Simply a Hypothesis? RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

» WARWICK ANDERSON

I can’t say that it’s typical of the discipline, told myself, to look again at ideas about race in but I do know that after I finish a research the southern hemisphere, this time from new project I like to move on to something different, angles, different standpoints. Iwhether in time or place or method. On the Each published book grows up differently few occasions I feel compelled to return to a and follows a distinctive life course. I saw historical topic, it’s because some new, and Cultivation of Whiteness as a novel analysis often surprising, perspective or approach acts of the co-constitution of racial science and on me like a lodestone. So it was when around the imagined virile, white Australian nation. 2010 I proposed the research programme that It was an attempt to represent Australia as a came to be embedded in my application to site of knowledge-making about human and the Australian Research Council (ARC) for a environmental difference, and not just a place Laureate Fellowship. I felt the need to reframe that received all its ideas from elsewhere, and extend my earlier studies of the sciences or served as a data mine for North Atlantic of ‘whiteness’ in Australia, which had begun savants. It was a critical archaeology of the as long ago as the 1980s and culminated in the sciences of whiteness in this country; an publication of The Cultivation of Whiteness in attempt to situate scientific knowledge- 2002.1 At the time of my ARC application, my making in the white nation. Accordingly, colleagues thought the grant-writing exercise a junior historian of science in the United probably futile, since so few humanities States complained that the monograph had scholars had succeeded in adapting their failed to address ‘real’ race science, which, so proposed research to the science model it seemed, took place only along the North supposedly favoured in that scheme. But I Atlantic littoral.2 When a senior cultural had trained in medicine and done a little historian at Berkeley claimed dismissively scientific research, so believed I knew the over dinner that there was never any ‘positive’ tricks, subterfuges and disguises that might science of whiteness in the United States, get me past any doorkeepers. Additionally, I unlike exceptional Australia, I insisted his (above) Fig. 1. Anderson thought I had an irresistible proposal — but views indicated the failure to recognise the conducting research then, don’t we all. It meant returning to the implicit whiteness of the unmarked subjects of for Cultivation of topic of my first book — back to a subject that much biomedical research in his own country. Whiteness, Palm Valley, Central had acquired new aspects and fresh appeal, or (American biological and biomedical sciences Australia, 1999. so I imagined, while I had been distracted, and still await a critical historical study equivalent PHOTO: ROSEMARY diverted elsewhere. Now was the moment, I to Cultivation of Whiteness, though recent ROBINS

Humanities Australia 55 signs suggest they are catching up.) Ordinary puzzled. ‘You are talking about Anglo settler readers in Australia were more astute: they societies’, someone pointed out, ‘yet these are saw more clearly why the book mattered. Latin race formations’. Another interlocutor A leader of Australia First denounced me as sketched the apparent similarities of racial a ‘race traitor’ — an old school, rinky-dink thought and policy between Australia and phrasing that pleased me though my infamy Argentina, and between New Zealand and proved disappointingly evanescent.3 The Mexico, during the same period. ‘How can this Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide be so?’ she asked. That’s an intriguing question, surprisingly offered an apology to Aboriginal I thought — strong enough, perhaps, to justify people over the scientific research revealed in a Laureate Fellowship proposal. I spent most Cultivation of Whiteness. (If only ‘impact’ had of the long flight back to Sydney, skirting the counted back then!) South Pole, pondering More pertinently, racial conceptions and perhaps, Tim Rowse formations across the reproved me in a southern hemisphere. perceptive review It frustrated and for not making any irritated me that so comparisons with much of our ‘southern’ racial thought in intellectual history New Zealand and was based on facile the Pacific — an diffusionist models, observation that not unlike those shook me out of prevailing in theories the national niche I of ‘modernisation’ and had so deliberately ‘development’. The and pragmatically history of ideas in occupied.4 Thus, as Australia, especially Cultivation of Whiteness those ideas deemed moved about in the scientific, still world, gaining a life of seemed to replay an its own, its reception aggressive cold-war taught me more about Atlanticism: science what sort of book I often was presented had written — and as a derivative how it might be done discourse, or at most differently. a minor language, in the southern hemisphere. The Laureate Fellowship research proposal It was this abiding sense of irritation that had crystallised suddenly in discussions following prompted me to reconstruct, and in a sense a lecture I gave in Rio de Janeiro early in 2010. re-place, the history of concepts of human I could tell you the hour, if not the minute, and environmental difference in the settler when it was formulated. My hosts had asked society, to situate knowledge-making about me to talk about my earlier inquiries into race in the national story — but I may have racial thought in Australia, so I focused on been too rigorous in enforcing the quarantine the last chapter of Cultivation of Whiteness, barrier. ‘What about south-south intellectual concerning the scientific rationalisation connections?’, I now wondered. Could one for administrative proposals in the 1930s to discern a general southern-hemisphere (above) ‘absorb’ biologically mixed-race Aboriginal distinction in racial thought in the twentieth Fig. 2. Cover of Cultivation of people into white Australia. Heeding Rowse’s century, or at least regional gradations in racial Whiteness by advice, I also considered scientific arguments in sensibilities and practices? What did we really Warwick Anderson, interwar New Zealand for the ‘amalgamation’ know about southern intellectual currents? As I (Duke University Press, 2006). of Maori and Pakeha. My audience in Rio was wrote at the time:

