Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve.
Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history—one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.
Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.
"Tabula Raza is an engaging and evocative ethnographic narrative interlacing genomics research, racism and race, peoples and practitioners, ideas and ideologies about ancestry, and a range of actual and assumed health-genome relations. Duana Fullwiley deftly immerses the reader in the experiential details of genetic analyses, develops substantive scholarly arguments about the topic, and connects the reader—personally and viscerally—to the cast of collaborators who populate the text."—Agustín Fuentes, author of The Creative Spark
"Set in the shadow of what Hortense Spillers called an 'American grammar' of race, Fullwiley brilliantly and bravely probes the racial paradoxes that scientists of diverse backgrounds find themselves trapped within as they claim to be able to genetically trace African, Indigenous, and other lineaments of American ancestry in order to undo the structures of American racism. This is a must-read not only for those interested in the new genetic sciences but for all who are trying to understand the eternal return of the tabula raza that drives differential racial outcomes in medicine and racial bias in policing."—Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Geontologies
"In the beginning there was delight at the universally shared potential of the human genome. Then came the human beings who applied meaning and money to the landscape of our common inheritance. Tabula Raza offers a brilliant history of how lab leaders spoke a haze of nearly indelible social expectations into being. In translating the chemistry of wordless polynucleotide chains, these mortal architects of the genomic landscape used habits of raced language and gendered hierarchy to rationalize familiar but insidious processes of knowledge production."—Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights
386 pp.6 x 9Illus: 6 b/w illustrations; 4 tables
9780520401174$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2024