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Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities f...

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Autor principal: Choksey, Lara
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BMJ Publishing Group 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8223650/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33879528
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012061
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author Choksey, Lara
author_facet Choksey, Lara
author_sort Choksey, Lara
collection PubMed
description This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.
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spelling pubmed-82236502021-07-09 Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit Choksey, Lara Med Humanit Original Research This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend. BMJ Publishing Group 2021-06 2021-04-20 /pmc/articles/PMC8223650/ /pubmed/33879528 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012061 Text en © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Original Research
Choksey, Lara
Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
title Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
title_full Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
title_fullStr Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
title_full_unstemmed Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
title_short Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
title_sort environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8223650/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33879528
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012061
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