Race and the possibilities of comparative critique

New Literary History

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 501-522

  Loomba, Ania ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950822756     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0103     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. See for example, Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003)
2. Rey Chow, 'The Old/ New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies," ELH 71 (2004): 289-311
3. Aamir Mufti, "Global Comparativism," Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 472-89
4. Pheng Cheah and Jonathan D. Culler eds., Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2003)
5. See especially Partha Chatterjee, "Anderson's Utopia," Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999), 128-34
6. and Shu-mei Shih, "Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition," PMLA 19, no. 1 (2004): 19
7. See Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton eds., Race in Early Modern England, A Documen-tary Companion (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
8. Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990), 38-57
9. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out, Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 1; 319
10. Joyce Chaplin, "Race," in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 154-72
11. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Race," in Critical Terms forLiterary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 274-87
12. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), 31
13. Roberto Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, The Idea of Race (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000)
14. Brian Niro, Race (New York: Palgrave, 2003)
15. See Irene Silverblatt, "Modern Inquisitions," in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 282-83
16. Shu-mei Shih, "Comparative Racialization: An Introduction," PAILA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1352
17. George Abbot, A Brief Description of the Whole World, (first published 1599) (London, 1664), 106. In this essay I will consider mainly English histories as well as the Iberian ones, which were so consequential for shaping European colonial ideas
18. "John Huighen van Linschoten his Voyage to Goa, and observations of the East Indies, abbreviated," in Purchas his Pilgrims, ed. Samuel Purchas (London: William Stansby, 1625), 1752, 1753, 1756-1757, 1760, 1762-67. Arabs themselves had used the word to describe both Christians and blacks
19. Wolfram con Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage (New York: Vintage, 1961). For a discussion of the dappling
20. see Lisa Lampert, "Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages," MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 6, no. 3 (2004): 391-421
21. Augustine writes, "If they be definable to be reasonable creatures and mortal, they must be acknowledged to be Adam's issue." St. Augustine, Of the citie of God, trans. John Healey (London: George Eld, 1610), 580-82
22. John Manning ed., The Emblems of Thomas Palmer: Two Hundred Poosees (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 56. This idea derives from one of Aesop's fables entitled "The Moor or Ethiopian" and is echoed by the Bible as well as many early modern writings
23. For an extended discussion, as well as complication, of the materials I discuss here see Loomba and Burton eds., Race in Early Modern England. There, other histories, such as those of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are also brought in, which this short essay cannot consider
24. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (first published 1566), trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1945), 127
25. Quoted by Jerome Friedman, "Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism," Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 1 (1987): 3-29, 16-17
26. The importance of early modern Spain to the development of what we recognize as race is explored by George Mariscal, "The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 7-23
27. James Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (1997): 143-66
28. Deborah Root, "Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth-Century Spain," Representations 23 (Summer 1998): 118-34
29. Friedman, "Jewish Conversion"; Andre Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978)
30. For a development of this argument, see Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 24-27, 67-70
31. Audrey Smedley, Race in North America
32. quoted by Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 15 (emphasis added)
33. Elizabeth I (1601), in P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 3: 221
34. Andrew Boorde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge (London: W. Middleton, 1555), I 2 v
35. Richard Ligon, A True History of the Island of Barbados (London: Peter Parker, 1657), 15
36. This anonymous document in the papers of the scientist Robert Boyle is quoted by Cristina Malcolmson, "Biblical Monogenesis: Race and Gender in the Early Royal Society," forthcoming in her book Race, Religion, and Science in the Works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish
37. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro's & Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church: Or, A Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negros and Indians in our Plantations (London: J.D, 1680), 142, 155
38. Cristina Malcolmsen, "Biblical Monogenesis."
