The Remnants of Race Science

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.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Remnants of Race SciencePart I: Confronting Racism in the Southern Hemisphere, 1890–19511. 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 Hemisphere3. Vikings of the Sunrise: Alfred Metraux, Te Rangi Hīroa, and Polynesian Racial ResiliencePart II: Race in the Tropics and Highlands and the Quest for Economic Development, 1945–19624. A Tropical Laboratory: Race, Evolution, and the Demise of UNESCO’s Hylean Amazon Project5. “Peasants Without Land”: Race and Indigeneity in the ILO’s Puno-Tambopata ProjectPart III: Engineering Racial Harmony and Decolonization, 1952–19616. A Brazilian Racial Dilemma: Modernization and UNESCO’s Race Relations Studies in Brazil7. A White World Perspective and the Collapse of Global Race Relations InquiryConclusion: “Racism Continues to Haunt the World”NotesIndex

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.