‘Not as a historian, but as a scientific observer': Notes on science in Jaspreet Singh's Helium

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Disclosure statement

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Volkswagen Foundation for the research on which this article is based.

Notes

1 I will understand the term ‘science’ as a shorthand for designating diverse and sometimes heterogenous sets of concepts, practices, settings, discourses and knowledges, rather than a unified, universal, objective, and culturally neutral practice. In the course of these remarks, I also find it useful to think of science as a ‘global assemblage’ in the sense suggested by Ong and Collier (2005).

2 I am referring, for instance, to Feynman’s well-known Los Alamos from Below (1980). Throughout the novel, Singh establishes connections to scientists whose memories of trauma have crystallised in a particular type of memoir: accounts which link the narrative of scientific facts, phenomena and developments to the scientists’ traumatic personal histories, thereby producing narratives in which science and genocidal trauma are entangled in ways that point beyond the individual experience, refracting also the ways in which science and genocidal trauma have been entangled in actual history.