Ashley Elizabeth Kerr. Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860–1910). 240 pp. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020. $34.95 (paper); ISBN 9780826522726.

Isis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-848
Author(s):  
Ricardo Roque
Author(s):  
Ruha Benjamin

In this response to Terence Keel and John Hartigan’s debate over the social construction of race, I aim to push the discussion beyond the terrain of epistemology and ideology to examine the contested value of racial science in a broader political economy. I build upon Keel’s concern that even science motivated by progressive aims may reproduce racist thinking and Hartigan’s proposition that a critique of racial science cannot rest on the beliefs and intentions of scientists. In examining the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, I propose that analysts should attend to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the material-semiotic benefits of such forecasts). Throughout, I draw upon the idiom of speculation—as a narrative, predictive, and financial practice—to explain how the fiction of race is made factual, again and again. 


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey G. Deichert ◽  
Kory D. Linton ◽  
Kurt A. Terrani ◽  
Aaron P. Selby ◽  
Yonathan Reches

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (18) ◽  
pp. 126-149
Author(s):  
Kasper Braskén

This article focuses on the ways in which anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and anti-fascism were intertwined within the Third Period, and the extent to which these ideals were already being drawn together in the preceding era of the United Front. Drawing heavily on the articles and imagery of Willi Münzenberg's Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, the piece demonstrates the ways in which communist anti-fascist campaigning around the world facilitated the development of sophisticated anti-racist arguments which aimed at undermining the ideological basis of fascist movements and colonial rulers alike. It evidences the extent to which communists felt that countering the pseudoscience of race could play an important role in numerous facets of their campaigning. Furthermore, it highlights the attempts by activists and writers to develop a conception of anti-fascism and anti-colonialism as mutually-reinforcing strategies which could be deployed in tandem, and the ways that this ideological interweaving was drawn into campaigns both against the Nazis' use of racial science to justify anti-Semitic policy, and fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia based on Social Darwinist precepts.


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