Introduction

Co-authored as a member of the Triangle Collective

The focus of this handbook is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even as both the editors and the contributors resist the popular tendency to view earlier scientific practices through an arguably twentieth-century lens of hierarchy and fixity. While phrenology, taxonomy, eugenics, and the general depiction of racially based traits as unyielding markers of inferiority or superiority are all certainly woeful narratives that plagued science in the nineteenth century, the actual science that came to fruition in this period proved quite the opposite: that all organic processes are, in fact, in constant flux, transformign and tranformative, adapting, changing, mobile, and most importantly, that human beings are not biologically separable by any kind of discrete racial markers. To this end, we approach science and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.