Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique

Is it possible to use comparative methods to "provincialize Europe"? Recent debates in several disciplines have made it abundantly clear that comparison, as a perspective and a method, has historically served to shore up Eurocentric and discriminatory ideologies and practices. The most productive potential of comparison is that it can establish connections and relations across seemingly disparate contexts and thus challenge provincialism and exceptionalism. But it is precisely this potential of comparative thought that has fed into the development of "global" or "universal" paradigms that posits a hierarchical relation between the entities being compared or simply exclude large chunks of reality from its domain. In other words, the perspective remains narrow while claims are enlarged.

The possibility of alternative methodologies, of course, has been the focus of recent debates within comparative literature and political science, both of which have historically claimed that they can address the "global."¹ As a host of recent comparative projects begin to shift the angle of vision to the global South and decenter Europe (but without denying the power and legacy of colonial-capitalist modernity) it sometimes appears that the Eurocentric roots of comparative methodologies are so deep that it is impossible to denaturalize the habits of mind that have emerged from them.² In this essay, I want to explore the possibilities of a comparative critique of racial ideologies across temporal and spatial boundaries. At first sight, such a project would seem particularly problematic, given that the "development" of racial ideologies in the West depended upon making particular kinds of comparisons between women, non-Europeans, blacks, religious minorities, the poor, sexual "deviants," and animals in order to deepen, broaden, and fine-tune the idea of a "natural" hierarchy between peoples and groups.³ Such comparison was foundational to disciplines such as anthropology, but more broadly to religious, literary, and cultural discourse. It was also an essential part of the very development of racial "science"—analogies and "metaphor [otherwise regarded as antithetical to the method of science]" became "part of the logic of science itself."⁴ To write the history of racism thus necessarily involves a study of the work done by comparative thinking. Might such a history also allow us to turn comparison on its Eurocentric head and reveal the global connections that have shaped racial histories in different parts of the world? Or would it be like trying to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house or to curse in the colonizer's tongue?

At the most fundamental level, the activity of comparison is an outcome of any process of categorization, which is one of the fundamental forms of knowledge production. As Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remind us, "sorting things out" into groups may be a necessary part of making sense of the world, but it is crucial to understand the ways in which this work of classification happens—in the sciences, in the social sciences, in the humanities, and indeed in everyday life. Who decides what count as categories, and the lines between them? How are such categories institutionalized so that they become received knowledge? Because over time we learn to take classificatory schemas for granted, they get naturalized and then exert a huge power over us to the point where the line between what is natural and what is socially constructed is obfuscated.⁵ These insights can be directed to the work of comparison itself: who decides how categories are to be constructed or which categories can be compared or which comparisons are legitimate and which not? Today we might ask, under what conditions can we denaturalize existing comparative methods and perspectives? In addition, we might ask: is comparison a necessary corollary to the work of categorization? On the other hand, can we make use of the comparative method to question these categories themselves?

Comparisons between the racial ideologies of different historical periods, between race and class, between racial and religious difference, and most crucially, between racial formations in different parts of the world are often undertaken by deploying dominant understandings of race, which are themselves colored by the perspectives and...