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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
DeGraw, Sharon;
(2004)
The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001561751/)
Book
Isiah, III Lavender;
(2011)
Race in American Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB011021920/)
Article
Kwan, Allen;
(2007)
Seeking New Civilizations: Race Normativity in the Star Trek Franchise
(/isis/citation/CBB000720328/)
Chapter
Alessandro Vescovi;
(2014)
Decostruzione di uno scienziato coloniale: il Cromosoma Calcutta di Amitav Ghosh
(/isis/citation/CBB662688431/)
Article
Thiago P. Barbosa;
(2022)
Racializing a New Nation: German Coloniality and Anthropology in Maharashtra, India
(/isis/citation/CBB043337684/)
Article
Damodaran, Vinita;
(2013)
Gender, Race and Science in Twentieth-Century India: E. K. Janaki Ammal and the History of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001320181/)
Thesis
Noni D. Carter;
(2022)
Homo Narrans: In Pursuit of Science’s Fictions of the ‘Human’ in Eighteenth-Century Science and Contemporary Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB489688409/)
Thesis
Daoine S. Bachran;
(2016)
From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction and (Re)creating the Future
(/isis/citation/CBB344343231/)
Thesis
Nichols, Rachael L.;
(2010)
The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature, 1870--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001567211/)
Book
Elisa Edwards;
(2011)
Race, Aliens, and the U.S. Government in African American Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB525996602/)
Thesis
Taylor Scott Evans;
(2018)
The Race of Machines: A Prehistory of the Posthuman
(/isis/citation/CBB584767615/)
Book
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas;
(2003)
Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space
(/isis/citation/CBB001032652/)
Book
Dawson, Gowan;
(2012)
Victorian Science and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001251062/)
Thesis
Siva Prashant Kumar;
(2021)
Colonizing Time: Caste, Colonial Rule, and the Exact Sciences in India, 1783–1874
(/isis/citation/CBB845659840/)
Book
Anna Greenwood;
Harshad Topiwala;
(2015)
Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895-1940: The Forgotten History
(/isis/citation/CBB796041613/)
Thesis
Rovel Jerome Alex Sequeira;
(2022)
The Nation and Its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India, 1870-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB679420788/)
Article
Projit Bihari Mukharji;
(2020)
Bloodworlds: A Hematology of the 1952 Indo-Australian Genetical Survey of the Chenchus
(/isis/citation/CBB663776469/)
Article
Basu, Amit Ranjan;
(2004)
A New Knowledge of Madness---Nineteenth Century Asylum Psychiatry in Bengal
(/isis/citation/CBB000600500/)
Article
Wagner, Kim A.;
(2010)
Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in Early Nineteenth-Century India
(/isis/citation/CBB001032337/)
Book
Andrew J. Rotter;
(2019)
Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines
(/isis/citation/CBB861511745/)
Be the first to comment!