Editorial
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”: Rethinking the Human/Race
Version 1
: Received: 2 March 2017 / Approved: 3 March 2017 / Online: 3 March 2017 (07:24:05 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Mendible, M. Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race. Humanities 2017, 6, 5. Mendible, M. Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race. Humanities 2017, 6, 5.
Abstract
This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. On the one hand, the humanities face material threats as the politics of austerity continues throughout Europe and the United States, diminishing public support and making profit margin and “job creation” the primary measure of value or the basis of state university funding decisions. On the other, the humanities face conceptual, theoretical and ethical challenges, as the emergence of post-racial and post-humanist discourses signal what Foucault called “a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge.” The defining boundaries of constructs such as “race” and “human” have been radically called into question, challenging us to rethink the classificatory systems that found hierarchical relationships between, for example, the “fully human” and sub-human or non-human others. Despite dominant nations’ professed commitment to a universal human rights paradigm, racialized identities are still often the targets of disenfranchisement and dehumanization, while the exploitation and destruction of the natural world continues in the name of “progress” and profits.
Keywords
none
Subject
Arts and Humanities, Humanities
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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