Sadiah Qureshi: Healing histories of division, racialization, and extinction (Ep435)

Written By kamea chayne
“Conservation is obsessed with these singular ways of recognizing species, but almost completely decontextualized from their environments.”
— Sadiah Qureshi

In this episode, Sadiah Qureshi invites us to unravel histories of science, race, and empire to understand the social dynamics that we have inherited in the present. How do we begin to heal from constructs of division and racialization that have led to real-life consequences and systemic injustices for so many?

Join us as we discuss how historical contexts influence how knowledge is shaped, the presumptions underlying “conservation” and “de-extinction” projects to interrogate, and more.

We invite you to…

 

About our guests:

Professor Sadiah Qureshi is a historian of science, race, and empire. She is currently holds a Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Her book Vanished, on histories of extinction, will be out with Penguin Random House in 2025.

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episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Sadiah Qureshi: You may well have heard the phrase ‘human zoos’, which gives a sense of people being put on show and exhibited and so on. But I prefer the term “display peoples” for all sorts of reasons which we'll come back to. I'm assuming that phrase might be familiar to a lot of people and ring some bells. My first book was all about how foreign people, whether from Africa, Australia, India, and so on, often colonized people, were brought to Britain and then put on show in museums, galleries, theatres, parks, zoos and in world fairs.

Before I wrote my book, people didn't know about these kinds of shows, but they tended to think about them as a kind of imperial display for promoting various forms of nationalism or imperial politics and so on and as spectacle and entertainment. But people often dismiss them as pure spectacle, and especially as a sort of trained historian of science, I was quite suspicious of this and I started looking into how and why there was interest in these shows, how and why anthropologists use those shows and why they had this lasting legacy. 

In doing that, I traced how a lot of anthropologists and people interested in race in this period used those shows as a form of research.

People tend to think that if something is a spectacle, that it cannot be scientifically significant, but that's a very modern division.

And that was not the case in this period. So what you have is all kinds of shows where people perform regularly to audiences and have private appointments with anthropologists, or anthropologists will be involved in curating the shows at world fairs and so on. They’re often doing important forms of research. And for me, what was interesting is that the shows existed before things like freak shows and things like commercial fairs and stuff like that. So there's a long tradition of exhibiting people as performers of various kinds. 

The thing that I thought was important is that there was a huge shift in the mid-19th century, where these shows went from being relatively small (maybe one performer or a very small group) to being incorporated into world fairs. So that by the end of the 19th century, you could go to a world fair, say in Chicago or London and see dozens, if not well over a hundred living performers, for instance.

There was this huge escalation in scale, but it also happened just as new ideas about race were emerging in the mid-19th century. I proposed that as anthropologists and ethnologists were debating the very nature of what racial difference was, they were using these shows and the availability of performers to do research that was very important for not just defining race, but figuring out who counted as human.

Kamea Chayne: And also just out of curiosity, the displayed people who were brought over, what was the dynamic like? Were they willingly performing and coming based on certain things or exchanges promised to them? Or were they coerced? What was the broader power dynamic around their presence in these exhibitions?

Sadiah Qureshi: In some ways, it's quite difficult to say because there's often not the records to know what performers thought. In the very early 19th century, there was a woman put on display called Sarah Baartman. She's put on display just a few years after the British slave trade was made illegal and abolished. Abolitionists believe she's being held captive and she's enslaved. This is in London and they bring a court case against her managers. And then a contract is produced supposedly between her and her manager. We have no idea of how legitimate that contract was, what she really understood about it and so on.

But after that, managers become very careful about trying to establish that their performers have consented in some form or other to these displays. By the end of the 19th century, performers got standardized contracts, so things like the Buffalo Bill Show and so on. Often you can find some record of consent or some formal record of an arrangement being made. But then we have the issue of whether that arrangement constitutes what we might call informed consent in this period. And of course, that's a very recent notion.

And then if we think about it in that way, we can ask all sorts of questions in terms of did people understood the commitments they were making. Did people have a sense of what being on the show would entail? And that's a much harder question to answer. Sometimes we can.

