Spillers's baby, anthropology's maybe: A postgenomic reckoning

This article is a meditation on the state of anthropological studies of race in the postgenomic era through its particular analytical obsession with the resurrection of biological racism as presumably embodied by genetic African ancestry. Drawing on Hortense Spillers' psychoanalytic framework on race, this essay argues that the failures ascribed to genetic African ancestry and those who build relations with one another through it, is a desperate plea to salvage the last vestiges of anthropology's anti-racialist position against biological determinism at a moment when the instability of field of biology betrays that possibility. This essay builds on feminist kinship studies to trace how genetic African ancestry is discursively put to work to naturalize the disciplinary refusal to reckon with racism – especially when it is perpetuated by the discipline itself. By reframing genetic ancestry through the grammar of black kinship practices, this article compels anthropologists to reflect on the ways critiques of genetic African ancestry traffic biological and historical essentialisms to reposition ourselves as "right" on race rather than take on a perspective on contemporary processes of racialization at this moment as the circulation of genetic African ancestry demands.