This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre‐ and early modern periods. In pursuing its second objective, the essay turns from histories cataloguing ancient, medieval, and early modern racisms to objections leveled, in these same literatures, against scholarship defending the modernity of race. The defense of a premodern origin to race is, I argue, not just a historical argument but a contemporary politics embedded in a narrative of continuity that insists on the relevance of the medieval past to the racial configurations of our current moment. Rather than demonstrating continuity and sameness, this essay seeks to draw attention to alternative modes of historicizing that are more attentive to the alterity of the past.

中文翻译：

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种族主义的起源：对思想史的批判

本文有两个目标。首先，它试图通过围绕思想史的较早辩论来与当代关于种族主义起源的学术研究进行批判性接触。它特别指出，昆汀·斯金纳（Quentin Skinner）对思想史的影响力批判可以帮助我们发现我们当前对种族主义起源的迷恋的陷阱，尤其是当这种起源可以追溯到上古和欧洲早期和近代早期时。为追求第二个目标，本文从对古代，中世纪和早期现代种族主义进行分类的历史转向在这些相同文献中针对捍卫种族现代性的学术提出的反对意见。我认为，对现代种族起源的辩护是，不仅是历史论据，而且是包含在连续性叙事中的当代政治，这种叙事坚持认为中世纪的过去与我们当下的种族形态有关。这篇文章并没有表现出连续性和相同性，而是试图引起人们对历史化的替代模式的关注，这些模式更关注过去的变化。