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When Race Is a Language and Empire Is a Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Marina Mogilner
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Abstract

The essay considers a twofold question: Why, until recently, has our field remained so reluctant to engage with racial epistemology, and what higher form of understanding does “race” offer to students of Eurasia? The answer to the first part of the question is located in the divergence between the “imperial” and “modernity” paradigms in Eurasian studies. With regard to the second part of the question, the essay suggests viewing “race” as one of the languages of self-reflection and modernization in the imperial space. It concludes that the discovery of “race” becomes tantamount to the rediscovery of Eurasia as an imperial space—irregularly hierarchical and heterogeneous, characterized by entangled exceptionalism and a constant renegotiation of differences, as well as the realignment of principles of belonging, subjectivities, and networks of solidarity.

Keywords

raceempiremodernityFoucaultauthenticitynationalism
Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 207 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1 See Discussion, Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–65, including Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges”; Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics”; Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty”; Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice”; and Eric D. Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics.” See also the forum, “The Multiethnic Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 231–303 including Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective”; Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet “Emancipation” of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective”; and Peter A. Blitstein, “Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context.” See also Avrutin, Eugene M., “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (2007): 13–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matusevich, Maxim, ed., Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, 2007)Google Scholar; Blakely, Allison, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC, 1986)Google Scholar; Tolz, Vera, “Discourses of Race in Imperial Russia, 1830–1914,” in Bancel, Nicolas, David, Thomas, and Thomas, Dominic, eds., The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations (London, 2014), 133–44Google Scholar; Tolz, Vera, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lemon, Alaina, “‘What Are They Writing about Us Blacks’: Roma and ‘Race’ in Russia,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 13, no. 2 (1995): 34–40Google Scholar; Rainbow, David, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sloin, Andrew, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Bloomington, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bojanowska, Edyta M., A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge, Mass., 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mogilner, Marina, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology) (Lincoln, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mogilner, “Racial Psychiatry and the Russian Imperial Dilemma of the ‘Savage Within’,” East Central Europe 43, no. 1–2 (2016): 99–133; Mogilner, “Classifying Imperial Russianness: Race and Hybridity in the Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century Russian Imperial Anthropology,” in Richard McMahon ed., National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945 (Lincoln, NE, 2019), 205–40.

2 Eley, Geoff, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 As an example of the work from this project where I make the above argument, see: Marina Mogilner, “ARA Relief Campaign in the Volga Region, Jewish Anthropometric Statistics, and the Scientific Promise of Integration,” Science in Context 32, no. 1 (March 2019): 5–24; and “Between Scientific and Political: Jewish Scholars and Russian-Jewish Physical Anthropology in the Fin-de-Siècle Russian Empire,” in Jeffrey Veidlinger, ed., Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, (Bloomington, 2016), 45–63.

4 Altalena, “Vskolz΄: O natsionalizme,” Odesskie novosti, no. 5874 (January 30, 1903): 4. Altalena was one of Ze΄ev Jabotinsky’s pen names.

5 For an analysis of this rhetorical repertoire, see the thematic cluster in Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science and Humanities 43, no. 1 (March 2020) including Marina Mogilner, “The Science of Empire: Darwinism, Human Diversity, and Russian Physical Anthropology,” 96–118; Bruce Grant, “Missing Links. Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography,” 119–40; and Riccardo Nicolosi, “The Darwinian Rhetoric of Science in Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution (1902),” 141–59.

6 Vladimir Ze΄ev Jabotinsky, “Pis΄mo (O ‘Evreiakh i russkoi literature’),” Svobodnye mysli (March 24, 1908): 3.

7 Emes, “Evrei i russkaia literatura,” Rassvet 3 (1908): 8–10 (emphasis added); Ibn-Daud, “Zametki,” Rassvet 5 (1908): 16 (16–18).