56 Humanities Australia For hundreds of years, the southern world; reshaped and challenged ideas hemisphere has been the scene of intensive about race; and informed national policies biological and sociological investigation concerning Indigenous peoples, race mixing, of the nature of human difference. Well and selective immigration across the into the twentieth century, physical southern hemisphere. Yet today we know anthropologists were meticulously little about these scientific activities. As a measuring thousands of people to result, the recent historical forces shaping determine their racial character; human human identity in the global south — and biologists, emerging in the 1920s, applied elsewhere — remain somewhat obscure.5 evolutionary and ecological theories to (above) understand the adaptation of southern Throwing caution to blustery austral winds, Fig. 3 White peoples to their environments; and after then, I proposed a critical historical inquiry Australian scientist World War II, biological anthropologists into patterns of racial thought across settler and Aboriginal man increasingly conducted genetic surveys societies of the southern hemisphere, a in the central desert of Australia, 1930s. across the global south. These biological study comparative in method and style, COURTESY NATIONAL inquiries into what it means to be human transnational and inter-colonial in scope. Even LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA, CECIL JOHN HACKETT generated scientific debate around the more unguardedly, I frequently substituted PAPERS, MS 9580

Humanities Australia 57 ‘global south’ for southern hemisphere in this on ‘standpoint’ or situated knowledge always prospectus, partly as a less clunky designation, delicately need to skirt essentialist speculation; but mostly because it drew attention to certain and the historicising of race requires special political and economic configurations, a care to avoid any sort of exonerative declension. particular historical composition, and avoided And, after all, I was postulating a hypothesis, geographical pedantry. As it happened, this a stimulus to rigorous inquiry — a question, heuristic — for that is what it is — proved less and not the definitive answer. The Laureate controversial than I expected. Later still, we Fellowship might provide the ideal laboratory in brazenly incorporated it in the shorthand name which to test such a hypothesis.7 for the project: Race and Ethnicity in the Global I felt I was being pulled up one of those South, or REGS. vast Pacific swells, which Herman Melville Like a proper scientist, I began with a described so evocatively. The wave of critical working hypothesis: I claimed that human postcolonial scholarship pushing us to situate biology might look quite different when knowledge, provincialise Europe, think of viewed from southern perspectives. What Pacific historicity, treat Asia as method, and did this mean? Well, it could be said that locate southern theory, was carrying me along.

I FELT I WAS BEING PULLED UP ONE OF THOSE VAST PACIFIC SWELLS, WHICH HERMAN MELVILLE DESCRIBED SO EVOCATIVELY.

the conventional — for my purposes, North My interest in such dispersive logics derived Atlantic — history of ideas about race and in part from discussion back in the 1990s human difference in the twentieth century was with Greg Dening, Dipesh Chakrabarty and pre-occupied with fixed racial classifications Patrick Wolfe (among others at the Institute or Mendelian typologies, policies of racial for Postcolonial Studies in ), separation and segregation, hard-line eugenics, conversations that had led me to advocate, in and condemnation of race mixing. Of course, a series of manifestos, the postcolonial study such concerns and enthusiasms could be found of science.8 My focus in these programmatic also in southern settler societies, especially tracts had been on Asia, but now it seemed in parts of northern Australia, and in South timely to think more generally about the global Africa after the 1930s. But I wondered if we south.9 Thus the current drew me toward the might detect, too, greater (even if piecemeal recent work of my colleague at Sydney, Raewyn and scattered) southern interest in racial Connell, who was urging us to consider the plasticity, environmental adaptation, blurring global south as a site for theory in the social of racial boundaries, endorsement of biological sciences.10 It led me to read more carefully the absorption of Indigenous people, and tolerance South Asian subaltern histories and to look at of the formation of new or blended races. In efforts by radical Latin American scholars to other words, should we continue to confine destabilise geopolitical intellectual dominance.11 more dynamic and flexible ‘Latin’ views of Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, among others, human difference to South America? ‘Although made me think again about comparative, white privilege would be maintained in transnational, and oceanic histories, and the Global South’, I wrote, ‘its conceptual how one might not so much sketch the global framework, institutional structure, and even colour line as restore the global colour palette, perceptual boundary often varied’.6 It struck revealing particularly its disingenuous and me as a useful research question, even if I meretricious tones and variations.12 ran the risk of appearing to imply some sort During the previous decade, while in of geographical or regional essentialism, or the United States, various obligations and suggesting that our racism somehow was less commissions had dragooned me into reflecting nasty than their racism. But claims depending on comparison-making and comparability.

58 Humanities Australia Reluctantly, I began to participate in Ann historical agency? Yet it now appears that Laura Stoler’s bold and provocative effort a comparative study of sites as different as to examine intimacy and sentiment in settler Australia and the Philippines under United States (US) history from postcolonial the American colonial regime can help perspectives. Although I admired Stoler’s us understand processes as elusive as the deftness in combining anthropological creation of national subjects — provided insight and sensibility with historical we hold constant our focus, that is, so long method, I initially was wary of her structural as we find a sensitive and specific ‘sampling or typological approach to comparison. device’. 13 Grumbling, I chose to compare practices of racial hygiene, reproductive regimes, and I concluded my chapter in Haunted by Empire classificatory schemes at the Culion leper with the hope that I had ‘demonstrated that a colony, in US-occupied Philippines, and a ‘half- taxonomic gaze allows one to discern patterns caste’ children’s home in outback Australia. and relationships that otherwise would remain Somewhat sententiously, I wrote: obscure. Even so, such a gaze still seems to me a distancing, imperial optic — and therefore Elsewhere I have argued for the tracing of one we should use with caution.’14 In the genealogical ties between imperial center Laureate Fellowship project I was proposing (below) and colony, and between colonies, rather mostly genealogical or historical comparison of Fig. 4 Anderson than resorting to the collection of apparently racial thought and practice across the southern with Masasa and Fore people, Okapa, unrelated homologies. Comparison of hemisphere, that is, tracing historical figures Papua New Guinea, different models has often proven idle and as they moved about intellectually, making 2003.

unrewarding. What does it mean if one thing comparisons and speculating on human and PHOTO: THOMAS P. happens to look like something else? What environmental difference. But through working STRONG does it tell us about cause and effect, about with Stoler, and sometimes against her, I had

