Cedric Dover
Cedric Cyril Dover (11 April 1904 – 1 December 1961) was a British Indian zoologist and later a writer on social and anthropological matters related to race. He preferred to be called a Eurasian rather than as an Anglo-Indian, both terms used for people of mixed ancestry. He wrote several books on race and sought an international unified action by oppressed races against prejudices.
Life and career
Dover was born in
The Dovers had three children but he separated from his family and travelled to Egypt and finally settled in London in 1934 and worked with V.K. Krishna Menon's India League. During World War II he served in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and after demobilization, he became a visiting lecturer on anthropology at Fisk University, Tennessee between 1946 and 1949. His affiliation with communism made it difficult for him to find employment in the US but he was briefly a graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research, New York. He moved back to London in 1949 and in this period wrote admiringly of Stalinism, seeing it as a driver for "the movement towards coloured unity" in his book Hell in the Sunshine and this helped earn him a place in George Orwell's list of unsuitable people for writing propaganda against communism. Orwell described Dover as a “very dishonest, venal person” whose “main emphasis” was “anti-white (especially anti-USA)” and "reliably pro-Russian on all major issues."[19] Dover also took a great interest in eugenics[20][21] but gave up his ideas after he read Julian Huxley's We Europeans (1935) which critiqued race science.[22] Dover also became a member of The Men of the Trees, an organization involved in afforestation and founded by Richard St. Barbe Baker in 1924 and edited its journal Trees.[16] In 1954 he was chosen as a delegate to visit China. He married twice again in later life and died from a heart failure in East Surrey Hospital.[23][24][25]
Writings
Dover published extensively on zoological topics until around 1934 when his focus shifted increasingly to matters of race.[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] He also had an interest in writing and poetry.[34] He also wrote several obituaries of friends and influences, including of T.N. Annandale, whom he called the "father of freshwater biology in the east".[35] Dover published as many as 300 publications but only a few books including:
- The Kingdom of Earth (1931)
- Half-Caste (1937)
- Know This of Race (1939)
- Hell in the Sunshine (1943)
- American Negro Art (1960)
References
- ^ Dover, Cedric (1922). "Some interesting specimens of the Pierid genus Euchloe". Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. 28: 1143–1145.
- ^ Dover, Cedric (1922). "A note on the occurrence of a species of the family Raphididae in British India". Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. 28: 1146–1147.
- S2CID 4040299.
- ^ Annandale, N.; Dover, Cedric. "The butterflies of Barkuda Island". Rec. Ind. Mus. 22: 349–375.
- ^ Dover, C. (1929). "Wasps and bees in the Raffles Museum, Singapore" (PDF). Bulletin of the Raffles Museum. 2: 43–73.
- ^ Dover, Cedric; Rao, H. Srinivasa (1922). "A note on the diplopterous wasps in the collection of the Indian Museum". Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. New Series. 18: 235–249.
- ISSN 0374-5481.
- ^ "A note on bees of the genera Xylocopa and Bombus in the Indian Museum". Records of the Indian Museum. 24 (1): 85–89.
- S2CID 4117960.
- ISSN 0028-0836.
- ^ Dover, Cedric. "Notes on a collection of aquatic Rhynchota from the Buitenzorg Museum". Treubia. 10 (1): 65–72.
- ^ Dover, Cedric (1930). "An Improved Citronella Mosquito Deterrent". Indian Journal of Medical Research. 17 (3): 961.
- ^ Dover, Cedric (1953). "The Story of a Living Fossil: Parabathynella malaya Sars" (PDF). Saertrykk av Nytt Magasin for Zoologi. 1.
- ^ Dover, C., ed. (1929). "Fauna of the Batu Caves, Selangor" (PDF). J.Fed. Malay States Mus. 14: 325–87.
- JSTOR 41559701.
- ^ a b Wright, Patrick (2010). Passport to Peking. A very British mission to Mao's China. Oxford University Press. pp. 246–252.
- ^ Biswas, K. (1929). "Papers on Malayan aquatic biology, Freshwater algae with addendum". Journal of the Federated Malay States Museums. 14 (3–4): 405–435.
- ^ Dover, Cedric (1922). "Entomology in India". The Calcutta Review. 3 (2): 336–349.
- ^ Slate, Nico (2014). The Prism of Race. W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 24.
- PMID 21260153.
- ISSN 0028-0836.
- S2CID 4140451.
- ISBN 978-1-118-66320-2. Retrieved 11 March 2021.
- JSTOR 2796989.
- ISBN 9780198614111. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- JSTOR 271905.
- JSTOR 272336.
- JSTOR 587490.
- JSTOR 24346906.
- JSTOR 272567.
- S2CID 145355381.
- ^ Dover, Cedric (1932). "The Duration of Life of some Indian mammals". Indian Forester. 58.
- ISSN 0011-3891.
- JSTOR 272254.
- S2CID 27319781.