Corners, Tables, Lines

Staffan Müller-Wille

doi:10.1163/18253911-03603001

Abstract

Abstract The modern concept of race is usually traced back to proponents of a “natural history of mankind” in the European Enlightenment. Starting from allegorical representations of the four continents in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the eighteenth-century visual genre of castas paintings, I suggest that modern conceptions of race were significantly shaped by diagrammatic representations of human diversity that allowed for tabulation of data, combinatorial analysis, and quantification, and hence functioned as “tools to think with.” Accounting for racial ancestry in terms of “proportions of blood” not only became a preoccupation of scholars as a consequence, but also came to underwrite administrative practices and popular discourses. To contribute to a better understanding of the history of race relations, historians of the race concept need to pay more attention to these diagrammatic aspects of the concept.

Highlights

The concept of race certainly belongs to one of the most contentious and historically fraught concepts in the human sciences
Starting from allegorical representations of the four continents in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the eighteenthcentury visual genre of castas paintings, I suggest that modern conceptions of race were significantly shaped by diagrammatic representations of human diversity that allowed for tabulation of data, combinatorial analysis, and quantification, and functioned as “tools to think with.”
The power that the race concept possesses in shaping the goals and actions of political movements—a power that endures to this very day—cannot be grasped without conceding that this power, in part at least, resides in the historically tenacious set of discursive rules by which it operates.[2]