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8 books match the query 'Scientific Racism'

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A Question of Character

Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912

Catherine Ann Boeckmann

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.

In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well.

Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson—each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white—Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.

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Brown Skins, White Coats

Race Science in India, 1920–66

Projit Bihari Mukharji

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A unique narrative structure brings the history of race science in mid-twentieth-century India to vivid life.

There has been a recent explosion in studies of race science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but most have focused either on Europe or on North America and Australia. In this stirring history, Projit Bihari Mukharji illustrates how India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends and argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making—not merely as footnotes to a Western history of “normal science.”

The book comprises seven factual chapters operating at distinct levels—conceptual, practical, and cosmological—and eight fictive interchapters, a series of epistolary exchanges between the Bengali author Hemendrakumar Ray (1888–1963) and the protagonist of his dystopian science fiction novel about race, race science, racial improvement, and dehumanization. In this way, Mukharji fills out the historical moment in which the factual narrative unfolded, vividly revealing its moral, affective, political, and intellectual fissures.

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Envisioning African Intersex

Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine

Amanda Lock Swarr

Duke University Press, 2023

Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda Lock Swarr debunks this claim by interrogating contemporary intersex medicine and demonstrating its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Tracing the history of racialized research that underpins medical and scientific premises of gendered bodies, Swarr analyzes decolonial actions by intersex South Africans from the 1990s to the present, centering the work of organizers such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. Swarr also explores African social media activism that advocates for intersex justice and challenges the mistreatment of South African Olympian Caster Semenya. Throughout, Swarr shows how activists displace doctors’ impositions to fashion self-representation. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes.

All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.

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Haunting Biology

Science and Indigeneity in Australia

Emma Kowal

Duke University Press, 2023

In Haunting Biology Emma Kowal recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asks how we now might see contemporary genomics, especially that conducted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists. Kowal illustrates how the material persistence of samples over decades and centuries folds together the fates of different scientific methodologies. Blood, bones, hair, comparative anatomy, human biology, physiology, and anthropological genetics all haunt each other across time and space, together with the many racial theories they produced and sustained. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishized piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to contemporary genomics and twenty-first-century Indigeneity, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils, and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twenty-first century.

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Inventing the Thrifty Gene

The Science of Settler Colonialism

Travis Hay

University of Manitoba Press, 2021

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Marginal People in Deviant Places

Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

Janice M. Irvine

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits twentieth-century ethnographic studies of deviance, arguing that ethnographies that focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from Los Angeles hoboes to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups offered an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism and then offers a social history of certain American outsiders and a prehistory of the academic fields of ethnic studies and sexuality studies. Through the stories Irvine recounts in this book, she identifies an American paradox represented in a simultaneous desire for and rejection of outsiders and describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Place plays a crucial role in this work as Irvine examines its role in shaping ethnographies about outsiders and therefore understandings of social difference. Irvine has visited the sites of each of the ethnographies about which she writes, collecting photos, videos, and archival materials that will help readers understand the importance of place in the generation of particular ethnographic stories. The open-access online edition of this book is richly illustrated to help convey the deep sense of emplacement of the ethnographies discussed in this book and includes a series of interviews with sociologists about how they conduct their work and understand their forebears.

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The Funding of Scientific Racism

Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund

William H. Tucker

University of Illinois Press, 2001

The Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by Wickliffe Preston Draper, is one of the most controversial nonprofit organizations in the United States. Long suspected of misusing social science to fuel the politics of oppression, the fund has specialized in supporting research that seeks to prove the genetic and intellectual inferiority of blacks while denying its ties to any political agenda.This powerful and provocative volume proves that the Pioneer Fund has indeed been the primary source for scientific racism. Revealing a lengthy history of concerted and clandestine activities and interests, The Funding of Scientific Racism examines for the first time archival correspondence that incriminates the fund's major players, including Draper, recently deceased president Harry F. Weyher, and others.Divulging evidence of the Pioneer Fund's political motivations, William H. Tucker links Draper to a Klansman's crusade to repatriate blacks in the 1930s. Subsequent directors and grantees are implicated in their support of campaigns organized in the 1960s to reverse the Brown decision, prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act, and implement a system of racially segregated private schools.Tucker shows that these and other projects have been officially sponsored by the Pioneer Fund or surreptitiously supervised by its directors. This evidence demonstrates that any results of genuine, scientific value produced with the fund's support have been a salutary, if incidental, consequence of its actual purpose: to provide ammunition for what has essentially been a lobbying campaign to prevent the full participation of blacks in society and the polity.

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The Perils of Race-Thinking

A Portrait of Ales Hrdlicka

Mark A. Brandon

Central European University Press, 2023

Eugenics and scientific racism are experiencing a resurgence, and an understanding of the ideas of Aleš Hrdlička can help combat them. Today, the racial science of the early twentieth century is both untenable and contemptible. This book is about an arch figure of that period: Aleš Hrdlička served as Curator of Physical Anthropology at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution from 1910 to 1941. Although his ideas about race are today considered pseudoscience, the uncomfortable truth is that he was an internationally respected scientist in his own day.

The Perils of Race-Thinking advances a bold new interpretation of modern racial ideology by exploring Hrdlička’s intellectual world. Using previously untapped Czech-language sources, Brandon irrevocably alters the discussion about this important figure by placing Czech nationalism at the center of his racial thinking. Defying disciplinary categories, Perils of Race-Thinking joins critical analysis of this key American anthropologist with an incisive revisionist perspective of interwar Czechoslovakia to unearth transnational racial presumptions lurking behind the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

At the center of Hrdlička’s race beliefs was his commitment to Czech and Slovak unity and independence. From this center, his next level of concern was what he believed to be a millennial racial struggle between Germans and Slavs. On a global scale, he viewed the Slavs, and especially the Soviet Union, as a eugenic bastion of White strength holding off the “rising tide of color.”

Step by step, Perils of Race-Thinking mercilessly dismantles Hrdlička’s racial system and exposes it as mysticism dressed up in the language of science. Convinced that human individuals belonged “naturally” in racial groups, Hrdlička embraced a revolutionary program of reordering the globe according to a harrowing morality of “Darwinist” struggle. Yet despite a lifetime of measuring body parts, even Hrdlička could not decide how many races there were or how to tell them apart.

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