Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial
This special issue of Postcolonial Studies is divided into two parts. In the first, three leading scholars of postcolonial science studies*a philosopher, an anthropologist, and an historian (although each wears several hats)*have been asked to contribute short, programmatic essays on a theme of their choosing, focusing less on providing a ‘state of the field’ and more on directions for future research and analysis. In the second part, three historians have offered papers on topics of particular current interest: the history of cartography and colonialism; botany and empire; and the history of method outside Europe. In the essay below, I offer an overview of secondary scholarship on, in turn, colonialism and science, and postcolonial technoscience, before turning to a discussion of the articles making up the issue. The idea that science and technology were among the gifts that Western imperial powers brought to their colonies was an integral part of the discourse of the ‘civilizing mission,’ one vaunted by both proponents and critics of the methods of colonialism. 1 ‘The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending further than it ever did under the Great Moguls,’ wrote Karl Marx in 1853, ‘was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.’ The fruits of science, that is, could achieve by peaceful means what had previously only been possible through violence. Elites within colonized nations, while rejecting the notion that science was imported from the West, often shared such sentiments about science’s positive and transformative powers, speaking a ‘language of modernity’ that*however uneasily*allied them with imperialist officials. 2 Decolonization movements, however, quickly began to call into question any vision of science as a positive enterprise that merely accompanied*and did not aid or support*a rapacious colonialism. In 1959, Frantz Fanon’s essay on ‘Medicine and Colonialism’ made clear to French audiences that the complicity of doctors with state-sanctioned barbarism was not limited to the National Socialist atrocities punished in the Nuremberg trials a dozen years earlier. Medical officials and psychologists played an integral role in the oppressive and interrogative practices of ‘a dying colonialism.’ 3 Soon thereafter, Phillip Curtin’s works on European ‘images’ of Africa described the medical breakthroughs, particularly with regard to quinine prophylaxis, that had made possible the wide-spread colonisation of the continent’s interior. 4 Medicine, in Daniel Headrick’s later terminology, was one of the ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/09/040373� 16# 2009 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies