The Ends of Race: The Rise and Fall of a Concept, 1780-1900

A discussion of the speaker's forthcoming book, "The Ends of Race: The Rise and Fall of a Concept, 1780-1900." The book traces the emergence, flourishing, and senescence of race as an object of scientific study over the course of this period. Throughout this time, the concept never acquired a consensual definition, a fact that both facilitated its usage by a wide range of thinkers and inhibited their ability to achieve the kind of clarity to which science aspired. The concept was always determined more directly by the ends it was made to serve rather than by the evidence that supported it, and after more than a century of inquiry and debate, the most responsible scientists announced their conclusion that race could not support a scientific inquiry. At that point, others took up the cause, arguing that the race concept should be "conserved" in order to serve non-scientific ends.

Geoffrey Harpham is a literary scholar and generalist who has written on a wide range of subjects including the grotesque, ethical theory, the work of Joseph Conrad, the concept of language, the American philosophy of education, the relation between scholarship and concepts of freedom, and concepts of race and nation in popular entertainment. For many years he was director of the National Humanities Center; in that capacity he wrote about and advocated for the American conception of the humanities. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Tulane, and Duke.