Toboggan Lodge, Cornell University
Free and open to the public
SUMAN SETH (Associate Professor, Science and Technology Studies,
Cornell University)
Suggested reading:
Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial
In the introduction to Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty examines two “concepts integral to the idea of modernity”: historicism and “the very idea of the political.” Oddly missing from this list of forms of knowledge that have been co-constituted with modernity is science and its concomitant forms of reason. Indeed, Chakrabarty’s text compounds this absence by opening with a quotation from Gadamer, which excludes the natural sciences from the process of European provincialization that had already begun with the events of 1914. Using a review of literature on science, colonialism, and postcolonialism recently published in Postcolonial Studies as a stepping-off point, my aim here is to open an interdisciplinary dialogue that can begin to unpack the roles of the sciences in the manufacture and maintenance of modernity, as well as the significance of colonial practices in the construction of seemingly universalist science.
Suman Seth is Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is the author ofCrafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT, 2010) and the editor of a special issue ofPostcolonial Studies on “Science, Colonialism, Postcoloniality.” He is currently at work on a new project, entitled “Modeling Modernity: Science and Colonialism in German Qingdao, 1897-1914.”
