DOC Black Women in America: Dance; Sports Visual Arts (Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America) by Edited by Darlene Clark Hine in History

Description

In this far-ranging and penetrating work; Denise Ferreira da Silva asks why; after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color; is there no ethical outrage? Rejecting the prevailing view that social categories of difference such as race and culture operate solely as principles of exclusion; Silva presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space. Looking at the United States and Brazil; she argues that modern subjects are formed in philosophical accounts that presume two ontological moments—historicity and globality—which are refigured in the concepts of the nation and the racial; respectively. By displacing historicity’s ontological prerogative; Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the present global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by the leading post-Enlightenment ethical ideals—namely; universality and self-determination. By introducing a view of the racial as the signifier of globalit y;Toward a Global Idea of Race provides a new basis for the investigation of past and present modern social processes and contexts of subjection. Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California; San Diego.