Name: Science and Empire in the Nineteenth Century
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Science and Empire in the Nineteenth Century

A Journey of Imperial Conquest and Scientific Progress

Edited By: Catherine Delmas, Christine Vandamme

£39.99

This book explores how sciences like anthropology and ethnography became tools of empire. It analyzes the link between knowledge and power, revealing the tension between scientific objectivity and imperialist propaganda in the British and American empires.

The issue at stake in this volume is the role of science as a way to fulfil a quest for knowledge, a tool in the…

The issue at stake in this volume is the role of science as a way to fulfil a quest for knowledge, a tool in the exploration of foreign lands, a central paradigm in the discourse on and representations of Otherness. The interweaving of scientific and ideological discourses is not limited to the geopolitical frame of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but extends to the rise of the American empire as well. The fields of research tackled are human and social sciences (anthropology, ethnography, cartography, phrenology), which thrived during the period of imperial expansion, racial theories couched in pseudo-scientific discourse, natural sciences, as they are presented in specialised or popularised works, in the press, in travel narratives—at the crossroads of science and literature—in essays, but also in literary texts.

Contributors examine such issues as the plurality of scientific discourses, their historicity, the alienating dangers of reduction, fragmentation and reification of the Other, the interaction between scientific discourse and literary discourse, the way certain texts use scientific discourse to serve their imperialist views or, conversely, deconstruct and question them. Such approaches allow for the analysis of the link between knowledge and power as well as of the paradox of a scientific discourse which claims to seek the truth while at the same time both masking and revealing the political and economic stakes of Anglo-saxon imperialism. The analysis of various types of discourse and/or representation highlights the tension between science and ideology, between scientific “objectivity” and propaganda, and stresses the limits of an imperialist epistemology which has sometimes been questioned in more ambiguous or subversive texts.

Catherine Delmas is Professor of British Literature at Stendhal University-Grenoble 3, France. Her PhD and field of research are about Western modes of representation of the Orient in 19th and 20th century fiction and travelbooks, as well as orientalist and (anti-)imperialist discourse in the colonial and postcolonial era. She has published several papers on Joseph Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee in various periodicals and collective works. She is the author of Ecritures du désert : voyageurs et romanciers anglophones XIXè XXè siècles (Writing the Desert from Burton to Ondaatje; Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2005), and co-edited History-Stories of India with Professor Chitra Krishnan (Delhi: Macmillan India, 2008).

Christine Vandamme is Senior Lecturer at Stendhal University-Grenoble 3, where she teaches British Literature in the pre-modernist and modernist periods as well as postcolonial literature, notably that of Australia. She has published extensively on the representation of imperial space and its narratological as well as ideological and ethical implications, in Conrad’s works but also in Patrick White’s and David Malouf’s fiction.

Donna Spalding Andréolle is Professor of American Studies at Stendhal University-Grenoble 3, where she teaches American history courses as well as seminars on popular culture. Her research centers on “low-brow” cultural objects as sites of social commentary as well as on representations of scientific progress in science fiction novels and Hollywood productions since the mid-twentieth century. Some of her most recent publications include the article in this book; “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Spaces of Entrapment in Big Love”; and “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? A Case Study of Some Radical Feminist Discourse in the 1970s.” She is currently preparing a collection of articles with Véronique Molinari entitled Women in the Sciences: 17th Century to Present.