Racism in the modern world : historical perspectives on cultural transfer and adaptation

385 Pages·2011·1.67 MB·English

by  Berg

Racism in the Modern World

Racism in the Modern World
Historical Perspectives on Cultural
Transfer and Adaptation
Edited by
Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt
Berghahn Books
New York (cid:129) Oxford
First published in 2011 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2011 Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
The printing of this volume has been made possible by the
generous support of the Thyssen Foundation and the
Heidelberg Center for American Studies.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A copy of the C.I.P. data for this book is available
from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
ISBN 978-0-85745-076-0 (hardback)
E-ISBN 978-0-85745-077-7
Contents
Introduction. Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives
on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1
Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt
1. The Racialization of the Globe: Historical Perspectives 20
Frank Dikötter
2. How Racism Arose in Europe and Why It Did Not
in the Near East 41
Benjamin Braude
3. Culture’s Shadow: “Race” and Postnational Belonging
in the Twentieth Century 65
Christian Geulen
4. Racism and Genocide 84
Boris Barth
5. Slavery and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Cuba 105
Michael Zeuske
6. Toward a Transnational History of Racism: Wilhelm Marr
and the Interrelationships between Colonial Racism and
German Anti-Semitism 122
Claudia Bruns
7. Transatlantic Anthropological Dialogue and “the Other”:
Felix von Luschan’s Research in America, 1914–1915 140
John David Smith
Contents
8. Transits of Race: Empire and Difference in
Philippine-American Colonial History 163
Paul A. Kramer
9. Interrogating Caste and Race in South Asia 192
Gita Dharampal-Frick and Katja Götzen
10. The Making of a “Ruling Race”: Defining and Defending
Whiteness in Colonial India 213
Harald Fischer-Tiné
11. Glocalizing “Race” in China: Concepts and Contingencies
at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 236
Gotelind Müller
12. Race without Supremacy: On Racism in the Political
Discourse of Late Meiji Japan, 1890–1912 255
Urs Matthias Zachmann
13. Hendrik Verwoerd’s Long March to Apartheid:
Nationalism and Racism in South Africa 281
Christoph Marx
14. The “Right Kind of White People”: Reproducing Whiteness
in the United States and Australia, 1780s–1930s 303
Gregory D. Smithers
15. Race and Indigeneity in Contemporary Australia 329
A. Dirk Moses
Notes on Contributors 353
Select Bibliography 357
Index 371
vi
Introduction
Racism in the Modern World:
Historical Perspectives on Cultural
Transfer and Adaptation
Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt
Although the term only gained currency during the 1920s and 1930s,
racism, both as a set of ideas and as social practice, has a much longer his-
tory. Broadly speaking, the concept has been predicated on the belief that
humankind is divided into distinctive entities, commonly called races, which
are delineated by descent and phenotype and regarded as primordial, static,
and homogeneous. Moreover, the assertion that race determines not only
physical appearance but also intellectual abilities and culture has been a key
tenet of racism. Finally, its advocates have tried to establish a natural hier-
archy of supposedly superior and inferior races from which they have
inferred the claim that the former have a right to rule and exploit the latter.
As a consequence, racist ideas have been employed in justifying colonial
conquest, slavery, and genocide as well as the segregation of and discrimi-
nation against purportedly inferior races. Arguably, no part of the globe has
remained untouched by racism, and although racist ideologies came under
increasing attack during the 1930s and 1940s, the World War II era did not
usher in an age of racial egalitarianism. In the United States, racial segrega-
tion was not abolished until the mid-1960s. South African Apartheid
persisted until the early 1990s. In the twenty-first century, racism, while
being less clearly identifiable, continues to affect modern society.1
Not surprisingly, scholars have been keenly interested in the question of
why and how racism developed into such a powerful historical force. Be-
cause racist ideas played a salient role in the process of European expansion
and in establishing the global dominance of the so-called white race, the
focus has largely been on the emergence of racism in Europe and North
America and on its impact on the rest of the world. Viewed from this per-
1
Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt
spective, racism appears to have been a Western ideology tailor-made to le-
gitimize the subjugation and exploitation of non-white peoples.2To be sure,
there are perfectly sound reasons why this approach has dominated the
study of racism for decades. No expert in the field would seriously dispute
that Europeans and their descendents all over the world have been the chief
propagandists and beneficiaries of racist ideologies and practices. But then