8 Jabotinsky, “Sidia na polu . . .” Evreiskaia zhizn΄ 14 (April 10, 1905): 21.

9 V.G. Tan, “Evrei i literatura,” Svobodnye mysli (February 18, 1908): 3; see also O. L. D’Or, “Lichnye nastroeniia: Otvet V.I. Zhabotinskomu,” Svobodnye mysli (March 31, 1908): 3.

10 V.G. Tan, “Posle pogroma (iz gomel΄skikh vpechatlenii),” Russkie vedomosti 356 (December 24, 1904): 3.

11 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011), 75.

12 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963), 6.

13 Tan, “Evrei i literatura,” 3–4.

14 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 10.

15 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

16 David G. Anderson, Dmitry V. Arzyutov, and Sergei S. Alymov, eds., Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond (Cambridge, Eng., 2019); and Marina Mogilner and Sergei Glebov, “The Transatlantic ‘Imperial Situation’: Archie Phinney, Early Soviet Ethnography, and Native American Visions of Progress,” Ab Imperio 21, no. 1 (2020): 27–38.

17 For more see Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Jan Kusber, Marina Mogilner, and Alexander Semyonov, “New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire,” in Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber and Alexander Semyonov, eds., Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Leiden, Netherlands, 2009), 3−32.

18 Alexander Semyonov, “Empire as a Context Setting Category,” Ab Imperio 9, no. 1 (2008): 193–204.

19 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1992); and Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April, 1993): 338–53.

20 P.N. Tarnovskaia, Zhenshchiny-ubiitsy: Antropologicheskoe issledovanie s 163 risunkami i 8 antropometricheskimi tablitsami (St. Petersburg, 1902); Tarnovskaia, “Antropometricheskie issledovaniia prostitutok, vorovok i zdorovykh krest΄ianok-polevykh rabotnits (zasedanie 21 noiabria 1887 g.),” in Protokoly zasedanii obshchestva psikhiatrov v S.-Peterburge za 1887 god (St. Petersburg, 1888); Tarnovskaia, Vorovki (antropologicheskoe issledovanie) (St. Petersburg, 1891); Tarnovskaia, Novye raboty po kriminal΄noi antropologii: Doklad i sektsii Russkogo obshchestva okhraneniia narodnogo zdraviia, 27 dekabria 1891 (St. Petersburg, 1892); Pauline Tarnowsky, Etude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Paris, 1889). For more on Russian criminal anthropology, Tarnovskaia, race, and so on, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii, 328–46.

21 See, for example, David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000).

22 Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2008).

23 Ivan Sikorsky, Chto takoe natsiia i drugie formy etnicheskoi zhizni? (Kiev, 1915), 52. For more on Sikorsky and “race,” see Mogilner, Homo Imperii, 167–200.

24 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995), 8.

25 The term “strategic relativism” is coined as an opposite to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s characterization of the modern episteme of groupness as “strategic essentialism.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1987), 205. Correspondingly, “strategic relativism” should be understood as a discourse and stance that relativizes the bounded and internally homogeneous nature of the constituent elements of the sociopolitical space and governance and produces a situation of uncertainty, incommensurability, and indistinction. For more, see Gerasimov et al., “New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire,” 20.

26 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 15; and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 265.

27 Jane Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 397–431.

28 The contemporary consensus is well summarized by Etienne Balibar, “Culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.” Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London, [1988] 1999), 22.

29 For the most consistent articulation of the Sonderweg discourse on race, see: Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnost΄ and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” in David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000), 41–64; and Knight, “Vocabularies of Difference: Ethnicity and Race in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 667–83. For a refutation of such an approach from a history of science and ideology perspective and with emphasis on Eurasia and eastern and central Europe, see Richard McMahon, ed., National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945 (Lincoln, NE, 2019).

30 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representation 37 (Winter 1992): 5.

31 Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 111–44.

32 Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April, 2008): 319–40. The important exceptions are Ilya Gerasimov, “The Great Imperial Revolution,” Ab Imperio 18, no. 2 (2017): 21–44; and some contributions to the volume by Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen, eds., The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington, 2014).

33 Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2005)Google Scholar.