Race in post-universalist perspective

This article takes the subject of the rise of racial discourse in the 19th century as a focus for extending critical race theory (CRT) in Cultural and Historical Geography. It pursues a critique beyond the familiar claim of raceââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s legitimatory function to elicit the fundamentally unstable and crisis-ridden origins of innatist thought. Crucially, this requires a situated account ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ one that emphasizes the singular challenge that Australian colonial encounters aroused in Enlightenment notions of human unity and development. Far from confirming European views of ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“savageââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ others, it argues that nature/native encounters on that continent precipitated a crisis in existing ideas ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ all the more contentious to today ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ of what it meant to be human. And, in emphasizing the palpably material sense in which Australia problematized European classificatory schema, the article opens one pathway from representational to ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“more than representationalââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ accounts in Cultural Geography. It also offers a potentially transformative understanding of the violence of humanism, in relation to both human and nonhuman.