The end of the racial regimes of the 20th century—Nazi Germany; Jim Crow in the Southern States in the US; and Apartheid South Africa—did not put an end to the violent history of racism. The elimination of racist laws, the debunking of racist science and the outlawing of racist policies failed to deliver post racial societies, so anti-racist intellectuals felt the need to elaborate a new theory of racism. As long as the history of racism seemed to be the history of state sponsored racism, anti-racist critique focused on the scientific discourses and the legal systems that emerged with the formation of modern states.

The emergence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the United States has widened the timeline of racism’s history to include the history of Western culture from the Middle Ages to the present. The goal of our transnational research group is to deprovincialize the perspective provided by CRT, critically testing its assumptions within the multiracial and multicultural context of the premodern and postmodern Mediterranean, before and after the emergence of the racial regimes. The concept of White Supremacy (WS), which CRT uses idiosyncratically, seems inadequate to account for the Mediterranean context. CRT defines WS as both a conscious or unconscious subscription to ideas of white superiority to support whites’ control over political, economic and symbolic resources. Anti-Semitism, a form of racism not based on color, is potentially erased by the CRT’s emphasis on WS. Hybrid racism, a form of racism that combines anti-religious bigotry with color-based racism—as in the case of Islamopobic narratives combined with anti-Arab feelings—seems to exceed the borders of WS as a CRT category. Finally, the racism of non-whites against non-whites, as in the case of anti-black racism in the Arab tradition, is completely invisible through the lens of the category of WS. Our research aims at preserving the anti-racist ethos of CRT while rejecting its US-centric perspective.

The goal of our research is to write a Mediterranean history of racialization, defined by Dalal Farhad and Christine Delphy, as the arbitrary process that divides human bodies and simultaneously creates hierarchical power relations. We will look at premodern and postmodern sources to reconstruct the longue durée of the tropes that provide the grammar of the language of race in the Mediterranean. The team will analyze the networks of multiethnic interactions in the Mediterranean as consequential components of the Mediterranean, European and Western conceptions of race. We contend that elevating the experience of the western racist states of the 20th century to models for the global understanding of all processes of racialization can obscure the problem of race construction in multiethnic and multireligious societies. By focusing on a cultural history and anthropology of the premodern and postmodern period, we move away from the conscious and pseudo-scientific racism of the late modern western tradition to unconscious and discursive practices of racialization. By researching the Mediterranean, in Braudel’s large understanding of the area, we aim at deprovincializing the debate on races without obscuring the crucial role that colonialism played, but also somberly recognizing that the end of the post-colonial era will not automatically end unconscious racism unless the hidden tropes and apparatuses of racial discrimination are made visible and debunked.

As a research team, we bring an expertise on a multiplicity of archives, ranging from medieval Arabic and European sources to early modern literary and juridical texts to postmodern videos, video games and non-traditional visual and textual sources. We believe that the recent polemics across the Atlantic on the role that American theories on racism play in French and European society can be overcome by increasing the collaboration between our two countries on the subject of the history and theory of racism, escaping the temptation to retreat into isolation. By providing the crucial funds to start an interdisciplinary French-American research group on the history of racism in the premodern and postmodern Mediterranean, the Thomas Jefferson Fund would help shape a common understanding of the processes of racialization. Such understanding would prove critical in overcoming the limits of race paradigms unaware and insensitive to other racial configurations, traditions and anti-racist responses.