes the context into account. In those cases where the term is used in a way that could be misleading for the reader an explanation is inserted. The term “race” is not any easier to define. Knowing that most scientists nowadays agree that there are no such things as human races 19 we are nonetheless in need of a working term of “race.” Every naturalist used the word “race” in his own way. Some used it to describe what they perceived as being in actuality different human species, some used it to describe any difference in the phenotype between population groups. There were naturalists who counted only three human “races” – the “white race,” the “black race,” and the “yellow race” while others counted more than 18 Cf.: Blanckaert (fn 8), p. 48. 19 Cf.: Alain F. Corcos: The Myth of Human Races. Tucson 2016; Luigi Luca CavalliSforza / Francesco Cavalli-Sforza: The Great Human Diasporas. The History of Diversity and Evolution. New York 1995. A summary of the most important arguments disproving the existence of “race” can also be found in the following article: Elizabeth Kolbert: There’s no Scientific Basis for Race – It’s a Made-Up Label. In: National Geographic (April 2018), https://www. nationalgeographic. com/ magazine/ 2018/ 04/ race- genetics- science- africa/ (accessed on January, 08 2020).

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ten. 20 These inconsistencies make it hard to give one definition of “race” that is fitting for every case. However, what is present throughout the various uses and definitions of the term “race” is that it is used to describe some kind of difference between groups that is assumed to be distinct and stable enough to allow for a permanent differentiation. Whether that also meant that the groups have a different or the same origin, whether it implied that they can procreate with each other or not varied considerably from author to author and must be articulated for every individual case. One last thing that is important to keep in mind is that Buffon changed his species concept over time. Due to the results of some crossbreeding experiments he conducted in which he tried to cross goats and sheep, and wolves and dogs he changed his approach to the definition of species. 21 Because some of these crossings were successful, he had to rethink his species concept. This reexamination of his own species concept was not picked up by most of the naturalists arguing for monogenism. It was certainly not picked up by the most prominent thinker who used reproduction as a main argument for monogenism and who helped to propagate this line of reasoning, Immanuel Kant. Trying to avoid confusions it is important to state that in the following pages whenever I will refer to the species concept of Buffon I am referring to the species concept how it was originally articulated by Buffon and picked up by Kant and others.

Countering Monogenism Polygenists and monogenists used different strategies to challenge the theory of their adversaries and to defend their own convictions about the origin of humankind. Both theories had weaknesses and strengths, so the most productive way to gaining the upper hand in the discussion was to get rid of the weaknesses and adding to the explanatory power of the own theory or undermining the explanatory power of the opposed theory instead, by pointing out (additional) weaknesses. The biggest struggle of the monogenists can be identified with explaining the diversity of humankind. They mainly relied on the assertion that external factors (climate, mode of life, habits) can create phenotypical differences. The climate theory, specifically the claim that external climatic influences can change the color of the skin over time, was contested since the 17th century with evidence constantly coming to the surface to prove the incorrectness of the climate 20 Georges Cuvier distinguished only three races, while Charles Pickering for instance divided the human population into eleven races. 21 Farber 1972 (fn. 13), p. 268.

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theory. 22 It was therefore a relatively unsuccessful way for monogenists to deal with one of their main weaknesses, meaning that naturalists who were not convinced by this explanation increased significantly over time. The polygenists found themselves in a similar predicament. They had difficulties with the fact that all humans are interfertile, thus making it implausible that they belong to different species. Around the beginning of the 19th century we could therefore subsume the status of the controversy as follows: monogenists and polygenists developed different arguments trying to proof their theory was correct. To give just a few examples: monogenists argued with features and properties shared by all humans, which clearly distinguishing them from animals, that therefore pointed to the unity of the species. Polygenists argued with the pretended resemblance between black people and apes, construing the black population as the so called “missing link” in the great chain of being, therefore separating them from the rest of the human population and making them into a distinct species. At the same time both theories had an equally hard time dispelling doubts regarding their own theory, these doubts being raised regarding interfertility and the diversity of humankind. The inability to account for a phenomenon such as interfertility or diversity strengthened the opposing theory, because they could account for the phenomena. Monogenists did not have troubles explaining the interfertility between all humans – they belong to the same species, so interfertility is the normal state. Polygenists, on the other hand, had no difficulties explaining human diversity – all human races were in fact human species, so it was obvious that they had to look different. The difference between monogenists and polygenists around the middle of the 19th century was though that monogenists apparently had a harder time finding a solution to the problem of human diversity than polygenists had finding a solution to the problem of interfertility. Between the end of the 18th and the middle of the 19th century polygenists managed to find a line of reasoning which gave them the opportunity to counter monogenism while at the same time strengthening their own theory of multiple origins. They did so by modifying and reframing the species concept of Buffon. In this chapter we will firstly take a closer look at Georg Forster and his dispute with Immanuel Kant. In this dispute we can already observe that there was doubt cast on the species concept of Buffon, which meant that one of the cornerstones of monogenism was questioned. Forster rejected not only Kant’s theory of race but also his claim that one could proof the

22 Cf.: Cristina Malcolmson: Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society. Boyle, Cavendish, Swift. New York 2016, p. 32.

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unity of the human species by relying on reproduction as a determinative criterion for species membership. Forster was a naturalist who cast doubt on the universal claim the species concept of Buffon made. This was later picked up by Samuel George Morton, a proponent of the American School, who developed this criticism into a new concept of hybridity which we will analyze in a second step. Morton, like Forster, had difficulties grappling with Buffons species concept and ended up overturning it by introducing multiple degrees of hybridity. In a third step we will discuss Morton’s colleague Josiah C. Nott, who was also a member of the American School and a fierce polygenist. He followed Morton and Forster in rejecting the monogenist claim, that all individuals who produce a fertile and healthy offspring with each other can be identified as belonging to the same species. Furthermore, he picked up another argument which was already brought forth by polygenist naturalists at the end of the 18th century: Nott claimed that biracial people, who he called “mulattoes,” were less fertile than “pure-bred” people. Lastly, we will analyze the reasoning of another polygenist, Paul Broca, who drew on Nott and Morton to argue his own polygenist point of view. The French anthropologist transferred Morton’s concept of degrees of hybridity to the human species, thus creating a synthesis between the arguments of Morton and Nott.

Georg Forster: Rejecting Buffon’s Species Concept Georg Forster, a voyager and naturalist, had, among others, traveled large parts of the South Pacific with his father Johann Reinhold Forster as part of James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. The outcome of this expedition was a report in form of a book called A Voyage Round the World, published in 1777, in which Forster describes the Fauna and Flora of the South Pacific as well as the different peoples, their physical appearance, their customs and the structure of their societies. His background was very different from that of his colleague and adversary Immanuel Kant. In a paper called Something More About the Human Races published in 1786 Forster criticized Kant for his theory of race and “argued against a defining role for skin color in any theory of human races, rejecting Kant’s premise that races could be defined at all based on the data at hand.” 23 His main problem with Kant’s understanding of race was that Kant did not seem to see the many gradations existing between the different human races, making a

23 Sally Hatch Gray: Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color. In: The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012) No. 4, pp. 393–412, here p. 401 f.

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clear-cut distinction nearly impossible. According to Forster Kant completely ignored the fact that there is no such thing as a homogenous white race. Instead, Forster was convinced, there is a gradation from the light skinned Scandinavians to the “Abyssins” who had a darker complexion but belonged to the white race nonetheless according to Kant. 24 Forster gave an example of two individuals belonging to two different races, following Kant’s racial division, whose skin color was nonetheless nearly identical. The offspring of these two individuals should be distinguishable as a “halfcaste,” according to Kant’s theory of race, because skin color is the one trait that is necessarily and unavoidably inherited. If every race is clearly distinguishable by their skin color and skin color is necessarily inherited, then one should always be able to spot the “half castes” because they display a mixture of the two skin colors of their parents. Forster, however, tried to show with his example that the races are not homogenous units detached from each other. Rather, there is a gradation within the different races, blurring the boundaries between them and making it therefore impossible to discern with certainty whether someone is a “half caste.” 25 Quite a lot has been published on this controversy between Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster, some papers focusing more on their diverging concepts of race, others centering on the difference of opinion regarding the methodological approach to nature. 26 I would like to draw attention to a fact that did not receive as much attention: Forster’s criticism of the species concept of Buffon in the way it was originally articulated and used by Kant. For Forster and Kant alike reproduction is the central touchstone in deciding if two individuals belong to the same species. However, I would like to argue that Forster’s argument digresses from the one made by Kant in a way that allowed for a definition of hybridity that was less rigorous and did not include universal validity. While Kant assumed that interspecific reproduction is either not possible at all or leads to a sterile and / or sickly offspring, Forster proposed a different point of view, which was interestingly very similar to the position Buffon took up later in his life regarding his own species concept. Forster claimed that “natural aversion”

24 Cf. Tanja Van Hoorn: Dem Leibe abgelesen. Georg Forster im Kontext der physischen Anthropologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin / Boston 2004, p. 139. 25 Cf. Van Hoorn (fn. 24), p. 139. 26 Cf. amongst others: Van Hoorn (fn. 24); Mario Marino: Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen. Eine Lektüre der Kant-Herder-Forster-Kontroverse. In: Simone De Angelis / Florian Gelzer / Lucas Gisi (eds.): “Natur”, Naturrecht und Geschichte. Aspekte eines fundamentalen Begründungsdiskurses der Neuzeit (1600–1900). Heidelberg 2010, pp. 393–414; Gray (fn. 23); Rainer Godel / Gideon Stiening (eds.): Klopffechtereien, Missverständnisse, Widersprüche? Methodische und methodologische Perspektiven auf die Kant-Forster-Kontroverse. München 2012.

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would counteract the reproduction between two individuals of different species: “Im Thierreich hat jede Art, jede Nuance, was diesen Punkt betrift, einen unwiderstehlichen Hang zu seines Gleichen, einen entschiedenen Abscheu vor andern Thieren, wenn gleich diese wenig, oft nur unmerklich verschieden sind.” 27 Forster speaks here of a tendency, not a law. Organisms only tend to reproduce with individuals of their own species. Thus, Forster does not eliminate the possibility that interspecific reproduction can happen, he rather presumes that it is unlikely, since there is an aversion between distinct species and an attraction between individuals of the same species. Insofar Forster as well as Kant want us to look at reproduction to classify individuals into species, but they want us to do so on different grounds. This seemingly minor difference gains significance when we take into consideration the kind of narratives that can be built around it. The species concept of Buffon in the way Kant used it upholds the idea that species are pure: they always only reproduce themselves, it is unnatural for them to mix and therefore such a mixture must ultimately and inevitably fail. The species concept that Forster held allowed for a mixture, although he equally deemed it unnatural and saw it mostly as a marginal phenomenon. A mixture could happen, according to Forster, because certain circumstances could change and overrule the natural aversion inherent in every organism. Thus, the production of an offspring is not necessarily evidence to a common origin, as Forster declared in his paper written in response to Kant: Als Beweis eines gemeinschaftlichen Ursprungs darf man also die künstliche und an Thieren durch Gefangenschaft erzwungene ungleichartige Begattung nicht anführen, obwohl sie in einer andern Hinsicht einigen Nutzen für die Naturkunde hat. Es ist nämlich außer allem Zweifel, daß die Blendlinge von Kanarienvögeln und Stieglitzen, auch mehreren Finkenarten, die Fortpflanzungsfähigkeit besitzen, die man auch von dem Hund und Fuchs entsprossenen Mittelgeschöpfe nicht absprechen kann. 28

Forster gives domestication or the human interference in natural processes in general as examples of such cases, where the natural aversion is disabled, 27 Georg Forster: Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen. In: Der Teutsche Merkus 4 (Oktober 1786), pp. 57–86, here p. 82 f. It translates to: “In this regard every species, every nuance in the animal kingdom has an irresistible attraction to one’s own kind and a powerful aversion to different animals, even if the difference is almost imperceptible.” Translation by the author. 28 Forster (fn. 27), p. 83. It translates to: “The artificial reproduction between two different animals that can only be brought about by confining them can never be proof of their common origin. Nevertheless, this kind of experiment can be of use to natural history in regard to another aspect. It is beyond doubt that the mongrels between canaries, goldfinches and other kind of finches are fertile and some mongrels between the dog and the fox are as well.”

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and a mixture occurs. 29 Furthermore, he admits to certain species generating offspring in a wild state, like specific species of finches. The rejection of a species concept which took successful reproduction as proof of unity of species, like it was advocated by Kant, enabled Forster to question whether the human “races” all belonged to one species. He argued that successful procreation does not necessarily implicate a common origin, thus challenging the most significant argument of the monogenists that reproduction between any two human “races” comes with no limitation 30 and therefore proofs a common origin. Forster does not deny the possibility of the creation of a fertile hybrid organism but only finds such an occurrence unlikely because of an aversion within these organisms that counteract mixtures. He knows of fertile hybrids arising in the wild and under domestication so he disputed the validity of the universal claim that one can tell whether two individuals belong to the same species based on their successful reproduction. These statements were an attack on what Broca labelled the first premise of monogenism. Forster’s argument did not stop here. After having denied that the first premise of monogenism is valid he went on to raise doubts on the unity of humankind by turning his attention to the second premise. Forster did not go so far as to doubt whether the progeny of a black man and a white woman or the other way round is entirely fertile and healthy. He did, however, claim that there is an observable aversion to sexual intercourse between different human races, meaning that although humans could reproduce, no matter what race they belonged to, they would prefer not to do so if left to their instinctive impulses and judgement. Forster gave as an example the alleged aversion a white, “unspoilt” man would feel when being faced with a black woman: Und horchten Menschen nur der Stimme des Instinkts, wäre es nicht ihre Vernunft, welche Lüsternheit und Begierde erkünstelt [. . . ] so würden wir sowohl bey Schwarzen als bey Weissen, vor der ungleichartigen Vermischung Ekel und Abscheu bemerken. Noch jetzt, glaube ich, darf man diesen Widerwillen vom rohen unverdorbenen Landmann erwarten; er wird die Negerin fliehen; wenigstens wird Geschlechtstrieb nicht das erste seyn, was sich bey ihrem Anblick in ihm regt. 31

29 Interestingly this is what Buffon has found out as well and why he reassessed his original claims on species and hybridity. Cf.: Farber 1972 (fn. 14), p. 268–270. 30 No limitations meaning that the offspring of two individuals belonging to different “races” is healthy and fertile. 31 Forster (fn. 27), p. 82 f. It translates to: “If humans only listen to the voice of their instincts, if not reason artificially manufactured lustfulness and desire, then we would be able to observe the aversion and disgust black and white people feel towards this unnatural mixture. Even today, I think, one could expect this aversion from a rude,

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For Forster this supposed aversion a white man would feel towards a black woman served as another argument for polygenism because it challenged the monogenist doctrine of the 18th century that “racial mixture” is natural. The German naturalist did not want to commit to a monogenist view, for he thought it impossible to know the origin of humankind, the actual formation of the first humans being in a too distant past as to gain access to any certain knowledge about it. 32 For him the evidence pointed to polygenism. His line of reasoning against monogenism was already based on the two objections against monogenism that were later picked up and expanded by Morton and Nott – challenging the universal validity of the species concept of Buffon and casting doubt on how well different races harmonize with each other. 33

Samuel George Morton: Overturning the Species Concept of Buffon Samuel George Morton was an US-American anthropologist and member of the American School. He worked mainly on crania and was in possession of one of the biggest cranial collections of the world. The result of his lifelong occupation with crania from various human “races” was the claim that the cranial capacity of Native Americans was inferior to those of the white population. 34 Stephen Jay Gould worked on dismantling the methodological errors made by Morton during his work on crania: “During the summer of 1977 I spent several weeks reanalyzing Morton’s data [. . . ]. In short, and to put it bluntly, Morton’s summaries are a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions.” 35 Gould further wrote that Morton “not only failed to correct for differences in sex or body size; he did not even recognize the relationship, though his data proclaimed it loud and clear.” 36 Besides his interest in crania Morton was also committed to polygenism and published multiple papers on the theory of multiple origins of humankind. His main interest in the debate was the role hybridity played in determining whether there are plural origins or whether there is only a single origin for humankind. Morton was in a difficult position, as most of the scientists who believed in

32 33 34 35 36

unspoilt man from the countryside, he would take flight from the negress, at least he would not have any sexual feelings toward her.” Translation by the author. Cf. Forster (fn. 27), p. 80. Forster (fn. 27), p. 80. Irmscher (fn. 2), p. 224. Stephen Jay Gould: The Mismeasure of Man. Revised and Expended Edition. Harmondsworth 1997, p. 86. Gould (fn. 35), p. 94.

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polygenism were. He had to reconcile the species concept of Buffon with polygenism and find an explanation for why the species concept was either not valid or not applicable to the human species. Samuel George Morton accepted the existence of healthy, fertile and biracial children, men and women: “But since all the races are capable of producing, with each other, a progeny more or less fertile, it is inferred that they must all belong to one and the same species.” 37 Nonetheless, he was convinced that the different human races were in actuality different species. This was a potential contradiction if one saw interfertility as proof of a common origin. 38 Morton resolved this situation by rejecting reproduction as a guarantee for unity of species, as did Forster. But Morton went further and offered an explanation to the puzzling diversity of the phenomenon of hybridity in the natural world. He did so by introducing degrees of hybridity. He claimed that hybridity, as many other phenomena in the natural world, is not to be understood in absolute but in relative terms: Hybridity, whether in plants or animals, has been singularly neglected by naturalists. It has generally been regarded as a unit: whereas, its facts are as susceptible of classification as any other series of physiological phenomena. Hence, I have, on a former occasion, proposed four degrees of hybridity [. . . ]. 39

A more flexible understanding of the phenomena of hybridity that included the “typical” hybrid organism – sterile and often sickly – as well as the “atypical” – but still existing – hybrid organism that was fertile and healthy allowed Morton to argue for polygenism without denying that hybridity oftentimes, if not most of the times, means sterility. Morton knew very well that interspecific crossings often led to a sterile generation or that such a crossing was oftentimes not to be achieved at all. But he was also aware of multiple examples for such crossings in which the fertility of the next generations did not decline in any way, thus contradicting the general rule of hybrids being infertile per se. Thus, Morton proposed the idea of a

37 Samuel George Morton: Additional Observations on Hybridity in Animals, and on Some Collateral Subjects; Being a Reply to the Objections of the Rev. John Bachman, D. D. Charleston 1850, p. 10. Although he also assumed that the fertility of so called “mulattoes” was sometimes lower than the fertility of “non-mixed” men and women, cf. Robert J. Richards: The Beautiful Skulls of Schiller and the Georgian Girl. Quantitative and Aesthetic Scaling of the Races, 1770–1850. In: Nicolas Rupke / Gerhard Lauer (eds.): Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Race and Natural History, 1750–1850. Abingdon / New York 2019, pp. 142–176, here p. 155. 38 In the debate between monogenists and polygenists unity of species was usually a synonym for a common origin, while multiple origins meant that there were also multiple species of humans. 39 Morton (fn. 37), p. 9.

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“law of hybridity” governing the natural world which evokes different results, depending on the similarity or difference between the species that are crossed. These different results could be described as “different degrees” of hybridity. He therefore divided hybridity into four groups or degrees, with varying degrees of fertility: The 1st degree is that in which the hybrids never reproduce; in other words, where the mixed progeny begins and ends with the first cross. The 2d degree is that in which the hybrids are incapable of reproducing, inter se, but multiply by union with the parent stock. The 3d degree is that in which animals of unquestionably distinct species produce a progeny which is prolific, inter se. The 4th degree is that which takes place between closely proximate species – among mankind, for example, and among those domestic animals most essential to their wants and happiness. 40

At first sight it seems as if Morton just added more layers to the species concept of Buffon, but in fact something more profound took place. With diversifying hybridity Morton dismantled the species concept of the great French naturalist. 41 If the outcome of an interspecific crossing is not necessarily a hybrid and sterile offspring, which would prove that the parent generation belonged to different species, one cannot draw conclusions about the species membership from a fertile cross. The fertility of biracial children was thus explained away with two propositions: firstly, that species that are very closely related to each other can produce fertile hybrids and secondly, that the different human species are so closely related to each other that they in fact produce fertile offspring which is nonetheless supposed to be hybrid. A species concept needs to meet the claim for universality, otherwise the application will lead to arbitrary results. If the production of a fertile offspring does not allow the conclusion that the parents share the same species’ membership its usefulness in classifying organisms into species decreases considerably, as Morton himself stated: “Since various different species of animals are capable of producing together a prolific hybrid offspring, hybridity ceases to be a test of specific affiliation.” 42 Morton tackled the first premise Broca outlined, echoing the criticism of Forster. Both naturalists pointed to cases of hybridity in species in the wild and under domestication, thus rejecting the monogenist claim that one can proof the

40 Ibid. 41 Something that Buffon had already done himself, although it was not widely received, as was already mentioned at the beginning of this article. 42 Samuel George Morton: Hybridity in Animals. Considered in Reference to the Question of the Unity of the Human Species. In: The American Journal of Science and Arts 3 (1847) No. 8, pp. 203–212, here p. 212.

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unity of the human species on grounds of interfertility. Furthermore, Morton offered an explanation for the different results obtained by different crossings. He initiated a new understanding of the concept of hybridity with various degrees of hybridity reflecting the proximity of the species.

A Mulatto is a Hybrid: Josiah C. Nott Josiah C. Nott was a member of the American School and a physician with a medical practice in Mobile, Alabama. 43 He published various articles on “intermarriage” between whites and blacks and on the state of health of their offspring. He contributed to the development of an influential new line of reasoning within polygenism by combining Morton’s new approach to hybridity with the claim that so-called “mulattoes” are less fertile than their “purebred” parents. Before the middle of the nineteenth century most naturalists who believed in multiple origins tried to cope with the major difficulty of polygenism – the interfertility of all human races – by either challenging the monogenist claim that interfertility is proof for the unity of species or by casting doubt on the fertility of “mulattoes.” Nott did both. He raised the question, already posed by Forster and Morton, whether hybridity could even be a test of species membership regarding the many examples of prolific hybrids that had surfaced in the past years: Desmoulins remarks that ‘though primitive species are unalterable by climate, they are not so by generation.’ The American bison, besides the conformation of the head, and other important anatomical differences, has a pair of ribs more than domestic cattle. They not only breed together, but produce prolific offspring, ‘and we have proved the same thing in relation to our domestic dogs with the wolf, fox and jackal, and of other species in different parts of the globe.’ 44

43 Adam Dewbury: The American School and Scientific Racism in Early American Anthropology. In: Histories of Anthropology Annual 3 (2007), pp. 121–147, here p. 138. 44 Josiah C. Nott: Unity of the Human Race. A Letter addressed to the Editor, on the Unity of the Human Race. In: Southern Quarterly Review 9 (January 1846) No. 17, pp. 1–57, here p. 5. For his argument about the deficit of a species concept that defines a species based on the successful production of an offspring and his promotion of the existence of different degrees of hybridity Nott relied mostly on Morton’s work, cf.: Nott: Two Lectures. On the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races. Mobile 1844, p. 14; Josiah C. Nott: Two Lectures. On the Connection between the Biblical and Physical History of Man. New York 1849, p. 47; Josiah C. Nott: Appendix. In: Arthur de Gobineau: The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, with Particular Reference to their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind. With an Analytical Introduction and Copious Historical Notes by H. Hotz. To which is Added

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Additionally, Nott focused on the alleged diminished fertility of the so called “mulattoes.” 45 His claim that biracial children often lacked vitality was based on his own observations as well as on research he had read in journals. In an early paper titled The Mulatto a Hybrid – probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry, he cited the work of an anonymous author before he moved on to his own observations, explaining that he himself had “been actively engaged in the practice of medicine for the last fifteen years in the south, and in situations where the population is pretty equally divided between the blacks and whites.” 46 He further comments, that he “was soon struck by certain facts connected with the mulattoes” and that his “attention since has been turned to their peculiarities.” 47 Those “peculiarities” included among others that allegedly “the mulatto women are particularly delicate – are subject to many chronic diseases” and that they “are bad breeders and bad nurses.” 48 From this Nott deduced that “many of them [the mulatto women] do not conceive at all – most are subject to abortions, and a large portion of their children die at an early age.” 49 He added that “the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific, than when crossed on one of the parent stocks.” 50 These are characteristics that were well known to apply to certain hybrid animals, the mule for instance, and Nott’s description of the so called “mulatto” tried to make that connection – at first implicitly, later on explicitly, seemingly confirming what one has already guessed at, that “mulattoes” are true hybrids: Some hybrids do not breed, as the mule. There are instances of their having propagated when crossed back on one of the parent stocks. [. . . ] Hybrids when bred together have a tendency to run out and change back to one of the parent stocks. This has been remarked of the Mulattoes in the West Indies [. . . ]. 51

Nott was not the first naturalist who questioned the fertility and vitality of biracial people. It was a common belief held by many colonialists 52 as well

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

an Appendix Containing a Summary of the Latest Scientific Facts Bearing Upon the Question of Unity or Plurality of Species by J.C. Nott, M. D., of Mobile. Philadelphia 1856, pp. 463–512, here p. 492. Cf. Josiah C. Nott: The Mulatto a Hybrid – Probable Extermination of the Two Races if the Whites and Blacks are Allowed to Intermarry. In: The American Journal of the Medical Sciences 6 (1843), pp. 252–256. Nott (fn. 45), p. 253. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 254. Cf.: Katherine Paugh: The Politics of Reproduction. Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of Abolition. Oxford 2017, p. 75.

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as naturalists. 53 However, by combining the new conception of hybridity with his data about the supposed infertility of “mulattoes” he created a line of reasoning for polygenists that was hard to counter. As Broca has pointed out, one of the cornerstones of monogenism can be described as a syllogism. By undermining one of the premises the argument already loses its explanatory power, this is what Morton did, for instance. Nott, however, tackled both premises at the same time. Forster did this as well, but not as eloquent and effective as Nott. Forster’s claim that there was an aversion between the different races could not as easily be corroborated with empirical data, but Nott’s claim that there was an observable lack in fertility in biracial humans could easily be backed up by the authors own field research and the field research of others. What can be recognized by carefully studying Nott’s argument is that he exchanged the monogenist syllogism with a polygenist one. The syllogism of the monogenists was based on the species concept of Buffon. The species concept, however, could be articulated in two ways: one could either say: “All individuals which can procreate with each other belong to the same species.” Or one could say: “Individuals which cannot procreate with each other do not belong to the same species.” Both wordings can be found in Buffon’s writings. Kant uses only the first one, as did many naturalists after him who favored monogenism. The impactful move that came from polygenists in the middle of the nineteenth century was that they rejected the statement of the first wording and embraced the one of the second. The syllogism could be subsumed as follows: 1st premise: all animals, incapable of producing a fertile progeny, belong to different species. 2nd premise: all human crossings are infertile. Conclusion: therefore, humans belong to different species. Now all that was left for polygenists was to prove that so called “mulattoes” were less fertile and healthy than humans of “pure race.” This is what Nott tried to do in his research. By including in his line of reasoning Morton’s research as well he not only argued with the pretended infertility of biracial children for polygenism, but he safeguarded himself from potential demonstrations of their fertility by rejecting fertility as evidence for the unity of species. To summarize this shortly: Nott contributed significantly to a new line of reasoning where fertility seized to be seen as evidence for organisms belonging to the same species while infertility gained in importance as an indicator for individuals belonging to different species. Broca was one of the naturalists who relied on this argumentation when arguing for polygenism. 53 By Charles White and Edward Long for example, cf. literature in fn. 10 in this article.

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Paul Broca: Good Crossings and Bad Crossings Paul Broca was a French anthropologist and surgeon and committed to the belief that the different human races 54 each have their own origin. He wrote extensively on this topic in a book called On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo in which he sought to rebut monogenism, particular one of the main monogenist doctrines that fertility was evidence for species unity. After framing the monogenist doctrine as a syllogism he explained that he wanted to refute both “fundamental propositions” of monogenism to advance polygenism: We were thus led to examine successively the two fundamental propositions serving as a base to the unitarian doctrine [. . . ]. We have, in the first place, investigated the results of certain crossings between animals of incontestably different species [. . . ] and we have demonstrated that these crossings produce eugenesic mongrels, [. . . ] perfectly and indefinitely prolific between themselves. It is thus not true that all animals capable of producing an eugenesic progeny are of the same species; and even if all human intermixtures were eugenesic, as is generally believed, we could not infer from this the unity of the human species. The monogenists are thus deprived of their principal basis and their sole scientific argument. It was, however, necessary to inquire, whether this popular axiom, that all human crossings are eugenesic, was a demonstrated truth or a lightly accepted hypothesis, without any verification or control? Such has been the object of our second series of investigations. 55

In On the Phenomena Broca thus did what Morton and Nott had already done before him: he pointed out that there are fertile hybrids and that therefore species membership cannot be defined based on fertility and he rejected the credo that “human crossings” are always fertile. So far Broca mainly repeated the standard polygenist argumentation since the 1840s. He did, however, add something new to his line of reasoning. For one, he gave up the idea of “pure” and “mixed” races completely. Broca advanced the view that all existing human races are hybrid races,

54 Broca did not use the word “race” in contrast to the term species but as a term interchangeable with it. Almost every “crossing” between two different human populations was for Broca a “crossing” between different “races” or “species,” therefore it is hard to get a firm grasp on the meaning Broca assigned to the term “race” or “species” respectively. To give an example: He characterizes the French population as a hybrid nation, being a mixture of Celts, Kimris, Romans, and Germans. They are, however, interfertile and therefore a “eugenesic cross.” He defines “eugenesic” as “mongrels” that “breed easily and indiscriminately with the two parent species.” Broca (fn. 9), Glossarial Note. Here he uses the word “parent species” in the definition of the term “eugenesic” which he then goes on to use for the intermixture of different populations that he labels “races.” 55 Broca (fn. 9), p. 65.

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and that hybridity could be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. He borrowed the persuasion that the world population nowadays only consists of hybrid peoples from his teacher Pierre-Nicolas Gerdy: “Gerdy, similarly postulated in 1832 that the human genus, originally composed of distinct species, had mixed in all directions to the point that no present nation was ‘pure of any foreign blood.’” 56 The claim that all existing races are hybrid races, having arisen from multiple crossings, prevented Broca from having to give an exact number of human species. However, Broca was not one who believed in the equality of humans and he differentiated between those “mixed races” that he thought to have arisen from an advantageous crossing and those that came out of a disadvantageous one. The French nation, for instance, arose from a cross between different races as well, according to Broca, and this cross had a very favorable outcome. He stated that the population of France stemmed from two different races – the Celts and the Kimris. 57 This particular “miscegenation” led to an improvement of the population and had no influence on the prolificness of the nation, as Broca remarked: To demonstrate that eugenesic hybridity really exists, one instance is sufficient [. . . ]. The population of France, as we have amply established elsewhere, is descended from several very distinct races, and presents everywhere the character of mixed races. [. . . ] nevertheless, this hybrid nation, so far from decaying, in accordance with the theory of Mr. Gobineau; far from presenting a decreasing fecundity, according to some other authors, grows every day in intelligence, prosperity, and numbers. 58

Other “crossings,” Broca was convinced, did not lead to such a fertile and prospering population but to declining birthrates and moral decay. 59 “The union of the Whites and the Australian women is but little prolific,” wrote the anthropologist, which would be why “we may suppose that Mulattoes sprung from such disparate unions must enter the category of inferior cross-breeds.” 60 Furthermore, Broca established his own terminology for distinguishing the different human crossings, according to their fertility. This theoretical construct introduced different degrees of hybridity within the human species, not, as Morton had done, within the natural world. Broca used the different degrees of fertility of hybrid crosses to divide the human species into races (or species) which blended well with each other and were 56 57 58 59 60

Blanckaert (fn. 8), p. 53. Cf. Broca (fn. 9), p. 23 f. Ibid., p. 21 f. Cf. Broca (fn. 9), p. 39 f. Ibid., p. 59.

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therefore interfertile and races / species that did not harmonize and could therefore not give birth to a new, healthy and fertile generation. Morton emphasized that there were many prolific hybrid crosses in the animal world, and that humans were one of those animals who are so closely related to each other, that they have no difficulties reproducing a progeny with each other. Broca took this a step further and stressed that there are prolific “crosses” within the human family and that those races that can reproduce with each other are able to do so because they are closely related. Others are not, which leads to disadvantageous hybridizations between different human races. Thirdly, the text of Broca shows us something new regarding the conception naturalists had of nature and how nature operates. We can take Broca as an example to show how the debate has shifted between the end of the 18th century and the end of the 19th century in this regard. While Forster advanced the view that the different “human species” do not reproduce with each other because they feel an aversion to one another, Broca bluntly rejected such a proposition as completely erroneous. It was not a “repugnance” between the “races” that prevented a mixture. Mixtures did happen, as Broca stated in a racist and sexist manner: “Is there in our seaports a prostitute sufficiently ugly and old to frighten the sailor? Is it not known that the Hottentots, whose ugliness is proverbial, have intermixed with the Europeans of South Africa?” 61 From this Broca drew the following conclusion: We must then set aside such a supposition, which is not founded upon a correct knowledge of human nature. There are, moreover, some documents, which induce us to believe that the Europeans of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land have intermixed with the native women. 62

The absence of biracial people of certain “crossings,” which Broca was convinced existed, could therefore not be led back to the different races not trying to reproduce with each other but only to some physiological obstacles that prevented such a mixture. Unlike Forster’s “aversion” which could be overridden by cultural influences the physiological incapability of humans to give birth to vital and fertile children could not be overcome. It was something seemingly deep within human biology that prevented such “mixtures.” Races could therefore be constructed as stable entities which remained more or less unaltered because “unfavourable crossings” were “sorted out” by natural mechanisms that guaranteed the vigor and fertility

61 Ibid., p. 49. 62 Ibid., p. 49.

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of the races. In this view certain biracial people were marked as inferior in a natural world that did not allow for “inferior” individuals to exist.

Conclusion This paper has presented us with a possible explanation for the rise of polygenism around the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been shown that Samuel George Morton’s new concept of hybridity could finally solve the problem all polygenists constantly faced: why is it that these alleged multiple human “species” can procreate with each other while in the rest of the natural world such an “interspecific crossing” leads inevitably to a sterile hybrid? Morton invalidated the monogenist doctrine that fertility is evidence for species unity by listing fertile interspecific crossings and ultimately proposing a new conception of hybridity as a nuanced and varying phenomenon. Thus, the first premise of the monogenist argument was refuted. Morton’s colleague Josiah C. Nott agreed with Morton that interfertility is not a criterion for species unity but did not contend himself with only invalidating one of the premises. He turned his attention to the fertility and vitality of the biracial population and claimed that biracial people were less fertile and healthy than those of “pure” descent. By rejecting both monogenist premises Nott substituted the syllogism on which the theory of monogenism was based with a new, polygenist syllogism. Interfertility was no longer a criterion for the unity of humankind, instead infertility was converted into evidence for multiple origins of mankind. The species concept of Buffon was turned upside down. Instead of forming the basis for monogenism it was now an argument for polygenism. This meant that not only did monogenists lose one of their post powerful arguments for the unity of humankind but at the same time polygenists gained an argument for their theory of multiple origins. The view that an infertile crossing can eliminate the possibility of the parents belonging to the same species was shared by monogenists as well as polygenists. However, for a long time most of the polygenists did not concern themselves with this specific idea because it seemingly could not help them in any way to argue their point. Instead, they tried to grapple with the far more controversial assumption that interfertility necessarily means a shared species membership. This paper did not only focus on the American School and its contribution to this new polygenist line of reasoning but also looked at Georg Forster, whose work predated the American School, and Paul Broca, whose research came after Morton’s and Nott’s. By analyzing a broader time frame two things could be shown: first, that the basis for refuting the monogenist

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doctrine was already there at the end of the 18th century and not invented by Morton and Nott and second, that the arguments made by Forster were still different than those brought forward by Broca. The context changed over the decades and with it the argumentative discourse. Different parts of the arguments were emphasized at the end of the 18th and the end of the 19th century respectively. Forster saw polygenism as more probable than monogenism and he challenged both premises of monogenism, as did Broca. But for Forster races were not stable entities, they could best be described as a continuous gradation, nuance after nuance, with the end always merging. Nonetheless, the natural world was perceived as orderly, if not forced the “nuances” did not reproduce with other “nuances,” even though such a “mixture” was physiologically possible. If one contrasts this view with Broca’s line of reasoning it is easily perceivable that even though he considers all races to be hybrid they are constructed as much more stable entities. Only what is marked as “good” and “valuable” is permitted to exist in the natural world, as Broca imagined it. Disadvantageous crossings are “obliterated” by their own physiological constitutions. The new context of eugenics, scientific racism and social Darwinism left little room for individuals that allegedly deviated from the norm, that were pretended to be less fertile, less healthy and less valuable.

5. Narrative and Representational Practices of ‘Race’ in Popular Media

Smith, L. Katherine

(De)constructing Race and Racism at the Ends of the Earth The Hollow Earth and Open Polar Sea Theories in Nineteenth Century American Literature

In his published record from an expedition bound for the North Pole in 1860–61, Isaac Israel Hayes contemplates the possibilities suggested by a “vast ocean which lay spread out before [him]” that he reportedly encountered in the Arctic at a record-breaking 81° 35’ longitude – the farthest north attained by a Western explorer at the time: the thought that these ice-girdled waters might lash the shores of distant lands where dwell human beings of an unknown race, were circumstances calculated to invest the very air with mystery, to deepen the curiosity, and to strengthen the resolution to persevere in my determination and sail upon this sea and to explore its furthest limits. 1

Hayes’ description of an open polar sea near the North Pole defies longstanding assumptions of an icy Arctic, but the theory idea gained considerable support in scientific circles in the mid-nineteenth century. American explorer Elisha Kent Kane promoted the theory as part of an effort to finance two Grinnell expeditions (1850–51; 1853–55) dispatched to rescue the British Franklin Expedition, last seen in July of 1845. 2 In Arctic Explorations (1857), his best-selling account of the second Grinnell expedition, Kane preceded Hayes’ description of the open polar sea with an alleged encounter described by William Morton, one of Kane’s party who reportedly observed the phenomenon alongside Hans Christian, a half-Danish, halfInuit guide:

1 Isaac I. Hayes: The Open Polar Sea. Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole in the Schooner “United States”. Philadelphia 1885, p. 352. 2 A full account of Kane’s reasoning and justification, which was presented to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in Dec. 1852, can be found in his publication

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Fig. 1: The Open Water from Cape Jefferson

“there was not a speck of ice to be seen. As far as I could discern, the sea was open.” 3 These accounts published by Kane and Hayes, which direct the gaze of readers beyond the littoral landscapes of ice and snow in the Arctic, are illustrative of the region’s seductive pull on the imagination of explorers and the American public alike. The Arctic’s “inviting absence of knowledge,” writes Adriana Craciun, allowed a person to “imagine virtually anything [could] inhabit the Arctic Ocean – mysterious continents, ice or land bridges joining America and Asia, ice-free passages, temperate utopias, and gateways into the planetary core or other dimensions, crowded by multifarious versions of the North Pole.” 4 Hayes’ romanticized longing to discover such “distant lands where dwell human beings of an unknown race” was especially prescient given the proliferation of utopian-themed hollow earth literature in the decades that followed. 5 Numerous scholars

Access to an Open Polar Sea in connection with the Search After Sir John Franklin and His Companions (American Geographical and Statistical Society). New York 1853. 3 Elisha K. Kane: Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, ’54, ’55 (Vol. 2). Philadelphia 1856, p. 378. 4 Adriana Craciun: The Frozen Ocean. In: PMLA 125 (2010) No. 3, pp. 693. 5 David Standish provides an extensive tabulation of hollow earth literature in Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines below the Earth’s Surface. Cambridge, MA 2006. Although Standish observes trends relating to race, his

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have addressed the cultural import of utopian and dystopian fiction, which surged in popularity from the 1880’s to mid-1910’s in response to anxieties about race in postbellum America and profound changes in the economic landscape from the industrial revolution. The significance of hollow earth and open polar sea fiction as a derivative of utopian genre fiction remains underdeveloped, however, and decontextualized from the scientific discourses that facilitated their emergence. 6 This paper demonstrates that anxieties about racial hierarchy and order in US culture have been largely overlooked in nineteenth century American literature addressing theories of the hollow earth, popularized in the US by John Cleves Symmes, and its later derivative the open polar sea. Both theories have a long lineage in scientific disciplines in Western culture. Postulations of a hollow earth date back as far Edmund Halley in the late seventeenth century but did not gain mainstream attention in the United States until advocated by Symmes, who in 1818 distributed a circular in which he “declare[d] the earth is hollow, . . . habitable within . . . [and] open at the poles” in an attempt to gain patronage for an expedition. 7 Symmes was widely ridiculed by the public and press for his belief the earth was hollow – a theory that, as Hester Blum observes, “relies more on the rhetoric of personal conviction than on that of scientific theory.” 8 His lectures nonetheless attracted a small cohort of devoted followers, some of whom developed publications on the subject. 9 By contrast, the theory of an

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emphasis is on tracing manifestations of the hollow earth in literature over time; he does not critically explore the cultural significance of race. Carl J. Guarneri’s book The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithica, NY 1991 emphasizes the influence of Charles Fourier’s ideas of independent cooperatives in utopian ideals, but his work nonetheless offers a useful account of the historical contexts driving utopian fiction in the United States in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Phillip Wegner does not discuss race or the authors featured in this essay, but his book Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 2002 positions utopian literature as simultaneously inspired by and a shaping influence on modernity and the nation-state over the same time period. Taking a different tack, Darby Lewes catalogs some of the driving forces behind women’s utopian fiction during this same time period in Dream Revisionaries: Gender and Genre in Women’s Utopian Fiction, 1870–1920. Tuscaloosa, AL 1995. While the historical and cultural contexts provided by works such as these are illuminating, the focus of this essay is on the sub-genre of hollow earth utopian literature on its own terms, which includes the frequent theme of encountering uncontacted civilizations and human or human-like races. John C. Symmes: Light Gives Light, to Light Discover – Ad Infinitum. St. Louis 1818. Hester Blum: The News at the Ends of the Earth. The Print Culture of Polar Exploration. Durham / London 2019, p. 249. James McBride published Symmes’s theories in Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres: Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable within, and Widely Open about the Poles (Cincinnati 1826) and created a wooden globe illustrating the “con-

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open polar sea enjoyed broader support from scientific circles promoting the viability of a temperate climate in the polar extremes capable of supporting animal life and, potentially, uncontacted civilizations. Although the theory did not gain much traction until the mid-nineteenth century, accounts of improbable polynyas and open polar seas can be traced as far as a voyage from 1360 in the Inventio Fortunata (Fortunate Discovery). Through their endeavor to study and analyze oceanic currents in the 1840’s and 50’s, Matthew Fontaine Maury of the US Naval Observatory and Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey both came to believe that the exchange of water circulating between the tropics and Arctic regions could explain such a phenomena. 10 By tracing the origins of the hollow earth and open polar sea in American literature to scientific discourses, this essay examines how both literature and science leveraged these theories to engage presumptions of white supremacy underlying justifications for settler colonialism and expansion. The notion that fantastic landscapes may yet be discovered and uncontacted civilizations were thought to be scientifically possible offered authors and readers the ability to look toward the Arctic as a different kind of frontier – one that, by virtue of its inaccessibility, was uniquely capable of negotiating attitudes about race as they related to questions about national identity at home. From the anonymously published utopian novel Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820) to Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1880–1) to Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), American authors in the long nineteenth century seized upon the imaginative potential of the hollow earth and open polar sea theories as fictional analogues to westward expansion and the frontier on the North American continent. In doing so, and regardless of intent, the works they published contributed to a diffuse exchange of ideas about race and racial hierarchies. Although some literary criticism has contextualized hollow earth fiction within the realm of nineteenth-century American imperialism, scholarship address-

centric spheres” at the polar openings. Similarly, Jeremiah Reynolds’s public support of Symmes’s theories and advocacy to US Congress helped mobilize funding and plans for the US Exploring Expedition to the South Pacific and Antarctica commanded by Charles Wilkes. 10 For an excellent account of the open polar sea in historical context, see Michael F. Robinson: Reconsidering the Theory of an Open Polar Sea In: Keith R. Benson / Helen M. Rozwadowski (eds.): Extremes. Oceanography’s Adventures at the Poles. Canton 2007, pp. 15–29, especially pp. 16–21. In The Coldest Crucible. Arctic Exploration and American Culture. Chicago / London 2006, Robinson examines the motivation behind Maury and Bache’s investment in the open polar sea theory, explaining “both were philosophically committed to viewing nature as a system of global, lawful, interconnected phenomena, and proof of an open polar sea would confirm their basic beliefs about the world” (40).

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ing how this genre of literature confronts cultural attitudes toward white supremacy remains underdeveloped. 11 Studies examining historical contexts of racial identity have emphasized the interplay between political history, cultural systems, and pseudo-sciences like phrenology to establish racial categories as part of scientific discourse. 12 These contexts are important, but they do not fully account for constructions of race and racism that pervade the discourses of geographic science in American fiction, which in turn influence readers’ conceptions of race. In many novels set in utopian hollow earth societies, racial identity exists along a continuum of appearance and character: unadulturated whiteness does not typically exist in the outer world and is associated with supreme intelligence and wisdom, lack of selfishness, commitment to interdependence, and superior scientific advancement. By contrast, darker skin tones in the genre are often presented as conniving, cannibalistic, selfish, unrepentant, and generally dehumanized. Moreover, by drawing upon conceptions of race rooted in the spiritual and occult, as discussed in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, hollow earth fiction explores what may lie beyond features of character and appearance conventionally associated with race in the nineteenth century. The scope of this essay necessarily limits claims that might be made about the entire genre of hollow earth literature. As such, rather than making definitive claims about the genre, I present textual analysis from Symzonia, Mizora, and Country of the Pointed Firs to identify two themes related to race that merit closer inspection in subsequent projects: anxiety and ambivalence about racial hierarchies, in which presumptions of white supremacy are ultimately upheld through processes of camparison; and the role of scientific discourses in shaping conceptions of race and racial taxonomies.

11 Although some scholars have observed the racism in hollow earth novels such as Symzonia, they do so in the service of other arguments not specific to the cultural significance of utopian and dystopian conceptions of race in hollow earth literature. The following are selected references not addressed elsewhere in this paper: Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America. Narrative, History, and Nation. New York 1997 offers a brief reference to race in Symzonia as part of her larger analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction (see esp. Chapter 2, “The Ghost of Race: Edgar Allan Poe and the Southern Gothic”); John Rieder: Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT 2008 approaches the topic of race in science fiction broadly, but only mercantile colonialism and capitalism are discussed in the analysis of Symzonia; and Scott Trafton: Egypt Land. Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. Durham / London 2004 analyzes the geographic structure of Symzonia in the context of Egyptian archaeology. 12 See Bruce Baum: The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race. A Political History of Racial Identity. New York 2006, especially pp. 9–21; Matthew Frye Jacobson: Whiteness of a Different Color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA/London 1998, especially “Anglo-Saxons and Others” pp. 39–90.

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Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820) As the seminal text for American literature engaging theories of a hollow earth, Symzonia (1820), published under the pseudonym “Captain Adam Seaborn,” provides context for racial ideologies that proliferated in subsequent hollow earth fiction. 13 By situating all iterations of white races on the exterior of the earth as a product of evolutionary degeneration, the novel establishes a racial logic that presumes non-white races to be even further degenerated. Historical precedence for such anxiety about white racial purity in early nineteenth century fiction can be found in sources such as Benjamin Franklin’s pamphlet Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. (1755). In this text, Franklin proposes the British increase their populations, which in his view were limited by the geography of a crowded European continent, by expanding throughout North America. He concludes with an observation on the racial character of the continent, laying forth an inchoate conception of racial order that pervades hollow earth literature and nineteenth-century configurations of hierarchal racial taxonomies. Because the pamphlet articulates an early lineage in racial thinking on the North American continent that is consistent with concerns about racial purity in Symzonia, I quote at length: that the number of purely white people in this world is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia is chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of new arrivals) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods . . . why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? 14

Emphasizing subtle gradations characterizing white racial genealogy, Franklin articulates fundamental anxieties about race in the early republic that suggest latent threats in the project of maintaining a lineage of a “purely

13 Authorship of the novel remains uncertain: although some attribute the text to Symmes himself, suggesting he wrote the novel to excite interest in his theory and funding for a polar expedition, Hans-Joachim Lang and Benjamin Lease have produced compelling analysis of the novel’s satirical stance towards Symmes’s ideas to advance Nathaniel Ames as a more likely candidate. See Hans-Joachim Lang / Benjamin Lease. Authorship of Symzonia. The Case for Nathaniel Ames. In: The New England Quarterly 48 (1975) 2, pp. 241–252. 14 Benjamin Franklin: Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries &c. Boston 1755, pp. 224, emphasis in original.

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white people” – a classification that imbricates physical characteristics such as complexion with assumptions of cultural superiority ingrained in evolving formations of the nation and national identity. For Franklin, who was devoted to the project of maintaining colonial unity on behalf of the British when the pamphlet was published, the matter of race emerges as part of an existential question about the character and ethos of the people. Though Franklin’s work is not explicitly referenced in Symzonia, it provides useful context for understanding a preoccupation with the physical and social attributes of whiteness in early American culture that permeates the novel. Symzonia propels the racial anxiety expressed in Franklin’s Observations to its logical conclusion by suggesting there are no “purely white” people in the US or entire outer world. 15 When the American protagonist Captain Adam Seaborn encounters the utopian civilization of “Symzonia” and its enlightened people after passing through a polar opening in the Antarctic, he observes the people are so uncommonly white that even the most fairskinned inhabitants of the outer world are revealed to be non-white by comparison. As Seaborn explains, “[my] skin was always in [America] thought to be one of the finest and whitest. But when one of the internals placed his arm, always exposed to the weather, by the side of mine, the difference was truly mortifying. I was not a white man, compared with him.” 16 Bringing the racial gaze of white colonizers from the North American continent into this interior civilization, Seaborn reveals the roots of racialized anxiety to be premised on comparison. The descriptor Seaborn uses to describe his complexion, such as “finest” and “whitest,” convey a belief in his own racial exceptionalism. In this racist logic of comparison, Seaborn is displaced from the top of a racial hierarchy leveraged to disenfranchise darker complected citizens and slaves of the United States through the mythology of white superiority. The novel posits an explanation for this displacement by suggesting the outer world is populated by exiled descendants from Symzonia, who were historically banished if they failed to uphold the society’s utopian ideals and have therefore grown darker in complexion due to exposure to the sun. Thus, the novel insinuates that skin tone and moral character are closely associated – or, more cynically, that darker skin tones are indicative of a genealogical deficiency in moral character. As a light-skinned interloper, Captain Seaborn represents what a descendent of an outcast Symzonian attempting to return to his homeland might look like. Although the citizens of Symzonia are surrounded by ma15 For more complete accounts of the historical lineages of “whiteness,” see Bruce Baum (fn. 12). 16 Captain Adam Seaborn (pseudonym): Symzonia. A Voyage of Discovery. New York 1820, p. 61.

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terial wealth, they are not corrupted by it. By contrast, as much as Seaborn tries to prevent the Symzonian ambassadors from realizing their ambition to capitalize on the internal civilization’s resources, his true motives are discerned by the Symzonian ambassadors and the captain and his crew are subsequently exiled. Framing the “finest and whitest” of Americans in terms that fail to uphold the otherworldly ideal of good character associated with the novel’s portrayal of racially superior whiteness of the Symzonians advances two interrelated ideas about racial hierarchy. First, the novel implies the white races of the external world are the closest descendants to a society that characterizes the type of egalitarian prosperity ingrained in idealized visions of the early republic. In doing so, the racist logic of white supremacy, which depends on identifying difference from a white ideal, is upheld. And second, by characterizing the “finest and whitest” American protagonist as racially degenerated and essentially non-white, the novel rationalizes the deficiencies of white men to execute utopian ideals while simultaneously positing that they remain the best facilitators of democracy. Said differently, the novel posits an explanation for the shortcomings of white governance by indexing all races within a hierarchy of racial degeneration, one in which the “finest and whitest” among humanity are morally flawed through racial degeneration, but less so than races that are less white by comparison. As illustrated in the examples that follow, themes of racial evolution and degeneration, so clearly established by the early example of Symzonia, pervade literary characterizations of the hollow earth.

Mizora: A Prophecy (1880–1) Of the novels discussed in this essay, Lane’s Mizora has received the most critical attention for its treatment of race, though this paper offers a new reading of the text’s ultimate stance on the matter. In the novel, the protagonist from the outer world, Russian aristocrat Vera Zarovitch, finds herself in the utopian matriarchy of Mizora after escaping to the Arctic from her internment as a political prisoner in Siberia, where she has been incarcerated for her actions defending female protestors from the state. In her thoughtful introductory remarks to the novel, Jean Pfaelzer frames Vera’s presence in Mizora as a transgendered intrusion into a hidden civilization in the earth’s interior. 17 Partially fulfilling the romanticized trope 17 Jean Pfaelzer: Introduction. Utopians Prefer Blondes. Mary Lane’s Mizora and the Nineteenth-Century Utopian Imagination. In: Jean Pfiezer (ed.): Mizora. A Prophecy by Mary Bradley Lane (1880–1). Syracuse 2000, pp. xi – xl.

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of the male voyeur discovering new worlds, Vera encounters Mizora after taking leave of her Eskimo companions, whom she has emulated to survive in the harsh Arctic climate, to cross the open polar sea in hopes that she “might meet in that milder climate some of [her] own race.” 18 Outfitted in garments of pants and furs, Vera’s physical entryway by boat and through a whirlpool to the hollow earth, itself symbolic of the womb, is unmistakably phallic. 19 While Pfaelzer emphasizes Lane’s daring allusions to lesbianism, the scene also registers the sexual anxiety of Victorian purity and its contradictory idolization of celibacy and motherhood. In this sense, Vera’s transgendered entrance and presence in Mizora symbolizes a metaphorical act of sexual contamination. Crossing the threshold to a strange new land, Vera, in men’s clothing and surrounded by beautiful blonde women, imports the perspective of the men from the outer world: “‘Why,’” she asks, “‘is such a paradise for man so entirely devoid of him?’” 20 The answer, Vera learns, is due to the racial eugenics adopted by the Mizorans in this otherwise paradisiacal society: in addition to “eliminat[ing]” racial characteristics of “the dark race” (which dark-haired and dark-eyed Vera partially embodies) by discovering the “Secret of Life” through “Science,” celibacy is maintained alongside autonomous procreation. 21 In doing so, gender becomes racialized in the novel as well, and the scientific discovery of asexual propagation jettisons anxieties about racial miscegenation. Considered by the women of Mizora to be inferior and, conveniently, no longer necessary in their world, “[the] race of men became extinct.” 22 Although some critics have read Vera’s “dark” features as evidence that the novel ultimately undermines logics of white supremacy, 23 Katherine Broad avers scholarship has generally “[sidestepped] the racism foundational to Lane’s text” by failing to recognize how the seeming superiority of the Mizorans’ character and society is achieved by eliminating difference through their mastery over science, though the novel does not identify pre-

18 19 20 21 22 23

Mary Bradley Lane: Mizora. A Prophecy (1880–1). Syracuse 2000, p. 12. Jean Pfaelzer (fn. 17), p. xxix. Mary Bradley Lane (fn. 18), p. 88. Mary Bradley Lane (fn. 18), p. 103. Mary Bradley Lane (fn. 18), p. 93, emphasis in original. Melissa Purdue: Review of Mizora. A Prophecy by Lane. In: Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 5 (2005) No. 4, http://reconstruction. digitalodu. com/ Issues/ 054/ purdue. shtlm [last accessed: August 30, 2019]. Purdue acknowledges that the novel “can certainly be read as a troubling endorsement of the eugenics movement,” but cites “its ‘dark’ narrator” as evidence that the text ultimately “works against messages of racial purity.” Similarly, Pfaelzer does not dismiss the novel’s disconcerting preoccupation with racial eugenics, but in lieu of outright critique, she subsumes it as “emblematic of nineteenth century America’s obsession with race.” Jean Pfaelzer (fn. 17), p. xxxi.

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cisely how. 24 “Vera’s insistence that the Mizorans have naturally evolved into a better race of people,” Broad continues, “speaks precisely to the insidious nature of scientific racism, which works to deny the presence of racism under the guise of a rational claim to truth.” 25 Broad’s claim aligns with my own argument about the influence of scientific and pseudoscientific rhetoric in the hollow earth genre of literature, but I would take her position regarding race somewhat further. The transgendered and phallic imagery defining Vera’s entrance into Mizora disrupts conventions of purity and Victorian sexual boundaries. In doing so the novel upholds presumptions of white supremacy through the mutual degeneration – or, one might argue, contamination – of Vera and Wauna, a Mizoran companion who joins Vera on her return to the outer world. In her educational conversations with the Preceptress, Vera’s guide in Mizora, Vera learns of the racial philosophy of her hosts: “We believe that the highest excellence of moral and mental character is alone attainable by the fair race. The elements of evil belong to the dark race.” 26 Vera, who reminds readers in several places of her own dark hair and eyes, negotiates this statement by “secretly disagreeing with [the Preceptress]” and positing her own “opinion that their admirable system of government, social and political, and their encouragement and provision for universal culture of so high an order, had more to do with the formation of superlative character than the elimination of the dark complexion.” 27 The novel’s ending firmly rejects Vera’s hopeful counter, however, by implying that the racially othered Eskimos – and, to some degree, Vera herself – are responsible for Wauna’s death. An earlier analogue in the novel describing the death of a young Mizoran girl by drowning helps clarify the import of Wauna’s later demise. Vera wonders whether the girl’s companions are worried that their friend’s “mother might censure them for not making sufficient effort to save her when her boat capsized,” to which Wauna replies with “astonishment”: “‘Such a thought . . . would never occur to her nor to any one else in Mizora. . . . I know that everything was done that could have been done to save her.’” 28 Selflessness is an ingrained racial characteristic of the Mizorans, and one that Wauna’s mother does not presume Vera possesses. Reluctantly, she concedes to allow Wauna to accompany Vera to the outer world, but only after receiving a firm commitment from Vera to uphold Wauna’s

24 Katherine Broad: Race, Reputation, and the Failures of Feminism in Mary Bradly Lane’s Mizora. In: Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28 (2009) 2, p. 262. 25 Mary Bradley Lane (fn. 18), p. 260. 26 Mary Bradley Lane (fn. 18), p. 92. 27 Mary Bradley Lane (fn. 18), pp. 92–3. 28 Ibid., p. 125.

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wishes: “‘The moment . . . that she desires to return,’” Wauna’s mother tells Vera, “‘she must be aided to do so.’” 29 When the two women venture into Vera’s society, the effects of the outer world have a diminishing effect on Wauna. As one observer from Vera’s society remarks, “She is too far above the common run of human nature. . . . I should not be surprised if her spirit were already pluming its wings for heavenly flight.” 30 The novel posits no logical rationale for the subtle indicators of Wauna’s decline, suggesting that merely being in contact with societies driven by self-interest has a contaminating effect on her physical health. Although Vera heeds her declining friend’s wish to return to Mizora, Wauna perishes due to an even more extreme expression of self-interest that the novel racially ascribes to the Eskimos, on whom they rely: “Like all low natures,” Vera explains, “the Esquimaux are intensely selfish. Nothing could induce them to assist us but the most apparent benefit to themselves.” 31 Unable to enlist the help of the Eskimos, who refuse to help Vera fulfill her promise to aid Wauna’s return to Mizora, Vera fails to save the life of her friend and the novel’s racist ideology is upheld, though with ambivalence. Vera, who is presented in transgendered and transracial terms upon entering Mizora, performs gender and racial characteristics that enact a kind of “passing” in the novel – one that supports her assertion that “superlative character” is the essential component in Mizora’s “universal culture of so high an order.” 32 Notably, her demonstration of this same “superlative character” occurs before her arrival in Mizora, when she sacrifices her own freedom and status as a Russian aristocrat by lashing out against her government for injustices committed against women, including a friend who perishes in her arms. 33 Thus, the novel suggests that Vera is not transformed by Mizora in terms of revising deficiencies in her moral character, but rather affirms her own preexisting tenets of social justice to be in striking alignment with the utopian ideal. And yet, the novel’s racist ideology is maintained by aligning behavior and moral decision making of the non-white Eskimos as a racial characteristic – one that reaffirms Vera’s racial “superiority” in relative terms. This logic of racial hierarchy in the novel posits Vera as a signifier of social progress exhibited by racial characteristic and form: on the one hand, the novel elevates her above non-white classifications such as “Esquimeaux” through direct comparisons, but on the other hand, the resemblance of her features 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., pp. 92–3. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

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to “the dark race” suggest a contamination of the racial purity Mizora has sought to achieve. 34 The racial contamination suggested by Vera’s physical presence and entrance to Mizora signals the possibility of the contaminating effects of this utopian society on Vera as well. Although Vera’s character is not essentially transformed by Mizora, the hope she has nurtured to reunite with her family and ameliorate the deficiencies of the outer world is dismantled in quick succession upon her departure: she learns her child and father have died in her absence; her husband’s whereabouts in the US are unknown; and although Wauna is much admired by all they encounter, her example is ineffective when it comes to inspiring transformation in the character of others. When Vera buries Wauna, she observes her friend’s name translates to “happiness” in the Mizoran language, suggesting that Vera’s encounter with and loss of Mizora and its ambassador reflect the death of her own hope for finding happiness, both for herself and for her own society. In this sense, Vera’s exposure to the example of Mizora has a contaminating effect on her mind. Pfaelzer takes Vera’s resistance to Mizora’s racial precepts and longing for her husband as evidence of the protagonist’s undermining of the “arrogant certitude” in the utopian society’s design, going so far as to point out the auricular dimension of the name “sounds like ‘misery.’” 35 Alternatively, I would suggest the name more convincingly evokes the phrase “my zora,” which in many Slavic languages translates to “dawn,” or “aurora,” after the Roman goddess of dawn – an interpretation that upholds a reading in which Vera desires to see her own society enter a new era following Mizora’s example. My analysis of Lane’s novel begins by considering Vera’s exploration of Mizora in terms of a breach to an insular culture played out through sexual metaphor. The geography of the Arctic and Antarctic regions evoked a similar insularity to nineteenth-century readers by virtue of their inaccessibility: at the time of Mizora’s publication, 25 major polar expeditions had been launched since 1818 in search of commercial shipping routes, geographical information, and survivors of missing expeditions; and yet, the North Pole was not attained until the early twentieth century. 36 Crossing the thresholds of knowledge and accessibility, Mizora takes readers beyond the geographical boundaries described by Hayes and Kane and into their imagined possibilities. Like Symzonia, the logic of racial hierarchy in Bradley’s Mizora is established through differences that emerge in response to a fictional ideal of white supremacy. 34 Ibid., p. 92. 35 Jean Pfaelzer (fn. 17), p. xv. 36 Hester Blum (fn. 8), pp. xi – xiv.

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The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) posits one of the more mystifying characterizations of race in its account of the open polar sea, which scholars have only recognized in passing. 37 Appearing at a moment when theories of the open polar sea were beginning to fall out of favor in scientific circles, Jewett’s Country unsettles the presumed authority of scientific discourses by subsuming them within epistemological frameworks that privilege the occult and experiences not accounted for by institutional gatekeepers of knowledge. Jewett’s inclusion of a strange tale about the Arctic conveyed by Littlepage, a retired sea captain, exemplifies how everyday acts of storytelling create affective bonds between the inhabitants of Dunnet Landing, Maine, and the narrator, a writer on summer holiday who describes her encounters with local residents as she slowly familiarizes herself with the community. In the narrator’s conversation with Littlepage in the Dunnet Landing schoolhouse, the novel brings together the worlds of science and the occult, indexing their simultaneous influence on ideas about the Arctic landscape. Specifically, I demonstrate that Littlepage’s account of an Arctic civilization shares an uncanny resonance with the occult writings of Helena Blavatsky, who conceived of seven “root races” of mankind in her global synthesis of religious and philosophical world views. 38 By tracing Jewett’s description of polar extremes to Blavatsky’s influence, I contend the novel elevates the Arctic’s imaginative and spiritual dimensions in order to resist the narratives of scientific progress represented by imperializing exploring expeditions. It is not far-fetched to suggest Jewett was influenced by Blavatsky’s publications. Critic Josephine Donovan has established Jewett’s exploration of alternative Christian beliefs through her interest in the ideas of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologist, philosopher, and mystic who inspired the founding of Swedenborgianism, a derivative of the Christian church. As Donovan illustrates in her readings of Jewett’s extant letters, Swedenborgianism helped her move past several “painful personal

37 To my knowledge, only two scholars have recognized Jewett’s reference to the open polar sea in Country. See Derek Kane O’Leary: American Polynya. In: MASKS (Sirens and Muses) 2 (2017–8), pp. 3–19. http://m-a-s-k-s.com/issue-2 [last accessed November 11, 2019]; and Terry Heller: Notes for The Country of the Pointed Firs (The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project). http://www. sarahornejewett. org/ soj/ cpf/ cpf. html [last accessed November 8, 2019]. In his notes, Heller identifies the reference as corresponding to John Cleves Symmes’s theory of a hollow earth “with habitable concentric spheres within” accessible “at the poles, where there were warm polar seas.” 38 Helena Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine. The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (3rd edition, Vol. 2). New York 1893.

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contradictions” relating to her sexual and occupational identities while offering a perspective on Christianity that did not fall into the trappings of doctrine and dogma. 39 Swedenborgianism was also an early precursor to the rise of theosophy, which Helena Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society of America (established in 1875), promoted in her influential writings on esoteric philosophy. The organization attracted mainstream followers in the late nineteenth century with close to 6,000 members and over 100 branches the year before Country was published. 40 Given theosophy’s popularity and shared tenets with Swedenborgianism, it is not altogether surprising to find evidence of Blavatsky’s conceptions of race in the pages of Jewett’s Country, a connection this paper will examine shortly. Following a typical trend in hollow earth literature, the Arctic in Jewett’s Country brings to fruition the imaginary reveries of explorers like Hayes, whose mistaken confirmation of the open polar sea’s existence spawned further delusions about “the shores of distant lands where dwell human beings of an unknown race.” 41 Captain Littlepage manifests this in his account of being stranded in the far north after a shipwreck, where he befriends a Scottish man named Gaffett. According to Littlepage, Gaffett “had been on one of those English exploring parties that found one end of the road to the North Pole, but never could find the other,” 42 which suggests he is the lone survivor of the infamous Franklin Expedition. 43 As his trust in Littlepage develops, Gaffett imparts information about “a strange sort of country ’way up in the north beyond the ice” with “strange folks living in it.” 44 The route to this “country” features details consistent with observations published by explorers like Kane and Hayes related to their supposed encounters with the open polar sea: Gaffett and his companions stumbled upon a “warm current, which seemed to come right from under the ice that they’d been pinched up in and had been crossing on foot for weeks,” which they “followed due north, just the very way they had planned

39 Josephine Donovan. Jewett and Swedenborg. In: American Literature 64 (1993) 5, pp. 731–2. 40 Bruce F. Campbell: Ancient Wisdom Revived. A History of the Theosophical Movement, Berkeley 1980, p. 104. 41 Isaac I. Hayes (fn. 1), p. 352. 42 Sarah O. Jewett: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (1896). New York 1995, p. 20. 43 Alison Easton, editor of the Penguin Books edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, makes this association to the Franklin Expedition as well in her notes on the quoted passage. 44 Sarah O. Jewett (fn. 42), p. 21.

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to go” until the “warm current took them out of sight of the ice, and into a great open sea.” 45 Although Jewett leads readers toward a version of the Arctic common in hollow earth literature, her characterization of the “distant lands” and “human beings of an unknown race” departs from traditions in hollow earth literature that imagine internal civilizations taking a more conventionally human form. According to Littlepage, as near as Gaffett could express it . . . [he and the crew] could see the place when they were approaching it by sea pretty near like any town, and thick with habitations; but all at once they lost sight of it altogether, and when they got close inshore they could see the shapes of folks, but they never could get near them, – all blowing gray figures that would pass along alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if they were watching. 46

The “blowing gray figures,” Littlepage goes on, are also described as “fogshaped men” 47 – descriptors that evade racial categories addressed by Symzonia and Mizora. They do, however, register questions about race posed by radical postulations of the North Pole, such as in Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1885) by Rev. Dr. William F. Warren (the first President of Boston University) and Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888). Whereas Warren contends the North Pole is the site of Eden lost, now frozen over and inaccessible following Adam and Eve’s departure, Blavatsky identifies it as the location of one of seven “Root-Races” appearing on seven continents, the first of which was an “Imperishable Sacred Land” that “capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust . . . beyond that inland sea which seemed like an unreachable mirage to the few arctic travellers [sic] who perceived it.” 48 The ungraspable contours Blavatsky attributes to this space and its inhabitants are reflected in Littlepage’s narrative of the Arctic town and “fog-shaped men,” which are only intermittently perceptible. Whereas racial hierarchy in Symzonia and Mizora is established through the comparison of skin tone and its supposed relationship to 45 46 47 48

Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Helena Blavatsky (fn. 38), p. 419, emphasis in original. These assertions are also consistent with Blavatsky’s analysis of the legendary history of Persia, which in the far north “is ever referring to an unknown glacial, gloomy sea, and to a dark region, within which, nevertheless, are situated the ‘Fortunate Islands,’ wherein, from the beginning of life on earth, bubbles the ‘Fountain of Life’” (416). To be clear, Blavatsky’s conceptions of “continents” and “races” do not follow conventional significations; without getting too far into the obscurities of her initiatic science, I will simply state that these descriptors refer to continents and races that have formerly existed, currently exist, or have yet to appear (422).

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character, Jewett’s Country directs readers’ attention to the possibility of dimensions that contrast with the scientifically observable physical world. In doing so, racial hierarchy is measured not against whiteness per se, but a cosmic philosophy centered in the divine. According to Blavatsky, the North Pole was the home of the “First Race” of mankind, which, in a description that mirrors the “fog-shaped men” in Jewett’s Arctic, “had neither type nor color, and a hardly objective, though colossal, form.” 49 Providing further context for this relatively intangible state of existence, Blavatsky goes on to explain that, at that time, “the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its consolidated state.” 50 This progression from “ethereal” form to consolidated physical matter does not necessarily indicate evolutionary progress in Blavatsky’s cosmic order, however. Joscelyn Godwin, a scholar of Arctic and polar mythology, observes Blavatsky held the view that the human race . . . did not struggle up from ape-like ancestors and continue to progress in knowledge and power up to its present level. On the contrary, its origin was divine and its first state a non-physical one; only as the cycle proceeded did it enter as fully into the physical world as we find ourselves today. It is not the ‘ascent of man,’ as Darwin put it, but a descent that is traced through these prehistoric phases. 51

Following a trope so common in hollow earth literature that it is nearly cliché, the encounter described by Littlepage suggests that when the British exploring expedition in the novel meets with the mysterious “fog-shaped men” in the Arctic, they are in fact coming face-to-face with their racially superior progenitors. The cosmic geographies and temporalities that comprise Blavatsky’s conception of the Arctic, as well as her depictions of race, serve as a counterpoint to institutions that serve as gatekeepers of knowledge referenced in Country. Littlepage shares his disappointment at being rebuffed by “men of science,” whom he attempts to impart the story to upon his return but are allegedly “all taken up with their own notions,” and opines that Gaffett, his friend from the British exploring expedition “never took proper steps” to convince organizations like the “Ge’graphical Society” of his otherworldly encounter. 52 And while Blavatsky’s occult philosophy of the Arctic may seem to contradict scientific observations, my reading of Blavatsky as a potential source of inspiration in Jewett’s novel suggests there may 49 Ibid., p. 260. 50 Ibid., p. 261. 51 Joscelyn Godwin: Arktos. The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Grand Rapids 1993, p. 24. 52 Sarah O. Jewett (fn. 42), p. 20, 23.

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be room for both: citing a “recent evaluation of the Vedic cosmology by a scientist, Richard L. Thompson,” Godwin explains that Blavatsky’s text “makes the bold suggestion that many readers will appreciate: that the places described in the Vedas, impossible to situate or accommodate within the known dimensions of the earth, are part of a broader, multi-leveled cosmos occupying the same space as our own.” 53 My point is not to argue whether Jewett personally believed in Blavatsky’s tenets, but rather to show how the novel appears to draw upon the content of this popular text in the late-nineteenth century to resist hegemonic claims to institutionalized knowledge and reclaim possibilities for coexisting epistemologies. Near the conclusion of Littlepage’s story, he recounts an uprising staged by the “fog-people” against the British exploring expedition that prompts them to take leave. 54 We can read this uprising in two ways: first, alongside common themes within the hollow earth literary genre, which often depict white inhabitants from the outer world as inferior or unworthy of the paradise imagined to exist within the planet’s interior; and second, as a rebellion against a profound symbol of the expanding – and, it is suggested, imperializing – influence of scientific progress ingrained within the agendas of exploring expeditions.

Conclusion The juxtaposed analysis of three hollow earth literary texts in this brief essay varying degrees of thematic continuity within the genre, including preoccupations with discourses on racial evolution and degeneration and anxieties raised by racial miscegenation. While hollow earth novels such as Symzonia and Mizora have received little critical attention within studies of utopian fiction, Country of the Pointed Firs has not been recognized for its participation in conversations about race that have emerged from literature of the hollow earth and open polar sea. Although this essay does not draw definitive conclusions about any one of these topics, the themes identified from the three texts analyzed reveal numerous and productive avenues for exploring the construction of racism and racial hierarchies through processes of comparison. Taking a broad view, the influence of scientific theories of the open polar sea from the 1850’s to 1880’s (and, to a lesser extent, the hollow earth) share parallels with pseudo-scientific arguments that introduce hierarchal taxonomies of race. And the interplay

53 Joscelyn Godwin (fn. 51), p. 21. 54 Sarah O. Jewett (fn. 42), p. 22.

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of these discourses, which rely on the presumed authority of scientific rhetoric, artificially manufacture confidence in their respective claims. This context is important, but the most promising avenues for further study from this preliminary analysis emerge from observing how the processes of comparison and the identification of difference in hollow earth and open polar sea fiction have contributed to the construction and maintenance of white supremacy, especially in the United States. Utopian (and dystopian) fiction often reveals the collective desires and anxieties of an author or society; set in faraway and fictional lands, the texts examined in this paper confront the contradictions posed by imperfect cultures that strive to uphold white supremacy as a racial ideal. With this in mind, future scholarship in this genre should be especially attentive to the construction of race and racism as central components of their cultural context and creation.

De Boodt, Robrecht

The Green Heart of Africa: Literary Knowledge of Scientific Racism

Science, Colonial Literature and the Congo The recent research on Belgium’s colonial past in Belgian and international academia has demonstrated that much source material on the Belgian colonization of the Congo is only now being analyzed. 1 This (re)new(ed) interest is perhaps most visible in the heated debate on the reconstitution of ‘colonial objects’ in the reopened ‘Royal Museum for Central Africa’ in Tervuren, the omnipresent statues of Leopold II and the many street names that honor colonials in Belgium. 2 These colonial statues and busts, along with their commemorative plaques, are physical evidence of a dominant colonial discourse, (in)famously captured by Rudyard Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’: the deeply racist notion that it was the ‘white European man’s duty to civilize his racially inferior brothers.’ 3 Colonial literature captures the complex interweaving of (pseudo)science, colonial politics and racist imagery that dominated this discourse. Heart of Darkness (1899), the dystopian critique of Belgian colonialism in the Congo by Joseph Conrad, comes to mind as the most famous and analyzed literary example. However, as Susanne Gehrmann points out: Heart of Darkness is certainly the most important founding text for a literary tradition of representing the Congo. Yet at the historical moment, it was just one text in a much larger corpus of travel writing, reports, pamphlets and fiction that formed a discourse on the so-called Congo atrocities, a subject which provoked heated debate among colonial powers at the time. The larger 1 For more information on academic developments, cf. Idesbald Goddeeris / Sindani E. Kiangu, Congomania in Academia. Recent Historical Research on the Belgian Colonial Past. In: Low Countries Historical Review 126 2011 No. 4, pp. 54–74. 2 S. N.: Klacht tegen Afrikamuseum Tervuren. In: https://www. standaard. be/ cnt/ dmf20191003_ 04642985, [Last Accessed: 5 November 2020]. 3 Michael Wintle demonstrates the tenacity of its imagery in Michael Winter: Eurocentrism: History, Identity, White Man’s Burden. London 2020.

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discursive formation has political implications for Europe and the colonial politics of the day. 4

Although some canonical Western-European colonial authors have always been an object of literary study, like Frieda von Bülow in Germany, Pierre Mille in France and Eduard Douwes Dekker in the Netherlands, many once (locally) renowned colonial authors have been forgotten, or their memory repressed. 5 However, these popular authors helped shape the ‘discursive formation’ of colonial discourse and remain a blind spot in literary and colonial studies. Belgian literary studies have recently begun to map and analyze Belgium’s colonial past and (popular) colonial literature through seminal publications such as Luc Renders’s anthology Koloniseren om te beschaven [Colonize to Civilize] (2019). Sylva de Jonghe (1904–1950) is a unique and frequently quoted example of a prolific colonial author within this (new) field of study. 6 His colonial novels and plays are manifold, but it is his theoretical survey Het Koloniale in de Literatuur [The Colonial in Literature] (1938), in which he presents his views on colonial affairs and literature, that form an interesting point of comparison to his novels and plays. 7 De Jonghe, like many other colonial authors, had had personal colonial experience in the Congo. He served as an administrator of the province Lusambo and later Dimbelenge, which both appear in his work. In Het Koloniale, de Jonghe underscores the differences between the many different kinds of colonial authors, ranging from “faux-colonials who write from their armchair,” to “real colonial authors with actual colonial experience.” 8 De Jonghe clearly thinks of himself as belonging to the second category, as his thinly-veiled autobiographical novel Het Groene Hart van Afrika

4 Susanne Gehrmann: Of Degenerated Heroes and Failed Romance. King Léopold’s Congo in Popular European Literatures. In: English Studies in Africa 59 (2016) No. 1, pp. 52–62. 5 Lora Wildenthal: When Men are Weak, the Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Bülow. In: Gender & History 10 (1998) No. 1, pp. 53–77; Alec G. Hargreaves: The Colonial Experience in French Fiction. A Study of Pierre Loti, Ernest Psichari and Pierre Mille. London 1981; Dik Van der Meulen: Multatuli. Leven en Werk van Eduard Douwes Dekker. Nijmegen 2002. 6 Bambi Ceuppens: Congo made in Flanders? Koloniale Vlaamse Visies op ‘blank’ en ‘zwart’ in Belgisch Kongo. Gent 2003, pp. 303–306. 7 Records of the number of copies and editions that were printed are scarce, as the publishing house Ignis was linked to collaboration with the German occupation during the Second World War and promptly shut down by ministerial decree in 1944; Ludo Simons: Geschiedenis van de Uitgeverij in Vlaanderen. I De negentiende eeuw. Tielt 1984; Ludo Simons: Geschiedenis van de Uitgeverij in Vlaanderen. II–De twintigste eeuw. Tielt 1987. However, de Jonghe’s many publications did have multiple editions. 8 Sylva De Jonghe: Het Koloniale in de Literatuur. Turnhout, p. 15.

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[The Green Heart of Africa] (1940), tells the story of Lode Doms, a young and romantic student of literature (!), who firmly believes in his ‘civilizing duty’ and who takes on a job as a colonial administrator. After an arduous overseas journey, Lode has to deal with colonial ‘problems’ such as uprisings against the Belgian regime, newly ‘discovered’ Indigenous peoples, tax evasion, etc. In his free time he muses on the mysterious Miss Burke, a rich white woman he met on board the ship to the Congo. He is infatuated by her, but she remains unavailable due to her marriage to Mr. Burke and Lode being stationed far away from her. While on the job in inner Congo, he falls in love with Moadi, a young Indigenous woman. Despite his affection for her, he keeps expressing feelings of guilt concerning his ‘interracial’ relationship and his resolute belief in the ‘superiority of white women,’ symbolized by Miss Burke. This is just one example of the ‘racist order’ which the protagonist Lode and the omniscient narrator have internalized. By ‘racist order’ we mean that “anthropological criteria [I.e. racial characteristics and categorizations] structure all social, legal and economic aspects of public and private life.” 9 Race permeates and connects virtually every piece of information the reader receives, whether it be information on tropical medicine, the justice system and colonial administration or the local animals and plants. Time and again the insurmountable rift between colonizers and colonized is emphasized by the narration and (stereotypical) characters. Indeed, much like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Belgian Congo is represented as a fundamentally different, hostile and unknowable place and an irreconcilable antithesis to ‘Western civilization.’ 10 The novel therefore ends with Lode falling ill – nearly dying – and returning to Belgium in order to heal. By comparing the theoretical survey Het Koloniale and the novel Het Groene Hart, we can map de Jonghe’s own theoretical views and sources on race and racialized (scientific) knowledge and explore their application in his novel. As Philipp Sarasin has shown, such popular knowledge and popular culture are marked by concepts and metaphors from science and its representations, which can have dire political implications. 11 Indeed, political neutrality, one of the hallmarks of authority in science nowadays,

9 Pascal Grosse: Kolonialismus, Eugenik und Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918. Frankfurt a. M. 2000, p. 10. 10 Sarah De Mul: The Congo as Topos of Dystopic Transgression in fin-de-siècle literature. In: Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 46 (2009) No. 1, pp. 95–108. 11 Cf. Philipp Sarasin: Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse. Frankfurt am Main 2003. Sarasin provides the example of the metaphor ‘infected bodies’ and its (political) ramifications in the first half of the twentieth century in Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse.

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is totally absent in colonial novels such as de Jonghe’s. 12 Rather, the authority of science is used to confirm colonial ideology and a fundamentally racist worldview, which was broadly accepted and common at the time. 13 In order to map this usage of scientific discourse, we will first analyze de Jonghe’s theoretical survey Het Koloniale and establish his views on race, colonial science and colonial literature as a genre. Secondly, we will zero in on scenes containing racist and sexist claims within the fields of anthropology, tropical medicine and eugenics, as de Jonghe time and again displays his belief that there is a fundamental racial difference between black and white physiologies and pathologies. 14

“The Colonial in Literature”: Attempting to Establish Epistemic Authority Het Koloniale in de Literatuur was de Jonghe’s attempt to structure and introduce a hierarchy in the field of Belgian colonial literature and the flood of information on the Congo via movies, commercials, newspapers, and other popular media. 15 The most professional providers of colonial information were, in de Jonghe’s eyes, colonial authors who possessed four key qualities, all of which he claimed to exemplify. 16 The first primordial criterion is personal experience as a colonial, preferably as an administrator or in another state position, in order to understand the inner workings of the colonial system, the colonized peoples and the local fauna and flora. To de Jonghe, this first prerequisite divides colonial authors up into the ‘armchair colonials’ and so-called ‘fantasts,’ who take a classic adventure scenario and simply transport it to the tropics, and ‘real’ colonial authors, who write from experience and study. De Jonghe finds it particularly jarring when ‘amateur’ colonial authors make geographical and ethnic ‘mistakes’ by confusing (or inventing!) regions and peoples. After all, de Jonghe claims, the wider audience needs to be informed correctly about 12 Ernst Waltraud / Bernard Harris (eds.): Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960. London 1999. 13 Siep Stuurman: The Invention of Humanity. Cambridge 2017, pp. 2–3, 348. 14 Racist and sexist views and passages are considered to be part of the same mechanisms of discrimination and are thus treated in an intersectional way. Cf. Mary Romero: Introducing Intersectionality. Cambridge 2018, pp. 1–2; Patricia H. Collins / Sirma Bilge: Intersectionality. Cambridge 2016, pp. 25–29. 15 Cf. Popular magazines like Le Patriote Illustré (1885) covered, among other things, events in the colonies. 16 De Jonghe received mixed reviews from other colonial authors and critics. For example, literary critics A. Verthé and B. Henry criticize de Jonghe’s belief that colonial literature chiefly revolves around white women. Cf. Arthur Vertheé/Bernard Henry: Geschiedenis van de Vlaams-Afrikaanse Letterkunde. Leuven 1962, pp. 21–22.

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the ‘dark continent’ – and the Congo in particular – and cannot tell if such mistakes are being made. 17 Therefore, even if an aspiring colonial author is a gifted writer, it is essential that: To his [the colonial author’s] innate talent he adds his multifaceted knowledge, which he has gained through years of long, local study. The colonial situations and matters can’t be known after a single day; the deepening of it demands one or more long-term stays in the tropics and knowledge of the native morals, habits and mentality – the ‘sine qua non’ of colonial literature – can only be obtained through intimate dealings with the natives. 18

Hard-won hands-on experience needs to be further supplemented by intensive studying of scientific texts, in order to structure and hone one’s knowledge. For example, the “native morals, habits and mentality” of the previous quote need to be understood in light of (new) anthropological and genetic theories like that of the French anthropologist De Fraipont, who is mentioned in a footnote in Het Koloniale. Charles De Fraipont was a Belgian geologist and paleontologist whose work on evolutionary theories focused on ‘proof’ in human fossils of racial and evolutionary theories: Wij mogen echter niet vergeten dat wij tweeduizend jaar verder staan dan de Bantoe’s of de Melaneziërs en Polyneziërs, en moeten dus het kinderachtige van hun gebruiken niet bespotten. Van anthropologisch standpunt uit is het trouwens bewezen dat de bewoner der tropische landen een kind moet blijven in zijn handelingen en redeneering, daar zijn schedel op zij 8e jaar reeds helemaal dichtgegroeid is, terwijl het hoofdbeen der Europeanen slechts na 18 of 20 jaar is gesoedeerd. Het hoofdbeen der groote anthropoïden, als de gorilla en de chimpanzee, is reeds gesloten na zes maanden en minder. De neger komt dus dichter bij den aap te staan dan bij den blanke. 19

The quote echoes the colonial ideology of the ‘white man’s burden,’ with the Indigenous being described as “children” that need to be ‘lifted up by European civilization.’ Furthermore, here we see a scientific quote, with a reference, being used as purported evidence for de Jonghe’s colonial claims. It is no coincidence that both anthropology and phrenology are invoked, 17 De Jonghe (fn. 8), pp. 14–15. 18 De Jonghe, (fn. 8), pp. 11–12. Citations with overtly racist vocabulary are kept in the original Dutch in the main text. A translated version can be found in the footnotes. All translations are my own. 19 “We must not forget that we are 2000 years ahead of the Bantus or the Melanesians and Polynesians, and so we must not ridicule the childishness of their ways. Moreover, it has been proven from an anthropological point of view, that the inhabitants of tropical lands must remain a child in his deeds and thinking, since his skull becomes fully grown at the age of 8, whereas the head bone of the Europeans only becomes fully grown after 18 to 20 years. The head bone of the big anthropoids, like the gorilla and the chimpanzee already closes after 6 months or less. The n* thus stands closer to the ape than to the white man.” De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 20.

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since both fields were, in their focus on anatomical differences between individuals and ‘races,’ to a large extent propelled by colonial activities. Darwin’s theory of evolution and evolutionary stages, the foundation of many racial theories at the time, is also made explicit in the comparison between “big anthropoids, like the gorilla and chimpanzee” and (black) humans. By using science as ‘proof’ for his racist claims, de Jonghe illustrates how (pseudo)science and colonial ideology and practice could validate each other reciprocally. De Jonghe presents scientific theories as additional proof for his personal colonial experience, whereas the sciences he invokes are presented as sources of authority on colonial affairs, which are then purportedly ‘proven’ (once again) by de Jonghe’s personal experience. Thirdly, there is the matter of style and the unique position of colonial literature in conveying colonial ‘realities’ through fiction. As a colonial author, de Jonghe believes that it is up to writers such as him to properly inform and educate the wider audience. There is an enormous market for colonial images, stories and objects, but it is up to the colonial author to shield the reader from (desiring) “cheap sentimentalism”: He [the colonial author] wishes only to serve the truth and the European reader does not always like it. All too often, the reader is only interested in sentimentalism, which can make him fantasize about this or that character, about her or his unfortunate love, or about her slavish dedication to the white Adonis. They do not seek the beautiful, the aesthetic of the images, they seek food for their own passions in cheap success-stories and, in fact, in pseudoexotic works of Parisian, Brussels or the Hague’s fantasts. 20

In other words, de Jonghe considers most popular works on the tropics to be misleading and mere repetitions of superficial – and aesthetically inferior – love stories and sentimentality. He is aware that this “food for (. . . ) passions” also reproduces racial images, as the “slavish [!] dedication for the white [!] Adonis” evokes the image of black Indigenous women falling for an idealized white colonial ‘adventurer.’ The enumeration of Parisian, Brussels [and] the Hague fantasts” shows that language and different national colonial contexts were no hindrance to reproduce the same kind of racial hierarchy on a European scale. Furthermore, his novel Het Groene Hart features exactly the same kind of hierarchical love interest, which we will discuss below, yet he still sees his and other “qualitative colonial novels” as infinitely superior to “cheap success-stories.” 21 The reason

20 De Jonghe (fn. 8), pp. 13–14. 21 De Jonghe does not accuse particular authors, he rather criticizes the European production of what we would now call ‘airport novels’ in a colonial setting.

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being their wish to “serve the truth” in an “aesthetic” way, in a European literary field that clearly favored commercial love stories. Indeed, the true test of the colonial author lies in the fact that the reader is totally unfamiliar with the colonial environment, which can only be overcome through a “powerful, realistic and resolute touch.” 22 Fourthly, there is the positioning of colonial literature vis-à-vis other (official) sources of colonial information. The novel Het Groene Hart makes a point of emphasizing its epistemic authority and functions as a gathering point for knowledge about colonial media and institutions. The very present omniscient narrator often interrupts the story to comment on events and provide the reader with additional information, gathered from de Jonghe’s personal experience. Additionally, these interludes are also used to disparage other sources of colonial information and highlight the importance of ‘qualitative colonial literature’ to convey ‘the colonial truth.’ When the protagonist is confronted with an uprising, de Jonghe pauses the story to provide more information as the narrator, which is drawn from his personal experience. But it is impossible to write down the terrible fights that happened then. In Brussels, in the archives of the ministry, there must be plenty of stored documents about this uprising and one would learn a lot, if one would be allowed to take a look at these dusty bundles. But the ministry does not like it when people meddle in their affairs, especially when maladministration and the likes apply. 23

This pause in the narration and ‘willing suspense of disbelief’ blurs ‘fact’ and fiction. Additionally, the Ministry for Colonial Affairs, one of the most central and official sources of information on the Congo, is heavily criticized and presented as an untrustworthy source of information. Once more, colonial literature, and more particularly de Jonghe’s own writing, is presented as the only credible source. The Ministry is not the only colonial institution or medium that is used to connect real-life colonial knowledge to fiction. By evoking popular colonial imagery and possible personal experiences of the Belgian reader, Het Groene Hart activates (all) pre-existing colonial knowledge the Belgian readership might have and connects them to its narration. In the early chapters of the novel for example, Lode has to cross the Ngandumai-forest and -river in order to reach Dimbelenge, non-coincidentally the town where the author had been stationed during his time in the Congo. ‘Ngandumai’ translates to ‘crocodile river’ and in a direct question to the reader the narrator stresses the similarities between

22 De Jonghe (fn. 8), pp. 16–17. 23 De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 123.

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a specific scene of the movie Trader Horn (1931) and the river in the novel: “Do you remember this image from the movie ‘Trader Horn’ where one can see the river sprawling with crocodiles? It was exactly the same here.” 24 Trader Horn is a colonial adventure-movie, in which white male heroes encounter a white princess, who governs the local Indigenous people through violence, fetishism and fear. This reign of ‘irrationality,’ which is dubbed ‘barbaric’ in the movie, is contested and resolved by the white male heroes, who ‘conquer’ the white woman and her tribe. The film is based on the ‘legendary’ ivory trader Alfred Aloysius Smith (1861–1931) and his stories about his dealings with, in his own words, “exotic animals and savages.” De Jonghe’s appeal to the movie could also be linked to the fact that Trader Horn was the first colonial adventure movie to be shot on location and not in an American studio, which could have made it more ‘reliable’ in his eyes. 25 Closer to home, the Antwerp Zoo (1843) provided a wide audience with colonial and orientalist images, fauna, flora and ‘architecture’ like the ‘Egyptian Temple’ (1856), the ‘Antelope Building’ (1861) and ‘Moor Temple’ (1885). The zoo, although originally geared towards the upper class, quickly became a popular site of recreation. De Jonghe uses this popular imagery to evoke up-close experiences with African animals the Belgian readership might have had. As Lode is guided through the forest on one of his first outings, which does not appear to be dangerous for his local guide, the omniscient narrator ties Lode’s experience back to a popular sight in the zoo of Antwerp: Moest de negerknaap hem op dit oogenblik in den steek hebben gelaten dan was hij reeds sedert lang door de woudspinnen, de hyena’s en de luipaarden opgevreten. Maar niets daarvan, de knaap scheen zoo gedwee als een tamme antiloop in den Antwerpschen zoo. 26

The novel’s reference to an existing colonial institution and popular experience not only makes the novel’s imagery more tangible for the reader, it also connects possible exciting and positive personal experiences to a colonial scene. Additionally, it reproduces a racist image that equates the Congolese to animals. The adjective ‘meek’ adds another layer of colonial domination. By using popular imagery, personal experience and scientific discourse, de Jonghe attempts to establish epistemic authority on all things 24 De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 79. 25 Cf. Michael Barson: W. S. Van Dyke. In: www.britannica.com / biography / W-S-VanDyke#ref1199538, [last accessed: March 17 2019]. 26 “Should the n*boy have left him in this instance, he would have long been eaten by the wood spiders, hyenas and leopards. But nothing of the sort [happened], the boy seemed as meek as a tame antelope in the zoo of Antwerp.” De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 28.