Humanities Australia 59 also come to appreciate the value of static or remarked made me look like a Rotarian), the modal comparisons, assays of cognate political research programme started to shift shape rationalities in seemingly separate places, such and take on unanticipated incidentals and as Latin America and Australasia. (The sort of appurtenances. So much depended on the ‘surprising’ comparison that Benedict Anderson recruitment of PDRAs and other affiliates. engaged in, especially in Under Three Flags and As it happened, expertise on Australasia, The Spectre of Comparisons, also was appealing Latin America, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia to those of us interested in Southeast Asia.15) abounded, whereas we received few applications As it turned out, further historical inquiry from historians versed in Indian Ocean, South often showed that the apparent intellectual Asian, and African circuits of knowledge. estrangement or separation of the southern Perversely, perhaps, most applicants came from continents was illusory, and such typological North America and Europe. We went with the or taxonomic or serial (as Ben Anderson would flow, as it were. During the past three years or put it) comparison was redundant. In any so, we’ve held conferences and workshops on case, the proposed research would become racial thought and Pacific futures; comparative fundamentally a reflection on different styles racialisations in Southeast Asia; south- of comparison-making and the protocols of south connections, especially between Latin historical comparability. America and Australia; and Lusophone racial In setting up a ‘laboratory’ it’s important conceptions across the global south. We are to allocate work carefully, or at least to look planning further symposia on the genetic as though one knows how to assign tasks. exploration of Australasia and the Pacific, I proposed to recruit a number of postdoctoral on race mixing, and German racial thought research associates (PDRAs) who would in the Pacific. We’ve hosted visiting scholars, identify and, in effect, translate the various arranged public lectures, and set up a first- imperial and postcolonial paper trails across book workshop. Fortunately, two efficient and the southern hemisphere in the twentieth engaged administrative assistants made sure century, encompassing Spanish, Portuguese, stuff happened: Rod Taveira, now a lecturer and German archives — while I concentrated in the US Studies Centre at the University of on Anglophone and Francophone materials. Sydney; and for most of this period, James Eventually, so I thought, we would come Dunk, who recently submitted his PhD thesis together to compare and connect such in history. Our intellectual activities have given vernaculars of human biology and dialects rise to a score of articles and five or more book of difference. Thus the project might also manuscripts (including my long-delayed ‘global’ serve to overcome some of the linguistic historical study of the scientific investigation limitations of much Australian historical of mixed-race populations in the twentieth writing. Thinking like a scientist, I regarded the century). Additionally, we are still busy turning Laureate fellowship principally as a means of the conference proceedings into special issues expanding our scholarly repertoire, or building of journals and essay collections. research capacity — that is, as a way to develop Since we have eighteen months to go, it’s a productive laboratory in which we could premature to evaluate the whole fellowship train new researchers to discover previously programme. There’s talk, for instance, of obscure historical patterns. Therefore it was funding a postdoctoral fellow for a year to necessary to structure the project around the begin to repair our neglect of the Indian cultivation of fresh fields of scholarly endeavour Ocean and southern Africa. There’s time for and the mentoring of early-career researchers— another conference, another colloquium, without heaping further laurels on the chief another subsidiary project, and certainly more investigator’s over-laden brow. integrative, informal discussions. Necessarily, Like books, Laureate Fellowships take on a our coverage has been unsystematic and life of their own once they are hatched. From partial, perhaps even fragmentary, revealing the moment I received my laureate lapel pin what we don’t yet know as much as explaining in Melbourne (which a colleague unkindly what we do know — we keep lighting out

60 Humanities Australia into new territories before settling old the enigmatic ones, so we know what to look ones. As in most team efforts, recurrent for and guard against. And we need to train problems of coordination and alignment new generations of humanities scholars to can challenge coherence — though maybe a betray racial codes, artfully. ¶ sort of contrapuntal narrative, or a mosaic of knowledge as William James put it, is more WARWICK ANDERSON faha faithful to our sources.16 In any case, we keep fassa fahms frsn is an managing to generate new research careers Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor and propel people into pioneering scholarly in the Department of History trajectories — almost too successfully, as it’s and the Centre for Values, been hard to retain PDRAs for more than a Ethics and the Law in Medicine couple of years. Miranda Johnson now teaches at the . Additionally, he is an comparative Indigenous histories at Sydney; honorary professor in the School of Population and Ricardo Roque has a tenured position in Lisbon; Global Health at the . He Christine Winter earned an ARC Future has taught at Harvard, Melbourne, California (San Francisco and Berkeley), and Wisconsin (Madison). Fellowship, leading to a professorial research He wrote The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, fellowship at Flinders University; and Sebastián Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (2002); Gil-Riaño will soon be an assistant professor Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. I could go Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (2006); The on, but evidently the Laureate Fellowship has Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into begun, though multiple intellectual itineraries Whitemen (2008); and (with Ian R. Mackay) and diverging routes, to transform research Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (2014); and edited (with Richard C. Keller and in the history of science and racial thought, Deborah Jenson) Unconscious Dominions: lending it southern inflections, sometimes an Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Australian accent. It seems, at least, a good Sovereignties (2011). beginning.17 Some fifteen years ago, the local reception of Cultivation of Whiteness, with its absorption ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS into contemporary debates about Australian racism, both surprised and intrigued me. I am grateful to Elizabeth Webby for suggesting Unexpectedly, I became involved in a minor I write this essay. Also, thanks to Race skirmish on the margins of the history wars, and Ethnicity in the Global South (REGS) and I felt exposed and poorly equipped.18 But participants for their continuing contributions; like many veterans, I now recall those battles and to Clare Corbould, Ann Curthoys, James with a frisson of nostalgia and a pervading Dunk, Hans Pols, Ricardo Roque, and Christine sense of regret for lost youth and clarity Winter for helpful comments at short notice. and drive. I suspect such moments of public This research is supported by a grant from the engagement have passed for most of my Australian Research Council (FL110100243). generation, as accumulated laurels immobilise us, or as we meander toward retirement — even 1. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of if the struggle continues. Racism abides in our Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny communities, but its manifestations can be in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), reprinted in the United States by subtle and specific and disconcerting. It seemed Basic Books (2003) and Duke University Press to me from the beginning that this Laureate (2006). See also Warwick Anderson, ‘Traveling Fellowship research programme should White’, in Reorienting Whiteness, ed. by Leigh function as a kind of historical sampling device Boucher, Katherine Ellinghaus and Jane Carey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 65–72. or search engine, locating and examining 2. Elizabeth Green Musselman, ‘Review of the various ingenious and slippery forms of Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of racial thought and practice in southern settler Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny societies and their environs. We need to in Australia’, Isis, 95 (2004), 497–98. understand our particular racisms, especially

