Rethinking kinship through genetics in a global world

In his erudite history of genetic science, tellingly titled The Gene: An Intimate History (2016), Siddhartha Mukherjee frames his account of the development of genetics with a personal genetic history of his own family. More specifically, Mukherjee describes several cases of mental illness in his family, mapping the relations between his afflicted and healthy relatives through the language of genetic risk. He recounts that his grandmother and father believed the Partition of India by the British in 1947 to be the cause for his uncles’ conditions, the ‘political trauma sublimated into their psychic trauma’.12 Later, while working as a doctor in the USA, Mukherjee learns of studies linking mental afflictions with genetics, which effects a geneticisation of his perspective on his family back in India. His embrace of a genetic view of kinship does not rule out the impact of incisive environmental ‘triggers’, such as the Partition. Moreover, he concedes that a lot about what actualises the genetic risk transmitted through his family still remains unclear.13 However, at the same time, his new genetic outlook on his family’s medical history and the explanations it offered brought him ‘a strange interior solace – answering some of the questions that had so haunted my father and grandmother’.14

Mukherjee’s account is insightful in the context of this study. Not only does it provide an example for a genetic kinship network with global dimensions, one typical of many migrant families, but also his family history directly connects India’s colonial and postcolonial history with a familial narrative of genetic risk. This perspective then shapes his understanding of his relations to his nearest kin, as well as of his own identity. In addition, his personal story includes the revision of traditional forms of explanation, in this case of the causes of mental illness, by the Western science of genetics, a site of potential conflict more deeply explored in the novels by Ghosh and Smith. Finally, Mukherjee’s perspective on kinship reveals some of the pertinent medical concerns accompanying a genetic understanding of family relations, namely, inherited diseases, genetic risk and the ethical dilemma of genetic testing, which raises issues of genetic privacy, responsibility towards one’s family members and the potential of discrimination and intervention.15 Mukherjee’s genetic family history exemplifies the epistemic and larger political and ethical implications of this new perspective on kinship in an age of ever-increasing global relations, both on the level of families and on the level of science and biomedical technology.

Mukherjee’s genetic history of family and migration showcases Western science as intimately entangled with the globalisation of knowledge during the 20th and 21st centuries. The histories of globalisation, in turn, as Anne Pollock and Banu Subramaniam state, cannot be understood ‘without taking into consideration the histories of colonialism and its aftermath’.16 Moreover, the globalisation of science and technology is not only an effect but to some degree a cause of the historical globalising processes given their ‘centrality […] to the colonizing mission of imperial powers’.17 The conception of global genetic kinship is thus inseparably bound up with the processes and discourses of globalisation and postcolonialism.

Twentieth-century assumptions about kinship in what is arguably the concept’s home discipline, anthropology, were for the longest time informed by a Western understanding of sexual reproduction, which served as the yardstick against which any non-Western understandings of kinship were measured.18 Towards the end of the century, this ‘Eurocentrism’ manifest in the opposition between fixed biological fact and cultural diversity was criticised in the ‘new kinship studies’.19 Increasingly, the analytical contrast between biology on the one hand and society and law on the other, which underpinned such classic studies as David Schneider’s American Kinship (1968), was replaced by an acceptance of constitutive inter-relations between biological and cultural dimensions of kinship.20 A greater attention to the complex interplay of biological and sociocultural dimensions of kinship not only occasioned a postcolonial emphasis on the value of non-Western systems of knowledge, it also questioned the predominant position of biology in Western notions of kinship relations.21 Paradoxically, particularly in a postcolonial context, the rise of genetics has both re-emphasised biological over cultural relations and further destabilised the boundary between biology and culture in the practices and understanding of kinship.