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colonial, and thus racial. This ‘specialist’s’ discourse and the link with race is predominantly apparent in scenes that feature ‘scientific’ remarks by the protagonist or narrator.

Tropical Medicine, Eugenics and Anthropology as Vectors of ‘Racial Knowledge’ We have already come across De Fraipont’s racist theory that served as an inspiration for de Jonghe, but his usage of racist scientific language runs deeper than just anthropology. No matter the science, its discourse is always permeated by colonial reasoning and racial hierarchization. The purported notion that European and African bodies, psychologies and cultures greatly differ (tacitly) seeks to confirm this racial hierarchy. We shall first look at ‘bodily differences,’ presented through scenes featuring tropical medicine. Secondly, we shall look at ‘psychological and cultural differences,’ presented through anthropology. Finally, these sciences come together in eugenics, which stresses the ‘incompatibility of European and African races.’ The many European institutions for ‘tropical medicine,’ which nowadays play a pivotal role in dealing with (potential) pandemics like the Ebola-virus and Covid-19, were predominantly established in colonial nations, like France, Germany, England and Belgium. At the turn of the twentieth century, many important centers for tropical medicine emerged, like the Institut Pasteur (1887), founded by the famous chemist in France. In Germany, the Robert Koch Institut was founded in Berlin in 1891 and in Hamburg the Bernhard Nocht Institut was opened in 1900 by bacteriologist Bernhard Nocht. In the UK, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, Southampton, became an important hub for sick colonials that would disembark there. The London School of Tropical Medicine, at the Royal Albert Docks, Greenwich (1899) provided a formal training in tropical medicine. In Belgium, the School voor Tropenziekten (1909) opened its doors, first in Brussels and then in Antwerp, the main departure point for a voyage to the Congo, from 1933 onwards. These institutions were an answer to the high death toll among white colonials, which gave several sub-Saharan regions the grim moniker ‘white man’s grave.’ 27 The issue even gave rise to debates in parliaments across Europe, like the Accli-

27 John Farley: Bilharzia. A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine. New York 1991, pp. 1–12; William C. Cockerham: Sociological Theories of Health and Illness. New York 2021; Deborah J. Neill: Networks in Tropical Medicine. Internationalism, Colonialism and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890–1930. Stanford 2012.

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mationsfrage in the German Reichstag in the 1890’s. 28 De Jonghe’s career as a colonial administrator (1925–1928; 1929–1931) had left him with vital knowledge of (tropical) medicine to survive the Congolese climate. Moreover, his second stay in the tropics was cut short due to his health and inability to cope with the environment. He would only ‘return’ to the Congo through his writing. 29 The Green Heart displays this medical knowledge in multiple scenes, in which the correct timely actions are crucial to the survival of the protagonist. In the middle section of the novel for instance, the protagonist is confronted with ‘gun fraud’ and a potential uprising by rebellious chieftains. As he sits at the campfire, resolute and unafraid of the potential violence, he can feel a fever coming up. This does not stop him from pursuing his mission of quelling the rebellion, as he keeps a cool head and relies on his medicinal knowledge. 30 Ever since the mosquitos had racked him and billions of microbes of malaria were within his blood, he wasn’t surprised in the slightest by a sudden outburst of fever. A bit of aspirin and quinine would trump the attack. 31

Theoretical medical knowledge and practical remedies converge in this suspenseful moment in the story. As Lode is presented as a paragon of ‘colonial heroism,’ the virtue of remaining focused in a dangerous situation comes as no surprise. His knowledge of microscopic imagery and pathology, however, is remarkable and could only have been gleaned by de Jonghe’s study of colonial sciences. This combination of theoretical knowledge and ‘hands-on’ remedies becomes even more apparent when a fight breaks out between Lode’s troops and the Indigenous rebels. The arrow was poisoned! The poison would soon penetrate his blood, spread through his body and before the hour was over, ‘tetanus’ would get him [. . . ] And, while reacting he had a flash of inspiration: burn out the wound before the poison could penetrate his blood. He swiftly cracked open a cartridge and spread the powder on the wound. He gave a match to his corporal and: ‘Ignite’ he said and he closed his eyes. [. . . ] The fire had delved deep into the bone, but he had been saved regardless. 32

28 Grosse (fn. 9), pp. 52–63. 29 S. N. (fn. 2). 30 Much like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Lode wields incredible power of the Indigenous, both his troops and the newly discovered of rebelling tribes, who view him as a supernatural figure. Cf. Charlie Wesley: Inscriptions of Resistance in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In: Journal of Modern Literature 38 (2015) No. 3, pp. 20–37. 31 De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 116. 32 De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 120.

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Once again, Lode’s bravery and theoretical knowledge, in this case of tetanus, saves him. His Indigenous troops assist him, but at no point are they threatened by poison, tetanus or malaria. Indeed, throughout the novel tropical medicine only deals with white bodies and its cures and remedies are never intended for the colonized black population. They aren’t denied the cures, the novel simply suggests that black and white people have different physiologies and react differently to the tropical environment and its hazards. In the following quote, there is a clear distinction between the disastrous and lethal effects of plagues among the Indigenous population and the far less severe effects among the white colonials. This in spite of the aforementioned status of sub-Saharan Africa as a ‘white man’s grave.’ Het is de tijd der borstvliesontstekingen en dergelijke, die de negerbevolking met heele kudden wegmaaien. Ook de blanken lijden er onder: ze schijnen te verschrompelen, hun vitaliteit is verdwenen, ze worden kregelig, zenuwachtig, mistroostig, wanhopig zelfs. 33

Racial ‘differences’ turn into racial comparison and, eventually, hierarchization. We already came across a quote of the narrator comparing Lode’s black guide to a “tame antelope,” but when de Jonghe observes the natural world, he sees signs of a ‘natural’ evolutionary hierarchy in nature’s every manifestation. In the first chapters of the book for instance, Lode quickly learns about the different creatures in the jungle. He is particularly struck by the human physiology and expressions of a macaque he had shot in a moment of frustration. It had seemed as if the monkey had been mocking him, which was apparently enough to shoot it, but now the creature was crying and dying like a human being. The link to Darwin, who claimed that there was a clear link between even the ‘highest ape’ and the ‘lowest savage,’ is explicitly mentioned. 34 By doing so, notions of evolutionary theory and population theories are presented to a wider audience, in the form of an understandable and emotionally relatable passage: “There the ape lay grinning of pain and crying like a human. He saw the tears pouring

33 “It is the time of the pleura and other infections, that wipe the n* population away in droves. The whites suffer as well: they seem to shrivel, their vitality is gone, they become annoyed, nervous, mournful, desperate even.” De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 21. 34 Cf. Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York 1899, pp. 65–66. Much had happened in the field of biology and genetics between Charles Darwin releasing On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and de Jonghe writing Het Groene Hart (1942). It is also important to note that debates on evolution, like the theory of a common ancestor (monogenesis) versus different ancestors per race (polygenesis), long predate Darwin. For an overview of contemporary scientific views on race, cf. Robert W. Sussman: The Myth of Race. The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Harvard 2014, pp. 1–11, pp. 11–43.

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out of his eyes and over his grinning face. O, Darwin, if only you could have seen this!” 35

Cultural Practice as Alleged Proof of Racial Difference Physical differences can only mean that there are psychological, intellectual and cultural differences. At least, that is what de Jonghe continuously suggests. In Het Koloniale, de Jonghe dedicates an entire chapter to ‘the native,’ who, so he claims, has a wholly different psychology than the white colonizer. More importantly, de Jonghe uses popular authors and philosophers to reinforce his ‘observations’ and activate the reader’s general knowledge about the Indigenous and activate racist tropes like ‘the noble savage.’ Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] claims that the Indigenous, who stand closer to nature than the whites, lead a more natural life, [and are] therefore much better than the whites, their civilizers. ‘Paul et Virginie’, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, the ‘Voyage autour du monde’ by the great traveller Bougainville have done their part to spread this idea. We, too, can acknowledge this. 36

The anthropological theory by De Fraipont, which we discussed above, follows shortly after this quote. Writers, philosophers, travelers and scientists are put on the same level of authority when observing the Indigenous. De Jonghe very cleverly adds himself to the list of these observers by providing examples of these literary tropes and ‘scientific observations.’ According to de Jonghe, literature is in a prime position to analyze the Indigenous, which he attempts to demonstrate in his novel Het Groene Hart. As his protagonist Lode becomes more experienced in his colonial assignments and role, he develops an ‘intuition’ for the local peoples and their cultures. This ‘intuition,’ which essentially consists of a set of racist and misogynist tropes, is presented in the form of anthropologic information and insights. Personal observation, the hallmark of anthropologic studies and discourse, is used to ‘prove’ colonial and racial stereotypes, pitting ‘Western reason, rationality and masculinity’ against ‘African irresponsibility, irrationality and femininity.’ 37

35 De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 29. 36 S. De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 19. 37 Depending on the national context, there are different, sometimes conflicting concepts and definitions for terms like ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnology.’ Cf. Sussman (fn. 34); Han F. Vermeulen: Before Boas. The Genesis of Ethnography in German Enlightenment. London 2015; Larry Wolff / Marco Cipolloni (eds.): The Anthropology of the Enlightenment. Stanford 2007.

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Het bleek dat de mannen, de belasting ontvluchtend, zich in het woud waar hij doorgetrokken was schuil hielden Dat was nu eenmaal negermode, maar vooral in zwang bij de Basonge. De leuze van dien stam was niet: werken; maar: genieten. Genieten op alle mogelijke manieren, bij middel van den drank (palmwijn, maïsbier en alcohol van maïs) en door het schuiven van kemp. De vrouw speelde echter de grootste rol in het leven van den Musonge, zoodat de stam reeds lang aan het degenereren was en weldra misschien zou verdwijnen, uitgeroeid door ziekte en uitputting. 38

Ironically, disciplines like anthropology and ethnology sought to ‘preserve’ Indigenous cultures that were disintegrating due to colonial missions to ‘civilize’ them. 39 If there was indeed drug and alcohol abuse and a high death rate within certain Indigenous communities, it is very likely that these were caused by forced labor (displacement) and other forms of colonial exploitation and suppression. 40 Moreover, alcohol and its abuses had largely been introduced by white colonials, among whom alcoholism was a dire problem. If anything, de Jonghe was trying to prove ‘Western white superiority’ through a scientific discourse that emphasized differences, in this case on the level of culture. De Jonghe takes this comparison a step further by analyzing the roots of the local culture through the psychology of its members. 〈〈Kashama〉〉: Luipaard! Een toenaam die hem als een schoentje paste en die hem meteen bewees welke goede psychologen de negers in ’t algemeen zijn. Lode wist wel dat ze den blanke, na hem een paar daagjes doende te hebben gezien, een typeerenden naam gaven, maar dat ze zoo raak konden kijken dat wist hij niet. Schattig die keuze van hun toenamen! (. . . ) Iemand die een bril draagt heet men 〈〈ntala-ntala〉〉 (de ruit); een tweehonderdponder noemt men natuurlijk 〈〈mafuta mini〉〉 (veel vet) of 〈〈lungundu〉〉 (de olifant), terwijl men een Janlawaai 〈〈waya-waya〉〉 (de geruchtmaker) doopt. 41

38 “It appeared that the men, dodging taxes, were hiding in the forest through which he had passed. That was simply n*fashion, but especially popular with the Basonge. The creed of that tribe was not: “work”; but: “enjoy”. To enjoy in every way possible, through means of alcohol (palm wine, maize beer and alcohol from maize) and by smoking hennep. Women played the biggest role in the life of the Musonge, which had been causing the tribe to degenerate and be on the verge of extinction, eradicated by disease and exhaustion.” De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 51. 39 Justin Stagl: Kulturanthropologie und Gesellschaft. Wege zu einer Wissenschaft. München 1974, p. 26. 40 David Van Reybrouck: Congo: een Geschiedenis. Amsterdam 2010, p. 141. 41 “‘Kashama’: leopard! A nickname that fit him like a glove and immediately proved the psychological acumen of the n* in general. Lode knew that they gave a white man, after having observed him for a couple of days, a telling name, but he didn’t know they could do it so precisely. How cute their choice of nicknames was! (. . . ) Someone with glasses would be called ‘ntala-ntala’ (the window); a two hundred pounder would obviously be called ‘mafuta mingi’ (much fat) or ‘lungundu’ (the elephant), all while a

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The accurate, and often insulting, names the Indigenous attributed to individual white colonials is, according to the omniscient narrator, proof of their psychological acumen. This is then used to criticize the corruption of some colonials and as a reminder of the true ideological goal of ‘civilizing’ the Indigenous through exemplary behavior. However, this claim can also be linked back to the overarching notion in The Green Heart that different ‘races’ have varying physical and mental abilities. De Jonghe considers the ‘psychological abilities’ to be impressive which, at first, seems to contradict his belief in the superiority of ‘white Europeans’ in body and mind. However, since the ‘psychology’ of the Indigenous is considered to be closer to ‘nature,’ its acumen is seen as a positive feat of an ‘irrationality’ which mostly took on negative forms, as the previous quote on the “Basonge” illustrated. The notion of ‘irrationality,’ be it impressive or repulsive, is always tacitly pitted against that of Western ‘superior rationality.’

Interracial Relationships, Offspring and other Racial Subversions to Colonial Rule The purported bodily, cultural and psychological differences between colonizer and colonized make it obvious, at least for de Jonghe, that black and white ‘races’ are not to mix. In his essay Het Koloniale, he dedicates an entire chapter to the ‘eugenic problem’ and literary topos of the ménagère, or ‘housekeeper.’ The ‘problem’ of the ménagère or Dienstmädchenfrage was a political issue that many European colonial powers like France, Belgium and Germany had to deal with, especially after 1900, when the effects of the white colonial domination became visible in the form of ‘mixed-race’ offspring. From the early stages of the colonization onwards, the number of white male colonists greatly exceeded the number of white women in the colonies, who, among other reasons, were thought to be “too frail” to survive the tropics. 42 This made (forced) ‘local relationships’ inevitable, given the patriarchal Zeitgeist. National political eugenic initiatives struggled with the tension between the values of the public sphere striving towards ‘racial purity’ and ‘sexual decency’ and the private (sexual) sphere of white men in the colonies, who fell outside of the stringent social control of the homeland. 43 De Jonghe’s novels were specifically geared towards the Belgian homeland and so de Jonghe was caught in the awkward position loudmouth would be baptized as ‘waya-waya’ (the noise-maker).” De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 57. 42 Ibid., pp. 26–32. 43 Grosse (fn. 9), pp. 155–156.

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between wanting to be “truthful about colonial life” and admitting to the rumors of sexual excesses, venereal diseases and abuse that would have been highly criticized in Belgian society. In order to absolve himself and the colonial enterprise, de Jonghe uses an apologetic discourse: It is a simple fact that the tropics sharpen lust in an extraordinary way. Not just the exceptional heat and the primitive nature have an aphrodisiac-effect, but above all the natural way of living and the nakedness have a contagious effect on the incited nerves of the white man. Someone who, in Europe, is morally strong and who lets himself be guided and influenced by his religion will, in Congo, or in any tropic country, be armed against the desires that creep up on him from all sides. The large majority can’t make do without a woman and will take in a maid. Whether he always does this out of lust is to be questioned, there are many other explanations available, like loneliness for instance. 44

De Jonghe presents multiple arguments, but they all consider the white male colonial to be a ‘victim’ of the climate and the tropic environment, in the same way that he could fall ill because of the heat, parasites, malaria or other diseases. The topos of ‘tropic fever,’ also called Tropenkoller, tropenwee and fièvre tropicale in English, Dutch and French colonial literature, combined irrationality, diseases, morality and sexuality in an apologetic way, presenting the white colonial as being ‘beside himself.’ Some of his other arguments hint at the ‘practical necessity’ of a woman doing domestic chores in a patriarchal society or the emotional support women can provide for ‘lonely men.’ Despite his best efforts, de Jonghe could not deny that the ‘housemaid’ became a euphemism for interracial – and thus ‘scandalous’ – relationships. As for the ‘problem’ of the ménagère, his proposed solution for any colonial problem in Het Koloniale is simply to only send “morally strong” men “guided by their religion” to the colonies. After all, de Jonghe reasons, if white Belgians are to uplift their black colonial subjects on the ‘ladder of civilization,’ it only makes sense to send the ‘best examples’ of white European civilization. By doing so he presents himself as an example of an exemplary colonial who couldn’t possibly be accused of any crimes or morally unsavory practices like the keeping of a ménagère. Despite his apologetic discourse on colonial sexuality, de Jonge does not try to hide the presence of ‘mixed-race offspring’ in the colonies, which he considers to be ‘an abomination’ in both Het Koloniale and The Green Heart. His racist eugenic discourse on the matter is particularly interesting since it is voiced through the protagonist Lode, who is in a ‘mixed-race relationship’ himself. Lode clearly favors the white, yet married, Miss Burke,

44 De Jonghe (fn. 8), p. 22.

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who is the object of many musings and dreams. Apart from her there are no white women in the vicinity and Lode gradually falls in love with his ménagère, Moadi. The narrator continuously reminds the reader that this is not only a shameful bond, but also an unfulfilling one for Lode. Indeed, because of their ‘racial incompatibility,’ Lode could never find peace and happiness with Moadi. Zoo gingen ze elken avond, genietend van den bedwelming en den mystieken toover van al die schoonheid. Tot de aanwaaiende wervelstorm hen terug naar huis dreef, waar hij in extase in Moadi’s ooren had willen fluisteren: – Indi ukuanyisha! Ik heb je lief! Maar Moadi was maar een zwartje, een soort huisdiertje dat hem geen verzet, geen opbeuring brengen kon en dus zijn huishoudstertje moest blijven. . . 45

The narrator returns – once again – to the trope of ‘tropical fever,’ this time in the form of ‘mystical magic.’ The irresistible “seduction” and “ecstasy” make Lode question the very racial foundation of the colonial enterprise. The narrator however, quickly quells Lode’s doubts by highlighting Lode and Moadi’s racial incompatibility. His vocabulary in describing Moadi as a “pet” and “little maid” both indicate the racial – once again a black character is described as an animal – and gender divide in racial colonial hierarchy. Lode’s persisting feeling of racial ‘guilt’ will eventually drive him to terminate the relationship. Note how de Jonghe puts his linguistic knowledge on display to reinforce his status as a colonial expert and guide to the reader. Without his translation, the reader would remain oblivious to the meaning of “Indi ukuanyisha! I love you!” and it is unlikely that anyone among the casual readership would have been able to challenge this translation. The narrator applies the same authority of observation and experience when he lets Lode think eugenic thoughts. Moadi does not become pregnant, so there are no ‘racial consequences’ to their relationship, but there are plenty of ‘mixed-race’ children to be found in the novel’s colonial realm: “Het meewaren sloeg Lode om het hart. ’n Ellendige kwaal, die halfbloeden-kwestie. Arm klein mulatje dat niet eens de geneugte van een donzig wiegje kende noch de zoete vertroeteling van een zachtzinnige blanke moeder.” 46

45 “So they went every night, enjoying the seduction and mystical magic of all that beauty. Until the coming whirlwind would drive them back home, where, in ecstasy, he would have wanted to whisper in Moadi’s ears: – Indi ukuanyisha! I love you! But Moadi was but a blackie [sic!], a sort of pet that could not make his mind move on, could not make him cheer up and thus had to remain his little maid. . . ” Ibid., p. 45. 46 “Lode felt compassionate. A miserable plague, the half-blood issue. A poor small mulatto [sic!] that didn’t even know the joy of a soft cradle, nor the sweet pampering of a gentle white mother.” Ibid., p. 17.

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Interracial offspring is pathologized in the same way as interracial relationships and ‘attraction’ was considered to be in the realm of tropical medicine, in the form of ‘tropical fever.’ Only this time, ‘interracial’ children are considered to be a “miserable plague,” indicating their number and repulsiveness in the eyes of the colonizer Lode. Compared to ‘interracial relationships,’ it becomes even more apparent that the colonial and racial mindset of segregation is unable to process ‘interracial offspring.’ On the one hand, Lode considers such children to be white and thus deserving of a “gentle white mother,” just like white colonial men would ‘need and deserve’ white women. However, on the other hand, they are considered to be black since they can never become a part of white colonial society. As they are left fatherless with their black mothers, their position in Indigenous societies isn’t guaranteed either. In a way, they are pariahs which threaten the racial segregation at the root of colonial society. In other words, de Jonghe suggests: in order to ensure the success – even survival – of colonial society and its ‘civilizing mission,’ eugenic hygiene needs to be preserved.

An ‘Authoritative’ Patchwork of ‘Scientific’ Racial Colonial Knowledge With a Western European audience desiring (exoticized) colonial adventure stories in the early decades of the twentieth century, the colonial author Sylva de Jonghe was all too eager to position the ‘quality colonial novel’ as the only herald of ‘the truth’ about the Belgian colonial enterprise. The position of the omniscient narrator in his novel The Green Heart of Africa, who focalizes through the protagonist, allows the author to comment on the thoughts, actions and environments of the story set in the Congo. This narrative voice, whose ‘insights’ can be traced back to de Jonghe’s theoretical overview The Colonial in Literature, relies on four main sources of epistemic authority to tell a ‘believable’ and ‘realistic’ story about the Belgian colony Congo. Firstly, personal colonial experience is paramount to write a qualitative colonial novel. Secondly, personal experience needs to be further supplemented by the intensive studying of the local fauna and flora, the Indigenous peoples, their cultures and their languages. Thirdly, it is the colonial author’s job to properly inform the general public about colonial affairs through his realistic style of writing. Fourthly, colonial literature should include and comment on other sources of colonial information like, among other things, movies, colonial institutions like the Antwerp Zoo, official reports and newspaper articles. In The Green Heart, scientific discourse, gleaned from anthropology, tropical medicine, (Darwinian) racial theories and eugenics prove to be the main vector for authoritative ‘knowledge’ about the Congo and its peoples.

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Theory is seemingly put into practice in de Jonghe’s own anecdotes and fiction. Allegedly backed by science and experience, he is free to set up a literary experiment which appears more like an eye-witness or scientific account than a novel. These literary ‘observations’ all confirm his deeply racist worldview and colonial ideology. No matter the science, the narrator’s discourse presents ‘race’ as the key concept to understanding and maintaining colonial society and its rule over Indigenous peoples. At every turn, de Jonghe presents white and black people to be fundamentally different on a physical, mental and cultural level. These supposed ‘racial differences’ are the foundation of the colonial racial hierarchy and the reason why interracial relationships – and especially interracial offspring – are experienced as a threat to colonial stability by de Jonghe. By using the form and authority of scientific discourse and by combining it with personal anecdotes and popular colonial imagery, de Jonghe presents his novel as a professional, yet accessible report on the colonial realm and racial hierarchy. With Belgian society being flooded with (imagined) colonial imagery and information, who among the (casual) readership could possibly challenge de Jonghe’s purported epistemic authority and racial ‘knowledge’ about the Congo and the, for his contemporaries, ‘unknowable and mysterious dark continent’?

