Brown Skins, White Coats

Race Science in India, 1920-66

Brown Skins, White Coats
Projit Bihari Mukharji
RRP:
NZ$ 66.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 53.59
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 368pg
15 Dec 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226823010
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A unique narrative structure brings the history of race science in mid-twentieth century India to vivid life. Recent years have seen an explosion in studies of race science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but the vast majority have remained focused either on Europe or North America and Australia. In this stirring history, Projit Bihari Mukharji shows that India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends and argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making-not merely as footnotes to a European or Australo-American history of normal science. The book is constructed with seven factual chapters operating at distinct levels-the conceptual, practical, and cosmological-and eight fictive interchapters. Drawing principally on one work of fiction published in 1935 and supplemented by other fictional works written by the same author, the interchapters tease out the full implications of racial research in India with fiction. The narrative interchapters develop as a series of epistolary exchanges between the Bengali author Hemendrakumar Roy (1888-1963) and the main protagonist of his dystopian science fiction novel about race, race science, racial improvement, and dehumanization. In this way, Mukharji fills out the historical moment in which the factual narrative unfolded, vividly revealing its moral, affective, political, and intellectual fissures.
"Race science enjoyed a prestigious place in Indian academic life in the twentieth century. Mukharji' s book is a startling revelation of how leading Indian anthropologists and statisticians used serological techniques to study caste. This is the forgotten story of Indian eugenics in the service of national development. " -- Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University "Mukharji' s Brown Skins, White Coats is a brilliant book, absorbing to read and brimming with lyrical insight about the vexed history of global racial science, identity, nationalism, and alienation. The book offers a masterful, often poetic journey into the ever-shifting practices of racial scientists striving relentlessly to weave notions of skin, blood, caste, tissues, disease, and belief into a potent yet illusory science of Indian identity, whiteness, and biologized difference. A captivating, pathbreaking new work in race studies and science studies. " -- Keith Wailoo, Princeton University "Brown Skins, White Coats is the most innovative and engaging book I have read on the fraught relationship between race and genetics. Combining rigorous historical research with compelling fictional interludes, Mukharji recalls India' s forgotten history of seroanthropology, a form of race science that links colonial anthropometry to contemporary genomics. A must-read for area studies and history of science alike, Mukharji' s book skillfully shows how the underappreciated contributions of Indian scientists to global human genetics also reinforced essentialist and often discriminatory narratives of racial difference within South Asia. " -- Elise K. Burton, University of Toronto
Projit Bihari Mukharji is professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of several books, most recently Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226823010
Published: 15 Dec 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 368

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