---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Age of Discovery was the age of da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan, an era when European civilization reached

out to the Far East and thus filled many of the voids in its map of the world. But in a larger sense, we have never ceased from our exploration and discovery The Human Genome Project is thus the next stage in an epic voyage of discovery a voyage that will bring us to a profound understanding of human biology. ( http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome ) This is the description of the Human Genome Project (HGP) on the US governments Department of Energys genome website. One of the most high-profile biological research projects of the 20 th century the initial outlay in 1988-89 was $ 28.2 million at the National Institutes of Health, and the National Center for Human Genome Research alone got $ 108 million in 1991 (Wilkie 1993: 83) since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, the HGPs auto/bio-graphy is fascinating reading. What arrests attention is that this massive techno-scientific project of biotechnology should take recourse to the language of European pre-colonial and colonial discovery and travel. The rhetoric of the HGP, while representing an echo of the

narratives of older European colonialisms, also heralds an entirely new form of colonialism itself. 1

Edited Draft The human body has always been the first site of social, legal, medical and theological control. Census operations and political arithmetic during the early modern period in Europe mapped regions and people, occupations, class affiliations and families, often categorizing the human body in terms of its economic productivity (Sussman 2004). Such forms of social control acquired racial overtones and imperialist agendas with the progress of colonialism in various parts of the world, from the New World to Asia. During the heyday of empire, as several critics have demonstrated, the metropole and the colony, West and East, rulers and governed were often spaces constructed through discourses of such demographic and social controls (Cohn 1990, Appadurai 1996, Hall 2002). Every stage, naturally, had its own rhetoric of mapping rhetoric that described, classified, mapped and constructed subjects of colonial control. Anthropology, ethnography, evolutionary biology all contributed to such constructions, even as scientific theories and developments proceeded apace with colonial conquest and rule (Kumar 1995, Arnold 2000). It is clear that the body native, aboriginal, subject, colonizer has remained the boundary object (to adapt a concept from Star and Griesemer 1989) for various rhetorics of colonialism. In this essay I explore a form of colonialism emergent in the

1990s, a colonialism predicated (expectedly?) on the body. The focus here is on what Eugene Thacker in his exhaustive work on biotechnology, genetics and globalization has termed biocolonialism (2005), a form of colonialism that uses genomics and demographic techniques to observe and quantify human population. My interest is less with the technology per se than with the rhetoric deployed by these genomic projects. Colonialism generated its own rhetorical figures, tropes and narrative modes (as investigated by postcolonial studies, starting with Edward Saids phenomenal Orientalism , 1978). In the new millennium, with numerous post-colonies, biocolonialism appropriates several of conventional colonialisms discourses. That is, biocolonialisms 2

Edited Draft narrative conflates several earlier and existing discourses that have often been used to discriminate, control and exploit. My aim here is to show how these new genomic projects extend the concerns, strategies and motifs of colonial discourse . In order to do so I explore the rhetoric of the major genomic projects that deal with human populations and racial mapping.

1 I must hasten to add that it is not my intention to reduce a techno-scientific project to its rhetoric or narrative. However, the echoes of colonial discourse are so startling in current writings on genomic projects that the narratives merit attention for what politics and ideologies are inscribed into techno-science. 2 Further, I believe that rhetoric and narrative are indispensable components of the techno-scientific enterprise, where projects convey, conceal and convince funding agencies, the state and the people of the use (or uselessness) of medical discoveries and inventions. The rhetoric of contemporary genomic projects has been extraordinarily pervasive. Gene talk is now a part of everyday life with cloning, genetic engineering and biotechnology research a regular feature of public culture and discourse. Media reports, scientific opinion and commentaries have never been so intensive before this. Part of it is to do with the amount of funding and commercial investment that genetics and biotechnology attracts today. Indeed, as Evelyn Fox Keller points out, gene talk has more rhetorical power than ever before, and the greater the ties between science and commerce, the greater the research scientists investment becomes in the rhetorical power of a language that works so well (2000: 143). The Human Genome Project (HGP) was funded and this is significant by the Department of Energy (DOE) of the US government (which alone had a budget of $ 46 million in 1991, independent of the

other bodies involved in the project), and the National Institutes of Health, publishing the first draft of the human genome sequence in June 2000. 3 The rhetoric of this high-profile project codes the HGP as another moment in a voyage inaugurated by Columbus, Magellan and Vasco da Gama, 3

Edited Draft almost as though the voyages have never ceased and the HGP is a moment in a European discovery saga of new worlds . It mentions the fact that the discovery voyages filled many of the voids in its map of the world, but omits to mention how the Europeans filled the not-so-empty voids of the globe: through colonization. By locating the early European voyages of exploration and discovery as its antecedents, and troping its work as an epic voyage of discovery, the HGP begs certain questions. The early exploratory voyages were never innocent discovery trips. They heralded numerous events that changed the geopolitics of the early modern world. The voyages inaugurated trade, political and cultural interactions. They also had unexpected environmental (specifically medical) consequences for the discovered populace as new diseases invaded the bodies of the aboriginal (Crosby 1972). They marked the start of slaving voyages and slavery, settler colonialism in the New World, establishment of trading companies that eventually became political entities (in Asia and Africa).

In short the epic voyage of discovery that the HGP mentions marked the anterior moments of colonization, which led to the suffering, exploitation and deaths of millions of indigenous peoples across the world. Now, it might not be accurate to say that all early exploratory voyages were colonial in intent: but we can measure them, with hindsight, only by their consequences, which were disastrous for many people in Asia, Africa, South America and the new world. The rhetorical flourish of the HGP, comparing itself to the anterior moments of colonization of what is now the Third World is disturbing in the implications. Does the rhetoric of the new biology then mark the rhetoric of bio colonialism? The genomic database thus fills the voids in the map of mankinds knowledge of itself, if one could return to the rhetoric of the HGPs ELSI. Since the map was a crucial component of voyage and colonization (Ryan 1994), the use of the term gestures at something beyond just a knowledge-base, it gestures, indeed, at the potential for biocolonialism inherent in the project. The map is an 4