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Articulations of Racism in Vénus Noire (2010) and A United Kingdom (2016)

1. Introduction: On the Mediality of Racism in Cinema The criticism and revision of the Western film canon since the 1980s has asked for the inclusion of ethnic minorities and a broader consideration of different and more diverse cinemas. It has also led to a turn in “cultural memory” 1 and enhanced awareness for racism and cultural discrimination. Recently, more and more feature films deal with racism in historical contexts such as slavery or colonialism. Movies such as 12 years a slave (2013) by British-American director Steve McQueen, Belle (2013) by Amma Asante or Roschdy Zem’s Chocolat (2016) are only a few examples for an unprecedented interest in racism. Scholars have emphasized the strong memory function that historical film images can hold, both on a collective social and individual level. Historical movies can make a great contribution to the fact that one can (re-)experience the past despite temporal and spatial distance and to prevent past experience to fall into oblivion. The relationship between history and cinematic media representations is commented on by film critic Anton Kaes, as follows: It seems scary: The further the past moves away in time, the closer it gets. Images fixed indelibly on celluloid, stored in archives and reproduced thousands of times, do not let the past fade away; they have taken the place formerly occupied by experience, memory and oblivion. You no longer need to have experienced the Hitler era, you know about it: We know the images about that time, authentic and re-enacted. Memory becomes public and collective

1 Jan Assmann: Cultural Memory and Early Civilisation. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge 2011; Astrid Erll: Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory. In: Astrid Erll / Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Media and Cultural Memory. Berlin / New York 2008, pp. 389–398; Martin Zierold: Memory and Media Culture. In: Astrid Erll / Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Media and Cultural Memory. Berlin / New York 2008, pp. 399–408.

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to the extent that individual remembering is covered and dominated by these images. 2

In this respect, media representations become storage media but also bridging media between the past, the present and the future. However, it should be noticed here that the wholeness of a historical event in its complexity cannot be exhausted in one medium, which then points to the selection work, not neutral work, from which a historical, historically (re)constructive film emerges. 3 Based on this, the question can be asked what can, should or may be (re)constructed cinematically from history and its atrocities. Undoubtedly, much of the debate about racism in movies was already prefigured by the question whether or not and how the Shoah should be portrayed in visual media. Elie Wiesel and Claude Lanzmann claimed that the singularity of the event and its sacred character was lost and demythologized as soon as it appeared on screen. 4 Others such as Michael Rothberg in his Remembering Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization 5 suggested an approach open to comparisons in order to understand historical acts and sources of unreasonable violence more comprehensively. The following paper will scrutinize two recent movies, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Vénus Noire (2010) and Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom (2016), in regard to their medial negotiations of racism. The questions raised will thus center around the different ways these films address racism. How do the films deal with racist practices? How do they articulate scientific and cultural racism with an emphasis on sexuality and corporality without, at the same time, being a vehicle of racism of telluric violence? If fictionalization is based on tools such as reconstruction, exposition and criticism, perhaps with the aim of a possible repair, what semiotic languages are used in these two films, in order to avoid becoming part of a sterile, even racist narrative? Do they have different narrative approaches to the matrix of sexuality and corporality in racial contexts?

2 Anton Kaes quoted from Waltraud Wende: Medienbilder und Geschichte. Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust. In: Waltraud Wende (ed.): Geschichte im Film. Mediale Inszenierung des Holocaust und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, pp. 8– 30, esp. p. 9, translated by Burrhus Njanjo. 3 Ibid., p. 9. 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 Michael Rothberg: Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation. Stanford / California 2009.

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2. Articulating Scientific Racism in Vénus Noire Vénus Noire is the 4th opus of the French filmmaker with Tunisian migration background Abdellatif Kechiche, one of the main figures of contemporary French cinema. After receiving many awards for L’Esquive and La Graine et le Mulet, his 2nd and 3rd movie, respectively, Kechiche experienced less resounding success with Vénus Noire. The movie was absent on podiums of the greatest film festivals in Europe in 2010 and harvested less than 125,000 entries in the box office. This skeptical reception of Vénus Noire in Europe in general and in France in particular bespeaks, according to Jean Miguoué, the incapacity and unwillingness of European societies and politicians to resolutely and critically engage with the violent episodes of Europe’s cultural history, such as colonialism for instance. 6 As Miguoué further points out from an intercultural and postcolonial perspective, Kechiche’s Vénus Noire does not match the topics and expectations of the European film canon. Even though the movie draws on the genre of French biopic, it can be argued that this genre is hardly (almost never) concerned with issues related to racism or colonization but rather celebrates ‘heroes’ of a great French history. 7 On the contrary, Vénus Noire, as this first chapter will point out, critically exposes, by means of a naturalistic film style, practices of scientific racism in the French past. Vénus Noire is a filmic processing of the biography of Saartje Baartman. 8 She is a South African woman commonly referred to as “Black

6 cf. Jean B. Miguoué: Kolonialismus – Exotismus – Wahnsinn. Literarische und filmische Verarbeitungen vom kolonialen Spektakel des Anderen in der europäischen Kulturgeschichte. Darstellungen der “Hottentotten-Venus” bei Hans Christoph Buch und Abdellatif Kechiche. In: Constatin T. Sonkwé/Hyancinthe Ondoa / Jean B. Miguoué (eds.): Postkoloniale Blickpunkte. Betrachtungen zur Interkuturalität in Literatur, Film und Sprache. Leipzig 2017, pp. 85–112, esp. p. 103. 7 Raphaëlle Moine: Le Biopic à la Française. De l’Ombre à la Lumière. In: Studies in French Cinema 10 (2010) No. 3, pp. 270–287, here p. 270; Caroline Vernisse: Paradoxe d’un Genre Renaissant en France: la Biographie Filmée. In: Raphaëlle Moine (ed.): Le Cinéma Français Face aux Genres. Paris 2005, pp. 141–150, esp. p. 143. 8 Saartje Baartman as Hottentot Venus has long been the subject of intense scientific discussions. There is an extensive research literature about her. cf. Deborah Willis (ed.): Black Venus 2010. They called her “Hottentot”. Philadelphia 2010; Pamela Scully / Clifto Crais: Race and Erasure. Sara Baartman and Hendrick Cesars in Cape Town and London. In: Journal of British Studies 47 (2008) No. 2, pp. 301–323; Maria I. Romero R.: The Hottentot Venus, Freak Shows and the Neo-Victorian: Rewriting the Identity of the Sexual Black Body. In: Odisea 14 (2013), pp. 137–152; Priscilla Netto: Reclaiming the Body of the Hottentot. The Vision and Visuality of the Body Speaking with Vengeance in Venus Hottentot 2000. In: European Journal of Women’s Studies 12 (2005), pp. 149–163; Harvey Young: Embodying Black Experience. Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Michigan 2010; Andreas Mielke: Contextualizing the “Hottentot Venus”. In: Acta Germanica 25 (1997), pp. 151–169.

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Venus” or “Hottentot Venus.” The ethnic group in South Africa she came from, the Khoikhoi, was widely known in ethnographic discourse under the label of “bochimanes.” 9 The movie represents, in a fictive genre highly intertwined with documentary characteristics, biographical aspects of Saartje Baartman in England and France: her portrayal as a savage animal in London and Paris, her prostitution, her death in Paris and, the appropriation and the dissecting of her body by the Royal Academy of Medicine in France. Over the course of Saartje’s biographical account, Vénus Noire critically examines different practices of racism, e.g., scientific racism in 19th century France or the exhibition of Saartje Baartman in shows for the purpose of entertainment. Already the opening of the movie is a key-scene to understand Kechiche’s approach to racism since it is also the epilogue of the story. It is an account of the lecture that the naturalist Georges Cuvier gave on Saartje Baartman. This narrative structure sets the scene for the film and provides information about the course of the film; a film that narrates in a naturalistic style the highlights of Baartman’s trajectory in Europe, which is essentially characterized by racism and violence. The analysis of this 9 In 1810, Saartje leaves her country with her white master to make a fortune in London and later in Paris. A dream she will never get closer to. She was confronted with a completely different constellation in Europe. In an enslaved position, she had to expose herself to the upper middle classes in Parisian theatres and salons. Later, she was forced into prostitution. As a consequence, she suffered from venereal disease, from which she died. Sometime before, her exoticized anatomically “atypical” body had aroused the interest of the French Academy of Sciences of the time, which was interested in the “espèces les plus rares,” here the “bushmen” or “bochimanes,” terms which I do critically distance myself from. The terms stand for the khoikoi, an ethnic group living in the austral part of Africa. It is originally derived from the exoticized and degrading expression of “bush men” in reference to the populations from this part of the continent. These concepts were all established during the first historical encounters between the white explorers and conquerors and the autochthones in the southern part of Africa. A closer look on Saartje’s life shows the inherent racial violence of this term, which acted as determinism on Saartje’s life in Europe and even afterwards and thus justifies in the eyes of her executioners the humiliations she suffered. This precision and critical distancing seems to me to be timely and relevant insofar as the concept still seems to be quite widespread today and is hardly deconstructed, even in works of evidenced relevance to Saartje Baartman such as those by Siobhan Somerville. cf. Siobhan Somerville: Queering the Color Line. Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham 2000, p. 26. In the same line of thoughts, a critical distance can be observed towards similar terms such as “Black Vénus,” “Hottentot Vénus” and “bochimans” or “Bushwoman” because their development ground on racist bases as well. “Black Vénus” and “Hottentot Vénus” seem etymologically to designate Saartje Baartman as the prototype of black or African beauty, which stereotypes the African beauty in one single model with more or less known features and therefore creates a classifying reference, from which any model of the “white female beauty” demarcates and defines itself.

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opening will focus on the critical representation of scientific racism that emerges from Cuvier’s presentation against a background of spectacle and mass voyeurism. The first scene of the plot is a representation of the ‘scientific’ presentation by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier 10 in a lecture hall of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Paris in 1815. A glance at the staging illustrates Cuvier with his assistant at the center of the hall, and in front of the two, young as well as old researchers of the academy carefully listening to Cuvier’s lecture and taking notes. The lecture’s material consists of paintings, pictures and a plaster statue of Saartje Baartman as well as her genitals prepared in a liquid in a transparent jar. The scene is about six minutes (00:00:31-00:06:19/CD1) and is made of peculiar cinematic frames, which clearly are far from any pure coincidence. Wide and medium-long shots are almost absent from the scene; instead it has a large offer of close-ups and extreme close-ups emphasizing the precision, the delicacy and the keen eye for detail of the French film director. The views are sometimes so tight that the screen is filled with single features, like Georges Cuvier’s mouth, lips or eyes, revealing in so doing a kind of dominance Cuvier projects on to his audience further illustrated by the authority he speaks with. Not accidentally, Kechiche chooses to display Cuvier’s talk almost in its entirety, whereby a pattern of comparing in stages can be noticed. In turn, and empowered with the epistemic authority of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he compares first Saartje’s buttocks and then her genitals with those of the white race and the apes. The demonstration culminates with a comparison of various racially coded skulls to which a mummified skull from ancient Egypt is added for maximum ‘scientific’ authenticity at the

10 Georges Cuvier, Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier was an anatomist, zoologist and paleontologist who was a great advocate of comparative anatomy in the 19th century and at the same time a member of the Collège de France, the Académie des Sciences in France and the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle. The Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, on the other hand, has been Georges Cuvier’s home institution since 1793 and in the continuity of the Jardin Royal de plantes médicinales, founded in 1626. As an institution for research, teaching and diffusion of knowledge, it houses an ensemble of scientific practices such as anthropometry and craniometry – the doctrine of measuring the skull, which formulated itself in the shadow of phrenology developed by the German anatomist Franz Joseph Gall – whose development can be traced back to the 19th century thanks to names such as Georges Cuvier and Paul Broca. cf. Françoise Collin: Le Sexe des Sciences. Les Femmes en Plus. Paris 1992; Jean Deligne / Esther Rebato / Charles Susanne: Race et Racisme. In: Journal des Anthropologues 84 (2001), pp. 217–235; Jacqueline Duvernay-Bolens: L’Homme Zoologique. Races et Racisme chez les Naturalistes de la Première Moitié du XIX e Siècle. In: L’Homme 133 (1995), pp. 9–32; Ulrike Kistner: Georges Cuvier. Founder of Modern Biology (Foucault), or Scientific Racist (Cultural Studies)? In: Configurations 7, (1999) No. 2, pp. 175–190.

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end. On the skull specifically, according to Cuvier, the classification of nations has always relied (00:03:50/CD1) (See figure 1 below).

Fig. 1: In: Abdellatif Kechiche, Vénus Noire. © MK2 S.A., France 2 Cinéma 2009.

In Cuvier’s argumentation, comparison is not only “a proper tool to demonstrate and persuade,” 11 as with Aristotle, but rather constitutes “an ingredient of logical thinking through classifying and concluding, judging and measuring.” 12 However, this comparison, as represented by Kechiche, raises a problem with regard to form, which reveals in substance an instrumentalization of science for racist, imperialist and even sexist purposes. Cuvier is indeed the only one who chooses his comparata and tertium comparationis. To assert with scientific authority that “Negroes” (00:05:17/CD 1) are condemned to eternal inferiority on the basis of their “depressed and compressed skulls” (00:05:57/CD1), like monkeys, i.e. animals, and that the white race in particular is destined to be the superior race, is pure fantasy verging on megalomania and madness. In the same vein, Cuvier chooses to compare a mummified skull from Ancient Egypt to an imaginary (since it is not visible during the presentation) white skull and it is he who defines the perspective, namely the tertium comparationis. 13 It is by virtue of the similarity between this mummified skull and

11 Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart: Practices of Comparing. A New Research Agenda between Typological and Historical Approaches. In: Angelika Epple / Walter Erhart / Johannes Grave (eds.): Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld 2020, pp. 11–38, esp. p. 12. 12 Ibid., p. 12. 13 In order to avoid images of the film that reflect particular violence, racist messages, and are therefore shocking, we have decided not to reproduce certain images in this paper.

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that of the so-called white race, just thought that the power of whiteness is all the more omnipotent in its phantasized absence, that he declared the whiteness of Ancient Egypt. The racist and instrumentalist character of such a practice is thus made evident by the aims pursued by the comparing subjects: to establish a classification of races, at the apex of which is the white race and to whom the whole world owes the fundamental “principles of law, science and religion” according to Georges Cuvier (00:05:01/CD1). This is the so-called primacy of the European race, understood here as the white race. At the core of this process of the instrumentalization of science stands another problematic element referring to the process through which somebody, a group of people or an institution, illegally or unethically, takes over the fatherhood of some knowledge. In Vénus Noire, Cuvier, as illustrated by Kechiche, exercises practices of anthropometry both on the head of Saartje Baartman and a mummified body from ancient Egypt. Because these two heads present different dimensions, Cuvier concludes that the ‘Negroes’ and ancient Egyptians are not from the same race. While admitting that the whole world today owes to the people from ancient Egypt principles of laws, science and perhaps religion and asserting that they (people from Ancient Egypt) share the same race with ‘us,’ the Europeans (00:05:43/CD1), Cuvier is then realizing heuristic expropriation because he implicitly emphasizes that ancient Egyptians were not Negroes or black, but rather white and Europeans. From this it follows that the principles of laws, science and perhaps religion as known today are from the white “European” race, which was later deconstructed by researchers such as Cheikh Anta Diop. 14 This implied (phantasized) historical genealogy in effect dispossesses the “Black race” of any paternity of the principles of science, laws and perhaps religion, which could basically be understood as part of the process described by Francis Nyamjoh as “epistemicide,” 15 and what condemns the “Negroes” or “the races with depressed and compressed skulls” in what Georges Cuvier called “an eternal inferiority” (00:05:57/CD1) and in effect justifies the “civilizing mission” of the European across the world,

14 cf. Cheick A. Diop: Antériorité des Civilisations Nègres. Mythe ou Vérité Historique? Paris 1967. 15 It refers to the epistemological dispossession by the colonizing hegemonies and its consequences in educational systems of a formerly colonized continent like Africa. It is with own Francis Nyamjoh’s terms “the decimation or near complete killing and replacement of endogenous epistemologies in Africa with the epistemological paradigm of the conqueror.” Francis B. Nyamjoh: Potted Plants in Greenhouses. A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa. In: Journal of Asian and African Studies 47 (2012) No. 2, pp. 1–26, esp. p. 1.

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which led in the 19th century to the colonization of African territories and cultures. The process of “Becoming-Animal” of Saartje in Paris, as Deleuze would call it 16, is in continuous order with the spectacles in London and even more acute. The language used during a sequence in a Parisian libertine salon for bourgeois is highly suggestive of this “Becoming-Animal” of Saartje. Réaux, Saartje’s abusive boss, who had performed in London on the same circus ground with Caesar, is the new master on stage in Paris because of his linguistic competence. Saartje is cast as the mute beast, while his “white” companion, Jeanne, makes the comments and plays music in the background. It should also be emphasized that these performances never once strike the audience as deceptive play. In their imagination, they believe in the real character of what they see, consume, and are involved in. Jeanne’s introduction raises the issue of the multivalent power relations performed on stage: “Master Réaux, an illustrious tamer, who defeated animals as ferocious as bears, tigers, and even lions, who succeeded in the fabulous wager of turning this wild hottentote into an obedient damsel. Here is the famous act of the Venus hottentote” (01:15:01/CD1). The credit goes to Réaux for being able to ‘tame’ Saartje. And this emerges from his experience with wild animals such as bears, tigers, and lions. In fact, the portrayal is a subtle way of informing the audience that it was even more difficult to tame Saartje and that she belongs to a different species. Here, a gradation can be read from the listing of “bears, tigers, and even lions” and then “this wild hottentote” Saartje. That is, in the absence of an existing equation between these aforementioned wild animals and Saartje, she appears as even wilder, more distant from “humanity” and the “limits of civilization,” further removed from what has already been seen and imagined. Réaux, as the symbol of the “white, strong, victorious man,” succeeds in dominating Saartje. The performance is clear proof of this mastery. Réaux exhibits his victorious competence, whereby Saartje in comparison plays the wild but domesticated animal. Following this spectacle, a captain from the army joins Réaux’s invitation. While Saartje is on all fours, the captain sits on her back and rides, slapping Saartje’s buttocks with his hand. As he does so, an ovation for his “bravura” is offered by the audience present in the film. This sequence is equally revealing of the articulation of race relations in French society at the time, where the superiority of the white race results from a subjective interpretation of the dominance of racialized bodies and heads for instance.

16 cf. Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis / London 2005, p. 232.

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Due to her body and sex, Saartje is an object of curiosity to her hosts at the spectacle, especially in France. Some want to touch her hair, others her buttocks. Saartje also arouses a cultural curiosity. She performs “a primitive ethnic dance” (01:05:02/CD2) at Réaux’s request. The mise-en-scène always takes place in confined spaces in French salons, so that the audience in the film can better enjoy their object of interrogation, so that they can more quickly become fascinated by Saartje’s “cute little backside” and by “as much fat, as much beauty, as much pleasure, as much sensuality,” quoting Réaux (01:16:30). This is clearly not about a harmless admiration of Saartje’s body, rather its fascinated abjection and stigmatization. It appears as a strangely “fat” body that does not correspond to the image of the slender, blond, refined, modern European woman sometimes with blue eyes – like the “white” women present at Saartje’s performance. The mise-en-scène of the “white rider” takes on a perverse, sexualized connotation in a libertine salon in Paris. As always, Saartje is chained up like an animal. She wears eroticizing lingerie just like most of the ladies in the room. She is on all fours with Réaux ridding on her back, the latter acoustically simulating an ejaculation by the moans he produces. This is followed by a “white” lady repeating the action once again to the applause of the audience. The language here is particularly erotic and the accent slow and ingratiating: “ride her,” “feel her,” “let you be won over by her undulation,” “slowly.” In the course of the performance, this racially charged mass voyeuristic perversity is taken up a notch. Réaux holds an artificial penis made of wood on his belt buckle, as if this artificial penis were his. On top of this penis, he places a grape for Saartje to eat. Saartje is first asked to bend down and eat the grape on the penis amidst the approving applause of the audience. Towards the end of this scene, the audience is invited to discover her vulamen vulvae, which is called a Hottentot apron in ethnological literature. They are even allowed to touch her vagina without Saartje’s consent. In a later scene when she is depicted in the brothel, Saartje is more often assigned the role of a provocative curiosity. At the request of the “white” brothel-goers, she is expected to show off her buttocks and vagina when these men sleep with white women at the same time, if not with her. These selected examples reveal two things that I would like to comment on with particular reference to the white protagonists. First, this white sexual perversity reveals a certain racial fetishism for Saartje as a symbolic figure for colonized peoples. This fetishism is well illustrated from the sexualized perspective in the film. It consists of viewing the geographical locations of such peoples as anachronistic, seeing them as sexually deviant and inferior, and from this self-proclaimed superior vantage point granting themselves the “legitimized” permission to conquer ‘them’ and put

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‘them’ under control. Even though an isolated female example is identified in the film, this fetishism is profoundly male, as with Freud and Lacan. 17 The cinematic sex scenes clearly exemplify what Ann McClintock would call “the magisterial centrality of the phallus.” 18 Saartje does not control anything on her own. During the kinky sexual scenes, her movements are conditioned by male desire and aim to fulfill that desire. There is no place for Saartje’s own sexual enjoyment or agency nor to express her desire toward others. Every time she speaks out against this, she receives punishment in the form of beatings from her masters (sometimes Caesar, sometimes Réaux) because Saartje has humiliated them. This means that Saartje is the abject object of male desire and masculine empowerment. In a study of fetishism in Georges Sand, Naomi Schor writes: [. . . ] it is an article of faith with Freud and Freudians that fetishism is the male perversion par excellence. The traditional psychoanalytical literature on the subject states over and over again that there are no female fetishists; female fetishism is, in the rhetoric of psychoanalysis, an oxymoron. 19

Saartje cannot and must not feel anything for her own pleasure. She must let herself go from herself. This is, according to Mbembe, a “genital domination,” whereby “the dominated subject, [. . . ] had to be transformed into a sexual object.” 20 In the Parisian brothels i.e. Saartje acts more often like an object of sexual desire. The “white” male perversity seems to discharge itself completely with Saartje’s presence. Saartje becomes the Freud’s nanny who is “‘the first to raise up,’ that is, to excite him to an erection.” 21 Saartje is the phantasm and stimulant of her “white” visitors. She seems to thoroughly influence her visitors in their phallic use and “genital domination.” In her dominated position, she becomes a generative force that influences her “white” visitors in the phallocratic exercise of power. In this way, the boundary between classes, social classes and races seems to have shrunk. In order to grasp the critical dimension of Kechiche’s aesthetics in regards to the problem of racism in the film Vénus Noire, we must pay

17 cf. Jacques Lacan: Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality. In: Juliet Mitchell / Jacqueline Rose (eds.): Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. New York 1982, p. 96; Sigmund Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: James Strachey (trans. and ed.): The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. London 1893–1895, p. 171. 18 Anne McClintock: Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London / New York 1992, p. 183. 19 Naomi Schor: Female Fetishism. The Case of Georges Sand. In: Susan Suleiman (ed.): The Female Body in Western Cultures. Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge 1986, pp. 363–372, esp. p. 365. 20 Achille Mbembe: Brutalisme. Paris 2020, p. 127, translated by Burrhus Njanjo. 21 McClintock (fn. 18), op. cit, p. 87.

