Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific: Genetic Drift

This book explores a panorama of historical studies, focused on the historical tensions between genealogical knowledge and well-known Pacific Islander engagements with genomic research in a postwar era of simultaneous decolonization and Big Science. These include connected examinations of ancient voyaging reconstruction and migration routes, “warrior genes,” a noted life-form patent case, questions of genetic engineering and biopiracy, the repatriation of ancestral remains, legacies of nuclear testing, and conflicts with the Human Genome Diversity Project in Oceania. It also considers the persistence of eugenics and race thinking within blood quanta and dispossession histories and how other histories are being written. Many of these subjects have been elaborated in detailed, specialist studies, but there is to date no single-volume overview of these multiple engagements that situates them all within a narrative framework of postwar racism and anti-racism, the technological promises of genetic science, and the cultural and political struggles and assertions of Indigenous islanders, whose voices structure and shape the arguments. It combines traditional archival and scholarly work with contemporary Islander commentary and research, and ranges from poetry to politics and molecular biology.