Fatal Invention

Fatal Invention PDF

Author: Dorothy Roberts

Publisher: New Press/ORIM

Published: 2011-06-14

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1595586911

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An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics that “is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book.” —Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union “A terribly important book on how the ‘fatal invention’ has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, ‘post-racial’ era.” —Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States “Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts.” —Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself

Vital Subjects

Vital Subjects PDF

Author: Rhiannon Noel Welch

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 178138455X

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Vital Subjects examines cultural production—literature, sociology and public health discourse, and early film—from the years between Unification and the end of the First World War (ca. 1860 and 1920) in order to explore how race and colonialism were integral to modern Italian national culture, rather than a marginal afterthought or a Fascist aberration.

Infrastructures of Race

Infrastructures of Race PDF

Author: Daniel Nemser

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-05-23

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1477312609

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With case studies that link practices of concentration to the emergence of new racial categories, this groundbreaking book convincingly argues that race was a product of, rather than a starting point for, the spatial politics of colonial rule in Latin Ame

Habeas Viscus

Habeas Viscus PDF

Author: Alexander Ghedi Weheliye

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-08-20

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0822376490

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Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference PDF

Author: Donald S. Moore

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-05-20

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 0822384655

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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

The Biopolitics of Feeling

The Biopolitics of Feeling PDF

Author: Kyla Schuller

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0822372355

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In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility—the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences—to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.

The Biopolitics of Race

The Biopolitics of Race PDF

Author: Sokthan Yeng

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-11-11

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 0739182242

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Many political figures insist that their anti-immigration sentiments have nothing to do with race and racism. Americans seem largely unconvinced, which is why politicians must protest so loudly and often. In order to deflect accusations of racism, public figures evoke the neo-liberal principle that calls for protection of state health and resources. Yet contemporary philosophers such as Hanna Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben argue that neo-liberal ideology is racist. Sokthan Yeng applies their analysis to the debate over immigration policies to show that neo-liberalism not only recodes traditional racist rhetoric but also expands systemic racism. Politicians can say that their anti-immigration policies are meant to protect the nation’s economy and strength. It is no coincidence, however, that the populations most affected by these regulations are ethnic and cultural minorities such as Mexican and Muslim immigrants. The analysis presented in The Biopolitics of Race will be valuable to philosophers and other scholars or students interested in critical race theory, feminism, and queer theory. It also has implications for anyone working in public health, bioethics, or migration studies.

Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities PDF

Author: Gulson, Kalervo N.

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2017-07-26

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1447320077

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For decades now, school choice has been growing in urban areas around the world, but we've not yet deeply analyzed the ways that such programs interact with the complicated politics of race and ethnicity in contemporary multicultural cities. This book offers a close look at such questions through the case of the twenty-year struggle within Toronto's black community to introduce black-focused curricula and schools, which culminated in the opening of the publicly funded Africentric Alternative School in Toronto in 2009. The authors offer a detailed analysis of the policy process and practices involved in the battle for and creation of the school, and they draw lessons from it for the politics of education in other cities.

What's the Use of Race?

What's the Use of Race? PDF

Author: Ian Whitmarsh

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2010-04-16

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0262265710

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How race as a category—reinforced by new discoveries in genetics—is used as a basis for practice and policy in law, science, and medicine. The post–civil rights era perspective of many scientists and scholars was that race was nothing more than a social construction. Recently, however, the relevance of race as a social, legal, and medical category has been reinvigorated by science, especially by discoveries in genetics. Although in 2000 the Human Genome Project reported that humans shared 99.9 percent of their genetic code, scientists soon began to argue that the degree of variation was actually greater than this, and that this variation maps naturally onto conventional categories of race. In the context of this rejuvenated biology of race, the contributors to What's the Use of Race? Investigate whether race can be a category of analysis without reinforcing it as a basis for discrimination. Can policies that aim to alleviate inequality inadvertently increase it by reifying race differences? The essays focus on contemporary questions at the cutting edge of genetics and governance, examining them from the perspectives of law, science, and medicine. The book follows the use of race in three domains of governance: ruling, knowing, and caring. Contributors first examine the use of race and genetics in the courtroom, law enforcement, and scientific oversight; then explore the ways that race becomes, implicitly or explicitly, part of the genomic science that attempts to address human diversity; and finally investigate how race is used to understand and act on inequities in health and disease. Answering these questions is essential for setting policies for biology and citizenship in the twenty-first century.

Biopolitics

Biopolitics PDF

Author: Catherine Mills

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-04

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1351401866

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The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field.