“Bodies and Nature in the Black Atlantic”

Pablo Gomez (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

In my remarks, I will reflect on the possibilities offered by a materialist approach to broaden our understanding of the development of widely adopted and robust intellectual models about bodies and nature in the early modern Black Atlantic. In existent histories of the early modern world, African Atlantic spaces do not appear as places for the production of “real” knowledge about nature. As an answer to existent historiographical limitations, I discuss evidence related to the emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth century of models for thinking about experiential matters, fungibility, risk, and quantification of human bodies that became widely adopted in the Atlantic, and which first appeared in slave trading circuits and African diasporic spaces. Through unsuspected linkages, this evidence challenges the homogeneity of Western historicism and a metaphysics born out of historical processes based on the notion of a universalizing nature, and a dualist ontology that separates nature and culture.

“Parasciences”

Projit Mukharji (University of Pennsylvania)

History of Science, even as it has become increasingly global, continues to disregard many non-western forms of systematized knowledge from its ambit. Thus global histories of science frequently come to mean simply western sciences outside the west. While historians of medicine have gradually come to at least partially accept the histories of Ayurveda, Unani and Traditional Chinese Medicine as part of the field, the historians of non-medical sciences remain much less willing to allow non-western sciences and their alternative rationalities into their midst. I want to interrogate the politics of this exclusion and urge a greater engagement with such parasciences.

“Who Should Speak for Jowar (Sorghum)?”

Prakash Kumar (Penn State University)

My contribution will problematize the position of experts and subalterns around agro-ecological practices from 1950s India. The tension was instantiated during a visit by the University of Illinois agronomist, Frank Shuman, who was also a Point Four expert stationed at the Allahabad Agricultural Institute to an Indian villager’s farm. On seeing sorghum planted too closely, Shuman tried to make a case for wider spacing, saying, that “if ten children were given a small bowl of rice containing only enough for two children, all would go hungry.” But the tenant’s mother-in-law dismissed the suggestion, retorting, and calling him a fool. I will use this episode as an entry point to consider conceivable planes of engagement and/or disengagement between elite and subaltern visions of agro-ecological practices.

“Islam, Science and History in the Making of a Postcolony”

Ahmed Ragab (Harvard University)

I pose two interlocking questions. First I look at the making of Islam as an ethno-religious identity through scientific-historical narratives. I ask how narratives of Golden Ages/Decline in the history of Islamic sciences contribute to the production of Islam as a global identity connected to a special past, and the role these narratives played in the making of colonial narratives that located Islam within a Eurocentric archive. Second, looking comparatively and conjointly at Islam and Africa, and Islam-in-Africa, I ask about the production of identity within the historiography of science. How the Muslim and the African construct/ed colonial and postcolonial identities both at home and in the diaspora through the articulation of worth as a dependent of scientific discourse. Here, I ask about postcolonial science as practice and identity and about the tools needed to rethink the positionality of the non-European in the telling and articulation of science and its histories.

“What is Colonial Science?”

Minakshi Menon (Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge and Humboldt University)

In this presentation, I examine how historians of science have understood European colonialism and colonial science over the last couple of decades. Some historians of science, for instance, have defined colonial science as scientific activity carried out in Europe on “colonial resources”, as well as in Europe’s trading and territorial empires. Such a definition implies that “colonial science” is done apart from the social and economic relations produced by European colonization. The occlusion, implicit in such definitions, of the life ways and knowledge forms of colonized peoples, as well as the violence that often accompanied colonial knowledge-making, I argue, results from the Eurocentrism, which is a constitutive part of our discipline. Moving beyond such Eurocentrism requires close engagement with the histories and cultures of non-Europeans, with “primary sources” in non-European languages, and, as well, an ability to read against the grain of records in European colonial archives.