Helen Tilley

Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility

Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time 1 PART ONE: ANIMA CHAPTER 1: Fredric Jameson Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future 21 CHAPTER 2: Jennifer Wenzel Literacy and Futurity: Millennial Dreaming on the Nineteenth- Century Southern African Frontier 45 CHAPTER 3: Dipesh Chakrabarty Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India 73 CHAPTER 4: Luise White The Utopia of Working Phones: Rhodesian Independence and the Place of Race in Decolonization 94 CHAPTER 5: Timothy Mitchell Hydrocarbon Utopia 117 PART TWO: ARTIFICE CHAPTER 6: John Krige Techno- Utopian Dreams, Techno- Political Realities: The Education of Desire for the Peaceful Atom 151 CHAPTER 7: Marci Shore On Cosmopolitanism, the Avant- Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Central Europe 176 CHAPTER 8: David Pinder The Breath of the Possible: Everyday Utopianism and the Street in Modernist Urbanism 203 CHAPTER 9: Igal Halfin Stalinist Confessions in an Age of Terror: Messianic Times at the Leningrad Communist Universities 231 CHAPTER 10: Aditya Nigam The Heterotopias of Dalit Politics: Becoming- Subject and the Consumption Utopia 250 List of Contributors 277 Index 281

Medicine, Empires, and Ethics in Colonial Africa.

This essay examines the history of European empire building and health work in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on four patterns that shed light on the ethics of outside interventions: (1) the epidemiological and bodily harms caused by conquest and economic development; (2) the uneven and inadequate health infrastructures established during the colonial era, including certain iatrogenic consequences; (3) the ethical ambiguities and transgressions of colonial research and treatment campaigns; and (4) the concerted and inadvertent efforts to undermine African healing practices, which were not always commensurable with introduced medical techniques. This kind of historical analysis helps us home in on different kinds of ethical problems that have grown out of past asymmetries of power-between people, professions, states, and institutions-that shape the nature of international health systems to this day.

Racial science, geopolitics, and empires: paradoxes of power.

Scholars interested in the history of racial science continue to puzzle over the ways in which such ideas endure. This essay takes up a variant on this theme by considering how critiques of ideas about racial purity and hierarchies, expressed at the Universal Races Congress of 1911, were part of a larger intellectual project that simultaneously undermined ideas of fixed racial types and bolstered identity categories defined in racial terms. Efforts to destabilize racial science in the early decades of the twentieth century often went hand in glove with burgeoning critiques of “white” and European domination in different parts of the world. This essay shines the spotlight on the paradoxical nature of these processes. While anthropologists helped to spearhead attempts to deconstruct mainstream pillars of racial science, they also left the door open for its reconstitution by refusing to reject classificatory schemes by group. And though global conversations about race and science tended to generate more cosmopolitan and egalitarian views, the very act of bringing together people from different places had the unintended effect of reinforcing racial identities and idioms, especially in the context of challenges to colonial rule. Finally, even as state building within empires ensured that racial taxonomies proliferated on the ground, imperial bureaucrats often avoided promoting racial science and research because such endeavors were a divisive force in transnational management.