Art Metropole

#16094

Towards a Global Idea of Race

Writer

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Date

2007

Publisher

University of Minnesota Press

Format

Monographs

ISBN

9780816649204

Size

14.9 × 22.8 cm

Length

352 pp

Genre

Theory

In this far-ranging and penetrating work, Denise Ferreira da Silva asks why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage?

Rejecting the prevailing view that social categories of difference such as race and culture operate solely as principles of exclusion, Silva presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space. Looking at the United States and Brazil, she argues that modern subjects are formed in philosophical accounts that presume two ontological moments-historicity and globality-which are refigured in the concepts of the nation and the racial, respectively. By displacing historicity’s ontological prerogative, Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the present global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by the leading post-Enlightenment ethical ideals-namely, universality and self-determination.

By introducing a view of the racial as the signifier of globality, Toward a Global Idea of Race provides a new basis for the investigation of past and present modern social processes and contexts of subjection.