Silencing the Hottentots: Kolb’s Pre-Racial Encounter with the Hottentots and Its Impact on Buffon, Kant, and Rousseau, by Robert Bernasconi
In “Silencing the Hottentots,” Robert Bernasconi focuses on Buffon’s and Kant’s interest in classifying the Khoikhoi (the Hottentots), the dark-skinned inhabitants of Africa, and contrasts the two accounts with that of Rousseau. All three accounts relied almost exclusively on the reports of Peter Kolb, a Prussian traveler in South Africa, which makes the contrast between the accounts particularly revealing. The paper shows that unlike Buffon and Kant, whose attempts at writing “natural histories” reduced the Khoikhoi to a curious object of study devoid of its own voice, Rousseau’s narrative allowed the Khoikhoi to speak for themselves. The “naturalized” account of the Khoikhoi construed by Kant contributed to the replacement of the initially favorable outlook at the Khoikhoi created by Kolb’s report with the new negative image. The paper demonstrates how Kant’s insistence on the existence of permanent physical and moral differences between human beings, came to be known as racial characteristics, and his theoretical efforts at cataloguing and classifying human varieties in the same way that the varieties of plants and animals are classified, prepared the way for the formation of the concept of race and development of scientific racism.
Article available through Philosophy Documentation Center, here.
Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. In addition to his work on Heidegger and Levinas, he has published extensively in the philosophy of race, including “Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept,” Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012); “Racism is a System: How Existentialism Became Dialectical in Fanon and Sartre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge, 2012); “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race,” which appeared in Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY, 2011). Additionally, he has edited numerous collections in the field of philosophy of race including (with Sybol Cook) Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2003), Race (Blackwell, 2001), and (with Tommy Lott) The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000).
Robert Bernasconi, “Silencing the Hottentots: Kolb’s Pre-Racial Encounter with the Hottentots and Its Impact on Buffon, Kant, and Rousseau,” in “Philosophy and Race,” ed. Alexis Dianda and Robin M. Muller, special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35:1–2 (2014), pp. 101–24.