‘Race-ing’ Back to the Bio-genetic Future?

Abstract

The inclination towards the end of the book is to engage with a conventional intellectual academic process which presents this work in a linear fashion, such that having provided a series of discursive constructional backdrop, the book then proceeds to unpack and deconstruct those formations. The aim was to show that constructions of ‘risk’ within South Asian populations as they are configured in cultural, lifestyle, and genetic science are performing specific and wide-ranging functions. These functions serve to mask the often vaguely conceptualised and operationalised notions of ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, and even manage to confuse geopolitical categories with ethno-religious and linguistic ones. On the basis of this and other themes I have discussed, there was a need to deconstruct these formulations because they have far-reaching consequences for the populations in question. Part of this narrative ‘set-up’ for the book was to address briefly, in early chapters, the scientific formulations of genetic predisposition in the so-labelled racial category, ‘South Asian’. The linear trajectory of conventional narrative requires that I leave the material where I discussed it, and move to closure by progressing to a conclusion. I would like to resist this temptation, and re-alert readers to the view that the ‘genetic race chapter’ in public health, diabetes research, and academic quarters is hardly closed, and re-emerges as newly formulated, albeit bringing with it older tropes of racial inequality. Within this chapter, I am opening the door onto a vista of future possibilities in which race and raciological meaning-making make their presence felt. The great ‘treacherous bind’, which Rhadakrishnan (1996) identified in both utilising race categories to explore the multiple ways in which they work, whilst simultaneously informing us that we are, indeed, complicit in the very process we are attempting to define and condemn, is appropriate here. I revisit the area of race-genetics diabetes arguments here precisely because the way ‘race-thinking’ re-emerges in different forms at different times within discursive formations is powerful and insidious in its shape-shifting mechanisms.