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E-book Biofictions : Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel

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Penilaian

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Is race a biological fact or a fiction? At the beginning of 2018, scientists working with ancient DNA in the UK and the United States offered two very different public responses to this long-asked question. In the UK in February 2018, Channel 4 aired the documentary The First Brit: Secrets of the 10,000 Year Old Man, in which geneticists at the Natural History Museum and University College London sequenced the DNA of Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old skeleton that is the oldest to have been found in Britain. Focusing on the question of what Cheddar Man looked like and where he came from, model-makers reconstructed the head of the man using information derived from his DNA to reveal that the person the programme dubbed ‘the first modern Brit’ had dark skin and ancestors who came from the Middle East.1 Overturning the previously held scientific assumption that Cheddar Man was white, the scientists then compared Cheddar Man’s DNA to that of modern-day Britons in order to answer the other question posed by the programme, ‘How Cheddar Man are we?’ The answer, the programme’s narrator playfully informed the audience, is that according to the DNA ‘we’re all a little bit Cheddar Man’. It was a finding which, combined with the man’s dark skin, led one of the scientists interviewed to conclude that ‘these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions...that are not applicable to the past at all’. With its suggestion that some ancestors of modern white Britons were black, the programme and its participants positioned race as a modern social construct, a genetic fiction, and situated their findings as a means of fighting against racism. The First Brit opens with a montage of images of people with varying skin colours against the London skyline while the generic sounds of parliamentary debate play as the narrator claims ‘there’s been a lot of talk lately about Britain; about who belongs and who doesn’t’. The programme’s scientific findings are then offered as an intervention into the contemporary debates about immigration which are evoked by these scenes, science becoming the justification for a national reassessment of ‘our notions of what it is to be British’.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

902 GIL b

Penerbit

USA : Bloomsbury Academic., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

233 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781350099845

Klasifikasi

902

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Miscellany of History

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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