Tabula Raza

"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