The Remnants of Race Science

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 neo-colonial incorporation into the nether regions 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 <i>Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity</i> 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 <i>The Economization of Life</i> Latin Americans 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 Two 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 <i>The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950</i>