Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities

This book reveals the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. In the decades following the Second World War and the Holocaust - years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement - the concept of race slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category. Nevertheless, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency, playing an integral role in numerous fields of knowledge, in some cases even serving as an essential basis. Existing scholarship has firmly associated notions of race with late nineteenth-century biology and anthropology rather than with the humanities. This collection brings together some of the most prominent historians in this area in order to take the first steps in filling this lacuna. Its contributors analyze different disciplines and national backgrounds from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting from the late eighteenth century, and seek to answer the following questions: At what point did notions of race surface in the humanities, and where did they come from? What roles did they play in various fields within the humanities, particularly with regard to epistemological categories?