Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

  • Author: Moore, Donald S.; Kosek, Jake; Pandian, Anand
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822330790
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822384656
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2003
  • Month: May
  • Pages: 488
  • DDC: 305.8
  • Language: English
How do race and nature work as terrains of power? From eighteenth-century claims that climate determined character to twentieth-century medical debates about the racial dimensions of genetic disease, concepts of race and nature are integrally connected, woven into notions of body, landscape, and nation. Yet rarely are these complex entanglements explored in relation to the contemporary cultural politics of difference. This volume takes up that challenge. Distinguished contributors chart the traffic between race and nature across sites including rainforests, colonies, and courtrooms.

Synthesizing a number of fields—anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory—this collection analyzes diverse historical, cultural, and spatial locations. Contributors draw on thinkers such as Fanon, Foucault, and Gramsci to investigate themes ranging from exclusionary notions of whiteness and wilderness in North America to linguistic purity in Germany. Some essayists focus on the racialized violence of imperial rule and evolutionary science and the biopolitics of race and class in the Guatemalan civil war. Others examine how race and nature are fused in biogenetic discourse—in the emergence of “racial diseases” such as sickle cell anemia, in a case of mistaken in vitro fertilization in which a white couple gave birth to a black child, and even in the world of North American dog breeding. Several essays tackle the politics of representation surrounding environmental justice movements, transnational sex tourism, and indigenous struggles for land and resource rights in Indonesia and Brazil.

Contributors.
Bruce Braun, Giovanna Di Chiro, Paul Gilroy, Steven Gregory, Donna Haraway, Jake Kosek, Tania Murray Li, Uli Linke, Zine Magubane, Donald S. Moore, Diane Nelson, Anand Pandian, Alcida Rita Ramos, Keith Wailoo, Robyn Wiegman

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • INTRODUCTION. The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature: Terrains of Power and Practice
  • PART ONE. Calculating Improvements
    • 1. After the Great White Error ... The Great Black Mirage.
    • 2. Simians, Savages, Skulls, and Sex: Science and Colonial Militarism in Nineteenth-Century South Africa.
    • 3. ‘‘The More You Kill the More You Will Live’’: The Maya, ‘‘Race,’’ and Biopolitical Hopes for Peace in Guatemala.
  • PART TWO. Landscapes of Purity and Pollution
    • 4. ‘‘There Is a Land Where Everything Is Pure’’: Linguistic Nationalism and Identity Politics in Germany.
    • 5. ‘‘On the Raggedy Edge of Risk’’: Articulations of Race and Nature after Biology.
    • 6. Beyond Ecoliberal ‘‘Common Futures’’: Environmental Justice, Toxic Touring, and a Transcommunal Politics of Place.
  • PART THREE. Communities of Blood and Belonging
    • 7. Inventing the Heterozygote: Molecular Biology, Racial Identity, and the Narratives of Sickle-Cell Disease, Tay-Sachs, and Cystic Fibrosis.
    • 8. For the Love of a Good Dog: Webs of Action in the World of Dog Genetics.
    • 9. Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood.
  • PART FOUR. The Politics of Representation
    • 10. Men in Paradise: Sex Tourism and the Political Economy of Masculini
    • 11. Pulp Fictions of Indigenism.
    • 12. Masyarakat Adat, Difference, and the Limits of Recognition in Indonesia’s Forest Zone.
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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