Postcolonial Technoscience

摘要

'Postcolonial technoscience' is a deliberately ambiguous title, calculated to elicit the question: 'what might it mean?' Too often the 'postcolonial' seems to imply yet another global theory, or simply a celebration of the end of colonialism. But it may also be viewed as a signpost pointing to contemporary phenomena in need of new modes of analysis and requiring new critiques. Some older styles of analysis in science studies - those that assume relatively closed communities and are predicated on the nation-state - do not seem adapted to explaining the co-production of identities, technologies and cultural formations characteristic of an emerging global order. A postcolonial perspective suggests fresh ways to study the changing political economies of capitalism and science, the mutual reorganization of the global and the local, the increasing transnational traffic of people, practices, technologies, and contemporary contests over 'intellectual property'. The term 'postcolonial' thus refers both to new configurations of technoscience and to the critical modes of analysis that identify them. We hope that a closer engagement of science studies with postcolonial studies will allow us to question technoscience differently, find more heterogeneous sources, and reveal more fully the patterns of local transactions that give rise to global, or universalist, claims.