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Professor Manu Samriti Chander (Rutgers University USA)

This paper presents a longer, wider intellectual history of the so-called “model minority.” Where scholars in Ethnic Studies and American Studies have emphasized the role of privileged minorities, especially Asians, in perpetuating that myth of racial equality in twentieth- and twenty-first century America, I turn to the philosophical groundings of brownness in Enlightenment European thought in order to argue that the figure of the model minority haunts foundational efforts to define the human. I demonstrate that a class of what Leibniz calls medii homines--middle or mediating men--emerges as a structural necessity within and across a number of hierarchical anthropological orders. My readings of Leibniz, Blumenbach, Kant, and others suggest that we might refine the notion that brown peoples serve, as Vijay Prashad argues in The Karma of Brown Folk, a solution to the problem of abject blackness. Indeed, as monogenetic theories of racial difference increasingly replaced polygenetic ones, brownness comes to function as a quantitative solution to the qualitative problem of difference, that is, a means of reconciling the idea of the oneness of the species with the deeply held conviction that darkness indicates absolute alterity.