Jerome de Groot, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023) 222 pp. £29.59 Pb. £108.00 Hb. £29.59 eBook ISBN: 9780367512354
Considering the ways in which genetic science has begun to inflect not only what we make of the past but especially how historians investigate the past and what they envision this science can establish, Jerome de Groot comes at the epistemology appended to the genome through six major frames: public, practice, politics, ethics, imagination, and self. One of the particular strengths of this book is de Groot’s nimble threading of his major foci, developing each not only in its own terms but also in connection to the others.
PUBLIC. From the rhetorical use of ‘DNA’ as a metonymy for a template or structure to the rhetorics of public commemorations of the research leading to the discovery of the double helix structure, from sculptural evocations of the shape to dramatic attributions of credit denied to Rosalind Franklin, from the saga of Richard III’s remains to the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, from African American burial grounds to ancestry analyses for descendants of the African diaspora, the first chapter offers a wide array of public engagements with DNA. De Groot’s treatment returns persistently to the role of DNA in forming personal connections to public history.
PRACTICE. Research on ancient DNA has facilitated the development of new approaches to the practice of history. As de Groot emphasizes, DNA has become both an object of study and a type of epistemology, and his unpacking of this relationship works through characteristically clear exemplification and presentation of conclusions.
POLITICS. This chapter particularly develops examples related to Indigenous peoples, tracing the reinscription of biocolonial violence through the extraction of genetic data. Contrasting the treatment of the remains of a Native American known as Anzik-1 with the treatment of the remains of Richard III, considering the practices by which ‘Cheddar Man’ has been studied, and reviewing selection biases in the building of DNA libraries, de Groot offers a strong call for thoughtful and deliberative decolonization of DNA knowledge work.
ETHICS. Here de Groot foregrounds ‘the ways in which data is used to engage with or create the past,’ especially the ways in which it is considered evidentiary (113). Key case studies for this chapter engage with the uses of genetic information to identify victims of war crimes or to connect African Americans with ancestral identities, with cold case investigations, and with de-extinctions (including those represented in the Jurassic Park films). Throughout these readings de Groot unpacks real and potential harms arising from disseminations of ‘knowledge’ acquired from the study of DNA.
IMAGINATION. This chapter ranges incisively across portraiture, music, video games, movies, poetry, and novels to think about ‘genetic aesthetics,’ particularly as a means of ‘reckoning with historical practices and aesthetics [in an effort] to situate the “now”’ (139-40). Tying these examples to their public engagements and political efforts, de Groot considers how various artists are articulating both celebrations of the connections DNA might foster and concerns for the harms it might enable.
SELF. The final chapter centers individuals privately obtaining DNA testing, largely for the purposes of supplementing their family histories. Noting a triangulation among ‘amateur’ family historians, direct to consumer genetic testing companies, and the discursive reach of both social and broadcast media, de Groot unpacks a diminution of the roles of historians alongside an internalization of the personal histories suggested by genetic testing. This chapter also brings things full circle in taking up the very public television programming that has centered genetic analyses of African Americans and ‘demonstrate that genetic evidence can decisively complicate the way that individuals think about their past, their nation, and their identity in the present’ while also transforming pre-existing narratives of history at many levels (194).
From the opening concern with an ethics of epistemology to the closing embrace of ongoing historiographic changes driven by work with genetics de Groot’s work cleaves close to the human effects of re-understanding our pasts and presents through the double helix. These complicated interconnections make for a book that is deeply moral, concerned with the means by which we acquire (and authorize) knowledge and with what we do with it.
Jenni G Halpin