期刊名称：Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
印刷版ISSN：1832-3898
电子版ISSN：1838-8310
出版年度：2011
卷号：7
期号：1
出版社：Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA)
摘要：In Race and the crisis of Humanism(2007),Kay Anderson provides an insightful and clearly written analysis of, as the title suggests, the crisis of the concept of the 'human' inherent in the movement of humanism. The contextualisation of this 'crisis' is available by reviewing the first one hundred years of colonialism in Australia. Anderson locates herself within the contemporary postcolonial and critical race literature well, agreeing with the general contention that racialised forms of colonial power were justified by reiterating a human/animal, nature/culture binary which operated by subordinating Indigenous populations to the status of 'closer to nature'. In this sense, she confirms the claim that humanist discourse contained a racism that promoted and justified the deeds of colonialism.However, Anderson is critical of the generalised manner in which this claim has been made, arguing that it has caused a blockage in critical race scholarship, "The inclination to reduce racist thought and practice to its functionin imperial and other power-laden projects", she writes, "needs to be more strongly resisted" (198). In an effort to provide a "deeper problematisation of race" (198), Anderson unpacks theories and materials circulating in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies from a range of philosophical, anthropological and scientific perspectives in order to provide a complex understanding of the relationship betweenconceptions of thehuman, nature and race. In so doing,she provides ample evidence to support her observations, as well as generating important new insights
