Daniel Purdy, director
Max Kade German-American Research Institute
Funding provided by the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts

Keynote Speaker: Robert Bernasconi, Penn State University

The conference will explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race connected with later discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe.  Which concepts and configurations were transferred across the nineteenth century? Which arguments were overlooked or ignored? Given the multiple often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, we want to explore how later race thinkers responded to these first formulations.  How do Enlightenment debates prefigure later anti-racist positions? Do fin-de-siecle and Nazi racisms posit a lineage with Enlightenment anthropology?

German racial discourses have multiple sources, drawing on Classical rhetoric, early modern colonization of the Americas, missionary reports, rationalizations for the African slave trade, Russian intra-Asian colonization, the long history of anti-Semitism, and the imposition of German cultural hegemony across Eastern Europe. The conference will explore possible continuities and reversals from eighteenth-century debates about race involving Immanuel Kant, Georg Forster, Gottfried Herder, along with numerous Göttingen professors to broader nineteenth-century writing about German settlers across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.  Not only will we consider writing from German settler communities dispersed throughout the world, but we will also explore racial distinctions used to justify the continued eastward expansion of Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires.   At the same time, we seek to understand how Wilhelmine German colonies during the Imperial Reich are connected to the larger dispersion of northern European settler communities.

We will ask whether communities in the Americas, East Asia, and the Pacific share the presumptions, intentions, tropes, and classifications developed during the eighteenth century? Given that German discourses about race did not emerge only within state-sponsored colonial administrations but rather drew also more diffusely from (1) the history of German settlements operating under foreign sovereigns; (2) scientific investigations and their attendant reports; (3) personal narratives presented as edifying missionary reports, novels, poems, and travelogues. The Enlightenment was also a principle source for anti-colonial arguments, thus we will consider: How settler relations and their publications diverge from the broad conceptual terms of race theory? To what extent do localized German publications in the 19^th century shift away from the contours of ethnic and racial difference established in the eighteenth? To what extent do local publications within settler communities present alternative ethnographies? How do later anti-racist statements also draw from Enlightenment principles?

Conference Schedule