In postcolonial and diasporic contexts, genetic relatedness can be turned both into a signifier of connection or of fundamental difference between former coloniser and colonised, or between supposed native and migrant. In this, genetic kinship behaves similarly to geneticised concepts of race. Genetic ancestry testing, especially those variants that test for and compare single-nucleotide polymorphisms across individual genomes, routinely provides assessments as to a person’s ethnic ancestry, stating in percentages, for instance, how ‘African’, ‘European’ or ‘Asian’ someone is.22 There are numerous problems with these kinds of results, ranging from limitations of data to the very concepts underlying the test in the first place.23 Due to the nature of its reliance on genetic data, the testing process inevitably reduces to biology such central matters to the experience of diaspora as ethnicity and origin. Such reductionism neglects the plethora of cultural factors that could equally be considered to determine, or at least describe, ethnicity or kinship. What is more, the test’s results are highly susceptible to divergent interpretations.24 It is this contradictory dynamic which has rekindled public suggestions of genetic foundations of race, even though an overwhelming majority of commentators have refuted any such claims for decades.25

Although the concept of kinship exceeds questions of race and includes a variety of additional sociocultural factors, race and kinship are closely related. Both establish and close off networks of connection between individuals and communities, at home and in diaspora. With a view to ancestry testing in particular, Koenig et al state that such ‘genetic race verification services have potentially serious implications for community concepts of kinship and nationhood’.26 Genetic conceptions of kinship, for instance, via geneticised notions of race, not only present new avenues for connection but also new ways to envisage and justify exclusion from existing or future kinship networks.

The same kind of paradoxical effect of genetic thinking on cultural imaginaries of kinship extends beyond the sphere of the individual and the family and shapes perceptions of nationality and kinship on a global scale. In her study of ‘geographies of relatedness’, Catherine Nash argues that the phenomenon of genetic genealogy produces contradictory reactions as it unfolds its impact ‘across the scales of family, nation and humanity’.27 The notion of genetically related ‘national families’, for instance, illustrates the geopolitical scope of genetic discourses of kinship. The concept fuses nationalism with genetic kinship and pits it against a transnational family produced in diaspora, which could easily also be framed in genetic terms. In a globalised world marked by a lingering postcolonial asymmetry in access to resources, power and forms of identification, genetic imaginaries of kinship negotiate starkly divergent interpretations of what genetic relatedness means on national and global scales.

In such divergent interpretations of genetic kinship, the meaning of genetic difference is a key variable. The relative absence of difference can signify strong communal bonds. At the same time, difference is also a vital marker of identity, and biologically informed models of kinship may obscure individualising markers of difference, genetic and otherwise. In postcolonial thinking, from Said’s ‘universal humanism’ to Khasnabish’s recent emphasis on a common humanity derived from Indian philosophy, a fundamental similarity often functions as a key political and philosophical asset.28 Establishing universal human kinship on the molecular level of genetics, genetic difference in turn becomes all the more political because its emphasis requires the effort to insist on its significance in a context where genetic similarity is foregrounded on a global scale.

Literary fiction is uniquely predisposed to engage with the poetics of postcolonial genetic kinship. According to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), literature alone is capable of unearthing all the existing and possible relations within a culture defined by postcolonial transformation.29 Genetic science provides a new and additional discourse through which to think and construct in literature the networks of postcolonial and diasporic relations that exist and develop among families and communities around the globe. I will begin my analysis with White Teeth because Smith’s appropriation of genetic kinship remains close to more traditional networks of kin, highlighting the role of the family in its representation of diaspora and multiculturalism. The Calcutta Chromosome then affords a radically expanded conception of kinship that goes beyond the bounds of the family and imagines a seemingly utopian kind of postcolonial connection among former coloniser and colonised and across the globe. Both novels illuminate and amplify the concept of a cultural poetics of genetic kinship by aesthetically transcending the limits of genetic science to construct additional genetic connections between the West and the Global South on the level of metaphor and analogy.

Genetic fate and the postcolonial family in White Teeth

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth has become an important cornerstone in recent British fiction about multiculturalism, and Smith’s examination of postcolonial and diasporic identity politics has arguably emerged as the foremost concern in critical discussions of the novel.30 A focus on kinship relations in this context reveals a new perspective on the text’s aesthetics of identity formation, especially regarding the interplay of biological and cultural dimensions of the characters’ continuously transforming identities. In the novel, the biological dimension of individual and communal identity finds expression in discourses of genes and blood. Genetic discourses of inherited characteristics dominate, however, and invocations of blood relations appear to buttress the novel’s interrogation of genetic heredity by dovetailing it with its historical precursor discourse, rather than suggesting an alternative view of the conjunction of heredity and identity.

