Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

How do race and nature work as terrains of power? From eighteenth-century claims that climate determined character to twentieth-century medical debates about the racial dimensions of genetic disease, concepts of race and nature are integrally connected, woven into notions of body, landscape, and nation. Yet rarely are these complex entanglements explored in relation to the contemporary cultural politics of difference. This volume takes up that challenge. Distinguished contributors chart the traffic between race and nature across sites including rainforests, colonies, and courtrooms. Synthesizing a number of fields - anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory - this collection analyses diverse historical, cultural, and spatial locations. Contributors draw on thinkers such as Fanon, Foucault and Gramsci to investigate themes ranging from exclusionary notions of whiteness and wilderness in North America to linguistic purity in Germany. Others focus on the racialised violence of imperial rule and evolutionary science, and the biopolitics of race and class in the Guatemalan civil war. Some contributors examine how race and nature are fused in biogenetic discourse - in the emergence of 'racial diseases' such as sickle cell anemia; in a case of mistaken in vitro fertilization in which a white couple gave birth to a black child; and, even in the world of North American dog breeding. Several essays tackle the politics of representation surrounding environmental justice movements, transnational sex tourism, and indigenous struggles for land and resource rights in Indonesia and Brazil. The contributors to this book include: Bruce Braun; Giovanna Di Chiro; Paul Gilroy; Steven Gregory; Donna Haraway; Jake Kosek; Tania Murray Li; Uli Linke; Zine Magubane; Donald S. Moore; Diane Nelson; Anand Pandian; Alcida Rita Ramos; Keith Wailoo; and, Robyn Wiegman.