Sovereignty in Return: Building Utopia through Genetic Reconnection in Cameroon

This dissertation examines how the rise of a genetic Cameroonian diaspora in the United States through genetic genealogy has become crucial to managing and transforming postcolonial sovereignty in Cameroon over the past decade. In 2010, 17 African countries celebrated 50 years of independence. Cameroon distinguished itself by marking the anniversary by inviting 54 DNA-identified African Americans of Cameroonian ancestry back “home.” This first genetic reconnection program would not be the last — neither in Cameroon nor in West Africa more broadly. As genetic ancestry takes on a new life beyond the American genetic genealogy industry, this project examines the ongoing problem of racialization through this technology as a problem of biocapital at a global scale. I consider the ways that genetic ancestry has catalyzed new modes of belonging beyond individualistic desires of American test-takers. The emergence of a genetic Cameroonian diaspora has enabled Cameroonians to repurpose the ambivalent relationship between the African American diaspora and Africa to recoup African Americans as a form of social capital. Through multi-scalar processes of disalienation, I argue that genetic reconnection programs create an ethic of sharing ancestry based on reciprocity. African Americans’ ability to be reunited with their genetically-identified ancestral homeland is authorized insofar as their return can be repurposed to simultaneously to reclaim the promise of independence that the postcolonial nation-building project has been unable to provide by ensuring those who share ancestry are invested in being dependable on and for each other. As this technology of the past is reoriented toward the future in Cameroon, the social, political, and economic pressures that genetic reconnection programs attempt to manage and that simultaneously set the limit for whether and how genetic reconnection’s utopian potential can come to fruition./nBy conducting nearly two years of multi-sited ethnographic research and archival research in Washington, D.C. and Cameroon from 2010 to 2018, I use this dissertation to intervene in critical discussions on the 21st century biologization of race through insights drawn from feminist kinship studies, biological citizenship, and historical repair. In the postgenomic era, where ethics is the currency driving the value of genetic information, I showcase how the politics of life itself has less to do with genetic determinism than how life chances are being differentially defined so as to make DNA a final frontier for a viable life from the scale of the nation-state to intimate kin. Rather than reifying a genetically-determined ancestry in Africa, genetic reconnection between Cameroonians and African Americans is inextricably linked to a reconfiguration of postcolonial sovereignty where the racialized prospects of life are opened up anew. This, however, requires attention to Africa as a contemporary space where scientific knowledge production processes unfold, rather than an ahistorical place either captured by science or where science is applied. Genetic reconnection not only links the related, but distinct, racialized histories of colonialism and slavery binding African Americans and Cameroonians. It also illustrates how these histories are being reassembled under 21st century modes of empire that racialize in ways that are neither undermined nor replicated entirely by DNA alone.

Advisor: Hayden, Cori