Neo-Malthusianism Whiteness as International Moral Power after Decolonization

• In Event: Globalizing Political Theory

Abstract

In the 1964 speech, “The Black Revolution” Malcolm X noted the racist fears that subtended Westerners’ talk of the recent “population explosion” in Asia and Africa. Such fears would animate Paul Ehrlich’s sensational bestseller The Population Bomb, published in 1968. One year later, Norman Lewis exposed the continuing extermination of Brazilian Indians, in the Sunday Times article “Genocide.” The international outrage provoked by accounts of atrocities against 'tribal' peoples in Latin America is credited with leading to the founding of prominent indigenous rights NGOs such as Survival International and IWGIA. Analyzing this constellation, this paper argues that in the wake of political decolonization North Atlantic whiteness was generated internationally in relation to three forms of racialized Neo-Malthusian excess: fears of Third-World “overpopulation,” the compulsion to save indigenous peoples qua victims of uncontrolled economic development, and Westerners’ anxieties about their own overconsumption and overproduction (cf. Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, 1972). While Marx’s ideas were being reconfigured transnationally in the 1950s and 1960s, Malthus’s arguments were being adapted to figure population politics/policies beyond nation-states and for a world increasingly understood as finite in its resources. Diagnosis of Neo-Malthusian pathologies contributed to new, global forms of racialization.

Author

• Jimmy Casas Klausen, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro