Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822330792 ISBN 13: 9780822330790

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2003

Synopsis

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

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"A stunning and original collection. As far as the essays here excavate the many valences of 'race' and 'nature' and the 'racisms' and 'naturalisms' that operate and mobilize them, they are cautiously hopeful, and write eloquently against the reproduction and government of life through these exclusive terms."--Lisa Lowe, author of "Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics"

About the Author:

Donald S. Moore is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jake Kosek is a geographer and a Lang Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University.

Anand Pandian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0822330792
• ISBN 13: 9780822330790
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 488
• Editor: Moore Donald S., Kosek Jake, Pandian Anand