For instance, in the 1850s, there's a group of Zulus that are put on show and one day outside the London Gallery in which they're being shown, there's a sort of fracas. And the manager tries to get the performers to go inside and he pushes the leader of the group who's called a chief at this point. He retaliates and strikes the manager and basically, the manager calls the police and the performer is taken into custody. And then there is an extraordinary courtroom drama where the Zulu says, I retaliated because I was pushed and I shouldn't be treated that way.

Although I agreed to come and perform and so on, there were no conditions set with me to be outside of those shows. And so there you have this extraordinary moment where the Zulu is very clear, the performer, that had agreed, but he understood the limitations of that agreement very differently from his manager. And then there's also cases, for instance with the Buffalo Bill shows, they become such a large and recurrent track. Some people go into those shows having performed before.

They go back to performing on the show and also they might potentially know other people who've performed. There’s a very different kind of way that they are informed about what the shows will entail. And sometimes we do have cases occasionally of people who have performed that then go on to become managers and become performers. So it is very much a case-by-case basis, but there is also a shift over the 19th century in terms of what we can say about how well-informed people might have been and what the nature of those contracts were.

Kamea Chayne: This is just one of the reasons why learning history is so important because everything that we know of and everything that we're a part of today has very much been shaped by what's come before us. So nothing is neutral. And whatever we might consider as “norms” have also been socialized in many ways. I always find it clarifying to learn these deeper histories also across different aspects of society to better understand them.

In terms of the lasting cultural impacts of these human diversity exhibitions, you started talking about this convergence of science and spectacle, but what are some ways that we might still be able to feel the influences that these events had on science and knowledge production? Also, what do you mean when you reference the term “racialized knowledge”?

Sadiah Qureshi: 

For me, race is an idea that has to come into being. It's not a category that is inherent in us, as it were. 

There was a time, although it might be difficult to imagine when people did not talk about human differences or other differences in this way. They might have thought of many different forms of hierarchy, but not necessarily race. And so when I'm talking about racialization, it's trying to draw attention to the fact that there is a process by which this idea of race is constructed. And there's a process by which we are all racialized, just as we're all gendered as well.

And sometimes, you know, when you're walking around, that can be because you've absorbed centuries of historical assumptions. And then you look at somebody and say, they're that race. Even if you never say to somebody else, we make those kinds of calculations in our heads all the time. And we might make them about ourselves, saying I identified as this or the other.

But racialization is very much a way to remember that this is not an inherent category, but it has been constructed very deliberately over a considerable amount of time with a lot of effort to say some people are worth less.

It’s an important way of recognizing that race is not some predestined category that we have to use and that we have to understand as inherent within the way we want to organize the world if that makes sense.

Kamea Chayne: Whenever we remember that race is a social construct, it's of course also paramount to centre the fact that by this becoming a social construct, it's also very much solidified and materialized these concepts into very tangible realities and systemic injustices that are racialized.

So there's kind of this both-and of, it's not as simple as saying race doesn't exist because the concept of racialization has led to material conditions and injustices for people that are real and need to be addressed. And at the same time, how do we navigate this in terms of acknowledging that this is a very harmful concept?

At the same time to address those harms, we have to recognize the reality that this concept has become a reality if that makes sense. Because sometimes when we continue to name something, it reinforces that reality even more. I struggle with this both-and of how we continue to name these things without having the naming itself contribute to a further reinforcing of the concepts.

Sadiah Qureshi: I understand what you mean. I think one of the problems with this kind of discussion is that if you say race is a social construct, people often assume that means it's not real or that it doesn't have consequences in the way. And I think that's a weird way of assuming that any claim we must make must have some kind of material reality to it for it to function. And that's not true at all. It's an idea, and it's an incredibly powerful idea that people have spent centuries creating.

And I think that is the function of talking about this in historical terms to show all how race, the effort that has gone into making race into this idea that does have this powerful effect to the point where even people who are racialized and who suffered those harms might well use those terms, and might well make assumptions about race as a result. I think that it’s important to recognize that just because something has come into being or has been socially constructed, it doesn't mean that it's not real at all. And certainly, with race, I think we need to be better at thinking structurally. 

