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University of California Press

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface: Skin and Code 
Abbreviations 

Introduction: America and the Tabula Raza 

1. Genomic World Building: The Mundus Novus of the Twenty-first Century 
2. From Mundus to Model to Mundus Again: The Art of Ancestry between Worlds 
3. Making Race: Pharmacogenetics and Its Necessary People 
4. For the Love of Blackness: When Science Can Feel Like Home 
5. Look, a Black Guy! (With a Genetic Finding) 
6. A Family Affair: The Barbed Bonds of Relationship 
7. Sci Non-Fi: Cells, Genes, and the Future Tense of “Diversity
8. Seeing Ghosts: From the Excavated Past to the Hauntings of the Present 
Conclusion 

Acknowledgments 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index

Reviews

"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