Previous critical analysis of the novel’s engagement with genetic science mostly zooms in on issues of genetic determinism and the perceived conflict between genetic nature and sociocultural nurture.31 When attention is paid to the inter-relation of genetic determinism and matters of postcolonial identity, the focus is primarily on the extent to which characters’ identities appear to be subject to genetic predisposition.32 I shift the focus of my analysis to the intersubjective relations figured and reconfigured through a discourse of genetics in the novel. Such relations are bound up with questions of genetic determinism, which help to make sense of the nature and consequence of these relations. However, their primary concern, as well as analytical virtue, lies in uncovering the communities of kinship from which postcolonial identities are shown to emerge in Smith’s novel. In particular, a focus on genetic kinship illuminates the central role of the family in the text’s negotiation of postcolonial identities.

Frequently, explicit and implicit discussions of genetics in the dyad of nature and nurture in the text appear, on second sight, to be more concerned with establishing the import of family relations and their impact on characters’ identities. In the novel, the conversation between Joyce Chalfen and Clara Bowden about the origin of their children’s intelligence is a case in point. For Joyce, the mental agility of her husband and children is clearly ‘in the genes’ because ‘nurture just won’t explain it’.33 Asked about the root of her daughter’s intelligence, British-Jamaican Clara responds that it must be ‘the English in my side’ (354). Her answer is meant to please her hostess. To herself, Clara thinks that, actually, her colonial English grandfather was not that bright at all: ‘Probably even Grandma Ambrosia was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham’ (355). The passage clearly undermines any belief in the primacy of genetic nature over nurture. However, more significantly, I argue, Clara’s contemplation of her genetic kin deploys the issue of inherited characteristics to enact a complex and comic investigation of her sense of self in the persistent shadow of colonial politics.34 Her intimidation by the representatively ‘English’ and middle-class Joyce leads Clara, to her later chagrin, to emphasise her own genetic claim on English kin. Privately, however, she asserts her Jamaican heritage by rejecting the superior influence she just attributed to the genes of her English ancestor. Their discussion of genetic predispositions is tangled up with a more emotionally charged interrogation of genetic kinship. This exposes the lingering postcolonial structures of assumed English superiority that also characterise the scene’s internal power dynamics. Even though Clara in the end manages in some measure to rewrite these dynamics, the meaning of genetic kinship in the novel emerges at the potent intersection of familial and national histories.

The genetic fate of the identical twins, Millat and Magid, provides another, even more elaborate, example of how questions of genetic determinism are linked with the novel’s overarching concerns about family and national belonging. Twin studies have long been a staple in genetic research to test the respective influences of genes and environment on individuals. In an aestheticised fashion, the novel conducts its own twin study by showing Millat and Magid emerging as completely different personalities from their respective teenage years. Marcus Chalfen, the novel’s primary geneticist character, and Joyce’s husband, confidently pronounces that ‘never in my life have I come across a couple of twins who prove more decidedly the argument against genetic determinism than Millat and (Magid)’ (367). The narrator later further cements the novel’s overall scepticism of genetic determinism, stating that the twins’ identical genomes had ‘reached different conclusions’ (463).35 However, in the larger context of the novel, the twins’ different paths figure prominently in the text’s exploration of the ties between families and national culture. In this way, the twins exceed the function of mere test subjects in a study of genetic determinism.

The reason why the twins spent their teenage years apart is directly connected to their father’s deep anxiety over the loss of his Bengali heritage in his new diasporic home in Britain. This heritage, for him, is deeply engrained in his biology—‘nothing was closer or meant more to him than his blood’ (98). In particular, he emphasises his relation to Mangal Pande, whom he claims was a national hero resisting British oppression. Ironically, in his attempt to salvage his cultural legacy and that of his family, he not only fails to live up to his ancestor Pande but also breaks his family apart. Having succumbed to what he perceives as Western temptations—drink, a dwindling of faith, an affair—the twins’ father, Samad, decides to send both his sons back to be educated in Bangladesh. However, he can only afford one ticket, and so the twins are separated and Magid alone is sent away. In a further ironic twist, Magid finally returns almost as a caricature of the British colonial gentleman. He appears thoroughly Westernised and is devoid of the religious fervour his father had hoped to instil in him in Bangladesh—he even dares to order bacon (450). Millat, in contrast, has joined a group of harmless but fervent Muslims, satirically called ‘Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation’ or ‘KEVIN’ (301), although his self-image as a gang member is highly influenced by Hollywood films. While all these differences between the two brothers also undermine notions of genetic determinism, they more pressingly embody their father’s conflicted sense of self, which has engulfed their whole family.

Samad’s and the twins’ troubled relationship is figured through a genetic discourse that often exceeds the bounds of established genetic science in order to poetically depict how their familial relations shape their cultural identities. Consider, for example, the narrator’s comments when Samad is about to meet the English woman with whom he is having an affair: ‘And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day’ (161). The narrator fashions Samad’s self-conscious guilt, which Samad understands as his personal assault on his Bengali heritage, as a heritable condition. The genes here mark both the kinship relation between father and sons, as well as the space through which moral failings are seen to reverberate along a familial lineage. At the same time, this geneticisation of his guilt is clearly indicated as a conflation of genetic science and Samad’s trepidations about his own and his sons’ assimilation to British culture. The narrator’s division of the family into the ‘Eastern father’ and his ‘Western sons’ underscores Samad’s cultural unease. Familial ties are here imagined through genetics and reflect the identity conflicts besetting families in a postcolonial society.

Using genetic discourses of kinship to reflect underlying issues and themes, like Samad’s anxiety, is a recurrent aesthetic strategy in the novel. The twins’ school, for instance, is named after an English colonialist who, supposedly to help them improve their stations, brought groups of Jamaicans to Britain. There, however, they ended up living lives of deprivation. The Englishman’s legacy is described as running ‘through people’s blood and the blood of their families; it ran through three generations of immigrants who could feel both abandoned and hungry even when in the bosom of their families in front of a mighty feast’ (307). The statement does not so much seriously indicate hereditary transmission of trauma in epigenetic terms. Instead, it uses a discourse of biological heredity analogically to emphasise the lasting impression of inequality and lack on a community. Similarly, when the narrator describes Millat’s violent act of rebellion at the end of the novel, the invocation of an inherited genetic predisposition to rebel appears more metaphorical than literal: ‘His is an imperative secreted in the genes and the cold steel in his inside pocket is the answer to a claim made on him long ago. He’s a Pandy deep down. And there’s mutiny in his blood’ (526). The recourse to genetics here underlines a performance of self that draws on genetic notions of kinship to fortify a cultural and national continuity across the gulf of globalisation and diaspora.

In addition to these aesthetic appropriations of genetic kinship, genetic discourses of relatedness inform and emphasise the central structural role played by the family in Smith’s interrogation of postcolonial identities. Ryan Trimm goes as far as stating that ‘Smith’s novel uses the family as a miniature of the nation’.36 Smith, however, not only draws on the family to depict its importance for its particular members. She dramatises the characters’ conflicted postcolonial identities through the interaction of the novel’s three central families, the British-Jamaican Joneses (Archie, Clara and Irie), the Bangladeshi Iqbals (Samad, his wife Alsana and their sons Millat and Magid) and the wealthier middle-class Chalfens. The Chalfens function as the supposed template of Englishness in the novel, even though it emerges that they, too, are marked by migration and diaspora as Marcus’s family are third-generation Polish immigrants. Over the course of the narrative, the Chalfens become the focus of acute diasporic kinship anxiety on the part of the first-generation immigrant parents, Samad and Alsana, as well as Clara. Although not for Clara’s husband, for him being ‘a father was such a solid genetic position in his mind (the solidest fact in Archie’s life), it didn’t occur to him that there might be any challenge to his crown’ (343). Archie’s indifference here appears as a striking example of the ease his privileged position as a white man affords him. Never having been seen as a racial other, he lacks the diasporic desire to protect his cultural identity and family against hybridisation. The more time Irie and Millat—and later Magid—spend at the Chalfens’ house and the more they appear to become integrated into the Chalfen family, the more their immigrant parents perceive this development as a threat to their families’ biological and cultural community. Alsana is desperately ‘trying to keep this family together’ (344). She fears an even greater assimilation in the second-generation immigrant sons and daughters of her extended family, who embrace Said’s diasporic ‘alternative communities’ with much less apprehension.37 Alsana’s fear manifests itself in a vision of the dissolution of her family’s sense of kinship and cultural identity in an undifferentiated gene pool of mixed lineages and ethnicities—‘their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted’ (327).38 Alsana would surely have emphasised the significance of genetic ancestry testing had the service been around at the turn of the millennium.

