Sonali Thakkar opens this talk in the early postwar period, which saw the formal delegitimization of antisemitism and racism, as well as the emergence of antiracism as a new moral and political universal. She will focus in particular on the UN and UNESCO’s mid–century attempts to redefine the scientific and social scientific meaning of race.
UNESCO’s central intervention was to assert race’s plasticity and malleability. Thakkar will reconstruct how the concept of racial plasticity was drawn from early 20th-century anthropological research in Jewish social science in the work of Franz Boas and his colleagues.
While racial plasticity was an important prong in Boas’s activism against antisemitism in the twenties and thirties and was enshrined as a key tenet of the new liberal antiracism of the postwar era, Thakkar will demonstrate how the concept also worked to reaffirm racial differences and hierarchies, including in a colonial and neocolonial global order.
Sonali Thakkar is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory, race and ethnic studies, critical human rights, and Jewish studies/Holocaust memory studies. Her book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023. Her current project, Regimes of Repair, investigates the centrality of the reparative in contemporary postcolonial poetics and politics. Her recent writing has appeared in venues such as Post45, Social Text, WSQ, and Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), edited by Brett Ashley Kaplan.