I think the other problem with an idea like race is it often comes down to people thinking about, well, how do I identify or how do I behave in the world so that I cannot be racist, for instance. But actually, racism is a kind of established pattern and structure within our lives.

I think one of the most important things we can do is learn to think structurally and learn to recognize how those structures affect our thinking, how we're embedded in them and just how hard it is to be aware of it in the way that we need to.

People who would consider themselves not racist or deeply committed to anti-racism will almost certainly still when they meet somebody, make a judgment about what kind of ethnicity they are. They might then think that's meaningless in terms of social organization, but they will still often make an assumption about, what ethnicity somebody is, whether it's based on complexion or looks and so on.

And that is embedded in the long history of creating this idea. For me, as a historian, writing about histories of race is about making people aware of all the ways that race has been embedded in our language, and our everyday lives so that we can reflect and we can be aware of what we're doing. Cause otherwise I think we completely and utterly underestimate how important it is and how powerful its effects still are.

Kamea Chayne: It's also very interesting for me to think about our relationship with language and indexing, like identification, naming, categorization, and even taxonomies in the more-than-human world which were initially intended as tools to just better understand the world to name things, and this reality that they have been weaponized as tools of power and control. 

So to connect these hierarchies of value in being alive, as you name them, to the more-than-human world, you share “Every time we commit resources to a particular species, we're usually making a value judgment about why that species should be preserved. It's very easy to convince people to try and save beautiful species or charismatic species, but it's much harder to convince them that insects matter or bacteria matter.

And it's those kinds of value judgments about conservation that people are making that need to be exposed” end quote. So to bring our conversation into the more-than-human world as well, what are some of the underlying threads here that you'd like to pull through and expand on?

Sadiah Qureshi: One of the reasons that I talk about ways-of-being instead of species is that it's a very good example of how there is this concept of species that has become embedded within conservationist practices, which is a choice. So in the early 20th century, when international wildlife protection movements were galvanizing and effectively being set–there's a wonderful book by Raf De Bont called Nature's Diplomats where he talks about how we take for granted that wildlife protection should be an international mission– but that is an idea that had to be established. But once it is, those diplomats have a choice about how to protect and what the objects are going to be of their study and their protection. And they choose species when they could have chosen families or orders, for instance.

But because they choose species, we end up with this situation where for a long time…

Conservation is obsessed with these singular ways of recognizing species, but almost completely decontextualized from their environments.

And it takes a long time to understand that, you can save a species, but if it has no environment to live in, then you remove the possibility of its much broader ecological function. And so there are those kinds of assumptions that are built into talking about conservation that I think is important.

But then I think there's also the assumption that because people tend to think of conservation as an inherent good, they don't necessarily step back and think critically about the kinds of assumptions that are built into conservation because of these histories, such as the category of species. And as a result of that, people find it very difficult to think critically about conservation, to step back and think, are there alternatives? Are there better ways to do this? Are there ways that we can pursue conservationist agendas or try and protect ways-of-being that are not perpetuating harmful strategies that are involved in things like conservation?

So for instance, one obvious example would be the creation of national parks. They were created from the late 1870s onwards and started in America with Yellowstone as the world's first national park. But that is a model that depends on dispossessing native peoples of their lands. When it gets taken up and established more globally in the first half of the 20th century, this model of people being removed from their lands to create wildlife sanctuaries that have absolutely no human presence becomes fundamental to how conservation is done.

But that is deeply harmful, not only because of the dispossession it allows but also because it completely and utterly overlooks how human use has shaped those landscapes. And so you get a deeply damaging idea that these landscapes or wildlife protection can only be ensured by protecting wildlife reserves almost like fortresses, which creates all kinds of violent forms of exclusion that are also tied up to dispossession.

And so when I talk about us trying to think about how we protect things are the kinds of values that we're bringing into conservation or when we think these kinds of things is a way of trying to say we need to slow down and think about the histories of these strategies because often they are deeply rooted in explicit forms of violence and dispossession, they are often not necessarily the best strategies because they're not necessarily thinking about functional ecosystems or thinking about species within the context of where they need to live.

Or as I say, for instance, we're in the middle of an enormous sort of reduction in several insects. How many people notice that? But without that, without insects, our food chain would collapse. They just don't attract the same kind of interest or attention or money as charismatic animals like whales. Of course, bees, to some extent, have become much more important and acknowledged as important pollinators, but they're very rare. This belongs to a much broader set of assumptions that have been sort of coalesced into these ideas around conservation. 

I think we need to unpack our thinking to address a future of how we treat endangered ways of being – and how we treat people who've already suffered extreme forms of dispossession.  

As well as what we do about those situations that are intended not to just save ways-of-being, but actually to create and move forward with policies that ensure justice and redress recovery. Rather than all these violent forms of dispossession that we know are at the heart of conservation, if we look at it historically.

Kamea Chayne: I resonate with all of this and I'm also very critical of these very reductionist approaches to “conservation”. When things get excised or taken out of context and then they're abstracted, I feel like they can more easily be used to justify or be weaponized for ulterior motives that are completely removed from the intentions that people might think that they're about.

I think about concepts of gross domestic product or GDP abstracted as a measure of our collective well-being or as the well-being of a nation-state. And I mean, I do think they've also been weaponized against people's well-being because they don't equate with our collective health and have been used to gaslight how people are feeling about where we are.

There is this problem of siloing, separating, and atomizing particular small parts of the whole and then using that to justify particular things that are harmful to the collective. Another part of this is de-extinction projects, which you critique as being troubling in all kinds of ways.

We had previously talked about some of the ulterior motives of de-extinction projects with Thom van Dooren in the past episode, but I'd love to get your perspectives as well, particularly centred on the lenses of power, control, intellectual property, and ownership. So in what ways do you see the intentions of these projects not lining up with what many people might think of when supporting “conservation” as a broad concept?

Sadiah Qureshi: Let's take the woolly mammoth as an example because there's a team based at Harvard that is trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth. And if that happens, there's already a Pleistocene Park that has been set up as an environment to receive the woolly mammoth. The idea is that if this happens, mammoths can help create or transform the landscape in Pleistocene Park to turn it from a tundra into a more welcoming environment for many, many different species.

So anyone hearing that story might get excited at the idea that there are going to be woolly mammoths again because they're extraordinary, beautiful creatures. And they might like the idea of potentially using woolly mammoths as a form of addressing climate change. But there are several complications. 

First, when people hear the idea of the woolly mammoth, they very rarely understand that whatever animal comes out of these experiments is not going to be a mammoth. What it will be, if it's done, is bits of ancient DNA taken from a mammoth spliced in with the DNA of living elephants who will then serve as surrogates for these genetically engineered beings that will then I think very clearly be intellectual property. We might end up with hairy red elephantine things that look a bit like the mammoth or a bit like the elephant, but they are not going to be a mammoth.

I think people don't understand that this is not a form of direct restitution, and of course, for lots of ecologists that doesn't necessarily matter if they're performing the same ecological function. But I think coming back to that notion of intellectual property is important because a lot of these projects are being funded by private wealth.

And this is often used as an argument in favor of them by saying, this is a technological project that doesn't involve taking public funds. But that also means we are then at a stage where incredibly wealthy people, whether that's philanthropists who've acquired their wealth through capitalism or any other kind of wealth, effectively, potentially evade all sorts of mechanisms that the public has for contributing to discussions about what we want the future to be. So there's that issue.

Then there's also the issue of where that wealth came from, how it was created, and how it's being used, which raises all sorts of questions about how science is funded, but also the money itself can be raised in deeply troubling ways. So even if you're not a capitalist, for instance, if we're talking about people who've made their wealth through not paying taxes properly or fairly on their income or treating workers badly, there's an issue there. 

Then there's also the issue of how the lives that these animals end up leading be of benefit to the animals themselves. And I don't think people have got a good enough answer for why this is going to be a meaningful life. Because when people talk about de-extinction, they almost always talk about how humans respond to extinction as a form of something that's depressing or that gives rise to grief. De-extinction projects are often justified on the basis that they will provide hope. I understand that, but I think they underplay who that hope is for. And I don't think it's necessarily for the animals. 

