“Shadowy Objects in Test Tubes”: Gene Fetishism and Racialized Biocapital in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the entwined questions of science and ideology through a symptomatic reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), studying how power, racism, and capital intervene into the genetic enterprise of tampering with the limitations of the human and produce a supplicant race of clones for organ harvest and extraction. I commence by drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of gene fetishism and Evelyn Fox Keller’s notion of gene talk to trace how an elision of the ideological frameworks of race and capital subtending genomics in Ishiguro’s dystopian world instrumentalizes the creation of the clones as racialized products. I bring into dialogue the clones’ obsessive quest for familial origins with Deborah Bolnick’s exploration of the reification of race as biology through ancestry tests to analyze how technology can be used to create and legitimize racism. Deploying Kaushik Sundar Rajan’s theorization of biocapital and James Doucet-Battle’s analysis of the intersections of race, capitalism, and time, I study how the clones are discursively defined as fungible commodities in service to a futurity from which they are precluded. I conclude by positing the call for “slow science” as a potential strategy against the accelerationism and market-ready speculations that dictate biotechnical enterprises today.