The Age of Plastic(s): Theorizing Race and Religion in the Protestant World Order

“The age of plastic(s) signified the temporal and material age of transition, whether from adolescence to adulthood, or from primitive flesh to civilized form, ushering in a biopolitical regime whereby the White empires granted themselves ever-increasing priority in managing, engineering, and molding the future world coming of age. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Matthew J Smith Northwestern University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

In my dissertation, I explore the racial and religious discourse of human “plasticity” as articulated by Protestant missionary science and the human sciences more broadly at the turn of the twentieth century. With the rise of polymer science, Anglophone settler colonialism, eugenics, and global capitalism, “plastic” came to signify a set temporal period or “age” in which a population is presently capable of being molded, but previous to this period and in the imminent future, that same population is incapable of transformation—resistant, rigid, molded into forms impenetrable to outside forces or powers. I locate this scientific discourse of the “age of plastic(s)” as a central analytic of racialized modernity; functioning to signify an imminent epochal shift in the temporal and material order of things. In this sense, it was characterized by transformation of form: evolution, molding, conversion, assimilation, reconstruction, etc. I claim the “age of plastic(s)” discourse helps generate modernity’s epochal shift as a project and process of colonial conversion. The age of plastic(s) signified the temporal and material age of transition whether from adolescence to adulthood, or from primitive flesh to civilized form, ushering in a biopolitical regime whereby the White empires granted themselves ever-increasing priority in managing, engineering, and molding the future world coming of age. Finally, it re-orients modern understandings of religion and race as intimately implicated in the imperial production of modern time; plasticity tying their co-constitution to the logics and practices of colonial governance rather than liberal secular logics that focus on overlapping identitarian frameworks for studying religion and race.