Colonialism and Enlightenment : the legacy of German race theories /
"The shock American scholars felt at rediscovering that Immanuel Kant, the cosmopolitan defender of universal rights, had also written several essays delineating racial classifications based on skin color has had lasting consequences. The tumult has been unrelenting: how could the defender of h...
| Other Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York, NY. :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "The shock American scholars felt at rediscovering that Immanuel Kant, the cosmopolitan defender of universal rights, had also written several essays delineating racial classifications based on skin color has had lasting consequences. The tumult has been unrelenting: how could the defender of human rights also espouse racial prejudice? Reviewing this heated discussion, our volume includes scholars who long have had a voice in these debates, as well as younger academics, who have been trained in critical race theory. The work of our contributors reflects their diverse backgrounds, ranging across philosophy, German studies, African-American studies, post-colonialism, and African literature. Our volume includes decisive essays that reveal the historical sources in modern racial thinking. We explain the long-term consequences of German colonial discourse in particular how the discourse around becoming "white" and "German" has persisted across centuries. For the last 30 years, scholars treated the Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. This volume will demonstrate that from its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism to the extent that philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Without colonialism and slavery, it would not have been possible for German professors to initiate a discourse on race as they did in the eighteenth century. The chapters in Colonialism and Enlightenment explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race reinforced discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe. Given the multiple, often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, we explore how later race thinkers responded to earlier formulations. How did Enlightenment debates figure in later racisms? How did nationalist and Nazi racisms view Enlightenment anthropology? What Enlightenment concepts and configurations persisted into the twentieth century? Our contributors do not take a narrow position within these controversies. Instead, we present a variety of positions, as we take stock of the debates about race and Enlightenment held over the last 30 years"-- Provided by publisher. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiii, 294 pages) : illustrations (some color) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197785058 0197785050 9780197785041 0197785042 9780197785034 0197785034 |