Tiago Saraiva, Drexel University, will lead a discussion on a chapter in his upcoming book: Decaying Oranges and the Reconstruction of American Democracy. You can find the abstract below and we will post the chapter here on the group page before the meeting at 1pm Eastern on Tuesday the 28th of November.
(Chapter two of The Orchard in the Ruins: Cloning and Racial Capitalism in America and the Global South)
This chapter explores agricultural surveys as experiments in scientific democracy in the United States during the early twentieth century. Surveys were designed to sustain communities of fruit growers celebrated across the country as exemplars of reconstructed democratic life after the Great Depression of the 1890s. Scientists like Liberty Hyde Baily and G. Harold Powell did not take Americans as objects of social scientific inquiry to be uplifted by progressive policies. Instead, working with the growers they surveyed, Powell and Bailey made them part of the process of scientific truth making; they made them into scientific democrats. The study undertaken here of the Southern California citrus cooperative demonstrates that science produced more than American citizens well adapted to reconstructed capitalism; It produced white scientific democrats and workers of color, the constitutive elements of a new form of racial capitalism.
You can find a copy of the chapter, please do not quote or circulate it.
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