Introduction

Abstract

The introduction investigates why the history of ideas of race in the humanities has not been written to date and why it is important. In order to offer a framework for the volume as a whole, we attempt to formulate the central historical and methodological questions that the study of ideas of race in the humanities involves, and outline the volume’s treatment of the topic. The chapter attempts a historical deconstruction of both the terms “race” and “humanities,” arguing that both are unstable signifiers and concepts. For reasons that are explained in the chapter, we propose a soft rather than strong argument concerning the history of ideas of race in the humanities. Nonetheless, we put forward three propositions concerning this history. First, we suggest that race, when looked at from the perspective of the humanities, implies cultural and mental, rather than physical differences. Our second argument relates to the necessity to draw distinctions between several interrelated but independent genealogies of race as a concept (or set of dynamic concepts). Finally, we argue that the discovery of the idea of race is a specifically modern phenomenon, which cannot be separated from the sense of the crisis of modernity. We specifically address Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism. We exemplify some of the complexities involved in the attempt to historicize ideas of race in the humanities, exemplify recurring concepts and interconnect separate chapters in this history, and describe the structure of the volume.