Date
Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014,) Part II, "Geneaologies of Variation: the Case of Morning Glory Flowers" (pp. 95-158.) Continuing discussion of questions raised about Part I:
- We talked quite a bit about "Singing the Morning Glory Blues," the utopian "fictional science" narrative in Chapter 3. It will be interesting to compare the shiningly resolved Saraswati Institute to the collaborative scientific experiment that Subramaniam reports on in Part II.
- Many parallels struck us between Subramaniam and Tsing: the careful use of storytelling as method, multispecies/ naturecultural narratives, ghosts and hauntings, and the search for optimism amidst destruction.
- Subramaniam, like Tsing, is attached to optimism. We wonder about how optimism works here. Is this "feminist reconstructive project" plausible (and does it need to be?)
- Given that even seemingly hopeful, positive visions of diversity and variation (like Dobzhansky's, or George Ball's in Part II) are caught up in the same eugenic script, where are the spaces for reconstruction?
- Ghosts of bloody and violent victims of eugenics, haunting a field of morning glories. These ghosts recall Tsing's hauntings, and yet they are very different. Does Tsing's materialism make the difference?
- Subramaniam describes forms of recursion on multiple scales: in the history of evolutionary biology, in the transit of 'eugenic scripts' to and from science and politics, in the design of biological experiments (shaped by and reinforcing these same scripts,) and in her biography as a feminist scientist and scholar. The same scripts haunt each of these stories. What about scale? Where does the recursive loop start and stop?