Foreword

Abstract

Extract Robert Bernasconi is internationally recognized as one of the founders of the new field of study called the critical philosophy of race. Yet the papers he has written in this area over the last several decades are scattered far and wide in journals and books across the (primarily) English-speaking world. For some years now, many have been pressing him to collect his papers on the topic of race in book form; finally, this wish comes to fruition with this volume and its companion, second volume. These collections will provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of Bernasconi’s scholarship on race, enhancing our general understanding of the origin of the concept in modern European philosophy and the new sciences. This collection will also contribute to our understanding of the ongoing ways in which European ideas about race were contested by Africana philosophers from the beginning. Reading European thinkers alongside Africana thinkers helps to open up the question of how to define racism, and how the twentieth-century formulations of racism emerged historically. Together, these papers reveal the contributions that a specifically continental philosophical approach can make to our efforts to understand the influence of racist ideas on the development of the modern West.