Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference
Author: Donald S. Moore
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2003-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822330912

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

The Nature of Race

The Nature of Race
Author: Ann Morning
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2011-06-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0520270312

Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-303) and index.

Understories

Understories
Author: Jake Kosek
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2006-12-08
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780822338475

A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.

Biopolitics

Biopolitics
Author: Ferenc Fehér
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Total Pages: 178
Release: 1994
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

"1989 marked not only the end of communism but also the beginning of a drastic change of pattern in modern politics. The authors analyse an emerging new type of political activity which they call "biopolitics". They trace back its origins, first, to the promises modernity made about the "liberation of the Body" and the fusion of the corporeal and the spiritual which have never been kept. In the second place, they connect it with certain failed hopes and perspectives of the Enlightenment and the dominant models of politics in the nineteenth century as well as with the "end of the grand narrative". In the main, they derive the rise of biopolitics from the weakening of class politics and its vocabulary, the transition from a class-based politics to the politicization of the Body (as well as from additional contingent factors, such as the appearance of the AIDS epidemics and the petering out of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s)." "They investigate the difficult coexistence of the values of freedom and life in biopolitics in four major areas: health, environment, sex (gender) and race. On the basis of a rich material, taken from both the major analysts of modernity and the present-day discussion of biopolitics in the media, the authors try to set up a preliminary balance of the pros and cons presented by the new phenomenon." "Although they accept the "language of difference" in which the movements of biopolitics predominantly articulate their programme, the authors argue for a minimalist conception of universalism and for dialogue, against the self-closure of the movements which inevitably generates violence and closes the avenues of reconciliation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Race and the Making of American Political Science

Race and the Making of American Political Science
Author: Jessica Blatt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2018-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812250044

Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that racial thought was central to the academic study of politics in the United States at its origins, shaping the discipline's core categories and questions in fundamental and lasting ways.

Whiteness of a Different Color

Whiteness of a Different Color
Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 1999-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674417801

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities, in becoming American, were re-racialized to become Caucasian.

Identity Politics and the New Genetics

Identity Politics and the New Genetics
Author: Katharina Schramm
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857452541

Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

Dangerously Divided

Dangerously Divided
Author: Zoltan Hajnal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2020-01-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108487009

Race, more than class or any other factor, determines who wins and who loses in American democracy.

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference
Author: Anand Pandian
Publisher:
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2003
Genre: Ethnic relations
ISBN: 9786612920653

A collection of essays that show the interdependence of concepts of race and nature.