Introduction

Abstract

Categorical analysis pervades scholarly research. Yet types, and the typologies that catalogue them, have been unexamined frameworks in cultural histories. Types certainly pervade studies as types, yet the typologies they are nested within, as overarching and conjoined descriptive orders, remain largely unexamined outside the social sciences or histories of ideas. As such social kinds are rarely historicized or theorized beyond documenting their meaning, presence and less often, their recurrence. While it is widely accepted that categories and standards pervade knowledge and language systems, from comparative anatomy to linguistic etymology, colloquial typecasting is yet to be considered as a discursive practice. Yet since the voyages of exploration the arrangement of new botanical specimens into networked zoological categories was accompanied by the designation of racial kinds through typecasting, and these popular types were often transcribed into print, and very often credited with the empiricity of natural history. The purpose of this collection is understanding the operation of types and typologies in colonial thought and inaugurating theories of types that can account for the transferral of categories across knowledge registers. The ideas canvassed seek to account for the material basis of types in print, and their valencies across epochs, and the ways they impact on one another and how they interact with invaded cosmologies. The intention of this collection is to account for the classificatory tendencies, or taxonomic fields, which colonial types can be situated within and query whether the cultural tendency for typologies was intensified within colonial perceptual relations.