Permanent Markers - by Sarah Abel (Paperback)

About the Book

"Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of 'objective' knowledge about the past. This book engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics"--

Book Synopsis

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of "objective" knowledge about the past.

This book&8239;engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics. Reckoning with the struggles of science versus capitalism, "race-blind" versus "race-positive" public policies, and identity fluidity versus embodied experiences of racism, Permanent Markers seeks to explain why societies that have broadly embraced the social construction of race continue to search for, and find, evidence that our bodies are indelibly marked by the past.

Review Quotes

An insightful look into the booming DNA ancestry testing industry in both the United States and in Brazil. . . . [A] significant contribution to [the] field of cultural anthropology, the scholarship on race and the genome, and to wider interdisciplinary scholarship on the complex operations of race in both modern Latin American and United States contexts."--Ethnic and Racial Studies

Excellent. . . . Abel's work is highly accessible yet theoretically astute. . . [and] of great interest to those of us who are intrigued and worried about the increasing use of historical genetics from Ancient DNA to Ancestry DNA."--International Public History