Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Remnants of Race Science
Part I: Confronting Racism in the Southern Hemisphere,
1890–1951
1. Substituting Race: Arthur Ramos, Bahia, and the “Nina Rodrigues
School”
2. Relocating Race Science After World War II: Situating the 1950
UNESCO Statement on Race in the Southern Hemisphere
3. Vikings of the Sunrise: Alfred Metraux, Te Rangi Hīroa, and
Polynesian Racial Resilience
Part II: Race in the Tropics and Highlands and the Quest for
Economic Development, 1945–1962
4. A Tropical Laboratory: Race, Evolution, and the Demise of
UNESCO’s Hylean Amazon Project
5. “Peasants Without Land”: Race and Indigeneity in the ILO’s
Puno-Tambopata Project
Part III: Engineering Racial Harmony and Decolonization,
1952–1961
6. A Brazilian Racial Dilemma: Modernization and UNESCO’s Race
Relations Studies in Brazil
7. A White World Perspective and the Collapse of Global Race
Relations Inquiry
Conclusion: “Racism Continues to Haunt the World”
Notes
Index
Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an assistant professor in the History and Sociology of Science Department and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Brilliantly and provocatively, The Remnants of Race Science reveals
that the so-called decline of racial thought in human biology was
really just a substitution of other more flexible ideas of human
difference—mostly from the Global South—for the rigid racist
typologies of the Global North. This more inclusive refiguring of
racial difference would make possible the economic ‘development’ of
people once excluded from modernity—which meant in practice their
neocolonial incorporation into the netherworlds of global
capitalism. In this paradigm-shifting book, Gil-Riaño thus offers
us a new ‘southern’ vocabulary to talk about racism and
antiracism.
*Warwick Anderson, author of Colonial Pathologies: American
Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines*
Starting with scientific research from the Southern Hemisphere,
this important book overturns the common story of antiracist
science as simplistically rooted in rejecting fixed biological
kinds. Drawing from a transnational archive, Gil-Riaño shows how
so-called anti-racist science was caught up in projects of
improvement that rested on a multitude of other racisms.
*M. Murphy, author of The Economization of Life*
Latin Americanists have long maintained that race and biology are
shaped by culture, social organization, and economic conditions. In
this deeply researched study, Gil-Riaño shows how Latin American
racial ideas shaped the post–World War II human sciences and UNESCO
projects. The human sciences did not renounce racial explanation—as
so many believe—but folded them into global ideas about economic
development.
*Karin Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in
Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950*
Offers useful historical context to current debates about how to
successfully build solidarity in science and society.
*Science*
An important and timely contribution to the social sciences that
any scholar interested in these fields, their history, or
antiracism ought to seek out.
*Journal of Anthropological Research*
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