ENGLISH MUD: TOWARDS A CRITICAL CULTURAL STUDIES OF COLONIAL SCIENCE

Abstract

In order to analyse colonial science as a form of culture, we must tell the multiple, tangled narratives of race, class, gender, nation and scientific progress together. The construction of ideas of nature in British colonies, for instance, intersects with the construction of ‘primitives’, the privatization of land, the scientific management of forests, their products and their inhabitants, and the political economy of global exploration. Excavating archival records of Ootacamund, a British hill station in South India, I read popular narratives of mud, flowers, forests, tribals, plantations, labour, disease and progress. These interlocking narratives must be read together if we are to understand the cultural construction of colonial science as part of a larger system in which a global political economy and a scientific epistemology were being simultaneously legitimated.

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