Postcolonial racial surveillance through forensic genetics

Abstract

The chapter explores the concept of postcolonial racial surveillance to deconstruct the rhetorical and operational devices of genetics and map out modes of biopolitics that connect science with the imposition of state power in its meshes of social classification and discriminatory exclusion. The authors analyse the ways in which Western science develops techno-scientific apparatus fixated on the quest for knowledge of biological individuality. At the same time, logics are unleashed that consolidate imperial and colonial legacies, whereby the search for “individuality” is interconnected, in a complex and intertwined way, with the “collective.” These relationships, interpenetrations and connections between the “individual” and the “collective” denote, in a particularly illustrative way, a form of technological control based on the knowledge of biological individuality and on the interweaving of suspicion and cultures of objectivity. The authors argue that these flows between “individual” and the “collective” bias have profound implications for the reinforcement of discriminatory logics and the marginalisation and surveillance of certain social groups in the light of the tension of the colonial past in postcolonial European time and space.