I think [some people] completely underestimate how perhaps we do need to grieve, work through, and think about the consequences of our actions rather than trying to use technological fixes to avoid having to deal with these consequences as a collective.

And so I think it's a troubling development because of all the ways that it is being justified politically and ethically, all the ways that it is being funded with little oversight and with very little concern about the wellbeing of the animals and what it means. For example, the woolly mammoth is a species that lives in herds. How can it be ethical to do that to an animal? That is an extraordinarily violent way of treating a way of being to provide some kind of false promise of a technological fix. So I think there are all sorts of issues with de-extinction that we do need to be concerned about.

Kamea Chayne: I think it goes back to this critique of things becoming decontextualized. If we take this reductionist approach to the idea of de-extinction, the distressing context that led to the extinction of these particular species is still here. So, are they even going to be comfortable being “brought back”?

And I also found it very potent how you name that they won't be the woolly mammoths as they were because there's this reminder that species are more than species. They are also an embodiment of their context, their culture, their language, their communities, their more than self environments and so forth. So we might be able to bring back a small part of how they express themselves, but unless we're looking at the idea of de-extinction in a much more holistic way, then it just perpetuates that same problematic reductionist approach.

Sadiah Qureshi: Exactly, and that's true for species as a way of being in and of itself. But of course, Thom van Dooren’s beautiful work on the ways that all these ways of being fit into a web of relations with humans. So for instance, if anybody hasn't read his work, he's written a beautiful book called Flightways, where he looks at different relationships that people have with various kinds of birds.

And if you think about something like vultures and the deep relationship of reciprocity that some people have with vultures through sky burials, it's all those forms of relating to the animal that doesn't seem to be thought about in these kinds of projects, other than “we will have a physical thing that we can call whatever species we want it to”.

That we decide to resurrect and then potentially breed or clone or create enough of them to create communities, to potentially create new ecological functions. I don't think humanity has a particularly good record of its ecological interventions either. And so I think there's a lot of promises being made about how this is going to save us that I don't think necessarily stack. 

Kamea Chayne: And on the topic of extinction, you also named this sense of panic we've been encouraged to nurture within environmental climate movements through languaging specifically around mass extinctions. So can you expand on how you feel this sort of apocalyptic framing has been weaponized against the dispossessions of certain communities? And then is it the panic and urgency that isn't justified or fruitful, to begin with, or more so their weaponization towards ulterior motives that need to be challenged, or maybe both?

Sadiah Qureshi: I think when people hear a term like “the sixth mass extinction”, they panic. Or they hear about the biodiversity panic and they panic. And I think that panic is warranted because we are living through extraordinary forms of change that I think are extremely damaging and extremely frightening.

In 2022, for instance, we had those horrific floods in Pakistan, or the black summer in Australia where an estimated billion animals died during that summer from wildfires and an estimated two billion in the aftermath. I think we are seeing unprecedented forms of environmental catastrophe and disaster. So I think the concern and the worry are very well justified. 

I think the problem with “panic” is that people often think we must do something, and it becomes an attempt to try and solve the problem as quickly as possible without thinking about the nature of how that problem emerged. 

So I don't think there's often an honest diagnosis about the situation we're in, whether that comes from climate denial or whether that comes from an erasure of how conservation itself has been tied to all sorts of forms of dispossession and so on. And so I think that panic can, even if it's not weaponized, even on an individual level, make people feel comfortable or at least choose options that are worrying in and of themselves. I think that’s troubling.

So I think we do need to think much more carefully about that panic, how it's used, and how it's often used as a means of shutting down debate, or as a means of saying “Because you're being critical, you are not in favor of saving anything”. It becomes a very binary choice between “acting” or “not acting” instead of thinking of how can we come up with policies that are genuinely about redress and recovery.

