DOI: 10.35515/zfa/asj.3334/201920.02
Australian Studies Journal Zeitschrift für Australienstudien 33/34 — 2019/2020
Wulf D. Hund, Stefanie Affeldt
‘Racism’ Down Under The Prehistory of a Concept in Australia Abstract: The conceptual history of ‘racism’ is hitherto underdeveloped. One of its assertions is that the term ‘racism’ originated from a German-centric critique of völkisch and fascist ideology. A closer look at the early international usage of the categories ‘racialism’ and ‘racism’ shows that the circumstances were much more complex. Australia lends itself for validation of this complexity. It once shared a colonial border with Germany, had a substantial number of German immigrants, and, during both world wars, was amongst the opponents of Germany. Even so, the reference to Germany is only one of many elements of the early concept of ‘racism’.
Racism is older than its name.1 Depending on the interpretative approach, the difference ranges from decades to centuries. Moreover, the conceptual history of ‘racism’2 is a desideratum. Despite the current omnipresence of the term, its etymological emergence and intellectual development are mostly unexplored. This has found widespread expression in the fact that, until today, ‘racism’ is often considered an exonerative term for a kind of racial thinking purportedly not affected by it. This observation applies to early attempts of distinction between race theory and racism that were meant to rescue racial thinking as value-neutral scientific consideration. It also applies to later analyses that consider ‘racism’ as a reaction to the Nazis’ discrimination of parts of the white race. The background of such discursive strategies is observable in the entry “Rasse” [‘race’] in ‘Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’ [Basic Concepts in History], a principal work of conceptual history.3 It was edited by three conservative historians, Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, 1
2 3
In the current discussion of the history of racism (which does not deal with the conceptual history), the following positions are, amongst others, taken: – a. Racism is a reactionary ideology that emerged in the nineteenth century (cf. Detlev Claussen, Was heißt Rassismus?); – b. Racism has its theoretical roots in Enlightenment thinking (cf. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment); – c. Racism is a white ideology that emerged in the context of colonialism and transatlantic slavery (cf., besides numerous contributions from ‘Critical Whiteness’ research, Joe Feagin, The White Racial Frame); – d. Racism dates back at least to the politics of the ‘limpieza de sangre’ in early modern Spain (cf. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, David Nirenberg, eds., Race and Blood in the Iberian World); – e. Racist thinking already existed in the European Middle Ages (cf. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages); – f. Racism was ‘invented’ in classical antiquity (cf. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity); – g. Racism was already known to the ancient Egyptians (cf. Malvern van Wyk Smith, The First Ethiopians); – h. Racism also has a long history outside Europe (cf. Ian Law, Racism and Ethnicity). Moreover, these positions are interwoven with different attitudes towards the concept of race. They range from the assertion that (i) racism did not exist before the development of modern racial thinking (cf. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture) on the idea that (ii) race-like concepts had existed before and (iii) ‘social race’ and ‘natural race’ are not mutually exclusive constructions (cf. Robin O. Andreasen, A New Perspective on the Race Debate) until the point of view that (iv) racism would also have used other than racial, e.g. religious points of reference (cf. George M. Fredrickson, Racism). ‘Racism’ is put in single-inverted commas when we refer to the concept; in the cases we address racism as a social relation, it remains unmarked. Cf. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – the volume with the lemma ‘race’ was published in 1984. For English contributions by