Postcolonial history and the concept of race

Postcolonial Theory and the Problem of History

 

Core readings:

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 337-357.

Gil Anidjar, “The History of Race, the Race of History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 4 (2015): 515-21.

Nancy Levene, “Sources of History: Myth and Image,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 1 (2006): 79-101.

Further readings:

Henry Clements, “Good Concept, Bad Concept: Religion and Race in the History of the Middle East,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 46, no. 3 (2026): 445-460.

Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,” The New Imperial Histories Reader ed. Stephen Howe (London: Routledge, 2010): 177-194.

Mohamed Amer Meziane, “The Invention of North Africa: Hegel, Fanon, and the Racialization of Geography,” Symposium 26, no. ½ (2022): 189-212.

Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8/5 (2011): 315-331.

Nancy Levene, “Artificial Populations,” Powers of Distinction: Religion and Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017): 56-98.

Seminar/essay questions:

1. Does history (as practice, knowledge, discipline) facilitate or hinder the project to provincialize Europe?
2. Is race universal? How would one go about answering that question? Will history tend toward one answer or another (i.e. no, race is a product of European modernity, or yes, the concept of race is present in all times and all places)?
3. How must the practice of history change (or must it change) in light of its complicity in the structures of modern colonial power?

 

Gobbet questions:

1. “A history that will attempt the impossible: look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous.” (Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 353.)
2. “While recognizing the scholarly rigor of this work, one may nonetheless wonder what it might mean that race—and racism—can now be found in ‘classical antiquity’ or anywhere.” (Gil Anidjar, “The History of Race, the Race of History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 4 (2015): 520.)
3. “But Scott’s comments are nevertheless indicative of a paradox in the contemporary practice of history that extends well beyond the discipline itself, to wit, that the consciousness that history can no longer identify meaning but only the ‘conflictual processes that establish meanings’ has had the effect of strengthening the authority and enlarging the scope of history as a discourse.” (Nancy Levene, “Sources of History: Myth and Image,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 1 (2006): 84.)