I think it’s disturbing and I think the problem is that because of the panic, those kinds of conversations about recovery and redress and justice are often dismissed or not even had, which I find worrying. I think one of the most important examples of that is the current move of the 30 by 30 plan. For those of you who don't know, this is the idea that 30 % of the earth's surface will become some form of wildlife refuge or so on by 2030. While aiming for greater protection sounds awesome if you then think through what that means, which 30% is the question? And how will that 30% be chosen?

If it's just an expansion of areas that are already considered wildlife refuges which have already been created through dispossessing people, then that isn't necessarily the best option. It's those kinds of much more complicated details that I think are easily overlooked in the panic.

Kamea Chayne: As we orient towards healing and re-entangling our relationships with the more-than-human world, a lot of this is contingent upon land access. And in the context of the United Kingdom, I'm aware that only 1% of the population owns most of the land.

The “Right to Roam” campaign has been trying to challenge the cordoning off of the countryside to the general public. And I also know that land struggles in the U.K. are different from places that have faced historic or ongoing colonization. But what might the concept of land rights and land sovereignty mean in the context of a place like the U.K.? 

On a more practical level, while we acknowledge the need for systemic and cultural transformations to not continue reinforcing these injustices, what are some more immediate changes that you would like to see in conservation spaces and mainstream conservation organizations, given that based on our existing context, they often do have more immediate access to managing more land than the general public might have otherwise?

Sadiah Qureshi: In terms of land access and land rights, I think that is going to be a huge fight within Britain in terms of ensuring people have access to land. And that's important. But I think, certainly as a historian, to me, when I think of Britain, I think of the broader British Empire, partly because effectively my head is mostly in the 19th century. And so there’s the broader issue of the British Empire’s role in having created situations [of inequality] across the globe in terms of access to land rights for native and Indigenous peoples.

And then in terms of immediate, there has to be a radically different way of approaching conservation that does not assume that this sort of fortress-style conservation is the best. We need to address forms of recovery, like rewilding, instead of constantly trying to create landscapes that are devoid of human beings. We need a different idea of our relationship to land, we need to find ways to live with other ways of being, instead of constantly saying that they need to be contained in some kind of way, where we can go and ogle them.

I think there needs to be significantly more effort done to actually grant land rights on a global scale and also involve communities in these kinds of discussions. So with the 30 by 30 plan, there was immediately a lot of concern from various Indigenous groups across the world and those concerns need to be taken seriously. Those communities have to be brought into the process of deciding what is going to happen. That of course goes for historically dispossessed peoples as well. What also needs to happen is an acknowledgement of how much of this has been shaped by historical forces that we can choose to reject in the present period. 

We can choose differently. So there also needs to be a reimagining. And I think we need to avoid the sense that there is only one path. 

I think that's crucial.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. As we come to a close, I welcome you to share anything else on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about and any calls to action or deeper inquiries you have for our listeners.

Sadiah Qureshi: When we hear of these histories and the way that they are tied up with all sorts of violence and all sorts of horrific acts that we do not want to perpetuate, it's very easy to step back and just become so depressed that we fall into inaction. And I think that's quite worrying.

As much as I value these histories, I think the one thing that they should do is empower us to know what not to do or how to reimagine things so that they're a form of hope, of being informed, of being aware of how we need to make better choices so that we can and using these histories to choose more wisely.

It’s far more common to just feel completely and utterly overwhelmed or unable to do anything. But there are so many different ways in which we can use that knowledge, in which we can use our passions, to actually both choose wisely, encourage others to choose wisely, but also hold power to account. When we're electing people, when we are engaging within our communities, making this a priority in terms of how we imagine the world we want and doing something to build it. 

What I would like to happen as a result of knowing these histories is a kind of proactive form of recovery, redress, and restitution, rather than giving up.

And I think that's the most important thing: that we continue fighting, but we make better choices.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, are coming to a close here, but we'll have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Sadiah, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. As we close off, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Sadiah Qureshi: I don't consider myself a wise person, but I think I would come back to that notion that we must find ways to hope and we must find ways to act. I finished the book [Peoples on Parade] with: we need to rethink our politics of crisis and go beyond that to create an ethics of care and love. 

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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