Race and Genetics

The object I chose was brought out of the store in the Hunterian museum (thank you to Simon Chaplin). It was a human skull, one of many hundreds, if not thousands, that the museum holds. Distinguished by a number written across the forehead and the word “British” written across the cranium, the skull was still, for me, an ambiguous object, as I had no information as to the sex, age, or ethnicity (although hinted at in the term British, I had no date for when the word was written on the skull) of the person it came from or how it came to be part of the Hunterian collection. All I knew, from being told by Simon, was that is was a real, human skull.

During our discussions, Alannah Tompkins made an interesting distinction between different ways of looking at objects. She suggested that objects might either be analysed in terms of their provenance and specific history or be looked at as having many potential connections and relationships stemming from them.  It was the latter idea that characterised my thoughts on the skull. This was not only for expedient reasons (I would probably not have been able to determine the specific history in the half hour we had to do our presentations!) but more importantly, I was interested in the potential possibilities and meanings which it might embody. It was the skull’s ambiguity which drew me to it as an object.

Looking around the Hunterian, with its juxtaposition of human and animal body parts (including skulls), presented in a similar way as in John Hunter’s time, I realized that debates today which posit the emergence of a posthuman subject, a breakdown in human/animal boundaries, provoked, in many cases, by new genetic technologies, echo the idea of a close relationship between human and animal which Hunter seemed to be suggesting in the 18^th century. The skull enabled me to make a connection between past and present ways of thinking about the human. It also led me to consider the differences between past and present constructions of race and how this reflects changes in science. Where once the skull, through phrenology, was central to racial science and constructions of racial difference, race is now (to borrow from Paul Gilroy) debated at a genetic level, it is said to be embodied at the interior, unseen level of the gene. Yet despite this move from the overtly physical to the internal, a concern with classification and ordering, similarity and difference, continues to be as predominant in scientific thinking as it was over 200 years ago. 

It is of course possible that I might have made these connections through reading a text.  Through research for my PhD – Race and Genetics in Contemporary British Fiction – I am already aware of the various uses to which skulls have been put in science in the past, and their role in racial science.  However I think that, if I had had more time, an historical analysis of my skull would have yielded interesting and original insights, which might not be gained through secondary reading. An object’s specificity, as well as its multiple possible meanings, have the potential to provoke new interpretations and analyses (an approach which is also increasingly being applied to texts). It is thus a combination of the methods suggested by Alannah which I think might work together to provide new perspectives in research such as mine. “Reading” an object requires many of the same skills as reading a text, and giving objects the same careful consideration as texts can be both interesting and productive.

Our discussions with Sharon Ruston about how we might understand and define disciplines, and about the meaning of terms such as interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, revealed that each of us has a highly personal understanding of our relationship to different disciplines. Sharon’s exercise, in which we had to locate ourselves within a single discipline, enabled us not only to reflect on the traditional classifications within which our work might be located, but on the purpose of classification, grouping and ordering itself, an issue which occurs frequently in our negotiations of literature and science. During our tour of Gladstone’s collection, Mark Llewellyn explained how Gladstone divided and classified his books according to his personal interests, and how the theological focus of the library reflects Gladstone’s commitment to the subject. Such a library demonstrates how classification can often be personal, as well as culturally constructed, and the library served as an interesting practical example of how we might begin to engage with this issue.

We continued to discuss these questions during Martin Willis’ session on literature and science scholarship. In tracing how criticism has developed since Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, we were able to situate and reflect on our own methodologies and the extent to which they draw on particular literary or historical approaches. Jerome’s session on materiality also raised important issues about how to think about texts and the role that archives might play in our research. For me, these opportunities to think over my own methodology, through considering the methodologies of other scholars, is what made this event so invaluable.

One of the main things I will take away from my week in Hawarden is the diversity of responses possible to the question, what is the study of literature and science? Both subjects are in themselves hugely diverse areas of study, and the topics presented by the speakers and students demonstrated this. Scientific topics covered included physics, biology, chemistry, paleontology and medicine (which included psychopharmacology, mental health, HIV/AIDS and transplantation). With regard to literature, poetry, the novel, serialised fiction, medical journalism, science fiction, travel writing, the short story and the essay were some of the forms which have inspired our projects. Covering the 16^th century to the present day, our studies of the interaction between literature and science present an almost bedazzling array of possibilities.

These intersections are made more challenging by the differing methodological and theoretical approaches which scholars are taking. Gowan Dawson’s meticulous ‘history of the book’ approach revealed the complex relationship between the writings of 19^th century scientist Richard Owen and the fiction of Dickens and Thackery. Katy Price’s suggestion (with reference to the early 20^th Century) that it is possible to identify literary precursors for later scientific developments, was another interesting approach. Even Literary Darwinism, whose proponents reject diverse approaches to literary analysis in favour of a reductive stance based on a particular interpretation of evolutionary biology, demonstrates the different kinds of intersections currently possible between literature and science. David Amigoni’s consciously open response to the Literary Darwinists seems to reflect the openness of the field as a whole to differing methodological approaches.

More to follow shortly…