The increasing integration of Irie, Millat and Magid into the Chalfen family highlights the role of culture in kinship relations as they expand their previous familial sphere through non-biological forms of connection. At the same time, their presence in the Chalfen household exposes the superficiality, so Smith seems to suggest, of much middle-class emphasis on multiculturalism.39 Marcus only really appreciates Magid—the most traditionally anglicised of the three children—and becomes Magid’s ‘English father’.40 Irie, although deeply infatuated with the erudite Chalfens (319–21, 343), is only deemed competent enough by Marcus to rearrange his filing system. Moreover, Joyce’s fascination with Millat remains literally superficial, since she is drawn most of all to his extraordinary and seemingly ‘exotic’ beauty (319–20). Within the sphere of the Chalfen family home, Smith stages a tableau of diasporic tension between Eastern and Western identities, cultural and biological forms of kinship and male and female exploitation.41 Smith’s depiction of the interfamily feud—which includes a scene of interfamily espionage (347)—and the cultural anxieties from which it springs, powerfully illustrates the ingrained importance of kinship relations in the negotiation of diasporic identities and belonging. However, the cause for the familial tensions also gives a glimpse of the facility with which the second generation could forge new connections unburdened by oppressive values of biological and cultural purity.42

Genetic conceptions of kinship in the novel also connect the text’s exploration of diasporic kinship and identity with contemporary biotechnology. As Everett Hamner remarks, the text combines the ‘impact of twentieth-century shifts in immigration and biotechnology’.43 Marcus Chalfen’s research project is the genetically engineered ‘FutureMouse’ (326), whose public presentation marks the conclusion of the novel. The mouse’s life is supposed to be completely pre-engineered—contradicting Marcus’s rejection of genetic determinism to an extent—in order to study the physiological function of genes. Ultimately, this is geared towards the advance of medical treatments: ‘a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s’ (312). His belief in the ‘perfectibility of all life’ is what most enrages the protestors at the unveiling of FutureMouse (312, emphasis original), causing them to neglect the medical application he envisions for his research.44 The novel offers a critique of the new forms of biopower that genetic engineering enables,45 for instance, through the countervoices of the protestors, Marcus’s arrogance as well as the final escape of the mouse from its glass cage. At the same time, Smith also draws attention to the problematic and reductionist cultural appropriation of some of genetics’ medical promises . She ultimately remains ambivalent as to the project.

However, the novel also makes use of the biotechnological discourse of Marcus’s research in chimaeras and transgenesis, studies in genetically fusing elements from different organisms (312), to describe Irie’s growing integration into the Chalfen household. The narrator pronounces Irie as becoming ‘transgenically’ fused to the Chalfens, prefiguring in genetic terms Joyce’s later assertion that Irie has become an ‘addition’ to the family (342, 353). Similarly, when inspecting the photographs of the Chalfen family, Joyce announces that they look ‘[l]ike clones of each other’ (314). These biotechnological images of relatedness expand the novel’s genetic vocabulary of kinship. They illustrate both the aesthetic function of genetic science in the novel as well as associate notions of genetic relatedness with the urgency of the discourse and debate around genetic technology and biomedical application.

At the end of the novel, questions of genetic identity and kinship are again emphasised. This time, the emphasis underlines a vision of familial bonds that transcends both the burdens of biology and postcoloniality. In the narrative, Irie is the character most troubled by the bodily visibility of her difference. Her anxiety about her appearance reflects the novel’s concerns with a sense of otherness derived from racial stigmatisation. She considers her body ‘genetically designed with another country in mind, another climate’ and her attempts at a ‘makeover’ are framed as a struggle with her ‘genetic fate’ (266, 268). Trying to change her appearance, Irie rebels against two crucial dimensions of postcolonial identity conceived through genetics in the novel: race and family. Unlike Millat, who ‘lived for the in between’ (351), Irie desires assimilation. The novel makes clear that her genetic fate is limited to certain aspects of her appearance.46 The text further qualifies her desire for assimilation by the persistent inequalities and maltreatments characterising the immigrants’ lives in the story. This renders assimilation a problematic and undesirable obfuscation of past and present social and political asymmetries.

Irie’s strategy in the end has given rise to divergent readings. In short sequence, she sleeps with both Millat and Magid. She then becomes pregnant and the narrator offers a glimpse of her living together with her ‘fatherless little girl’ (541), Joshua Chalfen and her grandmother in Jamaica. Her daughter is fatherless in the sense that her patrimony cannot absolutely be established—the twins’ genetic makeup is identical after all. The novel thus seems to offers us a final vision of family life that boasts a combination of biological and non-biological relations, skips a generation and, through Irie’s daughter, transcends the seeming definitude of genetic relatedness (although, of course, ironically, this transcendence is only comprehensible with recourse to the discourse of genetic kinship). According to Mindi McMann, this final utopian image is marred by the fact that its rejection of historical and biological burdens appears to be possible only outside of Britain.47 Roxanne Covelo, in contrast, reads the ending more optimistically, arguing that the ending’s ‘vision of a universe in which origins matter little or not at all is not distressing but liberating. Utopia for Smith is a post-hereditary place’.48 Covelo notes, however, that, with regard to the novel as a whole, it remains open to ‘what extent this is actually possible’.49 I would add that Joshua’s presence in the envisioned kinship network in Jamaica represents a continuous translocal link to their shared British home country, though now devoid of colonial ambitions. Irie’s new family cannot in fact escape the relations that connect them to their families and histories back in England, but these relations now seem less fraught with conflict. Moreover, since her daughter combines the cultural and genetic heritage of a network of family in Britain, Jamaica and Bangladesh, she comes to epitomise the very notion of global genetic kinship. This final flicker of postcolonial utopia in White Teeth resonates with a similarly utopian, if radically different, form of global genetic kinship developed in The Calcutta Chromosome.

New forms and geographies of genetic kinship in The Calcutta Chromosome

In The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh combines his fictional exploration of diasporic identity with a critical interrogation of Western science in the face of non-Western approaches to knowledge. The novel is set in a near future when technological globalisation is even more advanced, with increased levels of cyberconnection but also surveillance ‘around the globe’.50 Global migration has also increased and the text’s two protagonists exemplify what the novel reveals to be an often isolating and disorienting mobility that includes multiple diasporas. Antar grew up in Egypt and, after studying in Moscow, now works in New York City (5, 9). Murugan is originally from Calcutta but also worked in New York City until he disappeared on a research trip back to Calcutta. These multiple settings in The Calcutta Chromosome contrast with the singular focus on London in White Teeth. The representation of diasporic and native space in Ghosh’s novel therefore places a greater stress on translocation than we find in Smith’s text. This translocal focus in The Calcutta Chromosome is closely connected with the novel’s exploration of alternative and localised epistemologies. In India, Murugan searched for evidence that the discovery of how malaria spreads, which won the British Ronald Ross a Nobel prize in 1902, was actually the feat of Indian researchers working at Ross’ laboratory. The novel’s plot centres on Antar’s attempt to reconstruct Murugan’s trip and research and narrates its story in temporally and geographically fragmented segments. Antar and Murugan were colleagues, both working for the International Water Council, a massive global corporation that houses Antar’s direct employer, the company LifeWatch, a ‘global public health consultancy and epidemiological data bank’ (5, 8). The global corporate structures in the novel underline the near future’s connectedness of the globe, not just on the level of markets and capital but also on the level of the individual body and health. I argue that the text’s combined negotiation of diasporic identity and localised science gives rise to an aesthetic vision of postcolonial kinship that, on the level of characters, crosses national, temporal and gender boundaries. Moreover, on the level of discourse, Ghosh articulates forms of relatedness that integrate Western genetic science with alternative Indian epistemologies.

Antar’s life is marked by social and cultural alienation and representative of the majority of immigrants depicted in the novel.51 He works from home and, after losing his wife and child in an accident, his only regular company consists of the regulars at a café at Penn Station. The space of the café itself resembles what Munkelt et al have described as a ‘highly condensed translocal space’ that strongly references the individual home countries of the regulars who are joined together by their shared experience of diaspora.52 The spatial setting of the train station further underscores the feeling of transience and cultural homelessness shared by the patrons of the café (9, 15). Their sense of community is reminiscent of the ‘alternative community’ Archie and Samad find at the O’Connell’s pub in Smith’s White Teeth. However, contrary to Antar, both Archie and Samad still have their genetic families to return to. In The Calcutta Chromosome, the café community cannot make up for the loss of Antar’s family and the growing desolation around his home as more and more families move away from the neighbourhood. He dreams of going back to Egypt but cannot afford to (5). In his diaspora, he moreover begins to lose his connection with his home country and culture. He has ‘grown rusty in the (Arabic) dialect’, in which the artificial intelligence system, Ava, operating on his computer communicates with him. Ava is ‘programmed to simulate ‘localisation’’, a feat deeply ironic, given Antar’s emotional and geographical distance from his country of birth as well as the pronounced artificiality of the undertaking (14).53 Ava’s programme appears to represent the idea, revealed a fallacy by Hall, that cultural identities can be reproduced without attention to the mediating context of life in a new country.

