The Past and Present of Post-Racial Discourses in the United States

• Applicant: Dr. Marie-Luise Löffler
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252525959

This project aims at a reassessment of theoretical post-race articulations within the United States. By symptomatically reading specific black and white discursive moments of post-racial articulations during politically, culturally and socially transformative eras of American history, it revisits and reconstitutes scholarly approaches that have located these debates as an unprecedented phenomenon of the post-civil rights era. In particular, this project will turn to four exemplary densifications of white and black discursive formations which have not only repeatedly negotiated and thus foreshadowed central currents of postmodern post-race logics, but, in fact, frequently proclaimed a potential abandonment of race as an unprecedented phenomenon of the respective time, focusing specifically on early Quakerism before and during the American Revolutionary War (1760-1790), abolitionist resistance before and during the Civil War and its aftermath (1850-1870), black and white intellectual voices during the increasing black urbanization and the rise of a black intelligentsia in the late 19th and early 20th century (1880-1910), as well as black articulations during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and mid-1930s. More specifically, I will historicize specific strands of thought within postmodern post-racial debates by locating them within these four historical periods and tracing their continuities and discontinuities, concentrating particularly on such recurring tropes as appeals to universal humanity and constructions of interracialism and multiraciality, as well as references of social location and ambiguous conceptualizations of blackness. These tropes, as I assert, have repeatedly functioned as vehicles to articulate post-racial conceptions, both in the past and present, as they have provided platforms from which to propose fundamental interrogations of (post-)race and race relations as well as formulate new approaches to understanding and describing the complexity of socio-cultural formations in the United States that move beyond race as a defining marker of differentiation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants