STeMS Speaker Series | From Essence to Affect: Toward an Anti-Anti-Essentialist Biovalue of Genetic African Ancestry

For the past 20 years, scholars have long established that genetic ancestry exemplifies the 21st century reinscription of race, utilizing technical innovations in genetic sciences to advance race into a new era to which it does not belong. Genetic African ancestry has played a pivotal role in this anti-racist critique, noting the reparative promise this technology possesses for helping African Americans find their way to an African homeland to rewrite the legacy of chattel slavery is also the source of its peril: using DNA to fill a historical gap. To what extent, however, does this authority to essentialize depend on DNA or the denial of Africa’s contemporaneous presence? Drawing on more than 20 months of fieldwork conducted on ancestry reconnection programs in Cameroon from 2010 to 2018, this talk draws on Black feminist methodologies of "absented presencing" to consider the affective conditions that shape knowledge production around genetic ancestry in Africa, and how it can serve as grounds for a more robust anti-anti-essentialist approach to biovalue and the conditions of racialization beyond the body and genetic practices.

Victoria M. Massie, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a Faculty Affiliate for the Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS), the Center for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality (CSWGS), the Medical Humanities Program, and the Science & Technology Studies Program at Rice University. Her work explores 21st century ideas of biovalue developing around African ancestry, connecting the markets shaping scientific and biomedical knowledge production to global flows of racial capitalism, with a focus on Cameroon and the US. She addresses these issues through research projects ranging from ancestry reconnection programs to help the genetic diaspora feel at home in West Africa, statelessness as a chronic health condition for Black migrants in Texas, and generational weathering as a framework for chronic stress. With support from the Voices of Our Nation's Arts (VONA) Foundation and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, she is also recognized as a multi-genre writer experimenting with ethnographic form.