230374 Entangled Bodies - Entangled Races (S) (SoSe 2021)

Currently, due to the impact of the "Black Lives Matter" movement, there has arisen a broad public discussion about racism and different racial discourses and practices. However, these debates about origins, definitions, and distinctions of race(s) not only shape the present and recent past, but come to be increasingly related to earlier periods of history, which, in addition to the 18th century and the Early Modern period, sometimes also include antiquity or the Middle Ages. In light of present controversies on racism, for example, it can be asked whether and to what extent Shakespeare's dramas The Merchant of Venice or Othello depict and discriminate against representatives of different races (Jews, ‘Moors’) and whether Christian white society, since its beginnings, has not inevitably been formed as a racist society.
The seminar will explore these and related questions by looking at the historical emergence of encounters and entanglements of races on the one hand, and of entangled discourses of race in different cultural fields (ethnography, natural history, theology, medicine, literature) on the other. In this context, special attention will be paid to the significance of the body with regard to different mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, among other issues, it will be examined since when skin color has been equated with sameness or otherness, which concepts of the body have entered into the construction and definition of human races, how the body has been perceived, and what role the different forms of body perception have played for the perception of the (cultural) other. With respect to the formation of historical concepts of race, it is furthermore important to determine the extent to which body, religion, and culture are connected, to specify the historical period(s) in which the religious other was considered to belong to a different race, and to study the discursive entanglements of caste, race, and class.
The perspectives of investigation outlined above will be exemplified by different historical concepts of the body (humoral pathology, physiognomy, etc.) and discourses of race (religious history of creation, natural history, biology, etc.) as well as in the context of different cultural contact zones and conflict situations (debate about 'purity of blood' in Spain; European perception of India; Ottoman Empire as a multi-ethnic state; race and citizenship in France before and after the French Revolution; slavery in North America, mestizaje in Latin America e.a.).

The materials studied in the course include both historical sources (Lavater, Linné, Buffon; legal texts, travelogues etc.) and literary texts (Shakespeare, Cervantes, French travel literature, European and Latinamerican ethnography e.a.) belonging to different periods and cultures.

Bibliography

Literature (Selection):
Curran, Andrew S., The Anatomy of Blackness. Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, Baltimore 2011.
Doron, Claude-Olivier, Race and Genealogy. Buffon and the Formation of the Concept of “Race”, in: Humana. Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies 5, 2012, 75-109.
Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge 2018.
Meer, Nasar, Racialization and religion: race, culture and difference in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia, in: Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, 2013, 385-398.
Nirenberg, David, Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and its Jews, in: Greer, Mignolo and Quilligan (Hg.), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, Chicago 2007, 71-87.
Nirenberg, David, Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of "Jewish" Blood in Late Medieval Spain., in: Eliav-Feldon (Hg.), The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge 2009, S.232-264.
Pinnen, Christian, Colonizing Complexions: How Laws of Bondage Shaped Race in America’s Colonial Borderlands, in: Rohland, Epple, Flüchter and Kramer (Hg.), Contact, Conquest and Colonization. How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism around the World, New York 2020, 363-398.
Stoler, Ann L., Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley 2002.
Wheeler, Roxann, The complexion of race: categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture, 2010.
Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London 1995.