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Racism in the Modern World

Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation

Manfred Berg editor Simon Wendt editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Berghahn Books

Published:1st Apr '11

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Racism in the Modern World cover

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

“What emerges is a complex and polyvalent mapping of how Western notions of biological and scientific racisms were diffused and reworked by anthropologists, colonial policymakers, nationalist reformers, and intellectuals in other global settings.”• Journal of World History

“This volume ranges widely and creatively across time and space not only to investigate the history of racism, but also to interrogate its connections with related but distinct forms of oppression and subjugation. In almost every instance, the essays here reach a very high level—much higher than is typical for volumes of this kind.”• Christopher Leslie Brown, Columbia University

ISBN: 9780857450760

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 644g

384 pages