39. Etienne Balibar, "Is There a Neo-racism?" in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Emmanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 23
40. See, for example, Sweet, "Iberian Roots," 165
41. Goldberg has recently argued that the "concept of raásms without racism" is "the peculiar expression of neoliberalizing globalization." "Racisms without Racism," PAILA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1712-16
42. See also Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009)
43. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 197-99
44. Dalit literally means "broken" or "ground down" and was adopted as a term of self-definition by oppressed caste activists; the so-called lower castes were previously called "untouchables." Gandhi called them "Harijans" or "people/children of God." For a discussion of the politics of naming see Anupama Rao, "Who is the Dalit? The Emergence of a New Political Subject," in Claiming Power From Below; Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India, ed. Manu Bhagvan and Anne Feldhaus (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 11-27
45. For a useful summary of the contemporary status of Dalits see N. Paul Divakar and Ajai M., "UN Bodies and the Dalits," in Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in an International Context, ed. Sukhdeo Thorat and Umakant (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, 2004), 4 (hereafter cited as Caste)
46. Etienne Balibar, "Racism Revisited: Sources, Relevance, and Aporias of a Modern Concept," PAILA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1630-39, 1632
47. Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation and Societies Stuctured in Dominance" in Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg eds., Black British Cultural Studies, A Reader (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 16-60, 51
48. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). The original French edition was published in 1966
49. See Nicholas Dirks's excellent commentary in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 4-6 (hereafter cited as COM)
50. Cox also argued that premodern interactions between peoples were not marked by racial antipathy. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948). Later, the book was retitled Race: a Study in Social Dynamics
51. Thorat and Umakant, Caste, xxiii
52. Dipankar Gupta, "Caste is not Race: But, Let's Go to the UN Forum Anyway," in Caste, 53-54
53. Jaswant Singh on February 7, 2001, cited by Vijay Prashad, "Cataracts of Silence: Race on the Edge of Indian Thought," in Claiming Power, 134
54. Prashad, "Cataracts of Silence," 135-36
55. Andre Béteille, "Race and Caste," The Hindu, March 10, 2001, http://wcar.alrc.net/mainfile.php/For+the+negative/14/
56. For an easily accessible profile of Mayawati see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2fhi/south-asia/1958378.stm
57. Akeel Bilgrami, "Gandhi's Non-Violence: The Philosophy Behind the Politics," pre-sented at the MLA Annual Convention, New Orleans, December 29, 2001
58. Quoted by Christophe Jaffrelot, "The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s," in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 334
59. See for example, "A Swami's Open Letter to Pope," The Times of India, November 6, 1999
60. See Anand Teltumbde ed., Hindutva and Dalits (Kolkata: Samya, 2005) for an excellent review of this development
61. See also Tariq Thachil and Ron Herring, "Poor Choices: Dealignment, Development and Dalit/Adivasi Voting Patterns in Indian States," Contemporary South Asia 16, no. 4 (2008): 441-64
62. Quoted by Henry Yule and AC Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: a Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1984), 171. Dirks, COM, sees this attitude as a product of later colonial and missionary views
63. See Susan Bayly, "Caste and 'Race' in the Colonial Ethnography on India," Concept of Race in South Asia, 168
64. In the nineteenth century, W. Hamilton was to suggest that the term had been taken from the term "Kayastha," which described a particular caste grouping; see Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 171
65. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2004), 12-13
66. See also Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)
67. Bayly, "Caste and 'Race,'" 168
68. Michael Bamshad et al., "Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Popula-tions," Genome Research 11, no. 6 (2001): 994-1004, 991
69. Quoted by Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions: The Anti-Caste Movement and the Construction of an Indian Identity, Tracts for the Times series no. 8 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1995), 17
70. Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 18
71. Hindu fundamentalists are caught in the contradictions of this discourse, laying claim, on the one hand, to being Aryan and, on the other, to also being the only original inhabitants of India. See, for example, The Organizer: http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa= showpage&pid=257&page=27. A good discussion of some of these contradictions is provided by Jaffrelot, "The Idea of the Hindu Race."
72. Shiv Visvanathan, "Durban and Dalit Discourse," Caste, 272
73. Aamir R Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007)
74. Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, "A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe," Radical History Review 83 (Spring 2002): 146-172, 152-153, 160
75. Silverblatt, "Modern Inquisitions," 282-83. See also note 13 above