Summary
… heredity, formerly a concept restricted to the realm of law, began to be applied in matters of organic reproduction and successively became a concept of central importance to the life and human sciences … with the emergence of racial classifications in early sixteenth century Spain and Portugal …
STAFFAN MULLER-WILLE AND HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER ‘Heredity: the formation of an epistemic space’, 2007For Kant … one could clearly see the operation of inheritance in the case of race-mixing.
ROBERT BERNASCONI ‘Heredity and hybridity in the natural history of Kant, Girtanner, and Schelling during the 1790s’, 2014Creolising subjectivity … calls upon an agent to recognize the ways in which the person is raced in particular ways on the one hand, and the ways in which the person is both more and less than his or her race on the other. It is in this way that creolizing subjectivity can be understood as a call to assume responsibility for our (raced) selves. We are more than our race or races in the sense that we are always subjects who participate in the ongoing process of meaning constitution, and thus never properly determined by or reduced to our racial ascriptions … The creolizing subject, in understanding and affirming this complicated relationship to the ongoing process of living race is thus both affirming herself as an active participant in this process, and avoiding the traps of either pretending that she is somehow outside of or beyond it, or completely fixed and determined by it.
MICHAEL J. MONAHAN The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason and the Politics of Purity, 2011Skin colour was the first physical feature used by European colonists for socio-political classification: white skin meant freedom, black skin meant slavery. Ideas about ‘mixed ancestry’ have been as central to making race – the organising category of modernity – as ideas about blackness and whiteness.
As early as the sixteenth century, in the European imagination skin colour was combined with religious history, ancestry and legal status – particularly slave status – to turn physical features into a socio-political matter. It was much later, in the nineteenth century, that the idea of race as a biological differentiation which included skin colour, skull size and other features emerged.
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- Race OtherwiseForging a New Humanism for South Africa, pp. 77 - 104Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2017