Toward a Comparative History of Racial Thought in Africa: Historicism, Barbarism, Autochthony

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-98
Author(s):  
Jonathon Glassman
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Racial Thought ◽  
History Of Race

AbstractUsing material from the history of African thought, this essay proposes a strategy for writing a comparative history of race that ranges beyond a consideration of white supremacy and its anti-racist inflections. Studies of race outside the global north have often been hobbled by rigid modernist assumptions that over-privilege the determining influence of Western discourses at the expense of local intellectual inheritances. This essay, in contrast, proposes a focus on locally inherited discourses of difference that have shown signs of becoming racialized, at times through entanglement with Western ideas. It pays particular attention to discourses that arranged “human kinds” along a progression from barbarian to civilized, suggesting the presence of African historicisms that in modern times have converged with the stadial ideas that played a major role in Western racial thought.

Conclusion

Deadly Virtue ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 194-212
Author(s):  
Heather Martel
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race

This chapter explains how the story of Fort Caroline underpins the history of American white supremacy through a review of the scholarship on the history of race, placing the category “elect” into a historical continuum with whiteness. As with the status of the elect, whiteness seemed to be fixed and visible: apparent in their handsome, masculine bodies; in their stable, obedient, and moral families; and in their wealth and status. When Calvinist predestinarian logic enters the historical narrative of American race, it becomes possible to see it was the virtue of grace that made whites construct their own identities as naturally moral, trustworthy, and worthy of liberty.

Past Scents

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Reinarz
Keyword(s):  
Group Identity ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Olfactory Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North

This book offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, it shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop—what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, the book shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. The book is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.

A Comparative History of White Supremacy

1983 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Elphick ◽  
George M. Fredrickson
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
History Of

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Sampling Strategy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
History Of Race

The Introduction defines the concept of “ethnoracial boundaries” and introduces the concept of “groupness” to the reader. It discusses how scholars of ethnicity and nationalism have neglected how non-elites negotiate ethnoracial boundaries through non-state social interaction. It also critiques race and ethnicity scholars for essentializing ethnoracial categories and focusing exclusively on the United States. This chapter advocates a “critical constructivist” approach to race and ethnicity that focuses on how non-elite social actors negotiate ethnoracial boundaries and incorporates critical race theory's concept of intersectionality. Following this discussion, the chapter explains the history of race-mixing between blacks and whites in the United States and Brazil. It also outlines: the methodology of the book; the categorization of respondents; the sampling strategy; the meaning of marriage in the two societies; a statement on researcher reflexivity; and an overview of the remaining book chapters. It ends with a summary of the book's conclusion, that race mixture is no replacement for public policy and can coexist with white supremacy.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Life History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Historical Issues

This chapter introduces the life history of James Churchwill (“Church”) Vaughan and the historical issues that examining his life helps to clarify. These include the pervasiveness of slavery in the 19th century Atlantic world, the blurry distinctions between slavery and freedom, African American “return” to Africa, and the influence of the African diaspora on Africa itself. The chapter also lays out the methodological challenges of writing biographies of unknown individuals. Vaughan’s story as remembered by his family members is contradicted by historical evidence; but the way that story was produced and transmitted offers insights into historical memory as well as the comparative history of slavery, freedom, and white supremacy in the Atlantic world.

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