Results by title

“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.

Ingeniously connects the history of citrus cultivation to the production and maintenance of whiteness in sites around the world.

In The Orchard in the Ruins, acclaimed historian Tiago Saraiva illuminates the global impact of cloning Californian oranges, a practice that emerged in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1890s. Cloning promised control, uniformity, and resistance to an array of environmental and economic threats. But Californian orchards—white-owned but tended by workers of Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, or Indigenous origin—were also places where plantations and race intertwined. Agricultural anxieties about strains of oranges and their value, Saraiva shows, formed a continuum with anxieties about vanishing whiteness.

The Orchard in the Ruins connects Californian history to other sites of citrus cultivation: South Africa, where concerns about white poverty grew during the early twentieth century; Mandatory Palestine, where orchards were key to Zionist undertakings; colonial Algeria, where French settlers transformed the landscape with European farming techniques; and Brazil, where orchards were cultivated post-abolition. Drawing on local histories as well as the works of John Dewey, J. M. Coetzee, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and artist Tarsila do Amaral, Saraiva shows that in each place, orchards grew in the wake of specific historical crises. Orange cultivation was a transnational project in cultivating whiteness, one in which studies of fruits, buds, rootstocks, fungi, and viruses became race-making experiments.

A must-read for anyone interested in the history of science, technology, agriculture, and race, The Orchard in the Ruins reveals a troubled account of science-led attempts to remedy crumbling worlds.