An 'anthropathology' of the 'American Negro': anthropology, genetics, and the new racial science, 1940-1952.

Abstract

This essay documents how, in the 1940s and early 1950s, one scientifically discredited racialist assumption, namely the notion that 'hybridity', embodied by the 'American Negro', and linked to degeneration and disease, was re-authorized, again by science, through the discursive fusion of anthropology, medicine and genetics in the context of a particular disease--sickle cell anaemia. More specifically, I am concerned with the construction of what came to be called an 'anthropathology' of the 'American Negro', the discourse networks that situated it, its conditions of possibility and its consequences.