Geopolitical Cultures of Race and the Power of Modern Culture

• In Event: 226 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. How Political Culture Matters

Abstract

This paper explores the importance of race to modernism as a political culture, tracing a genealogy of racial imaginaries from the Renaissance into the 19th century. The genealogy is based on racial representations in geography, and is connected to the patterns of geopolitics. I argue that this exploration of race was integral to modernism because it engaged with the idea of natural man. The primitive and modern dichotomy was central to defining what modern meant and how to be progressive. But how conceptions of how race fit with modern practices were more complex and produced multiple racial imaginaries and logics of power.

Author

• Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego