Suman Seth

Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial

This special issue of Postcolonial Studies is divided into two parts. In the first, three leading scholars of postcolonial science studies*a philosopher, an anthropologist, and an historian (although each wears several hats)*have been asked to contribute short, programmatic essays on a theme of their choosing, focusing less on providing a ‘state of the field’ and more on directions for future research and analysis. In the second part, three historians have offered papers on topics of particular current interest: the history of cartography and colonialism; botany and empire; and the history of method outside Europe. In the essay below, I offer an overview of secondary scholarship on, in turn, colonialism and science, and postcolonial technoscience, before turning to a discussion of the articles making up the issue. The idea that science and technology were among the gifts that Western imperial powers brought to their colonies was an integral part of the discourse of the ‘civilizing mission,’ one vaunted by both proponents and critics of the methods of colonialism. 1 ‘The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending further than it ever did under the Great Moguls,’ wrote Karl Marx in 1853, ‘was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.’ The fruits of science, that is, could achieve by peaceful means what had previously only been possible through violence. Elites within colonized nations, while rejecting the notion that science was imported from the West, often shared such sentiments about science’s positive and transformative powers, speaking a ‘language of modernity’ that*however uneasily*allied them with imperialist officials. 2 Decolonization movements, however, quickly began to call into question any vision of science as a positive enterprise that merely accompanied*and did not aid or support*a rapacious colonialism. In 1959, Frantz Fanon’s essay on ‘Medicine and Colonialism’ made clear to French audiences that the complicity of doctors with state-sanctioned barbarism was not limited to the National Socialist atrocities punished in the Nuremberg trials a dozen years earlier. Medical officials and psychologists played an integral role in the oppressive and interrogative practices of ‘a dying colonialism.’ 3 Soon thereafter, Phillip Curtin’s works on European ‘images’ of Africa described the medical breakthroughs, particularly with regard to quinine prophylaxis, that had made possible the wide-spread colonisation of the continent’s interior. 4 Medicine, in Daniel Headrick’s later terminology, was one of the ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/09/040373� 16# 2009 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

Crisis and the construction of modern theoretical physics

This paper takes up the concept of ‘crisis’ at both historical and historiographical levels. It proceeds through two examples of periods that have been described by historians of physics using a language of crisis. The first examines an incipient German theoretical-physics community around 1900 and the debates that concerned the so-called ‘failure’ of the mechanical world view. It is argued, largely on the basis of what is now an extensive body of secondary literature, that there is little evidence for a widespread crisis in this period. Abandoning the term as both description and explanation, one comes to the far more intriguing suggestion that the conflict over foundations was not evidence of a divisive dissonance but rather of collective construction. What has been termed crisis was, in fact, the practice of theoretical physics in the fin de siecle . The second example is the period either side of the advent of quantum mechanics around 1925. Different subgroups within the theoretical-physics community viewed the state of the field in dramatically different ways. Those, such as members of the Sommerfeld school in Munich, who saw the task of the physicist as lying in the solution of particular problems, neither saw a crisis nor acknowledged its resolution. On the other hand those, such as several researchers associated with Niels Bohrs institute in Copenhagen, who focused on the creation and adaptation of new principles, openly advocated a crisis even before decisive anomalies arose. They then sought to conceptualize the development of quantum mechanics in terms of crises and the revolutions that followed. Thomas Kuhns language of crisis, revolution and anomaly, it is concluded, arises from his focus on only one set of theoretical physicists. A closer look at intra-communal differences opens a new vista onto what he termed ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science.

Materialism, Slavery, and The History of Jamaica

This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long’s polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on “race science” with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between “salt-water” and “creole” Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long’s polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.