RACE

A highly problematic form of human categorisation that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may refer to bodily, cultural, geographic, historical, ethnic, linguistic and/or social difference. In relation to modernism, race can be understood as a Western formation to determine a notion of kinship that is contingent on context and unevenly applied. Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in artistic responses to EMPIRE and work on GLOBAL MODERNISMS has led to new understandings of race in modernism. Although the modernist movement is traditionally associated with the West and Western forms of representation, non-Western influences on artistic form and content, and engagement with racial discourse, theories and typologies, can be found in modernisms from all over the world. A sense of race as a constitutive aesthetic and culturally significant aspect of modernism can be found in Len Platt's edited collection (2011) which suggests that any definition or account of modernist culture cannot be separated from discussion of race, and in work by scholars such as Michael North, Urmila Seshagiri and Carole Sweeney who read race as central to modernist art forms.

Nineteenth-century Europe saw the proliferation of new sciences that engaged with, or sought to determine, race and racial difference through evolutionary, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, biological and sociological methods. Some significant works include: Karl Vogt, Lectures on Man (1864); Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866); Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); and Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871). These texts mapped human characteristics along racial lines, enforcing a hierarchy of man in which the white European was cast as evolutionarily and culturally superior to people from other parts of the world. Reinterpretations of evolutionary development led to theories of DEGENERATION that intensified fears of sexual depravity, poverty, criminality and, in Britain, anxiety over losses in the Boer war. While these theories of human development and racial difference provoked concern about the possibility that Europeans could regress to a ‘lower’ form of life, they also stimulated admiration for forms of human culture attuned to simpler, ‘primitive’ ways of living.

ORIENTALISM and PRIMITIVISM in Western art have been the focus of various studies across various traditions, coinciding in particular with the development of postcolonial approaches to understanding art and culture.