ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

The Island of Heterotopia: Scientific Racism, Colonial Violence, and the Manufacture of the Colonial Subject

The research paper undertakes a postcolonial reconsideration of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), arguing that the novel functions as a cogent allegory for the violence, racial hierarchies, and ideological justifications of European colonialism. Proceeding beyond conventional readings of the text as a Gothic fable of scientific hubris, the study investigates Dr. Moreau’s vivisection experiments as a direct metaphor for the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ and the structured dehumanization of marginalised people. The study substantiates how the forced metamorphosis of animals into the human-like ‘Beast Folk,’ their imposed mimicry of human law, and their eventual rebellion potentially align with the historical processes of psychological trauma, cultural erasure, and anti-colonial resistance. Implementing the theoretical frameworks of prominent postcolonial theorists, the paper explores the engagement of the novel with anthropological othering, pseudoscientific racism, and the epistemic violence ingrained in colonial knowledge production. It argues how Moreau’s laboratory on the isolated island serves as a heterotopia of deviation, a microcosm of the colonial domain where the application of scientific discourse conceals an agenda of brutal domination and subjugation. Ultimately, this study reclaims The Island of Dr. Moreau as an influential, but often undervalued, work of anti-colonial literature that unwraps the grotesque realities and racial hierarchies cloaked by the discourse of progress and enlightenment cardinal to the Victorian colonial enterprise.