My Grandfather’s Face: A Black Contemplative Educator’s Discovery of Unknown Relatives through DNA

This narrative essay offers an exploration of the power and importance of family origin stories as a grounding aspect of collective and individual identity for Black people. The author, drawing on his experience as a Black queer contemplative scholar and college professor, gives attention to the question of whether the truth is necessary or beneficial in the creation of family narratives and what each successive generation is allowed to know. This question is explored through the story of the unintended positive and negative consequences the author experienced as a result of submitting DNA to Ancestry.com.

DNA repair and gene editing: the director’s cut

Novelists and screenwriters have bombarded our imaginations with the idea of genetic engineering. From superhero origin stories to theme parks inhabited by dinosaurs, the prospect of re-writing the genetic code has inspired many and raised many ethical questions. The potential for these tools in medicine and biological sciences to prevent genetic diseases is readily being explored. Recent successes include destruction of simian immunodeficiency virus DNA from infected rhesus macaque monkeys (synonymous to the human immunodeficiency virus). The diverse power of these tools is also helping to control mosquito populations and supress the spread of malaria. New gene-editing tools have made genome editing faster, more accurate and cheaper than ever before, but how do they work? And how do we know whether the desired edits will be made?

Genesis and Exodus as Conceptually Independent, Competing Origin Myths?

Against Konrad Schmid’s thesis that the pre-P ancestral and Exodus traditions existed as competing origin myths that were conceptually independent from each other, this article argues that this conceptual independence is difficult to prove in the context of the ancient Israelites’ oral-written culture. Moreover, societal negotiation about the past should not be misconstrued as a sign of traditions’ conceptual independence. Competition between origin stories, or selective emphasis on one story over another, does not indicate their conceptual independence.

Destabilising myths of origin: Collaborative storytelling and biopolitical communities in Wajdi Mouawad's Le Sang des promesses

This article analyses how diverse communities are formed through storytelling and mythmaking in Wajdi Mouawad's theatrical tetralogy, Le Sang des promesses (1999–2009). Mythic origin stories, which Mouawad's migratory characters collect and share on their journeys from one community to the next, draw individuals from their pasts on stage to act out the events from each narrative. Mouawad thus reveals how the theatre can serve as an ideal venue for spectators from diverse backgrounds to gather and experience the various conditions many migrants face. Drawing on Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory of communitas and Lévi-Strauss's structuralist analysis of myth, this article argues that collaborative storytelling and mythmaking allow Mouawad's migratory characters to cross various types of borders and form unexpected communities that defy barriers of time and space.

Slavery, the Hebrew Bible and the Development of Racial Theories in the Nineteenth Century

Racial ideas which developed in the modern west were forged with reference to a Christian worldview and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Up until Darwin’s scientific reframing of the origins debate, European and American race scientists were fundamentally Christian in their orientation. This paper outlines how interpretations of the Hebrew Bible within this Christian Weltanschauung facilitated the development and articulation of racial theories which burgeoned in western intellectual discourse up to and during the 19th century. The book of Genesis was a particular seedbed for identity politics as the origin stories of the Hebrew Bible were plundered in service of articulating a racial hierarchy which justified both the place of Europeans at the pinnacle of divine creation and the denigration, bestialization, and enslavement of Africans as the worst of human filiation. That the racial ethos of the period dictated both the questions exegetes posed and the conclusions they derived from the text demonstrates that biblical interpretation within this climate was never an innocuous pursuit, but rather reflected the values and beliefs current in the social context of the exegete.

Origin Stories

This chapter examines auditory racism via the concepts of the sonic colour line and the listening ear and details its fundamental, deeply-rooted impact on what is called ‘sound art’. As the sonic colour line sorts ‘good’ listeners from ‘bad’, the curatorial listening ear—the disciplinary mode of white listening operating as the sonic colour line’s ready attendant—thoroughly permeates the exhibition, review, and scholarship of sound art, particularly in three areas: the field’s origin story, the pointed rejection of self-identified black diasporic aesthetics, and a refusal to hear critique on these grounds. In addition to auditing prior scholarship, I challenge previous renderings of ‘sound art’ via close and historically-contextualized analysis of artworks by Camille Norment, Betye Saar, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and Jennie C. Jones.