Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism

Posted in Africa, Anthologies, Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2019-05-01 22:11Z by Steven

Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism

Berghahn Books
April 2019
346 pages
15 illus., bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78920-113-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78920-114-7

Edited by:

Warwick Anderson, Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics
Department of History; Charles Perkins Centre
University of Sydney

Ricardo Roque, Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences
University of Lisbon

Ricardo Ventura Santos, Senior Researcher at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz; Professor
Department of Anthropology
National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism

Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.

Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Luso-tropicalism and Its Discontents / Warwick Anderson, Ricardo Roque and Ricardo Ventura Santos
  • PART I: PICTURING AND READING FREYRE
    • Chapter 1. Gilberto Freyre’s view of miscegenation and its circulation in the Portuguese Empire (1930s-1960s) / Cláudia Castelo
    • Chapter 2. Gilberto Freyre: Racial Populism and Ethnic Nationalism / Jerry Dávila
    • Chapter 3. Anthropology and Pan-Africanism at the Margins of the Portuguese Empire: Trajectories of Kamba Simango / Lorenzo Macagno
  • PART II: IMAGINING A MIXED-RACE NATION
    • Chapter 4. Eugenics, Genetics and Anthropology in Brazil: The Masters and the Slaves, Racial Miscegenation and its Discontents / Robert Wegner and Vanderlei Sebastião de Souza
    • Chapter 5. Gilberto Freyre and the UNESCO Research Project on Race Relations in Brazil / Marcos Chor Maio
    • Chapter 6. An Immense Mosaic”: Race-Mixing and the Creation of the Genetic Nation in 1960s Brazil / Rosanna Dent and Ricardo Ventura Santos
  • PART III: THE COLONIAL SCIENCES OF RACE
    • Chapter 7. The Racial Science of Patriotic Primitives: Mendes Correia in ‘Portuguese Timor’ / Ricardo Roque
    • Chapter 8. Re-Assessing Portuguese Exceptionalism: Racial Concepts and Colonial Policies toward the Bushmen in Southern Angola, 1880s-1970s / Samuël Coghe
    • Chapter 9. “Anthropo-Biology”, Racial Miscegenation and Body Normality: Comparing Bio-Typological Studies in Brazil and Portugal, 1930-1940 / Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes
  • PART IV: PORTUGUESENESS IN THE TROPICS
    • Chapter 10. Luso-Tropicalism Debunked, Again: Race, Racism, and Racialism in Three Portuguese-Speaking Societies / Cristiana Bastos
    • Chapter 11. Being (Goan) Modern in Zanzibar: Mobility, Relationality and the Stitching of Race / Pamila Gupta
  • Afterword I / Nélia Dias
  • Afterword II / Peter Wade
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CFP: Deadline approaching – Race, Sex, and Reproduction in the Global South, c.1800-2000 workshop

Posted in Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Media Archive, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers on 2016-09-19 00:05Z by Steven

CFP: Deadline approaching – Race, Sex, and Reproduction in the Global South, c.1800-2000 workshop

Humanities and Social Sciences Online
2016-09-12

Chiara Beccalossi

Reminder – Proposals for the Race, Sex, and Reproduction in the Global South, c.1800-2000 workshop are due on 25 September 2016.

Call for papers: Workshop: Race and Ethnicity in the Global South and the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science (The University of Sydney), 18 April 2017

Keynote speaker:

Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History
University of Cambridge

Biomedical scientists grew preoccupied with the size of the population and patterns of reproduction at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end of the same century sexology, a science devoted to the study of human sexual behavior, emerged, and at the beginning of the twentieth century the eugenics movement advocated active social engineering and state intervention in citizens’ private lives and reproductive sexuality. Such medical attention on reproduction and control of human sexual behaviour has been closely intertwined with interest in evolutionary theories, the improvement of hereditary traits and racial differences. Scientific and pseudo-scientific inquiries into race and sexuality increasingly informed national policies in the modern period; for example they were used to support policies to restrict mixed-race unions, control immigration and to promote pronatalist campaigns among some ethnic groups.

This medical and scientific knowledge on race and sexuality has moved across countries and continents to become global through processes of translation, hybridisation and transculturation. However, historical accounts of how science and medicine have shaped modern ideas of race and sexuality in a global context quite often refer only to Western countries in the Global North. Recent innovative histories on the Global South have shown that debates on race and reproduction in the southern hemisphere have their own history; they neither uncritically reflect ideas from the Global North nor have they been simply influenced by theories popular in the northern hemisphere. For example, we can find biomedical scientists in the southern hemisphere who showed greater interest in racial plasticity, environmental adaptation, mixing or miscegenation, and blurring of racial boundaries. Likewise sexologists in the Global South were far more interdisciplinary than their northern counterparts and incorporated criminal anthropology, psychiatry, biology, endocrinology and psychoanalysis in their studies until well into the 1970s.

