Description
Book SynopsisThe Remnants of Race Science traces the influence of ideas from the Global South on UNESCO’s race campaign, illuminating its relationship to notions of modernization and economic development.
Trade ReviewBrilliantly and provocatively,
The Remnants of Race Science reveals that the so-called decline of racial thought in human biology was really just a substitution of other more flexible ideas of human difference—mostly from the Global South—for the rigid racist typologies of the Global North. This more inclusive refiguring of racial difference would make possible the economic ‘development’ of people once excluded from modernity—which meant in practice their neocolonial incorporation into the netherworlds of global capitalism. In this paradigm-shifting book, Gil-Riaño thus offers us a new ‘southern’ vocabulary to talk about racism and antiracism. -- Warwick Anderson, author of
Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the PhilippinesStarting with scientific research from the Southern Hemisphere, this important book overturns the common story of antiracist science as simplistically rooted in rejecting fixed biological kinds. Drawing from a transnational archive, Gil-Riaño shows how so-called anti-racist science was caught up in projects of improvement that rested on a multitude of other racisms. -- M. Murphy, author of
The Economization of LifeLatin Americanists have long maintained that race and biology are shaped by culture, social organization, and economic conditions. In this deeply researched study, Gil-Riaño shows how Latin American racial ideas shaped the post–World War II human sciences and UNESCO projects. The human sciences did not renounce racial explanation—as so many believe—but folded them into global ideas about economic development. -- Karin Rosemblatt, author of
The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950Offers useful historical context to current debates about how to successfully build solidarity in science and society. * Science *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Remnants of Race Science
Part I: Confronting Racism in the Southern Hemisphere, 1890–19511. Substituting Race: Arthur Ramos, Bahia, and the “Nina Rodrigues School”
2. Relocating Race Science After World War II: Situating the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race in the Southern Hemisphere
3. Vikings of the Sunrise: Alfred Metraux, Te Rangi Hīroa, and Polynesian Racial Resilience
Part II: Race in the Tropics and Highlands and the Quest for Economic Development, 1945–19624. A Tropical Laboratory: Race, Evolution, and the Demise of UNESCO’s Hylean Amazon Project
5. “Peasants Without Land”: Race and Indigeneity in the ILO’s Puno-Tambopata Project
Part III: Engineering Racial Harmony and Decolonization, 1952–19616. A Brazilian Racial Dilemma: Modernization and UNESCO’s Race Relations Studies in Brazil
7. A White World Perspective and the Collapse of Global Race Relations Inquiry
Conclusion: “Racism Continues to Haunt the World”
Notes
Index
