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This provocative analysis of American historiography argues that when scholars use modern racial language to articulate past histories of race and society, they collapse different historical signs of skin color into a transhistorical and essentialist notion of race that implicates their work in the very racial categories they seek to transcend.

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1. Colonial Histories 2. National Histories 3. Modern Histories 4. Other Histories

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James Carson is Chair of the Department of History at Queen´s University, Canada.

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