Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Roots of African Eve: Science Writing on Human Origins and Alex Haley's Roots
2. Race, Genetic Ancestry Tracing and Facial Expression: "Focusing on the Faces" in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
3. "One Part Truth and Three Parts Fiction": Race, Science and Narrative in Zadie Smith's White Teeth
4. "The Sick Swollen Heart of This Land": Pharmacogenomics, Racial Medicine and Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt
5. Mutilation and Mutation: Epigenetics and Racist Environments in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

This innovative new study explores how writers such as Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead and Octavia Butler have drawn on developments in genetic science to tackle racial identity in 21st century culture.

About the Author

Josie Gill is Lecturer in Black British Writing at the University of Bristol, UK.

Reviews

Biofictions makes an overwhelming case that the science of genetics and its ongoing conceptualization of race have been heavily shaped by fictional visions. Gill’s book makes clear literature’s inextricability from genetic biology’s racial significance, and as a result, will likely strengthen its readers’ antiracist resolve. That is an interdisciplinary vision that should be welcome on any campus tour.
*Science Fiction Studies*

In Biofictions, Josie Gill compellingly demonstrates the importance of works of fiction engaging race and genomics in manifesting the continuing confusion of fact and fiction concerning race as well as of literary critical approaches to cultural narratives of race. Her astute readings offer insight into how racism creates the conditions that produce “race” as a biological category justifying social and political hierarchies—a “biofiction,” as she puts it--and how works of fiction challenge as they expose this process and how they imagine alternatives. The work of one of the foremost theorists of science and literature, Biofictions illustrates the importance of our cultural forms and our cultural critics in challenging the constantly mutating forms of racism that characterize contemporary life.
*Priscilla Wald, Professor of English, Duke University, USA, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative*