Ghost People

What does race feel like? What does race make people feel? Ghost People traces the haunting feelings that constitute race as a structural, social, and psychic experience in modern European history by focusing on the case of Jewish racialization. Taking a theoretical cue from W.E.B. Du Bois’ question in the Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Paul E. Nahme queries the affective experience of racial formation and reframes how we should think and talk about the Jewish Question. He explores the ways feeling and emotion have colored the lives of different people in social, political, and psycho-social dimensions. From Enlightenment constructions of rational humanism, to nineteenth-century colonialism, antisemitism and the racialization of Jews in Europe, to the construction of Judaism as a religion and the disavowal of racial categories in liberal secularism, Nahme asks after the enduring problem of race for Jewish identity, and for how Jews have remained haunted by the specter of race in the modern world.