Beyond Eurocentrism: Race Theory from the German Enlightenment to Postcoloniality

Catalog description

Scientifically defining “race” is impossible, the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote, yet since the Enlightenment attempts to do so have continually been made. The philosopher Immanuel Kant first introduced the concept into scientific language in the late eighteenth century, and it quickly became a vibrant point of contention among European scholars. By the twentieth century, intellectuals of color from around the world took the lead in critically reconfiguring the hitherto Eurocentric conversation around race to reflect the realities of identity, culture, and politics in the colonial and postcolonial eras; meanwhile, older patterns of thought established by thinkers such as Kant, Herder, and Hegel still persist in the ways we think about the topic. To critically engage with such an ingrained idea requires exploring the complexities and ambiguities of its history, and in this seminar, we will read a rich range of texts from Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and North America in order to sound out some of the contending iterations of this concept that so profoundly shapes our world and the way we live in it.