Conceptual Categories, III: Race & Nation

By now the various theories we have encountered should be familiar to you.  We began our survey of "conceptual categories of historical analysis" with a discussion of the category of space and the ways in which spatial dynamics (material culture) helped inform Londoners' identity.  Over the next two weeks, we will read about race and class and how they function in British history and explore the dynamics of racism in the modern world.  We begin with today's reading, an excerpt from the influential work of Edward Said (1935 – 2003).  Said (pronounced Sy-eed) was a literary critic who spent most of his career at Columbia University (since 1963).  Born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family, Said and his family moved to Cairo, Egypt after the founding of Israel.  He then moved to the United States and was educated at New England boarding schools, then went on to Princeton and Harvard for Graduate school.  His work has been consistently critical of the ways in which Palestinians have been treated in the construction of the Israeli state, though he did recognize the de facto existence of Israel.

NATION—Edward Said wrote Orientalism in the late 1970s in response to western histories of the Middle East.  He conceptualized nationalist identity as being predicated on an essentialized bipolarization—"the other".  There is a normative national identity that the west characterizes as "self" beyond which difference is insurmountable.  This "otherness" philosophy he coined "orientalism" which frames the middle-eastern other as exotic and unable to be understood.  The excerpt you have is the introduction to this seminal work, a work that helped to deconstruct the concept of national identity and whiteness and that had profound influence on the last of our theories, Subaltern Studies.

At one point he wrote:

Historicism meant that one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe, or the West... What...has never taken place is an epistemological critique at the most fundamental level of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of Western imperialism and critiques of imperialism on the one hand, and on the other, the actual practice of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and homogenisation of histories are maintained (quoted in  White Mythologies p. 10).

RACE & CLASS—one way of thinking about history is through the lens of race and class.  You will next read Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack a late-1980s sociological examination of racial politics in twentieth-century England.  One of the key elements that Gilroy wants to convey is that conceptual categories such as race and class cannot easily be divorced from each other and taken as mutually exclusive.  In other words, according to Gilroy, the way to think about the cultural politics of twentieth-century Britain is not in neat and tidy frameworks, but in the messiness of overlapping existences.  We will be studying class in a much different way after reading Gilroy's book, however, and we'll see the ways in which the history of class has transformed since the nineteenth century.

(For questions to guide you through the monograph, go to Gilroy monograph Questions).