Historicizing Race

Abstract

Historicizing Race is a sweeping reassessment of race and racial ideologies in Western intellectual history. The authors Marius Turda and Maria Sophia Quine emphasize the “stealth and wiliness” of race, beginning their analysis with an overview of “blood purity” laws in the fifteenth-century Iberian world and concluding with timely observations about the reemergence of racism and xenophobia in the twenty-first century (pp. 2, 18). Given the fractured political and cultural landscapes that characterize much of Western Europe and North America today, Turda and Quine's sustained focus on how race feeds “cultural arrogance” and notions of superiority seems particularly timely (p. 8). In five chapters—“History,” “Culture,” “Nation,” “Genealogy,” and “Science”—Turda and Quine remind us that race is a relationally constructed marker of identity lacking the abstract markers of scientific certainty that its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century apostles claimed it possessed. Echoing the work of cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, Turda and Quine insist that seeing race as a “signifier” that is used (and abused) to reinforce perceived differences and rationalize iniquities in socioeconomic and political power is a far more useful way of understanding the historical development of race (p. 13).