Of African Descent? Blackness and the Concept of Origins in Cultural Perspective

Sarah Abel

doi:10.3390/genealogy2010011

Abstract

Over the past decade, the DNA ancestry-testing industry—based largely in the United States—has experienced a huge upsurge in popularity, thanks partly to rapidly developing technologies and the falling prices of products. Meanwhile, the notion of “genetic genealogy” has been strongly endorsed by popular television documentary shows in the US, particularly vis-à-vis African-American roots-seekers—for whom these products are offered as a means to discover one’s ancestral “ethnic” origins, thereby “reversing the Middle Passage.” Yet personalized DNA ancestry tests have not had the same reception among people of African descent in other societies that were historically affected by slavery. This paper outlines and contextualizes these divergent responses by examining and comparing the cultural and political meanings that are attached to notions of origin, as well as the way that Blackness has been defined and articulated, in three different settings: the United States, France and Brazil.

Highlights

Since the emergence of the first genetic ancestry testing companies in the early 2000s, personalized DNA-testing products have been presented in the United States as tools that hold a particular significance for the descendants of enslaved Africans, whose cultures and kin structures were systematically suppressed and ruptured by the dehumanizing mechanisms of chattel slavery.In Alex Haley’s best-selling 1976 novel Roots, it was the moment of the author’s “return” to the alleged birthplace of his ancestor Kunta Kinte in the Gambia that constituted the story’s emotional climax, symbolizing his ultimate triumph over countless attempts to rid his ancestors of knowledge of their origins and identities—a feat made possible by the analysis of linguistic elements passed down through his family folklore
The piece was based on the results of uniparental analyses, carried out using cohorts of White Brazilian men from different parts of the country, and the results showed that while most of the men had Y-Chr lineages originating in Europe, 60% of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages studied were of Amerindian or African origin (Pena et al 2000)
In the United States, Alex Haley’s Roots myth has recently been reinvigorated for a new generation, with the proposition of genetic testing as a novel and scientific tool for claiming an African homeland and ethnic identity, in order to symbolically revert the trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage

Summary

Introduction

Since the emergence of the first genetic ancestry testing companies in the early 2000s, personalized DNA-testing products have been presented in the United States as tools that hold a particular significance for the descendants of enslaved Africans, whose cultures and kin structures were systematically suppressed and ruptured by the dehumanizing mechanisms of chattel slavery. I aim to complement Nelson’s analysis by focusing on an alternative genetic-genealogical model put forward by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who likewise emphasizes the revelation of ethnic identities as a key goal of DNA ancestry testing for African Americans, but orients these practices towards a hegemonic, multicultural paradigm of identity This is followed by a discussion of the contrasting case of a French Antillean collective who are using genealogical research as a means of visibilizing. I present some examples from Brazil, whose national ideology of mixture is seen as constantly threatening to subsume the attempts of activist groups to create a distinct political identity based on various interpretations of Blackness Using these cases, I aim to offer a more complex picture of Black genealogical practices across the Americas, problematizing the message that has been widely encouraged by US-based genetic-testing companies and their promoters, that claiming an African ethnic or national identity is the ultimate goal for descendants of enslaved Africans to be able to symbolically “reverse the Middle Passage.”

The Importance of Roots in the United States

Genealogies of Resistance

Blackness out of Mixture

Findings

Conclusions