Mar 7, 2024

The Reeducation of Race

A Discussion with Sonali Thakkar

Sonali Thakkar

Hosted by Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

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Summary

NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023),begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race.

They discuss the founding years of UNESCO and how it came to be that Jews were defined as the most plastic of races, and “Blackness” came to be seen as a stubbornly un-plastic category. The discussion ranges to include entwinement and interconnectedness, and Edward Said's notion of the "contrapuntal" analysis of the mutual implication of seemingly unrelated historical developments. Sonali's "Recallable Book" shines a spotlight on Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism--revised in 1955 to reflect ongoing debates about race and plasticity.

Mentioned in the episode:

Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)
Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" (1954) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought ( "the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming" )
Franz Boas, "Commencement Address at Atlanta University," May 31, 1906 (this is where he says the bit about "the line of cleavage"
Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Final Report, immigration COmmission (1911)
W.E.B. Du Bois, "Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace," (1945)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"
Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
IHRA definition of Antisemitism.
Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (1952)
Natasha Levinson, "The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness," in Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. by Mordechai Gordon (2001)
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (on the contrapuntal)
Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1950 Statement on Race
UNESCO, 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences
Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (on the methodological nationalism of postcolonial studies and new approaches that challenge it)

Recallable books:

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950, 1955 rev. ed.)
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

Read and Listen to the episode here.

Your Host

Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world. Recall This Book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University and John Plotz, Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative.

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