The Genealogical Imagination

Catalog description

For most of US history, why was it possible for a white woman to give birth to a black child, but impossible for a black woman to give birth to a white child? Why does the grandchild of an Irish citizen who has never been to Ireland have more citizenship rights than a child born and raised in Ireland to immigrant parents? Why do some indigenous groups use DNA tests to legitimize membership while others explicitly reject them? This course examines the “genealogical imagination”—the social, cultural and cognitive underpinnings of descent—and its manifestation in notions of kinship, ancestry, race and nation. We explore how genealogy as a logic and practice links together ideas about who we are as members of families with “what” we are ethnically or racially. The genealogies we use to record family relationships are the same ones we use to establish our belonging in ethnic groups. And use them we do! Genealogical research is the second most popular hobby in the US, interest in which has skyrocketed with the advent of commercial genealogical research sites. Yet genealogies are never a simple cataloging of our ancestors or our ancestry. Which ancestors we remember or forget, and what forms of relatedness we recognize or deny, are shaped by culture and politics. We examine queer and indigenous kinship and group logics and practices, and how developments in assisted reproductive technologies and “genetic genealogy” are disrupting conventional reckonings of family and ethnoracial relatedness.