Goethe Yearbook

Critical whiteness studies in the German context has thus far not examined the literature of the Goethezeit with the same detail as the philosophy of the period or literature and culture of later eras. This discipline also frequently draws on foundational work from the Anglo-American context; Julia Roth remarks that "most German texts on Critical Whiteness relate themselves (at least on the margins) to Toni Morrison's publications."¹ Indeed, although Toni Morrison's 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is concerned specifically with how an "Africanist presence" emerges in and defines literature by white American authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she poses a series of questions and calls for further examination that I see as entirely applicable to other (pre)national literatures and periods as well.² In her preface, Morrison questions the relationship between race and notions of humanistic or universal literature: "How is 'literary whiteness' and 'literary blackness' made, and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be 'humanistic?'" (xii–xiii) Later in the text, she offers an explicit series of calls for projects that she views as essential to understanding literary whiteness. Morrison asks, "In what ways does the imaginative encounter with Africanism enable white writers to think about themselves?"³ She then elaborates on this question by outlining multiple areas for future study:

We need studies of the ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. We need studies that analyze the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters. … We need to analyze the manipulation of the Africanist narrative … as a means of meditation—both safe and risky—of one's own humanity.⁴

Although she couches these projects in terms of a specifically Africanist presence in American literature, I take these needs to apply to racial others in white cultural traditions in other linguistic contexts. I also take them to require attention from white scholars, of whom I am one, as well as BIPOC scholars inside and outside academia—following the lead of Black feminist writers in multiple national traditions, white scholars need to turn a careful eye on white scholarly positioning and practices, as well as white disciplinary [End Page 125] histories.⁵ In this reflection I outline one avenue for such work in German studies: the conceptions of selfhood emerging in the eighteenth century and still shaping the genre and scholarship of the novel today.

In the German context, the discipline of philosophy has undertaken consideration of the question of race in the eighteenth century, perhaps because philosophy makes some of the most explicit claims to universality of the humanistic disciplines.⁶ Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze traces how Kant insists throughout his anthropological writings that the inherent nature of nonwhite races makes them incapable of full, rational humanity. That is, "for Kant, then, skin color encodes and codifies the 'natural' human capacity for reason and rational talents," and skin color, for Kant is not "merely a physical characteristic," but rather "evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality."⁷ Kant's overall conception of human nature means that racial categories and their moral implications are absolute and essential.⁸ Robert Bernasconi, Jennifer Mensch, and Susan Shell have all built on Eze's work to discuss further details of Kant's racialized anthropology, the relationship between Kant and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and the connection between Kant's anthropology and his aesthetics.⁹ Peggy Piesche also points out that Kant's racial anthropology prompts him to de facto remove whites from his racial hierarchies "and place them in a sort of neutrality"—a supposed neutrality that also marks the white protagonists of literary texts of the later eighteenth century but is still contested in its earlier decades.¹⁰ Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal history argues that in formulating his master-slave relation, Hegel was directly influenced by the Haitian Revolution.¹¹ While...