This absence of meaningful community and a sense of rootedness in Antar’s life is contrasted by the novel’s equivalent of the final optimistic image of global kinship in White Teeth. This genetic conception of kinship in The Calcutta Chromosome emerges from the novel’s postcolonial negotiation of Western science. This critical interrogation of Western and non-Western scientific epistemologies is a foremost concern in the scholarship on the novel.54 The research of Antar’s former colleague, Murugan, is the primary vehicle of this epistemological enquiry. Murugan is convinced that Ross did not discover that malaria spreads through mosquitos by his own accord but that he was led towards this discovery by a group of Indian ‘counterscientists’, a man named Laakhan and a woman called Mangala. Murugan aims to rewrite scientific history and, through his findings, the novel challenges the reader to rethink the hierarchies between colonial British scientist and colonised Indian researcher that defined the scientific community at the time, extending imperial domination at the level of science and technology.55 Against the background of Khasnabish’s reminder of the persistence of such epistemological hierarchies, the emphasis in The Calcutta Chromosome on Indian epistemology appears particularly significant. In White Teeth, in contrast, alternative epistemologies to Western science only ever appear at all in the form of a more generalised scepticism against notions of race and otherness supposedly legitimised by genetic science. In the context of Ghosh’s more extensive questioning of epistemic hierarchies, his focus on the field of malaria research, as Diane Nelson notes, is additionally suggestive because malaria is by nature ‘a disease dependent on multiple connections’.56 Malaria’s inherent connectivity lends metaphorical weight to the novel’s depiction of substantial inter-relations between Western and Indian epistemologies during the colonial period.

According to Murugan, the ‘counter-science’ (103) pursued by the Indian researchers is premised on a completely different epistemological foundation from Western science. He explains that to the counterscientists, ‘to know something is to change it, therefore, in knowing something, you’ve already changed what you think you know so you don’t really know it at all’ (104). The epistemological uncertainty of this scientific methodology proves confusing to the reader precisely because it confounds positivist Western standards of knowledge and scientific knowledge production. In the face of what in the novel appears to be the big breakthrough achieved by the counterscientists, their alternative reasoning is not rejected. Instead, this alternative epistemology performs a serious challenge to the assumed primacy of Western scientific knowledge. Science and so-called counterscience are shown to mutually propel each other forwards on an equal footing.

Ghosh’s utopian vision of postcolonial kinship is a direct product of the inter-relating forces of Western and non-Western experiments in the novel. The resulting relations among the different characters thus appear as a reflection of the converging epistemologies that underlie the genetic discourse through which their kinship is being articulated. By guiding Ross in his malaria research, the Indian Mangala chances on the novel’s eponymous ‘Calcutta chromosome’ (108). This is, however, only the name Murugan gives to the process unearthed by Mangala and her followers, namely, the process of transferring personalities from one body to another: ‘For the sake of argument let’s call it a chromosome: though the whole point of this is that if it really is a chromosome, it’s only so by extension, so to speak – by analogy’ (246). The exact nature of this chromosome is never revealed in the novel and, possibly, cannot be revealed in a Western scientific framework. Murugan explains that Mangala’s discovery allows her to transfer personalities from one body to another by transfusing a particle, the chromosome, that carries the collected information about a person’s character, but which itself cannot be heritably transmitted (247). The Calcutta chromosome, thus, in some regards, critically diverges from conventional assumptions about genetic science, where the inheritance of chromosomes is key, while reproducing classic genetic dogma about the information carried in the DNA. The extent to which personalities are genetically inscribed or prescribed is of course notoriously controversial and relates back to my discussion of genetic determinism in White Teeth. In The Calcutta Chromosome, genetic determinism does not play a substantial role as such, but it can be observed that both novels emphasise that genetic ancestry, while important, does not translate in any predictable way into individual personalities or cultural identities.

