Professor Lesley Larkin discusses racial critiques developed in postgenomic literature

Lesley Larkin, Professor of English at Northern Michigan University, presented work from her just-published book, Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature (Ohio 2025) at the Research Institute’s Faculty Seminar Series event on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Maria Bo, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, served as her discussant.

Choosing three novels with which to illustrate her argument, Larkin noted that contemporary literature written between the early 1990s (when the Human Genome Project began) and June 2000 (when the first draft of the human genome sequence was completed) has been shaped by what she calls the “postgenomic age.” In both the talk and the book, she focuses on literature that takes genomics as a theme to 1) comment on the ethical, social, and political issues raised by advances in the life sciences; and 2) reflect critically on the literary enterprise itself.

Beginning with Ruth Ozeki’s 2003 novel All Over Creation, Larkin demonstrated how the novel critiques monoculture and genetically modified organisms even as it is both permeated by and celebrates a kind of linguistic promiscuity—one that the novel links back to genetic recombination and mutation. The effect, Larkin notes, is a challenge to the idea of genetic determinism through the revelation that textuality—ambivalent, contingent, and unstable—is a “wildly inapt figure for the authority of genes.”

Next, Larkin turned to Gerald Vizenor’s 1991 novel Heirs of Columbus to emphasize the fact that stories, because they are inextricable from bodies and worlds, always have a material impact on readers and their worlds. In a compelling reading of the novel that noted the coincidence in timing of the Human Genome Project (HGP), the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA), Larkin drew a parallel between the “discovery” of the New World and our newer “Age of Exploration” in which geneticists had hoped to map a new genomic frontier. She showed how Vizenor takes control of the Columbus narrative by changing it in a way that refuses genetic determinism. By narrating Coumbus as someone with Mayan ancestry who returns to this continent and takes up with an indigenous woman named Samana, Larkin explained, Vizenor creates an alternative genomic discourse that seeks to heal, through acts of chance and ongoing narrative play, the wounds of colonialism.

Lastly, Larkin turned to Octavia Butler’s 2005 novel Fledgling to show how the novel literalizes, through its genetically-modified protagonist Shori, the figure of the vampire that was circulating in postgenomic discourse. Drawing her inspiration from Black feminist theories, Larkin then modeled what she called a “fleshy reading”—one that is sensory and tactile and draws our attention to reading as an embodied practice that shapes us and our world in material ways. Paying close attention to the language and metaphors embedded in the novel, and noting that language and storytelling are part of readers’ embodied experiences, Larkin argued that language, storytelling, and metaphors can reinforce and redirect people’s habitual responses—whether by pushing us to act in different ways or to imagine doing things differently such that we are able to change our worldviews. Literature, she suggested, has the capacity to undo our habituation to racial and colonial structures as well as to those spaces that have evolved alongside racism.

Maria Bo was a lively and incisive discussant, starting off the discussion with a question that connected to her own work on translation that prompted Larkin to clarify some of her claims. At stake for Larkin, Bo, and those of us in the audience were ethical questions related to the ongoing dangers for less-privileged persons who end up as “bioresources” for more privileged “biological citizens,” as well as a more general concern about the role that genes play in our lives during a time of rapidly developing technologies.