This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
Winner of the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize.
In this important interdisciplinary study, Josie Gill explores how the contemporary novel has drawn upon, and intervened in, debates about race in late 20th and 21st century genetic science. Reading works by leading contemporary writers including Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, Biofictions demonstrates how ideas of race are produced at the intersection of science and fiction, which together create the stories about identity, racism, ancestry and kinship which characterize our understanding of race today. By highlighting the role of narrative in the formation of racial ideas in science, this book calls into question the apparent anti-racism of contemporary genetics, which functions narratively, rather than factually or objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. In so doing, Biofictions compels us to rethink the long-asked question of whether race is a biological fact or a fiction, calling instead for a new understanding of the relationship between race, science and fiction.
| ISBN: | 9781350237452 |
| Publication date: | 26th August 2021 |
| Author: | Josie Gill |
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 224 pages |
| Series: | Explorations in Science and Literature |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Literary studies: postcolonial literature Ethnic studies |