again, racism did not exclusively target non-white people and racist ideas
and customs were not solely confined to the United States or Western Eu-
rope. For example, in the Middle East notions of race have influenced the
development of slavery as well as regional identities. Historical research has
demonstrated that racial categories and racial hierarchies were a significant
aspect of intellectual discourse in modern China. Imperial Japan used sim-
ilar notions of racial superiority to occupy and colonize China and Korea.3
Furthermore, the challenge that the new global history has mounted
against Eurocentric interpretations of world history has also affected the
study of racism.4 Ironically, the notion that Westerners simply imposed
racism on the rest of the world in a top-down fashion may well reflect a
Eurocentric interpretation of a Eurocentric ideology. This volume, there-
fore, seeks to explore additional and alternative explanations of racism’s
historical significance by going beyond the dominant paradigms, which
have focused on the development of racism within the framework of West-
ern nation states, on the spread of white supremacy, and on the oppression
of blacks by whites.5Instead, it proposes to take a closer look at the com-
plex processes of diffusion, transfer, adaptation, and transformation of
racial ideas in various parts of the world, including their interaction with
indigenous traditions.
Scholars have begun to examine these issues from different angles.A
global perspective conceives of racism as one of the grand cultural, social,
and political forcesthat transcend the boundaries of nation-states or even
continents and have shaped the history of the modern world.For instance,
inasmuch as historians are interested in global movements, understood as
shared visions of common destiny and purpose, they will consider racism
a most appropriate subject.6 When racism reached the pinnacle of re-
spectability as a scientific theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, its proponents claimed that the struggle between the races was
the major driving force of world history and that the fate of humanity and
civilization depended on the global supremacy of the white race. In the
same vein, many anti-racists viewed racism and colonial oppression as a
global challenge for all non-white peoples.7
2
Introduction
Of course, the focus on global processes and forces begs the question of how
they manifested themselves in specific cultural and historical contexts. The so-
ciologist Roland Robertson has coined the phrase “glocalization” to capture the
“simultaneity and inter-penetration of what are conventionally called the global
and the local, the universal and the particular.”8With regard to racist ideologies,
this means that indigenous populations did not simply adopt certain ideas
about race that were introduced into their societies by Western colonial au-
thorities, scientists, and military personnel, but that they actively adapted them
within the local contexts of their native environments. Hence, glocalization be-
comes part of a larger transnational history thatIan Tyrrell succinctly defines
as the study of“the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions
across national boundaries.”9If we want to understand how racist ideologies
were disseminated within and beyond the Western world and how Western
nations, in turn, were influenced by racial practices and debates in the colonial
periphery, a transnational or transcultural perspective is imperative. For ex-
ample, in his work on Brazil and the United States, historian George Reid
Andrews shows that there was an “extended, century-long conversation be-
tween the two countries… on the topic of race,” which, among other things,
contributed to critical discussions of Brazil’s racial identity.10
While historians often combine transnational and comparative history,
these two approaches pursue different scholarly interests. “Through com-
parisons,” Peter Kolchin, an eminent comparativist, characterizes the
method, “the historian seeks to establish similarities and differences be-
tween common processes in two or more locations or eras,” trying to
establish either generalizations or distinctiveness or point to “significance
that would be less evident in isolation.”11 For example, the comparative
work of the late George Fredrickson and others on white supremacy in the
United States and South Africa has demonstrated that race relations in
these two societies did not simply mirror a fixed set of racist doctrines but
“can only be understood within a broader historical context that is itself
constantly evolving and thus altering the terms under which whites and
nonwhites interact.”12However, in recent years critics have argued that the
histories of nations, societies, and cultures in the modern world are so
closely entangled and interconnected that comparisons make little sense
because the isolation of variables is simply impossible. Still, without the an-
alytical rigor of the comparative method transnational history may easily
lose direction and focus.13
Although some enthusiastic promoters of global and transnational his-
tory seem to suggest that in the age of globalization their approach is the
3