Hamites, Nilotes, and True Negroes: Charles Seligman, Africa, and the Racist Roots of Anthropology
Speaker: Dr. Jemima Pierre
Social Justice Institute, UBC | Department of Anthropology, UBC | Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study
Abstract:
This presentation is based on a reappraisal of Charles G. Seligman’s 1930 book The Races of Africa to both explore the early history of anthropology’s race-making practices and to reflect on their long term epistemological and theoretical legacies. I argue that the consolidation of the discipline of anthropology occurred through 1) its early development of (and through) racial science, 2) racial science’s early dependence on specific constructions of Africa and Africans, and 3) racial science’s redeployment and expansion into the African continent. Seligman’s Races of Africa was critical to this consolidation. Widely taught and cited, it went through multiple editions and was regularly published until 1979. This talk is part of a broader project, a work of intellectual history and analysis that sets to acknowledge and explain anthropology’s intellectual domination of historical and contemporary representations of Africa, and how the theoretical and conceptual apparatuses of anthropological engagement with Africa and African phenomena become the most powerful sites of racialization.
About Dr. Jemima Pierre
Dr. Jemima Pierre is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies in the Social Justice Institute (GRSJ). She is also a Research Associate at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS).
Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist in the African Diaspora Program at the University of Texas, Austin, her research and teaching engages with Africa and the African diaspora across three broad areas of inquiry: 1) the relationship of political economy to race, as articulated through capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism; 2) migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; and 3) the ethics and politics of western knowledge production and disciplinary formation.
Dr. Pierre has published widely; her essays and articles have examined the racial history of the discipline of anthropology, race and colonialism, theories of the African diaspora, the cultural politics of racial formation in Africa, Western resource extraction in Africa, and the history and politics of U.S. imperialism in Haiti and the Caribbean. She is also the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (University of Chicago Press). The Predicament of Blackness was winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology and long listed for the 2013 OCM – BOCAS Literary Prize. She is co-editor of the volumes The Anthropology of White Supremacy (Princeton University Press) and The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity (Cambridge University Press). Her next book, titled Of Natives, Ethnics, and True Negroes: A Counter-History of Anthropology, will be published in 2026.
Born in Gros Morne, Haiti and raised in Miami, Florida. Dr. Pierre joins UBC from Los Angeles, California.
Photo Credit: New York Public Library
