Book review of 'Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940'

Is race a dirty word? Since the end of the Second World War it has been denounced, denied and euphemised. It has become, as Bronwen Douglas puts it, ‘all but unsayable’ in most academic discourses. And yet race has also continued to live a healthy existence within popular discourse. It has a powerful, if subverted, meaning within indigenous lexicons. And in the last decade there has been, as Douglas notes, a renewed scholarly interest in the history of the ‘pernicious consequences’ of racialist thought.

Foreign Bodies makes an important contribution to this more recent field of scholarly inquiry. It is, Chris Ballard explains, ‘the first attempt to assemble the writings of a group of scholars with a common interest in the history of racial thought in Oceania’. This scholarly group, made up Chris Ballard, Bronwen Douglas, Paul Turnbull, Stephanie Anderson, Helen Gardner, Christine Weir and Vicki Lucker, first began to work together on this project nearly a decade ago.