Although the Calcutta chromosome’s alternative epistemological status is repeatedly underlined, its primary point of scientific and discursive reference remains genetic science.57 In consequence, the kinship networks imagined through the chromosome’s transmission are presented as genetic kinship relations. Further, in the Calcutta chromosome’s stated transgressions of conventional genetic science, we can identify the same aesthetic appropriation of genetic discourse as was identified in White Teeth, for instance, in Alsana’s genetic vision of Bengali identity.58 Moreover, like Smith’s novel, The Calcutta Chromosome uses its poetics of genetic kinship to map and negotiate the construction of diasporic identities and postcolonial relations.

The novel’s particular imaginary of global genetic kinship comes to a head in the final scene of the narrative, when Antar himself, or at least his personality, becomes fused with the other characters who have undergone Mangala’s treatment. Aided by the latest incarnation of Mangala, in the body of his neighbour Tara, Antar is joined by a diverse community of people: ‘There were voices everywhere now, in his room, in his head, in his ears, it was as though a crowd of people was in the room with him. They were saying: ‘We’re with you; you’re not alone; we’ll help you across’’ (306). It remains unclear exactly what happens at this moment, whether his body becomes the receptacle of other personalities or whether he joins them in another body or, even, in a digital form.59 In any case, the scene is much more significant for its emphasis on kinship. At the end of the novel, Ghosh here imagines a community of strangers from around the globe intimately connected and mindful of each other. Their connection is achieved via an aesthetic construct that combines genetic science with non-Western forms of knowledge—and is strongly reminiscent of the Hindu mythology of reincarnation. The new kinship relations among the group are remarkable not only because they envision a kind of biological kinship that is in fact the product of cultural and scientific manipulation, but also because they combine individuals from Western, Eastern and Southern backgrounds. As Nelson points out, ‘the Calcutta chromosome lashes together rich and poor, in India and in diaspora; it links Egyptian and Armenian, journalist and Bollywood star, a self-made man and a nineteenth-century laboratory assistant, colonial science and post-colonial counter-science’.60 Moreover, as Romanik remarks, ‘markers of identity (race, class, religion and language) get displaced and come to be understood as series of interconnections’.61 Through The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh offers a vision of genetic kinship that connects those who have been affected by the social and political consequences of colonial rule, including global diaspora. In light of their various cultural and racial backgrounds, it is the newly forged chromosomal relatedness that stands out as the strongest kind of kinship among them. Yet, at the same time, the genetic imaginary of their connection is expressive of profound relations between them and their histories. Because of their fused minds, they quite literally share their past experiences. Their individual and localised memories come together in another highly condensed translocal space: the geneticised diasporic body. This genetic imaginary of postcolonial relations appears utopian but evinces a real desire for connection across perceived national and ethnic boundaries.

Ghosh’s vision of a global cross-cultural, interethnic kinship, established on the level of genes, powerfully imagines a poetics of postcolonial relations that may glimpse beyond the political, economic and epistemic inequalities governing the world in the novel. This optimistic vision of a future global kinship goes markedly further than the cautiously utopian depiction of Irie’s new transnational family glimpsed at the end of White Teeth. However, this powerful invocation of unity in The Calcutta Chromosome also risks dissolving the difference that as an analytical and political tool fuels postcolonial appeals to diversity and which circumscribes the particular kinship networks, like the family, which are so vital to individual identity. As a case in point, Robbie Goh reads the community established at the end of the novel as a ‘cacophony of voices’ that recreates the notion of the ‘body of the native’ as ‘an indistinguishable mass’.62 Honing in on the novel’s vagueness as to what exactly happens to the host body once a foreign personality has entered it, Goh interprets Mangala’s identity transfer as a form of colonisation reminiscent of the other prominent colonial force in the text, the British colonial rule of India.63 While the novel is indeed ambiguous about the fate of the host, I would argue that the plurality of voices at the end implies an accumulation of personalities in the host rather than a hostile takeover by an invading genetic particle. Nonetheless, Goh has a point. It is crucial to keep in mind that, as I have stressed before, an appeal to genetic kinship might paradoxically invite others to see genetic ties among a particular group as justification to denounce them as more or less fundamentally other.