Call for Papers
Special issue proposal for Dix-Neuf
During the nineteenth century, discussions of societies and cultures began to revolve around the newly emerged idea of ‘race’ and this interdisciplinary special issue of Dix-Neuf will analyse how French and European ideas of ‘science’, ‘race’, and ‘heritage’ were constructed in its wake. It was during this period that the field of philology’s distinctions between language families were instrumentalised to bolster a racist narrative that divided the Orient into two parts: a positive ‘Indo-European’ or ‘Aryan’ Orient, and a negative ‘Semitic’ Orient. This served to group Ancient India and Persia along with Ancient Greece as Europe’s ‘noble’ ancestors. Egypt, Carthage, Assyria, and Jewish people however were defined as ‘inferior’. French writers, artists and composers sought to engage with this recently rediscovered ‘Aryan’ heritage, i.e. ancient philosophy, music, and religions. This highlights a tension integral to France’s redefinition of its cultural heritage, for while it shows a new open-ness to a world beyond Ancient Greece, it is often an act of appropriation which serves to reinforce notions of Indo-European superiority, and thus rampant Anti-Semitism. Alongside this repositioning of Europe’s relationship to the ancient Orient in academic discourse, the period saw French and Belgian colonialism in Africa and Asia being justified on the basis of scientific theories of race, most famously with Jules Ferry’s 1885 declaration that ‘les races supérieures ont un droit vis-à-vis des races inférieures’, while, for instance, Belgium’s adoption of German policies based on race ‘science’ and eugenics in its occupied territories in Sub-Saharan Africa after World War I would play an important role for the continuing violence in the region, including the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
‘Science and Culture after the Advent of Race’ is a special issue that seeks to explore the extent to which ‘scientific’ narratives of heritage in the Francosphère are inextricably bound with experiences of imperialism, exceptionalism, and racism throughout the long nineteenth century. Through focus on a range of Francophone contexts, textualities and sources, this special issue hopes to address questions such as: How did the French and the Belgian empires instrumentalise science? What role did cultural representation play for the development of ‘pseudosciences’ and vice versa? Is ‘scientific imperialism’ a useful term across different contexts? In what way(s) did exchanges between Western and non-Western knowledge function as contact zones? How can scholarship engage with these questions without reproducing violence? How do we foreground dissenting and resisting voices that have traditionally been excluded from the archive?
In order to address these questions, we invite articles from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and particularly encourage submissions from postgraduate and early-career academics.
The following is an indicative, but by no means exhaustive, selection of the kinds of issues we would like to address:
- Science and racism
- Scientific imperialism/racism
- The ‘science’ of philology
- Postcolonial legacies
- Control and resistance
- Uncovering ‘hidden’ voices
- Archives and collections
- Scientific encounters and knowledge exchange
- Race ‘science’ and medicine
- Race ‘science’ and decolonial activism
- Race ‘science’ and the Francosphère
- Race and historiography
- Sex and gender
- Class and access/restriction
- Literary, visual, and musical representations
- Ethnography and travel writing
- Authority and authorship
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words detailing your topic, along with a very brief bio, to scienceculture2022@gmail.com by Monday, 13 September 2021 (full articles due in January 2022).
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