Mixed Race Studies

Race and Medicine in America (AMST 256 – 01)

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut
Fall 2016

Megan H. Glick, Assistant Professor of American Studies

This course will trace ideas of race in American medical science and its cultural contexts, from the late 19th century to the present. We will explore how configurations of racial difference have changed over time and how medical knowledge about the body has both influenced, and helped to shape, social, political, and popular cultural forces. We will interrogate the idea of medical knowledge as a “naturalizing” discourse that produces racial classifications as essential, and biologically based.

We will treat medical sources as primary documents, imagining them as but one interpretation of the meaning of racial difference, alongside alternate sources that will include political tracts, advertisements, photographs, newspaper articles, and so on.

Key concepts explored will include slavery’s medical legacy, theories of racial hierarchy and evolution, the eugenics movement, “race-specific” medications and diseases, public health politics and movements, genetics and modern “roots” projects, immigration and new technologies of identification, and intersections of race and disability.

For more information, click here.

Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the “Almost Human”

Social Text
Volume 30, Number 3 112
pages 97-121
DOI: 10.1215/01642472-1597350

Megan H. Glick, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies
Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

From the moment Charles Darwin proposed Africa as the site of human origins, scientists and the lay public alike labored to reconcile contemporary racial hierarchies with the possibility of a universal African birthplace. Previous historical treatments of this phenomenon have focused on the search for the “missing link” in Asia and Europe, an investigation that, if successful, would have effectively established a separate ancestry for the white races. This essay identifies a new component of this history: the racialization of higher-order primates within the nascent discipline of primatology and within US popular culture between the 1910s and 1930s. Departing from Donna Haraway’s originary work on the field, this essay argues that primatology was in fact built upon preexisting scientific racial ideologies, such that the animals themselves became parsed according to racial categorizations. In particular, the anthropomorphization and “whitening” of the chimpanzee on the one hand, and the bestialization and “blackening” of the gorilla on the other, provided a forum for ideas about biological essentialism, evolutionary capabilities, and racial difference. This alternative history is revealed through an examination of the photographic archives and written work of longtime eugenicist and founding primatologist Robert Mearns Yerkes, and through a contextualization of these documents within contemporary scientific and popular cultures. By tracing the lineage of American primatology to the closing arc of eugenic science, this essay seeks to enrich and reimagine the relationship between practices of racialization and speciation within the larger histories of evolutionary thought and racial formation.

Read or purchase the article here.