This workshop aims to explore medical and scientific understandings of race and reproduction in the Global South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to illustrate how these understandings have influenced government policies. We invite scholars working on the Global South to submit a proposal and possible topics include:

  • Reproduction, sexuality and race
  • Gender and race
  • Sexology
  • Evolutionary, hereditary and ecological theories
  • Medical and scientific ideas about racial plasticity, environmental adaptation, miscegenation and assimilation
  • Indigeneity and post/colonialism
  • Biopolitics, immigration and reproductive policies

We aim to publish the contributions in an international peer-reviewed journal.

Abstracts of proposals and a short CV (max. 2 pages) should be sent to: CBeccalossi@lincoln.ac.uk

Abstracts should be approx. 250 words in length, sent as an email attachment, and list name, organisation, and contact address. They should also include the title of the proposed paper.

The deadline for the submission of proposals is 25 September 2016. Proposers will be informed whether their paper has been accepted by 1 October 2016.

Enquiries about the workshop should be directed to the above email address.

Organisers:

Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
Chiara Beccalossi (University of Lincoln)
Hans Pols (University of Sydney)

For more information, click here.

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Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2012-07-13 17:36Z by Steven

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

Warwick Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States,” Current Anthropology, Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012): S95-S107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662330.

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The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

Posted in Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania, Politics/Public Policy on 2012-07-13 17:26Z by Steven

The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

Melbourne University Publishing
March 2002
364 pages
235 x 154 mm, 25 b/w illustrations & 4 maps
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-522-84989-9

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

Winner of the Australian Historical Association W.K. Hancock Prize 2004

In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place.

In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about ‘racial degeneration’ of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans.

Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed ‘race’ as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions.

The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on the history of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • The Temperate South
    • 1. Antipodean Britons
    • 2. A Cultivated Society
  • The Northern Tropics
    • 3. No Place for a White Man
    • 4. The Making of the Tropical White Man
    • 5. White Triumph in the Tropics?
    • 6. Whitening the Nation
  • Aboriginal Australia
    • 7. From Deserts the Prophets Come
    • 8. The Reproductive Frontier
  • Conclusion: Biology and Nation
  • Notes
  • Bibliography of Works Cited
  • Index
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Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, Passing, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-02-27 21:50Z by Steven

Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012)
DOI: 10.1086/662330
pages S95-S107

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai‘i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai‘i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice.

In 1920, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the forceful president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote to a young physical anthropologist on his staff telling him how to conduct research into pure Polynesians and mixed-race people in Hawai‘i. Osborn had recently returned to New York from the islands—the territory of the United States—having found their exotic beauty enthralling and their inhabitants amenable to racial study. Like many other visitors, Osborn took surfing lessons on Waikiki with Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer, whom he regarded as a “model chieftain type.” “Do not fail to make the acquaintance of Duke,” the keen eugenicist Osborn urged Louis R. Sullivan, “and secure his measurements, ascertaining if you can, without giving offence, whether he is full blooded.” In particular, Osborn wanted the diffident, frail anthropologist, a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, to “obtain any data regarding swimming adaptations in the limbs and feet.” He hoped, too, that bathing and surfing in the refreshing climate would improve Sullivan’s consumptive tendencies. Additionally, Osborn demanded measurements of other types, including “fishermen,” “poi makers,” “tapa makers,” and “hula dancers.” He heard that the “Hawaiian and Chinese blend is an excellent one; in the schools, intelligent, upright, persistent.” Collecting “primitive” types was compelling because Osborn planned a Polynesian hall at the American Museum; the United States boasted a “historic connection” with Hawai‘i, and the evaluation of racially mixed peoples might offer insight into contemporary social problems on the mainland, including New York.

During the 1920s, physical anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard University treated Hawai‘i as a racial “laboratory,” a controlled site where they might assess an experiment in human biology (MacLeod and Rehbock 1994). They came to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu to study the origins of Polynesians and the process of contemporary race formation in the islands, presumably the result of environmental adaptation of newcomers and hybridization between different groups. In this sense, anthropologists such as Sullivan and his successor Harry L. Shapiro pursued a Boasian program in physical anthropology, elaborating on their mentor’s earlier work on race mixing and the modification of the bodies of immigrants, and producing dynamic and historical accounts of human difference (Boas 1910; Herskovits 1953; Kroeber 1942). Even though conservative eugenicists such as Osborn and his friend Charles B. Davenport initially had promoted research in the islands, the Pacific soon became a Boasian laboratory—to their consternation—a workshop for investigators skeptical of racial typologies and fixities. Most of these rising anthropologists arrived in Hawai‘i already discontented with the complicated and contradictory typological enterprise, and experiences there propelled their drift toward racial recusancy. The vast sea of islands, with Hawai‘i in the middle, proved an exemplary site where physical anthropology could be refashioned and a new human biology might emerge…

…Race Crossing in America

Louis Sullivan, Osborn’s young emissary, was not the first mainland expert to evaluate racial diversity and mixture in Hawai‘i. After studying the decline of the northern “Negro,” the punctilious statistician Frederick L. Hoffman traveled to the islands to investigate the effects of Pacific “miscegenation.” Not surprisingly, his analysis of vital statistics revealed the supposedly baleful results of “Hawaiian mongrelization,” thereby confirming his prejudices (Hoffman 1916, 1917, 1923). Alfred M. Tozzer, the Harvard anthropologist, was rather more sympathetic. From 1916, he visited his wife’s (haole) family on Oahu each summer and measured the bodies of Chinese-Hawaiian and white-Hawaiian neighbors. After struggling with the statistics of race crossing, Tozzer, a close friend of Boas, handed over his data on 508 subjects to Leslie C. Dunn, a progressive young geneticist. While lamenting the unreliable “pedigrees,” Dunn could find no signs of “degeneracy” among the mixed offspring—by which he meant no obvious physical disharmony or mental deficiency. He noted that the first generation of European-Polynesian crosses showed native pigmentation and lacked hybrid vigor, but supposedly Hawaiian corpulence disappeared and finer European features emerged. Dunn complained of the difficulties calculating white hybrids: whites seemed too heterogeneous to fit one type or even to sort neatly into conventional Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean divisions (Dunn 1923). After further analysis, Dunn (1928:2) decided that Hawaiian-Chinese crosses generally reverted toward their Asian ancestry in what he called “this great experiment in race mixture.”

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

American physical anthropologists and scientists tried to elucidate the biological principles of this controversial social issue. Even in the 1890s, Franz Boas, a liberal Jewish-German émigré inspired by the environmentalism of his mentor Rudolf Virchow, was scouring American Indian reservations and boarding schools looking for “half bloods” to measure. He noticed that rather than blending their ancestry, mixed children manifested features favoring one or the other parent, but he thought this segregation of heredity scarcely constituted “degeneration,” however defined. Indeed, mixing seemed to have a “favorable effect upon the race” (Boas 1902, 1940 [1894]; Stocking 1982). Miscegenation also intrigued less sympathetic physical anthropologists. “I am seeking information concerning the offspring of mulattoes,” Charles B. Davenport wrote in 1906 to Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian Institution. “That is, I wish to learn if white skin color and black are produced as well as mulattoes. Are such pairs of mulattoes perfectly fertile and are their children vigorous?” The anatomist Hrdlička was stumped. He suspected three-quarters of the people of color in Washington, DC, were part white, but the “question of the mixed bloods of white and Negroes and of their progeny still awaits scientific investigation.” Over the following years, Hrdlička frequently urged the aging eugenicist to use the resources of the research station at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to look into this question. But not until the late 1920s did Davenport enlist Morris Steggerda to measure and assess sociologically mixed-race people—and then in Jamaica. By this time their condemnation of disharmonious race crossing would appear exceptionally vehement and absurd. The scientists worried that Jamaican “hybrids,” inheriting the short arms of whites and the long legs of blacks, had trouble stooping and picking things off the ground; browns became “muddled and wuzzle-headed” (Davenport and Steggerda 1929:469)…

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Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific Between the Wars

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, Oceania on 2011-08-15 02:14Z by Steven

Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific Between the Wars

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 40, Issue 2, 2009
pages 143-160
DOI: 10.1080/10314610902849302

Warwick Anderson, Professor of History
University of Sydney

The attitudes of Australian biologists, anthropologists, and historians toward race mixing in the early-twentieth century should be viewed in relation to the investigations of Indigenous depopulation and miscegenation taking place in the Pacific. Those Australian scientists committed to national or continental racial ideals–Cecil Cook and Norman B. Tindale among them–remained resistant to the lessons of the Pacific, favouring ‘half-caste’ absorption. Other scholars such as Stephen Roberts and A. P. Elkin took the oceanic approach, coming to value and harness racial hybridity. This essay shows how much of Australian racial thought drifted in from the Pacific.

In 1925, as he shuttled between Townsville and Rabaul, Raphael Cilento wrote to extol the new tropical white man evolving in North Queensland. A fierce advocate of white racial purity, the director of the Townsville Institute of Tropical Medicine was convinced the peculiar Australian combination of selected European stock, restriction of intercourse with other races, a tropical environment and modern preventive medicine was producing a more virile white man north of Capricorn, not another degenerate type. ‘He is tall and rangy, with somewhat sharp features, and long legs and arms’, Cilento wrote. ‘Inclined to be sparely built, he is not, however, lacking in muscular strength, while his endurance is equal in his own circumstances to that of the temperate dweller in his. This North Queenslander moves slowly, and conserves muscular heat-producing energy in every possible way’. It was as though the Townsville racial visionary was channelling Marcus Clarke, only the Melbourne novelist’s sardonic 1877 prophecy of the coming man now spawned rhapsodies in the tropical heat. The race is in a transition stage’, Cilento continued, ‘and it is very apparent that there is being evolved precisely what one would hope for, namely a distinctive tropical type, adapted to life in the tropical environment in which it
is set’. Cilento was certainly not crying in the wilderness. Ronald Hamlyn-Harris, director of the Queensland Museum and scourge of the mosquito, joined him in trying to cultivate ‘in the rising generation year after year a vision of…

Read or purchase the article here.

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