Humanities Australia 61 3. Warwick Anderson, ‘Confessions of a Race Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Traitor’, Arena Magazine, 30 (August 1997), 35–36. Press, 2000). 4. Tim Rowse, ‘Review of Warwick Anderson, 12. Connected Worlds: History in Trans-National The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, Perspective, ed. by Ann Curthoys and Marilyn and Racial Destiny in Australia’, Australian Lake (Canberra: Australian National Book Review, 241 (2002), 15. Another prompt University Press, 2006); and Marilyn Lake was Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Race, 1750–1940, ed. by Bronwen Douglas and Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Chris Ballard (Canberra: Australian National International Challenge of Racial Equality University Press, 2008). (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 5. Warwick Anderson, ‘Racial Conceptions in the 2008). Global South’, Isis, 105 (2014), 782–92 (p. 782). 13. Warwick Anderson, ‘States of Hygiene: Race 6. Anderson, ‘Racial Conceptions’, p. 783. “Improvement” and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines’, in 7. This framing of the proposal proved useful Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in responding to an assessor who disagreed in North American History, ed. by Ann Laura passionately with many of my premises, which Stoler (Durham NC: Duke University Press, he took to be conclusions: I could write in the 2006), pp. 94–115 (p. 111). rejoinder that his fervour clearly indicated the importance of the topic, and confirmed the 14. Anderson, ‘States of Hygiene’, pp. 111–12. need to test the hypothesis. (I say ‘he’ because 15. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: the assessor was readily identified.) Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination 8. See Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: (London: Verso, 2005), and The Spectre of Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia 1774–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University and the World (London: Verso, 1998). As Press, 1980); Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Benedict Anderson put it, ‘the most instructive Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self comparisons are those that surprise’ (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, (‘Frameworks of Comparison’, London Review 2004); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing of Books, 38 [21 January 2016], 15–18, p. 18). Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical See also Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols, Difference (Princeton: Princeton University ‘Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and Press, 2000); and Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia’, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54 Race’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), (2012), 93–113. 866–905. 16. ‘Life is in the transitions as much as in the 9. Essays in this vein include Warwick Anderson terms connected’ (William James, Essays in and Vincanne Adams, ‘Pramoedya’s Chickens: Radical Empiricism [New York: Longman, Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience’, in Green and Co., 1911], p. 87). See also Warwick The Handbook of Science and Technology Anderson, ‘Edge Effects in Science and Studies, 3rd edn, ed. by Edward J. Hackett, Medicine’, Western Humanities Review, 69 Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy (2015), 373–84. Wajcman (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), 17. Many postgraduate students and research pp. 181–204; and Warwick Anderson, ‘From affiliates have also contributed to the success Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects: of our research programmes, too many to list Science and Globalisation, or Postcolonial here. Studies of Science?’, Postcolonial Studies, 12 18. On the Australian history wars, see Stuart (2009), 389–400, ‘Asia as Method in Science Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History and Technology Studies’, East Asian Science, Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Technology and Society Journal, 6 (2012), Press, 2003); and Bain Attwood, Telling the 445–51, and ‘Postcolonial Science Studies’, in Truth About Aboriginal History (Sydney: International Encyclopedia of the Social and Allen and Unwin, 2005). For my views on Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, ed. by James D. the related international ‘science wars’, see Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), pp. 652–57. Warwick Anderson, ‘Waiting for Newton? 10. Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global From Hydraulic Societies to the Hydraulics of Dynamics of Knowledge in the Social Sciences Globalization’, in Force, Movement, Intensity: (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007). The Newtonian Imagination and the Humanities 11. In particular, Fernando Coronil, ‘Beyond and Social Sciences, ed. by Ghassan Hage Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial and Emma Kowal (Melbourne: Melbourne Geohistorical Categories’, Cultural University Press, 2011), pp. 128–35. Anthropology, 11 (1996), 51–87; and Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border

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