المعيار
Volume 30, Numéro 3, Pages 182-190
2026-06-11
Reverse Genealogies Of Race: Rethinking The Origins Of Proto-racial Epistemologies
Authors : Benkhelifa Imane .
Abstract
Recent revisions in the historiography of intellectual movements have challenged linear models that locate the emergence of racial thinking solely in the scientific classifications of the eighteenth century. This article proposes a reverse-genealogical approach to the history of race, reading the discourse backward to uncover earlier conceptual formations. Drawing on scholarship in Premodern Critical Race Studies, it traces proto-racial imaginaries across various forms of discourse. Such an approach demonstrates that ideas of human difference did not appear abruptly with Enlightenment science. Rather, they developed gradually through overlapping intellectual and cultural frameworks. Examining examples from medieval literature and classical environmental thought reveals the longue durée of racialized thinking. Reverse genealogy thus exposes the plurality and instability of racial discourse prior to modern scientific racism.
Keywords
Reverse genealogy ; Premodern Critical Race Studies ; historiography of race ; medieval discourse ; proto-racial imaginaries
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