Defining Race, Periodizing Race | Listen to the full talk

Presented by Geraldine Heng at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2019

Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms. Because the concept of race uses a vocabulary that defers to modern understanding, premodern scholars have been missing a vocabulary to analyze the breadth of racial “phenomena, institutions, and practices” that premodern critical race scholarship now uncovers. Heng describes archival evidence of racialized atrocities that PCRS reveals: stigmatized bodies blamed and punished, identified as not only not-human but also evil personified. Heng outlines the repetition of racial thinking across history, despite the differences in eras. By tracing the wide variations of the conditions and targets of enslavement over time, for instance, Heng demonstrates the persistence of racialization and its consequences for peoples perceived as essentially different. Heng closes with a description of the Cagots, European peoples labeled “monstrous” and ostracized from the 13th-17th centuries. To demonstrate the persistence of racialization, Heng illustrates how the Cagot suffered intersections of religious, class, and gender prejudice coupled with fear of disease, and were discriminated against based on changing biological markers of disability and non-normative bodies.

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