Diversity: The Elusiveness of “Business as Usual”

According to dictionaries, the English word “diversity” dates back to the mid-fourteenth century and originates in medieval Latin forms that had rather negative connotations, from the more benign “turning aside” to the more troublesome “contradiction, disagreement.” Its modern Russian equivalent, raznoobrazie, was not yet included in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 1789–1794) but was first used in print around 1785, according to Google Books Ngram and the Russian National Corpus. By this time, “diversity” was seen in European political thought more as a challenge and a potential resource than a negative. For example, it was recognized early on as an opportunity for sustaining political representation. In February 1788, in the Federalist Papers no. 60, Publius (Alexander Hamilton) argued:

There is sufficient diversity in the state of property, in the genius, manners, and habits of the people of the different parts of the Union, to occasion a material diversity of disposition in their representatives towards the different ranks and conditions in society. And though an intimate intercourse under the same government will promote a gradual assimilation in some of these respects, yet there are causes, as well physical as moral, which may, in a greater or less degree, permanently nourish different propensities and inclinations in this respect.¹

Regardless of whether the concept of diversity emerged in the fourteenth or eighteenth century, or whether the early American usage indeed reflected the inclusion of all types of human diversity (which was obviously not the case), most of human history had been permeated by diversity that did not yet have a special name, but this did not mean that the condition itself was never noticed and problematized. And when the special word was coined, its semantics varied dramatically depending on the historical context; in general, it has evolved from undertones of suspicion in the early modern period to the hierarchical renderings of modernity, and to the celebration and recognition of diversity’s productive potential nowadays. Diversity is a useful analytical concept, but without proper historical contextualization, it can mean very different things or nothing in particular. Hence Ab Imperio’s annual theme in 2021: “Historicizing Diversity.”

In 2021 the editors of Ab Imperio invite contributors and readers to historicize diversity in thematic issues of the journal organized along four possible modes of dealing with the concept and different genres of historical inquiry into it. As recent scholarship shows, the history of dealing with diversity and the modes of approaching it did not evolve in a steady linear way. So it seems more productive to identify four ideal types of tackling diversity that can, arguably, be discovered in any historical period and in virtually any society: (1) the stage before diversity is identified as a distinctive problem and therefore must have been taken as given; (2) the situation in which diversity is viewed primarily as an avoidable hindrance; (3) the moment of social anomie that deems any system of groupness conditional and limited in application; and (4) the generally positive and constructive approach to diversity. These four approaches to handling diversity will be addressed in four issues of Ab Imperio in 2021.

Accordingly, the current issue 1/2021 is centered on the topic “Norm: Diversity as an Order of Things and Lived Experience.” It opens with materials pertaining to the six-volume series A Cultural History of Race to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021. The introduction by the series’ general editor, Marius Turda is followed by his conversation with Marina Mogilner, the editor of volume 5 of the series, A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (1760–1920). Turda and Mogilner discuss the challenges of addressing the problem of diversity by means of the very ambivalent category of “race.” On the one hand, the basic somatic differences have been identified by people and addressed by human cultures from prehistoric times. On the other hand, the modern concept of race is relatively new and has radically evolved along several distinct trajectories over the past two–three centuries. Contemporary scholarly consensus views “race” as being located in culture rather...