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particular attention to his style and try to understand this style in relation to its function in the field of the arts in general and that of French cinema in particular. Inspired at the beginning of the 20th century in France by literature of the same style and by canonized authors such as Emile Zola, French cinema was deeply influenced by the naturalistic style. This style is sometimes defined in the field of cinema as a radicalization of poetic realism, which is semiotically translated by bringing together, enlarging, exposing and clarifying certain social realities objectively and authentically. In a language borrowed from Gilles Deleuze or Henri Bergson, we would have spoken of a cinema proposing “impulse-images,” and whose identity can be revealed in the “movement-material-image” matrix. Poetic realism in France is mainly carried by the filmmakers of the New Wave with emblematic figures such as Jean Renoir, Maurice Pialat or Marcel Pagnol, to whom the naturalist semiotics of Kechiche, according to several critics, seems to refer resolutely. The visceral critique of racism in Vénus Noire is therefore deeply linked to the narrative grammar of the film. Essentially, this grammar presents the film in large narrative blocks, each of which goes back over key moments in the process of subjugating Saartje Baartman’s existence in Europe (her exhibition in London, her master’s trial, her exhibition in the Parisian bourgeois salons, her prostitution and her death, the purchase and dissection of her body by the Jardin d’acclimatation), the narrative blocks of which are presented in a kind of balanced relationship between the narrative and the narrated time, offering the spectators the opportunity to exhaust each narrative block, each scene in time and intensity, in order to create effects of authenticity and an objective approach to historical truth. In the same vein, the naturalistic semiotics of the film consist more in the extensive use of Saartje’s hyper-visuality in the film (posters, leaflets, statue, scientific illustrations, etc., all issued by means of anthropometry and craniometry by the team of the anatomist Georges Cuvier and almost identically represented in the movie) in order to denounce a more scientific violence which seems to be the cornerstone of Saartje’s existence in Europe. To this media semiotics the particular staging that gives more space and prominence to details, can be added. This entails the casting, acting and movements of the actors on the stage, that relies very precisely on tight and close shots, descriptive shots, to the effect of creating a considerable but deeply critical distancing from racism in its follies and fantasies.

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3. Representing “Cultural Racism” in A United Kingdom A United Kingdom is a biopic of Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana and his British lover Ruth Williams. A United Kingdom, released in 2016, is the third featured movie shot by Amma Asante, after A way of life and Belle. In 1947 the young king Seretse Khama, a student in London at the time, fell in love with the young Londoner Ruth Williams. Everything, however, seems to be against their love and marriage: their social origins, their cultures and differences, and above all, some laws and regulations in the British Empire and especially in South Africa, due to their different “races.” 22 After the young black king’s persistence to get married to his white fiancée, the retort of the British government is not long to coming: “Now you will see how the empire defends itself” (00:46:10). The central part of the love story between Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams happens in Bechuanaland. 23 The couple’s love faced ferocious resistance by the British Empire and the neighboring country South-Africa because it was considered as a threat to the established socio-political system. Taken within the historical contexts of colonization and the apartheid 22 It was a policy of ‘separate development’ (afsonderlike ontwikkeling), conceptualised by Hendrik Verwoerd, then Prime Minister of South Africa (Union of South Africa, then Republic of South Africa). It was introduced in South Africa as early as 1948 by the National Party, with the aim of declaring white supremacy by guaranteeing the security of whites and promoting Afrikaner culture rooted in the history of a “chosen people” (Volk). Through segregationist laws, racial divisions were applied to various areas of ordinary life such as housing (Group Areas Act), education (Bantu Education Act), control of movement of people and employment. Sexuality was not left out, since genetic and racial mixing, interracial marriages and interracial sexual relations were purely and systematically prohibited. South Africa has the apartheid and also wants to see the apartheid system applied in bordering territories such as South West Africa (actual Namibia). England supports this, but Bechuanaland / Botswana prefers to going its own way. cf. Josephine C. Naidoo / Devi M. Rajab: The Dynamics of Oppression. In: Psychology and Developing Societies 17 (2005) No. 2, pp. 139– 159; Hermann Giliomee: The Afrikaners. London 2003; Arthur Keppel-Jones: South Africa. A Short History. Hutchinson 1975, p. 132; Keith Breckenridge: Biometric State. The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present. Cambridge 2014; Tom Lodge: Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945. New York 1983. 23 Bechuanaland became independent under the name Botswana. The references to Bechuanaland and historical figures such as Seretse Khama, Ruth Williams or Wilson Churchill and the reference “based on true story” in the opening attest to the film’s postcolonial positioning and its desire to somehow engage with a particular past. cf. Brian T. Mokopakgosi: The 1965 Self-Government Elections and the Transfer of Power in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. In: South African Historical Journal 60 (2008) No. 1, pp. 85–102; Godfrey Mwakikagile: Botswana since Independence. Pretoria 2009; Scott A. Beaulier: Explaining Botswana’s Success. The Critical Role of PostColonial Policy. In: Cato journal 23 (2003) No. 2, pp. 227–240.

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system in South Africa, and arguably in the whole austral Africa, this union stirs up trouble due to the troubling blurring the differences between blacks and whites. In the following, I would like to briefly discuss how the film A United Kingdom aesthetically articulates cultural racism. In doing so, I will focus specifically on the articulation of socio-political measures imagined in the English center, which lead to an incommensurability between notions of corporality and sexuality in the racial context of the 20th century. This incommensurability in an interracial context consists in imagining any love between black men and white women as impossible, or even in casting opprobrium on the black man, holding him responsible for such a union, considered here as an abomination. Following the diegesis, the Whites in particular, do not accept this love, and Seretse Khama is always held to be responsible for its eventuality. One day, as Mr. Khama and Mrs. Williams were walking back home hand in hand, the couple was violently attacked by three white men, two of whom were heard shouting: “Keep your black fingers back from ours, savage” (00:13:00). Later at her work place, the British representative in Southern Africa tells Mrs. Williams “Mr. Khama has been gravely mistaken believing he can take you as his wife” (00:18:41). On another occasion, Ruth Williams notices a picture stuck on a hotel exit door. The picture does look like a child’s drawing. It is infantile and very crudely drawn but carries a vicious and serious threat: “Nigger out” with a sign indicating that this “nigger” is to be hanged (00:24:14) (see figure 2 below). This is a clear reference to “lynching,” which can be understood here as a national, popular, and cultural mechanism of violently asserting, (re)producing and cementing positions of power and privilege. It is a process of positioning oneself – ‘us,’ the world and others – ‘them,’ in such a way that the ‘us’ experiences and perceives itself from a privileged point of view in contrast to and in violent rejection of the imagined “otherness.” Although the civil marriage took place in England, this bizarre but serious threat actually provides information about the rejectionist position of a part of the British population toward a legal measure, which “ostensibly do[es] not offer sufficient protections for the property or security” 24 of the community and their women and wives. The fact that this picture is hung in a hotel after the honeymoon leads the film interpretation to include the perspective of sex. Looked at from this perspective, this image comes across more as a “racial intimidation,” rather than a condemnation. The “Nigger” (00:24:39) is accused of having

24 Michael J. Pfeifer: Introduction. In: Id. (ed.): Global Lynching and Collective Violence. The Americas and Europe. Urbana / Chicago 2017, pp. 1–11, esp. pp. 4–5.

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had sexual intercourse with the white Williams, of having stepped onto the “forbidden frontier.” 25 From this intersectional interpretation of race, sexuality, nationality and corporality, it emerges that sexuality as well as sex as a crime in the British cultural history of the 20th was structured along the intersecting lines of gender, race and nationality. Here it seems ethnicity is sexualized and sexuality is in turn ethnicized, racialized, culturalized, so that the union between Seretse Khama und Ruth Williams is constructed as all but impossible. This is evidence of a culturally racist society in which the Black is at some symbolic intersections clearly unwanted and in which the Black is imagined and marginalized as an exotic, subordinate subject to the white person. The lighting in the first part of the film also participates in representing this pejorative image of British society. The lighting is generally dark, with many scenes depicted at night, and many characters or images shot in chiaroscuro, which can be interpreted as a metaphor of a profoundly divided society.

Fig. 2: In: Amma Asante, A United Kingdom. © Pathé Productions Limited, British Broadcasting Corporation and The British Film Institute 2016.

This division becomes even more acute in Bechuanaland. The inferiorization and ghettoization appear stronger in this context. After Ruth Williams and her husband’s arrival at the hotel in Bechuanaland, one comes to this conclusion with the help of a traveling shot that is actually Ruth Williams’ view. The space depicted, as well as the social practices, is completely segregated: black people are not allowed to enter, a statement which is confirmed by the address on the wall “Whites only.” Young black

25 Joane Nagel: Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality. Intimate intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York / Oxford 2003.

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people carry suitcases of white people and serve them. They dress alike in shorts and short shirts. As was the practice, Blacks in the British Empire were mainly given the low-paid jobs; they were not allowed to drink alcohol, for example, or to display certain higher levels of social and economic capital. Just like this hotel, schools, hospitals, churches, and public spaces were all segregated in law and practices, as a way of maintaining this forced inequality. Thus, skin color found its extension and meaning in the daily economic, social, and political imaginaries. And the British Empire as a contact zone was a binary-led (the Whites and the other) that drew boundaries within which class, race, gender and capital were linked; within which movements were thought of in an intra-sense rather than an intersense; and within which certain bodily and sexual interracial circulations were imagined as restricted, contained and stifled; within which bodily and sexual interracial circulations between a black man and a white woman were an aim but also the starting point of political racial practices. Cultural racism, exacerbated by the interracial union of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, leads to a kind of vulnerability, fragility, captivity of the forms of existence of the weakest, represented here by Seretse Khama and to some extent by its tribe. Fearing the consequences of intercultural unification of the British Empire in general and in the neighboring territories of South Africa, Southwest Africa and Rhodesia in particular, the British Empire takes further drastic decisions to maintain the established socio-political system which, moreover, as a vantage point, helps to perceive forms of continuity of racism in the European cultural history of the 20th century. One means, through which this racism is expressed, is the destruction of certain cultural values. The actions corresponding to this goal are announced in one of the first scenes, when Seretse Khama arrives in Bechuanaland after studying in London. In this sequence the representative of the British government, the district commissioner of Bechuanaland and Mr. Seretse Khama are having a discussion together. The two British men, following their conversation, have called to inform Mr. Khama of the great disapproval of his choice of wife among his people and therefore strongly recommend him to “resign any claim to the chiefship and that” he “announces this resignation to the tribe at the meeting” (00:48:45), which Mr. Khama clearly rejected. The British administration then took further measures: the attempt to depose the king through a later convened assembly of the Kutla 26, the support of Seretse Khama’s uncle in

26 This is a sort of traditional general meeting in Bechuanaland, where important decisions are taken. It also refers to the village’s sacred place in traditions and customs of Bechuanaland. cf. Laurie Falvo: Welcome to Botswana. In: Global Mission’s Frontline 14 (2014) No. 1.

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the creation of new settlements in order to weaken the power of the Black king, later the banishment of the king Seretse Khama from Bechuanaland for initially 5 years and then for life, the imposition of the direct rule in Bechuanaland, which was previously a protectorate. These measures were aiming at smashing the local culture of Bechuanaland and destroying some values and referential aspects of this culture. While the British administration promotes new territorial settlements among the local population and tries to replace the legitimate king Seretse Khama with his uncle, they are in fact looking for someone who does not feel equal to them, who is “governable” as his people are, for, as Fanon puts it “reliable men to execute certain gestures” 27 and therefore to repress the “spontaneous, generous, fertile lines of forces” of the local culture. 28 This strategy reveals a strong will not only to subjugate, alienate, weaken, dehumanize Seretse Khama, but also to apply pressure tactics that are intended to weaken Seretse Khama psychologically so that he renounces his union with a white woman. Such a union could have fatal consequences, both at the center of the British colonial empire and on its periphery, and would threaten both the geopolitical stability of the former Southern Africa and the empire itself, whose foundation and keystone is none other than racial inequality itself. Faced with the incommensurability of corporality and sexuality in the English racial and racist cultural system in regard to the union between Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, from which stem the measures and practices elaborated above, Amma Asante’s film has a critical logic. This critique of racism can be derived from the realistic cinematographic semiotics used by the director in her film. It is not only a question of the choice of biopic as a genre, but more about the use of elements of docufiction in the filmic narrative, especially the introduction of fragments of different medias (radio, press and TV) of the time, which dealt with the delicate question of interracial marriage. Alongside television images of everyday life at the time, excerpts from radio commentaries can be heard and seen, overlaid with images from the print press, with the emphasis on the headlines. In the News chronicle of 30 October 1951 one can read “Seretse Khama faces lifetime in Exile, Chief marks another anniversary separated home,” while The Times of 9 April 1952 displays in its columns “Khama battle continues, 12 months after reuniting with wife.” One could also add the excerpt from the Daily Mirror of 21 June 1952 entitled “White Queen, Black King, unrest in Bechuanaland as tribesmen demand chief

27 Frantz Fanon: Towards the African Revolution. London 1970, p. 34. 28 Ibid.

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return” (01:30:42). Besides the fact that the film allows for a time-lapse in the narrative and thus serves as a transition from one narrative block to another, it can at the same time assume a ventriloquist function helping the director to determine the function from which the perspective and critical positioning of the film can emerge. This is because in these titles, all of which are chosen and inserted into the film on purpose, one can discern a subjective coloring in favor of the Khama couple. A further semiotic element that can bring out the bias and thus the critical perspective of the film against the cultural racism experienced by the Khama couple is the narrative perspective. The film is told from the perspective of either Seretse Khama or Ruth Williams or both. It retraces their journey, follows their paths, brings their hopes to the screen, viscerally articulates their pain and suffering, and above all portrays the logic of thought with the supremacist and racist calculations of their white executioners. The closeups of Seretse Khama’s face and tearful eyes as he ferociously defends his interracial love at the Kutla reunion; the dark light that dominates as Ruth Williams is rebuffed and almost disowned by her father when she confesses her decision to marry a black man; and the silent sequences (both intra- and extra-diegetic) showing a tearful Ruth Williams weakened by the expectation of her husband trapped in exile in England, can also be mentioned in the same wake. They all highlight the effects of soft and sometimes even hard racial cultural violence (when, for example, they are physically attacked by a group of white men in the street) on corporality, on sexuality against the background of racism in the cultural history of the British Empire in the 20th century.

4. Conclusion This analysis highlighted media practices in the critical representation of anti-black racism used in the films Vénus Noire by Abdellatif Kechiche and A United Kingdom by Amma Asante. While Vénus Noire uses an accentuated naturalist style to expose the practices of scientific racism suffered by Saartje Baartman in France at the beginning of the 19th century and the role played by her body and her sex in the process of racialization to which she is subjected, A United Kingdom articulates with realistic filmic semiotics the cultural racism suffered by the interracial couple Seretse Khama and his wife Ruth Williams at the dawn of the independence of Bechuanaland (which subsequently became Botswana). In both films Saartje and Seretse Khama have in common that they are black, that they are racialized bodies, and therefore dehumanized. While Saartje’s dehumanization is achieved through a profound violence on her body and sex, the one of Seretse

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Khama is achieved through the systematic refusal of his intercultural union and his systemic exclusion from an empire (in the metropole as well as in the colony) culturally dominated by the white colonists. While A United Kingdom therefore offers insights into the socio-political and geopolitical consequences of commensurability between sexuality and corporality in a racial context, Vénus Noire exposes the role played by sex and the body in the processes of racialization and subjugation of individuals. The particular emphasis on a realistic style, on a hyper-visuality, on tight, close shots, descriptive shots points out a critical distancing from racism in its follies, aberrations, fantasies, in its processes of dehumanization in the past. The release of these historical biographies in the 21st century about distant racial practices in the past, sufficiently demonstrate that racism and race cannot only belong to the past. 29 Therefore racism and race will definitely belong to the future as long as bodily remains (skulls, bones, so-called art objects and other artefacts) once embroiled in so-called “scientific” fantasies, remain today encapsulated by “the law” and museums; as long as interracial unions remain taboo in some places; as long as life in our societies and the course of the world is influenced by the processes of imagination, subjugation and distancing of racialized bodies; as long as the present is shaped by the racial prejudice of inequality, and by the injustice of non-neutrality and non-universality of the concept of equal humanity.

29 France 24: French presidential hopeful Macron calls colonization a ‘crime against humanity’ (16. 02. 2017), URL: https://www. france24. com/ en/ 20170216- france- presidential- hopeful- macron- describes- colonisation- algeria- crime- against- humanity, (last accessed February 24, 2021).

Baßenhoff, Lisa

Presenting White Scientific Conferences and the Practice of Presentation

The idea for this text began with the BGHS Young Scholars Conference, the Annual Seminar, which took place in 2019 under the title The Making of Mankind: Tracing Race & Racism. Together with other PhD students from different disciplines such as law, history and literature, I was one of the organizers. Due to the chosen topic, questions about sensitive language, politics of representation, privilege and institutional exclusion accompanied the organization of the conference from the beginning, in addition to the discussion of the topic from heterogeneous disciplinary perspectives. 1 This paper will explore two moments of irritation during the conference. The first moment of irritation occurred during the discussion of two presentations. Long quotes were read aloud from historical sources (which formed the basis of the analysis), containing highly derogatory, racist language. Following the presentations, various participants articulated discomfort with the atmosphere that emerged during the read out, which led to the question of how to deal with violent and disparaging language in analyzed quotes when presenting a paper. The second moment of irritation arose in the course of the ‘cultural evening’ which complemented the conference as an art event. For this we had invited – in addition to Berlin-based illustrator Diana Ejaita – artist Ojudun Taiwo Jacob from Lagos, whose works deal with African dance and postcolonial themes, among other things. After the performance the possibility was given for a public talk. A tentative attempt to connect topics of the conference with the performance led to subsequent discussions of the participants on how we, after two days of conference and academic debate, can find an appropriate mode of speaking about an artistic presentation on the topics of interest for our conference. 1 It should be noted that the organizing team (myself included) was almost entirely made up of White people, who are therefore not negatively affected by racism.

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What struck me most in these situations (and prompted me to write this article) was how the otherwise smooth language of academia faltered and an uncertainty arose about how to talk about these issues and what it was that needed to be talked about in the first place. It seemed to have something to do with, on the one hand, the highly political content of the papers, and, on the other hand, difficulties in reconciling feelings and aesthetic experiences with the academic language of the conference. Assuming that irritations often hold potential for insight, I pursued an analysis of what I observed.

(Critical) Whiteness Studies This paper is inspired by studies that critically examine Whiteness 2 as a socially powerful category. Under keywords such as Whiteness studies, critical Whiteness, White supremacy, or White privilege, an interdisciplinary field of research has emerged in the United States in recent decades that deals with Whiteness and the privileges that go hand in hand with this position. Fundamental to Whiteness studies, in contrast to previous approaches to the phenomenon of racism, is a focus on those privileged by racism, rather than looking only at those affected negatively by it. The approach was imported to German universities from the U.S. debate in the 2000s under the term Critical Whiteness (now also referred to as Kritische Weißseinsforschung). An activist practice developed that sees the engagement of White people with their privileges as part of an anti-racist political practice 3. For example, in the course of the protests following the death of George Floyd, German activists used the hashtags #kritischweisssein (Malcolm Ohanwe) and #kritischeWeiß_heiten (Josephine Apraku) to call on White people on Twitter and Instagram to engage with their skin color. 4 2 By using capital letters, I follow arguments that this can be used as a strategy against the racial invisibility of White people. For further reasons see the comment by Nell Irvin Painter: https://www. washingtonpost. com/ opinions/ 2020/ 07/ 22/ why- whiteshould- be- capitalized/ (accessed on 8/1/2021). 3 cf. Susan Arndt / Maureen Maisha Eggers / Grada Kilomba / Peggy Piesche (eds.): Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland. Münster 2005; Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur: Weiß-heit. In: Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur / Ljubomir Brati´c/Andreas Görg (eds.): Historisierung als Strategie. Positionen – Macht – Kritik. Berlin 2004, pp. 10–11; Peggy Piesche: Traditionen des ‘neuen’ Diskursfeldes “Kritische Weißseinsforschung” in Deutschland. In: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (ed.): Heimatkunde. Migrationspolitisches Portal. https://heimatkunde. boell. de/ de/ 2013/ 11/ 18/ import- % E2%80%9Ecritical-whiteness%E2%80%9C-traditionen-des- %E2%80%9Aneuen%E2% 80%99-diskursfeldes-kritische (accessed on 10. 11. 2020). 4 See https://www. rbb- online. de/ rbbkultur/ radio/ programm/ schema/ sendungen/ rbbkultur_am_nachmittag/archiv/20200610_1505/kultur_aktuell_1630.html (accessed on 8/1/2021).

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The academic side of critical Whiteness studies has primarily contributed to making Whiteness visible as a construct and category. Studies in the field show historical developments and reproduction mechanisms as well as the effectiveness of the White position. A central insight is that Whiteness is an invisible norm that only becomes indirectly visible through its ‘non-White’ deviations. 5 This allows privileged persons to circumvent discussions of disadvantage and racism. Accordingly, one powerful White privilege is not having to deal with one’s own skin color and the phenomenon of racism. 6 Against the backdrop of these key findings and their implications for a critique of racism, the paper will engage with academic presentations based on observations from our own conference. With this, I hope to illuminate the role that White privilege and Whiteness play in the conference room of German universities. To do this, I will first briefly discuss the concept of racism from the perspective of practice theory and Whiteness studies. Afterwards, I will depict the talks and the performance in question to then analyze my observations with the help of a concept from performance theory. Against this background, the irritations appear as an unusual shift from discussing the content of what is said to discussing the mode of how it is shown and who shows it. The reason for this shift is localized in the special combination of presentation theme and presentation mode which can be understood when we consult findings of Whiteness studies. Conventional techniques of distance and proximity, used in the demonstrating part of academic presentations, get risky in this moment. The irritations make Whiteness visible as an undetected norm in giving a paper at scientific conferences. At the end, I discuss the possibilities of interventions.

Theories of Practice and Race In this text, racism is understood from a praxeological perspective. The term practice theory refers to a bundle of approaches that share a resemblance in central points 7. This includes, in particular, a turning away 5 cf. Ursula Wachendorfer: Weiß-Sein in Deutschland. Zur Unsichtbarkeit einer herrschenden Normalität. In: Susan Arndt (ed.): AfrikaBilder. Studien zu Rassismus in Deutschland. Münster 2001, pp. 87–101. 6 cf. Elina Marmer: Kritisches Weißsein als Perspektivwechsel und Handlungsaufforderung. In: Beate Blank / Süleyman Gögercin / Karin E. Sauer / Barbara Schramkowski (eds.): Soziale Arbeit in der Migrationsgesellschaft. Berlin 2018, pp. 291–302. 7 cf. Andreas Reckwitz: Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32 (2003) No. 4, pp. 282–301; Hilmar Schäfer (ed.): Praxistheorie: ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm. Bielefeld 2001.

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from approaches that examine society as a discursive, mental, or symbolic structure. Instead, in practice theories the focus of analysis is directed to concrete processes in everyday action, to questions of corporeality and materialities. Agency appears as predominantly anchored in the body and is therefore mainly unconscious. It is supported and guided by material co-players. For the following considerations it is crucial that the body is assigned a site of structured patterns of action. This allows moving attention to bodily aspects of scientific presentations and racialized structures. An early example of an analysis of embodied practices of racism (without being labeled as practice theory) are the reflections of the French philosopher Frantz Fanon on the ‘White gaze’ which he develops in his book Black Skin, White Masks from 1952. 8 Thus, the approach becomes linkable to further praxeological investigations. This is shown, for instance, in an attempt by Sophia Prinz, who, following Fanon reflects on orders of perception as racist practice. 9 Turning back to the specific perspective of Whiteness studies, one can trace the everyday practices that produce White norms, White bodies, or even White spaces with a praxeological approach. In the context of scientific presentations, approaches that refer to bodily aspects, the practice of lecturing and giving a paper, are of interest from a praxeological point of view. This analysis will be carried out in the next sections with the help of an attempt based in performance theory. This helps to expose practices of looking, speaking, listening and posture in academic settings. With this, I hope, we can begin to understand the reported irritation and analyze it with regard to White privilege.

Presentation as Performance To what extent can we understand the act of presentation at scientific conferences as performance, and what does this bring into view? For some years now, there has been both scientific and artistic research on this topic under the roof of performance studies. Research on this topic in the German-speaking context was greatly extended by Sybille Peters, using both theoretical and aesthetic means. In her article Sagen und Zeigen – der Vortrag als Performance 10, she traces how the lecture established itself 8 Frantz Fanon: Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris 1952. 9 Sophia Prinz: Das Tableau der ‘weißen Welt’. In: Susanne Gottuck / Irina Grünheid / Paul Mecheril / Jan Wolter (eds.): Sehen lernen und verlernen: Perspektiven pädagogischer Professionalisierung. Berlin 2019, pp. 45–70. 10 In English, the title reads Saying and Showing – The Talk as Performance (my translation). Peters herself thinks about the different connection of academic talks and

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as a central element of academic activity. She pursues connections to the concept of performance, and argues why the lecture as a performance of research results occupies its own epistemic location. 11 Peters starts from a historical reconstruction of the emergence and change of meaning of lecturing in science. She then defines the lecture as an assemblage of saying, showing, and self-presentation. Thus, in addition to the mere content of the lecture, the technical means and physical aspects of the presentation of this content come into focus. Peters ascribes a special epistemic function to the demonstrative part of the lecture: in addition to the comprehension of content, there is a specific form of performative evidence, which is achieved through self-exemplification, the demonstration of what is said in what is shown. Every lecture thus consists of the presented content, the presentation of this content and the person presenting it. The act of presentation and the person who’s presenting are usually neglected to such an extent that they are not discussed after the lecture. One may think about the presentation style of individual persons, about the way they speak, even about the persons themselves, but these thoughts do not play a role in the discussion of the presentation. Showing and showing off is probably more of a necessary evil for many researchers, in order to communicate their research findings to a professional community. In most cases, the oral presentation is supported by a presentation program with digital slides. These slides can contain textual elements such as a few key words or quotations. In addition, pictures, diagrams or video material can be used as objects of analysis or illustration. The talks from our own conference discussed here focused on the analysis of texts from the first and second half of the 19th century, which were examined with regard to racist elements and the construction of race as a category. For this purpose, passages were inserted as slide-filling quotations and read out aloud. During this, a certain uneasiness arose among the audience, which was composed of People of Color (PoC), White people, and Black people. In the discussion that followed the presentations, a rather unspecified concern with the act of presentation was articulated,

the term ‘performance’ in the German and Anglo-American context: “In the AngloAmerican institutes of performance studies [. . . ] the project of examining giving a talk as performance does not come as a great surprise, since an important strand of what is now known as performance studies emerged here from departments of rhetoric, that is, from the scholarly study of speech communications, of public speaking in general.” Sybille Peters: Sagen und Zeigen – der Vortrag als Performance. In: Gabriele Klein / Wolfgang Sting (eds.): Zeitgenössische Performances – ästhetische Positionen. Bielefeld 2005, pp. 197–218, p. 199 (my translation). 11 Ibid., p. 201.

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without being able to put the discomfort into a term or come to some kind of resolution of the situation. If we approach this with Peters’ theoretical framing, we can first note that a change in the mode of discussion took place. The audience no longer addressed the content of the words – that what was said – but the aspect of showing got such relevance that it was addressed. The unfamiliarity of this shift became immediately apparent in one of the two cases: the speaker persistently related the criticism to his own analysis – when it was precisely not the analysis but its presentation that was addressed. The irritation can thus be located in the change of the mode of discussion from saying to showing. A look at the cultural evening within this analytical framework reveals this form of irritation more clearly. Even though the performance was not explicitly structured as a lecture performance, its content made clear reference to the themes of the conference. Thus, a part of it displayed a form of Black re-enactment of the Congo Conference, also known as Berlin Conference (1884–1885). Its concluding document, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, formalized the division of Africa into Colonies. In the performance, the colonial demarcation of borders on the African continent was traced as a geometric affair, as plans made up on a white map at a small table, which then connected forcefully with muddy earth, vastness of space and rage. After the performance, I felt anguish in the crowd. At the same time there were obvious points of connection to our scholarly endeavor, such as the power of knowledge practices like the map as a technical tool used for this purpose. However, as already observed in the aftermath of the aforementioned presentations, I observed stagnation in the following discussion. In response to my inquiry the conference participants showed a kind of speechlessness on the topic. As was the case after the presentations, this showed as a kind of irritation, visible through the stagnation of the discussion and the subsequent articulation of speechlessness. Following the previous considerations, we can approach this speechlessness by noting the reversal from what is said to what is shown. The main mode of understanding in a performance lies in the moment of demonstration while the content recedes behind it. It is precisely in this focus on sensori-emotional aspects that I locate the need for a shift in the mode of discussion from saying to showing following the performance. For this, however, the audience would have had to leave the usual scientific conference mode of discussing content instead of form. Against this background, I would interpret the problems expressed by the conference attendees in such a way that the thematization of what was said was perceived as too scientific, as something that applied the wrong standard of criticism. Therefore the possibility of a deepening connection

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with our scientific findings through a more sensual approach remained largely closed. So we face the same form of disruption of the scientific mode of talking from two sides each. First, a shift from saying to showing that caused irritation within the framework of our conference. Then a shift from showing to the content of what was shown, which would have allowed for a more in-depth connection with the performance. In this short analysis, the phenomenon of speechlessness I observed in the discussion of the two presentations and the performance indicates an irritation caused by unfamiliar changes in the mode of discussion of saying and showing. But what became visible through these irritations in regard to scientific conferences? To answer this, I turn to Peter’s assumption that lectures / presentations carry their own epistemic potential. If we assume that the epistemic potential of performances – as performance art or performed science – consists in their self-exemplification, we can speak of performatively successful presentations in the cases of the presentations discussed here: the analyzed, colonial-racist violence became vivid in such a way that various listeners made the unusual shift in the mode of discussion, even if it obviously left the expected framework of talking at a conference and therefore led to a stalling of the discussion. The reason for leaving the usual mode thus lay in a linking of content and display: the relationship between saying, showing, and showing oneself became risky in these moments, the conventional way of presenting irritated. With Peters, I’ll now turn to this particular risk. According to Peters, one characteristic of lectures is their temporal and spatial dimension: the lecture is the “realization of that to which the reference of the speech merely points.” 12 Temporally and spatially distant facts are drawn together in the here and now. A central point of this practice of making present is its dependence on embodiment. Showing is saying and hearing, the embodied presence of language in the co-presence of others. The corporeality can occur as a disturbance in this process. The voice is not only a “vehicle and instrument of speech, but interprets, comments on, and undermines speech with its whole, quite unpredictable corporeality.” 13 Now, in the cases I discuss here, it was precisely the act of reading aloud that stimulated the discussion. On the presentation slide, a quotation from the past is brought into the here and now, as something to be read by the audience or something recited by the speaker. This small example from our 12 Ibid. 13 Sybille Krämer: Sprache – Stimme – Schrift: Sieben Gedanken über Performativität als Medialität. In: Uwe Wirth (ed.): Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt a. M. 2002, pp. 323–346, p. 340 (my translation).

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conference suggests that the act of making present has different degrees. What happens when we transport quotes into the room not just as text on slides, but through our voices? The voice is an intrusive tool, one that imposes itself on the listener and to which they are partially exposed, in a momentum and proximity that they cannot determine themselves. In this way, the voice can bring passages of text forcefully into co-presence, out of their written repositories on a slide, a place that we can turn to, but that we can also hold at a distance. We can conclude from this observation that a presentation is composed of practices of proximity and distance in making things present. Especially techniques of distancing belong in a broader sense to the scientific conventions that are learned in the course of studies, such as quotation marks, references to sources and authorship. These are found in the manuscript or on the digital slide, the textual part of the presentation. Vocal equivalents of these techniques can be located, for example, in pauses in speech and the change of voice. The voice can thus be used as a marker of quotations, as quasi-phonetic quotation marks. The act of detachment through textual or vocal quotation marks can be understood as a possibility to relinquish a certain part of the responsibility for what is written. This dissociation is called into question by the reactions in this case. Following these considerations, one interpretation of what happened could be that the violence of the scientifically analyzed language was bodily experienced through the connection between showing and showing oneself. The design of the presentation, the techniques of distancing and closing in, led to a disturbing discomfort. The archive of violence not only appeared on the slide of the presentation program but developed a momentum of its own through body and voice. This raises the question of the extent to which the speaker can distance themself from a performed text, even when techniques of distancing are employed. To what extent does the speaker, by speaking out, enter into an intimate connection with the material and deepens the relationship between showing and showing oneself? Answers can be found in performance art. A performance is designed to demonstrate through intimate embodiment. The artist tries to achieve a close relationship between saying, showing and showing oneself. The performance of the guest artist is a good example for this. The body of the artist enabled the audience, to a certain extent, to co-suffer pain and violence related to our coldly analyzed topics of race, racism and colonialism. While the performing of research findings through a presentation is determined through practices of detachment, performance as art is determined through practices of proximity. But since both share an aesthetic, embodied component, this co-feeling can also take place in the conference

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room. Through movements and voice, not only intellectual but multisensory understanding is stimulated. Following this idea, the neutrality, distance and disembodiment that science continues to produce as an ideal is questioned. A detailed analysis of the ideal of objective science, a science purified of all external influences, can be found in feminist critiques of science. While looking through the lens of gender as a category, feminist scholars have shown how bodily aspects are displaced from science. 14 The underlying thesis is that it has never been possible to discuss facts only on the level of saying – that is, that it is not feminist discourse that introduced the body and emotions into science, but that these have always been there. Western science is simply built on the ideal of the unmarked body (white, male, heterosexual, ablebodied, etc.) which can afford to conduct a purely rational discourse. What is revealed when we interrogate these findings with Whiteness studies in mind? Firstly, thinking with Peters, a presentation entails showing oneself and thus, as in the scientific presentations analyzed in this text, showing oneself as a White body. This goes normally unnoted as the White body is characterized by its unmarkedness. In this case, however, the presenting body became evident in a way that made the quotation eerily up-to-date. The content showed up forcefully in the presentation. The result was successful in a certain sense: the strong presence it created led to actually experiencing the analyzed violence. Second, the episode reveals a White privilege of not having to deal with the continuing devaluation through this kind of violent speech in the preparation and execution of the presentation. Not only can the White speaker conform to the ideal of objectivity by approaching their object of analysis in utmost neutrality – they can also use this ideal to deflect criticism of the mode of presentation. Subsequently, comments on racialized power structures within the conference room get suppressed. Because this follows a conventional routine in academic settings, the White speaker can do this without experiencing themself as part of such societal patterns or as an agent of their reproduction. It is simply not intended to address the demonstrating part of a presentation. At this level, however, the connection between the White position of the speaker and the presentation of an analysis of racialized violence would need to be addressed. The White privilege of the speaker is thus their non-affectedness: not to have an experience of difference that resonates with the text analyzed or

14 One of the most influential texts in this regard is a paper from 1988 by Donna Haraway, cf. Donna Haraway: Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In: Feminist Studies 14 (1988) No. 3, pp. 575– 599.

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calls into question one’s own raison d’être in the field of science. Paradoxically, this non-affectedness can come to light precisely where the content of the analysis reflects on this very same constellation of domination. The White conference room is created by the fact that analysis, critique, and current action remain unconnected in this situation: non-affectedness is assumed to be universal and unconsciously an ideal to strive for. It is simply not seen. This remains invisible until an irritation breaks up the usual processes. An irritation that presumably arises when people are present who experience a difference from this White norm. In the case discussed here, White privilege and the construction of the White conference room become visible through the alternation between the discussion of what is said and what is shown. In conclusion to this short analysis, I want to discuss what suggestions can be drawn from this for practices of presentation.

From Writing Culture to Presentation Culture As an inspiration, I draw on the Writing Culture debate, a highly polarized controversy during the 1980s and early 1990s within anthropology that remains formative for the discipline. Its name stems from the influential book Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus in 1986. 15 In ethnographies it was common until then to write in a sort of ethnographic realism that resulted in field reports purified of subjective elements. Writing Culture challenged these kinds of seemingly neutral, objective texts. One way to do this is to contrast the official reports with autobiographical accounts of the researchers. Famous examples are the diaries of Bronisław Malinowski from 1967 or the autobiographical writings of Claude Levi-Strauss from 1955. 16 Here, personal experiences in collecting data were written down. Malinowski’s diaries in particular were used as an example to show (racist) prejudices with which the researcher went into the field. They clearly influenced his findings, but remained hidden in the published report. 17 The Writing Culture debate dealt, on the one hand, with the production of knowledge, and, on the other hand, with its textual representation. This self-preoccupation of anthropologists with their writings revealed that a

15 James Clifford / George E. Marcus (eds.): Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Oakland 1986. 16 Bronisław Malinowski: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York 1967; Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques. Paris 1955. 17 cf. Gavin Weston / Natalie Djohari: Anthropological Controversies. London 2020.

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neutral stance is not only an illusion, but can even distort the outcome of a study. It renders implicit prejudices invisible while reproducing them in form of scientific knowledge. It was examined, for example, how an ethnographer positions themself as a persona in the text to generate authority, or how the asymmetry of representation leads to an othering of those studied and can thus justify racist and (neo)colonial violence. 18 Subsequently, ethnographic reports were deconstructed in terms of the extent to which they are context-bound and based on implicit presuppositions of the authors. Self-reflection on the written persona, personal experience, relationship to the field and questions of representations were demanded. The manufactured nature of the facts – their fictional character through written representation – was exposed. Experimental forms of writing and research were developed that tried to involve the researcher and those researched in a more reflexive and less asymmetrical way. This is a model a debate on ‘presentation culture’ could follow. Out of this, multifaceted questions arise as to how presentations are constructed, how they are related to power dynamics and what the conference room might cover up by the invisible norm of objectivity. Irritations can be used to reveal one’s hidden privileges and embodied practices that repeat and stabilize structures of domination. It leads to an understanding of science that does not locate science outside of structures of disparagement and violence and does not view emotions as unruly behavior in scientific debates. Ultimately, it calls for a willingness to see oneself not as a neutral observer but as an involved actor. The scientific engagement with the topic of race and the practices of reproducing racialized structures of domination can then become a resource for White scientists to reflect on their own entanglement. We can begin to think about concrete strategies to reflect on one’s own position in societal patterns that are still structured by the category race. What would a debate on presentation culture look like and what new forms of presentations would it generate?

Being Involved Following these reflections, I’ll conclude with some thoughts in view of Whiteness studies. Considering the modes of making present, one can think about distancing as a privilege. Who can distance themself from

18 cf. James Clifford: On Ethnographic Authority. In: Representations 2 (1983), pp. 118– 146; Johannes Fabian: Time and the other: How Anthropology makes its Object. New York 1983.

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violent language in a quotation, because this kind of language, the ongoing discourse addressed in this quotation, does not currently affect them as a personal experience of violence in their life? What is pulled together in this moment of re-enactment? In preparing a presentation, most work is dedicated to content. If we include the various forms of showing and showing oneself, we can incorporate the demonstrating effect of presentations in a more sophisticated way. Do I want to give voice to particular terms, making them more vivid and powerful than a mere textual quotation could? Do I want to confront, bring closer, touch? Do I want to read aloud with the powerful, matterof-fact tone that I notice as a mood in the analyzed text and that I want to transport as faithfully as possible to the present situation? To what extent might someone be directly affected by issues in the setting? How do you manage to be responsible towards these groups, for example through feedback and opportunities for dialog? The goal of such an attitude is not a non-violent interaction, but an exchange that’s sensitive towards violence and privileges within the space of a scientific conference. The difference between saying and showing – and the irritation that the shifting of the two modes can trigger – is thus made productive for the researchers’ own reflection on Whiteness. In this way, White scientists conducting research on race or racism can aim at not separating their work from their own social practices. They can understand the critical examination of their own privileges as a step towards an antiracist practice. Within our organizing team, the events described here had led us to think specifically about how to deal with quotations in a presentation. We thought about showing a quotation on a slide, but leaving it mute. Then one could point out why the words are not re-sounded, why we don’t want a certain level of making present. One could cross out, abbreviate or obscure words that continue to do violence or evoke experiences of violence. In the introduction to the presentation, the speaker could address why it is felt necessary to make present certain terms. These ideas can be extended to the presentation of illustrations and film material. Our experience with the integration of a performance into a conference has shown us above all that this can form a powerful connection with the scientific presentations – but for this to happen the inclusion especially through finding a common language must first be practiced or used more strongly on the part of science. A moderator who is skilled at mediating between scientific and aesthetic modes and is able to initiate appropriate dialogs could certainly help with that. Ultimately, the power of performance can bring affective and demonstrative dimensions of one’s own topic to consciousness.

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All in all, White researchers should take up Whiteness as a topic in their own work, developing an awareness of the fact that Whiteness is a powerful structure that is reproduced through everyday practices. To notice one’s own entanglement can lead to a change of perspective within one’s own work. This should not stop at an individual confession but lead towards developing and implementing counter-strategies.

List of Authors

Lisa Baßenhoff is doctoral researcher at the department of sociology at Bielefeld University, where she is a member of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS). Her PhD thesis centers around an ethnographic exploration of the involvement of material in the production of art. Her research interests include the sociology of arts, postanthropocentric approaches and the relationship of arts and science. Andreas Becker studied history and Finnish studies at the University of Cologne and the University of Oulu which he completed with a Bachelor of Arts in 2014. He finished a master’s degree in history at the University of Cologne in 2016. Until 2020 he worked as research assistant and PhD student in the project ‘Order in diversity: Practices of comparing in intercultural jurisdiction (17th – 19th century),’ situated at Bielefeld University at the SFB 1288 “Practices of comparing. Ordering and changing the world.” In 2021 he finished his dissertation (“Die Ordnung der Lappmarken. Herrschaft und die Praktiken des Vergleichens im Zuge schwedischer Expansion in der Frühen Neuzeit”) in Early Modern History at Bielefeld University. Sophie Bitter-Smirnov studied contemporary history in Vienna and worked as a university assistant at the University of Graz where she finished her PhD in the field of history of science. During her studies she collaborated on research projects on Austria and German Reunification and on the foundation of the seminar of art education at the academy of fine arts in Vienna. Her main research interest is the history of anthropology in the late 18th and the 19th century. In her dissertation she examined the changes and continuities in the debate on polygenism and monogenism. Mark B. Brown is professor in the Department of Political Science at California State University, Sacramento. He studied at UC Santa Cruz and the University of Göttingen, and received a PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies, Bielefeld University. He is the author of Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009), and various publications on the politics of expertise, political representation, bioethics, climate change, and related topics. He teaches

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courses on modern and contemporary political theory, democratic theory, and the politics of science, technology, and the environment. Robrecht De Boodt is PhD student of the MDRN research lab of the Faculty of Arts at K.U. Leuven. He obtained separate degrees in historiography (BA and MA), literary studies (BA and MA) and teaching (MA), all of which were acquired at K.U. Leuven. De Boodt’s ‘Colonised Citizens’-project tackles epistemic authenticity and authority in Belgian and German colonial literature between 1890 and 1950, particularly with regard to (new) life-sciences like tropical medicine and eugenics. Julian T. D. Gärtner holds a BA in comparative literature from the University of Saarland and a MA in literary criticism from Bielefeld University as well as a master’s degree in German studies from the University of Cincinnati. He is an associate member of the collaborative research center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing.” Currently he is working at the Department of Literary Criticism / Romance Studies at Bielefeld University. His doctoral thesis focuses on practices of comparing in 19th century French travel accounts, namely in the works of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. Christian Hoffarth is a research and teaching associate at the Department of Regional History at Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel. He studied history and German language and literature in Heidelberg and Hamburg and received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 2016 with a thesis on the political and religious history of ideas in the late Middle Ages. Other positions have taken him to the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Institut für Personengeschichte in Bensheim as a research assistant, and to McGill University in Montreal and the University of Calgary as a visiting scholar. His research interests include the history of the body and the history of medicine, pre-modern cultural contacts and travel, utopian thought, and the history of marginalized persons and groups. One of his recent publications is the co-edited volume Von Hamburg nach Java: Studien zur mittelalterlichen, neuen und digitalen Geschichte (2020). Burrhus Njanjo studied German studies and African literatures and civilizations at Université de Yaoundé 1, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degree. Currently he is PhD candidate at a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities and at the Institute of Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. His doctoral thesis focusses on film and cultural studies on migration, imagination and cinema in Western European contexts. His research interests are ‘minor’ cinemas, postcolonial theories and poststructuralism.

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Sheila Ragunathan (M.A.) is a Doctoral Researcher at the Professorship for Political Science and Gender Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She graduated from Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany with a master’s degree in sociology. Her research focuses on antiracist feminist theory, education and pedagogy, institutional discrimination in higher education and post-/decolonial framings of civic education in Germany.) João Fiocchi is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He received an M.A. in sociology (2020) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Law, State, and Constitution (2018), and a Bachelor of Laws, L. L. B., (2015) from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. His research is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of sociology, law and history. His research interests include race relations and the law, colonialism, state formation, and slavery studies in comparative perspective. Julia Roth is professor for American studies with a focus on Gender Studies and Interamerican Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. She was postdoctoral fellow at the research project “The Americas as Space of Entanglements” in Bielefeld and at the interdisciplinary network “desiguALdades.net – Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America” at Freie Universität Berlin as well as lecturer at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Potsdam and the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on postcolonial and gender approaches, intersectionality and global inequalities. Her work currently focuses on anti-racist feminist knowledge from the Caribbean, Hip Hop, intersectionality theorizing, and rightwing populism and gender. Alongside her academic work, she organizes and curates cultural-political events (e.g. the theater-festival “Women / Images of the Americas in Movement” in Berlin 2010; 2014 and 2016 BE.BOP – Black Europe Body Politics with Alanna Lockward). L. Katherine Smith completed her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma in December 2016. Her thesis, The Legibility of Empire in Nineteenth Century American Literature, examines how American authors responded to evolving disciplinary practices of geography in their literary works. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Transnational American Studies and College and Research Libraries News. At Western Colorado University, she has delivered courses in Geography, English, and Political Science and directed the Writing Center and First Year Seminar programs. Currently, she serves in public office as County Commissioner for Gunnison County, Colorado.

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Devin J. Vartija is Assistant Professor of History at Utrecht University, where he received his PhD in 2018, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. His book The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. Malin Sonja Wilckens is fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and PhD student at the Department of History at Bielefeld University. She is a member of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology and an associate member of the Collaborative Research Center “Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World” at Bielefeld University. She completed her BA in history and politics at Göttingen University in 2015 and her MA in history at Bielefeld University in 2018. Her research interests lie in the fields of history of science and knowledge, colonial history and ‘race’ studies. Heidemarie Winkel is professor of sociology at Bielefeld University and Senior Research Associate at the Von Huegel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry (University of Cambridge, UK). Her research areas are sociology of religion, gender and Arab societies. She was awarded a two-year fellowship for a study about Middle Eastern ecumenism and gender by the German Research Foundation. Winkel is a. o. a member of the Council of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for Religion, Society and Politics.