Simply a Hypothesis? RACE and ETHNICITY in the GLOBAL SOUTH

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

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