Historical Approaches to Race and Colonialism in Astronomy Reading List

The following materials were compiled by Rebecca Charbonneau, CfA Historian-in-Residence
 

This is designed to be a brief introductory collection of resources that can act as valuable tools in approaching the subjects of race and colonialism in astronomy from a historical perspective. 

This is deliberately not a “decolonising” list, which is a recently popular trend in academia. My justification for not creating a “Decolonizing Astronomy” reading list is best put by K. Wayne Yang and Eve Tuck in their article, “Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor”: 

Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor.” 

Rather than decolonize, this list attempts to provide tools and empirical facts to inform our future conversations and actions on race and colonialism within the Observatory and University.  Please note the content of some of these readings can be disturbing.  

Essential Reading 

  • Alexander, Michelle, “The Rebirth of Caste” in The New Jim Crow (2010).
    • Rather than approaching racism as something natural and with a long and inexplicable history, Alexander’s chapter charts a specific and deliberate creation of a racial caste system in American, with roots in class and economics. 
  • Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda; Walkowicz, Lucianne M.; Tuttle, Sarah; Nord, Brian; Neilson, Hilding R., “Reframing astronomical research through an anticolonial lens -- for TMT and beyond”, White Paper submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. 
  • Gould, Stephen Jay, “Introduction” in The Mismeasure of Man (1996)
    • Gould’s book is a response to The Bell Curve (1994), a book which attained notoriety for justifying a biologically determinist approach to studies of intelligence and race/gender. The Mismeasure of Man pushes back against the idea of “objective” scientific studies of race and intelligence. 
  • Swanner, Leandra, “Mountains of Controversy: Narrative and the Making of Contested Landscapes in Postwar American Astronomy” PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2013.
    • Link: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/11156816 
    • This is a dissertation from a historian who conducted her PhD research at Harvard’s Department of History of Science. It is, to my knowledge, one of the most comprehensive historical analyses of conflict with telescope siting. It takes a compassionate perspective, highlighting the voices of astronomers, indigenous peoples, and environmental activists, and demonstrates how there is no simple or monolithic solution to the problems that arise from siting telescopes on settled land.

Methodological Challenges

  • Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
  • “Stereothreat”, RadioLab
    • Link: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/stereothreat 
    • This is a podcast from the radio show “RadioLab”. This episode explains the discipline of  psychology’s approach to combating the effects of racism on individuals, but also highlights an intra-disciplinary problem with this kind of research, demonstrating that even a scientific-technical approach to these problems can be rife with bias and error. 
  • Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (1966).
    • Minority Studies often fall into the trap of focusing on the identities of people facing oppression, not the oppressors themselves (for example, “Women’s Studies” places an emphasis on women, and not men). Noel Ignatiev’s famous book How the Irish Became White (1966) turns the mirror around to examine how the category of “whiteness” works-- how it has changed to include and exclude various groups over time and why other oppressed groups have fought to “become” white. Ignatiev’s book first introduced the fundamental concept of white privilege and forces us to question whether or not racial categories, which, as Michelle Alexander demonstrates, are a relatively new phenomenon rising out of the 18th and 19th centuries, are part of what keeps racism alive to begin with.

Early American History

  • Stannard, David, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1992)
    • Stannard’s book attempts to humanize indigenous peoples and their histories in a way many of us have never been exposed to. He recognises that most American exposure to these histories either centers on myths (Thanksgiving), hegemonic and discriminatory interpretations of indigenous cultures (cannibalism, human sacrifice, etc), or an over-emphasis on quantitative approaches to colonial genocide (speaking about the numbers of people killed by plague, for instance, rather than centering the violence enflicted by European settlers). Stannard’s book gives an in-depth account of many different indigenous cultures and individual stories drawn from primary sources accounts of conquistadors, British military leaders, and other settlers. Please note this book can be descriptive and frank about deeply horrific subjects, making it often uncomfortable and difficult to read. 
  • Calluccie, Shakeah, “How contributions from Christopher Columbus’ Sephardic astronomer illustrate complex legacies of exploration and conquest”, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington. 
  • “The 1619 Project”, The New York Times
    • Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html 
    • This project was developed by the NYT with the aim of reframing US history “by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [the United States'] national narrative”. The project creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was awarded a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for this work.

Black and Indigenous Perspectives

  • “A Native Hawaiian-led summary of the current impact of constructing the Thirty Meter Telescope on Maunakea” 
  • Kuwada, Bryan Kamaoli “We Live in the Future, Come Join Us”, Ke Kaupo Hehi Ale
  • Tallbear, Kim, “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 21(2-3), 2015: 230-235
    • What do protestors mean when they say a mountain is “alive” and being desecrated/killed? Some indigenous ontologies (means of understanding the world and ways of being) are radically different from hegemonic ones. Tallbear assesses some of these interpretations through a queer-theory analysis of what it is to be human and non-human. Please note this particular reading is quite academic theory dense, and so may be of most interest to those familiar with the jargon of that field. 
  • Marchand, Michael E., “The River of Life: Sustainable Practices of Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples”, Ph.D Dissertation (University of Washington, 2013)
Illustration by Nadieh Bremer showing glowing stars against a dark blue background. The stars are connected with thin lines representing asterism boundaries.

Figures in the Sky detail, Nadieh Bremer