Ideas of ’Race’ in the History of the Humanities

Amos Morris-Reich is Professor in the Department of Jewish History and Thought and Director of Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa, Israel. Past publications include The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science (2008) and Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876-1980 (2016).
Dirk Rupnow is Professor at, and Head of, the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Previous publications include Judenforschung im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft zwischen Politik, Propaganda und Ideologie (2011) and Vernichten und Erinnern: Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik (2005) and co-edited (with I. Roebling-Grau) 'Holocaust'-Fiktion: Kunst jenseits der Authentizität (2015) and (together with V. Lipphardt, J. Thiel and C. Wessely) Pseudowissenschaft. Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2008).

This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust - years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement - the concept of 'race' slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.

Reveals the role of the humanities in the history of the concept of 'race'

1. Introduction; Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow.- 2. Were Early-Modern Europeans Racist?; Joan-Pau Rubiés.- 3. Formal Analysis: Art and Anthropology; Margaret Olin.- 4. Max Grunwald and the Formation of Jewish Folkloristics: Another Perspective on Race in German-Speaking Volkskunde; Dani Schrire.- 5. Racism and Anti-Semitism in German Political Economy-The Example of Carl Schmitt's 1936 Berlin Conference "Jewry in Jurisprudence"; Nicolas Berg.- 6. Theogony as Ethnogony: Race and Religion in Friedrich Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology; George Williamson.- 7. Race and Richard Wagner; Michael Steinberg.- 8. The Concept of Race in Musicological Thought- from General Remarks to a Case Study of So- Called Gypsy Music in European Culture; Anna G. Piotrowska.- 9. On Racial Thinking and the Problem of "Oriental" Prehistory; Suzanne Marchand.- 10. "Nordics" and "Hamites": Joseph Deniker and the Rise (and Fall) of Scientific Racism; Nigel Eltringham.- 11. Phonocentrism and the Concept of Volk: The Case of Modern China; Christopher Hutton.- 12. "The Creation of a Frustrated People": Race, the Teaching of History, and South African Historiography in the Apartheid Era; Derek Charles Catsam.- 13. Afterword; Sander L. Gilman.