Texture and color: Ethnic difference in the Enlightenment

This study examines a foundational moment of modern "ethnicity." I frame my discussion around two concepts: "texture," which refers to eighteenth-century efforts to integrate ethnic differences into an Enlightenment notion of universalism, and "color" referring to differences perceived as irreducible.; My introduction analyzes Gearg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel's Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte. Whereas Hegel links China by its texture to European Enlightenment discourse, he sees Africa as threat based on color. By insisting on these disparities, I propose a Foucaultian model of discourse analysis to account for the heterogeneity in constructions of ethnic difference, while unveiling that the configuration Self and Other has limited the thinking of ethnicity since Hegel.; Chapter one discusses universalism, beginning with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's establishment of Chinese philosophy (Zwei Briefe) as the basis for rationality. Leibniz conceives ethnic difference as but one appearance of infinite differences that express nothing but unlimited possibilities of reading the "world."; Chapter two centers around pedagogical tracts published anonymously in Journal von Tiefurt. Representations of ethnic difference serve as the medium through which constraints are inflicted upon individuals--with the effect that the acceptance of limitations becomes a universal norm.; Chapter three discusses travel literature, introducing the second geographical local, Africa. The distinctions between China and Africa may be described in perceptual rather than geographical terms. China continues to serve as a thread of universal texture, expressing now universal Woman. Africa, by contrast, represents effects ascribed to black skin.; Chapter four juxtaposes a tract on anatomy (Johann Peter Camper's "Uber den Ursprung der Farbe der Schwarzen") with a drama (Friedrich Schiller's Verschworung des Fiesko zu Genua). It explores eighteenth-century perceptions of skin color as a threat to individual and community, and the alliance of medical and aesthetic writings in disseminating such ideas. The chapter suggests how an aesthetic foundation of race was "invented" to cope with these threats.; Although "ethnicity" embraces the idea of ethnic difference as the expression of a universal language (texture), discourse analysis reveals the ruptures in universalism, once it confronts the body of the individual (color).