The New Race History outside the West

The category of race has come to be used more and more by historians over the last decade or so in analyzing an increasing number of historical situations outside of the traditional areas where race has long been understood as important (Atlantic slavery and post-slavery, settler colonialism, modern eugenics, etc.) Since the publication of Frank Dikötter’s The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) historians have sought to uncover racial histories in India, Africa, and late medieval Spain, among other places. This has provoked disquiet among some historians who fear that deploying race in such diverse contexts dilutes the value of the concept in its modern Western ‘home’, while at the same time imposing a Western category on histories for which this term had no meaning. Essentially, what is at stake is whether historians want to understand race as the exclusive province of modern Western historical formations, or whether the category can be used analytically in different settings without being bound to a Western genealogy of race. I argue in this paper that as an analytical tool, or as an etic category, race has proved to be very useful in a wide variety of historical settings. The emerging historical literature which uses race as an analytical tool in many non-Western contexts makes it possible to re-conceptualize race in a truly comparative way, and arrive at a more sophisticated and less parochial understanding of its different historical manifestations. I argue that this should have important implications for the ways in which race is understood by historians of more traditional racial terrain.