Details

Subject(s)

• Race [Browse]
• Critical race theory [Browse]

Series

• Oxford Academic [More in this series]
• Oxford scholarship online

Summary note

The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either to miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow. For example, relying on biology to reject the concept of race as a way of disarming racism misses the fact that racism precedes the biology of race. It also ignores the prevalence of forms of racism, such as cultural racism, that do not take their starting point in biology. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, the late Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Robert Bernasconi argues for a holistic approach that integrates the concrete experience of racism faced by individuals into the study of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. Studying the interventions of such Black philosophers as Ottobah Cugoano, Anténor Firmin, and W. E. B. Du Bois shows the value of allowing them to set the terms of the debate, instead of trying to fit them into debates shaped by other areas of philosophy. If race is indeed a social construct, then it is necessary to uncover the different forces, material as well as intellectual, that at different times shaped the various forms the concept of race has taken and the value then placed on preserving racial purity. Critical philosophy of race has a role to play in rendering both the material and psychological effects of slavery and segregation more intelligible as forms of systemic racism. When critical philosophers of race ignore the history of racism, they are in danger of being complicit with that part of society that seeks to erase that history.

Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Contents: Foreword by Linda Martín Alcoff - Acknowledgments - Note on Sources - Introduction - I.What Is Critical Philosophy of Race in the Continental Tradition? - 1. Critical Philosophy of Race - II.The Construction of Race - 2. Racialization and the Construction of Religions - 3. The Philosophy of Race in the Nineteenth Century - 4. Racial Science in the Nineteenth Century - 5. The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms - 6. Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept - III.Black Philosophers Speak Out - 7. Ottobah Cugoano's Place in the History of Political Philosophy: Slavery and the Philosophical Canon - 8. A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a Philosopher against Racism - 9. "Our Duty to Conserve": W. E. B. Du Bois's Philosophy of History in Context - 10. Frantz Fanon and Psychopathology: The Progressive Infrastructure of Black Skin, White Masks - 11. Frantz Fanon's Engagement with Phenomenology: Unlocking the Temporal Architecture of Black Skin, White Masks - IV.The Construction of the Concept of Racism - 12. Nature, Culture, and Race - 13. A Most Dangerous Error: The Boasian Myth of a Knock-Down Argument against Racism - 14. Making Nietzsche's Thought Groan: The History of Racisms and Foucault's Genealogy of Nietzschean Genealogy in "Society Must Be Defended" - 15. Existentialism against Colonialism: Sartre, Fanon, and the Place of Lived Experience - Notes - Bibliography - Index

ISBN

• 0-19-758799-2
• 0-19-758798-4
• 0-19-758800-X

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