Article
ID: CBB369633289

Relocating Anti-racist Science: The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and Economic Development in the Global South (2018)

unapi
Postcolonialism Modernization Science and society Economic development Science and race 20th century UNESCO

This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race (1950) in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities – typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive.

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Authors & Contributors
Hyun, Jaehwan
Andersen, Caspar
Gilman, Nils
Arnold, David J.
Sara Lorenzini
Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe
Journals
Technology and Culture
Science in Context
Physis: Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
History of the Human Sciences
Gewina
Publishers
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Temple University
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
University of California Press
Temple University Press
Princeton University Press
Concepts
Science and society
Modernization
Postcolonialism
Economic development
International cooperation
Science and race
People
Samyŏl, Yi
Nehru, Jawaharlal
Lerner, Daniel
Joliot-Curie, Frédéric
Hayek, Friedrich August von
Friedman, Milton
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Places
United States
India
West Africa
France
Great Britain
Africa
Institutions
UNESCO
United Nations
Asian-African Conference (1955 : Bandung, Indonesia)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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