Reading Race in Africa and the Middle East

Abstract

This article discusses the temporal and geographic expansion of racial frameworks in historical and social scientific scholarship in Africa and the Middle East. After discussing the important distinction made by the sociologist Loïc Wacquant between what he calls “folk” and analytical notions of race, the article then argues that race is an appropriate analytic model for understanding some of the internal dynamics within the societies of these regions. Examples of recent scholarship on the regions which uses an analytic model of race are then critically explored.