'Under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired': Epigenetics, race and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

Abstract

This article examines the role that literature might play in post-genomic biology as it moves toward a complex, non-deterministic conception of the gene. Epigenetics has overturned the notion of the gene as discrete entity with stable, determining effects. Instead, epigenetics reveals that genes can change according to environmental circumstances and that such changes can be passed on to offspring. This finding has far-reaching implications for the concept of race. The effects of past environments - the experience, for example, of slave ancestors - become embodied in health disparities in the present, the genes carry a 'memory' of these experiences, while creating new memories as they are affected by contemporary experiences of racial inequality. This essay argues that literature can illuminate our understanding of these emerging scientific insights. I explore how Rushdie's representation of the porous boundary between the body and its wider environment in The Satanic Verses offers a mode of comprehending the epigenetic effects of racism as the imagined (racist belief in the inferiority of other races) made real (in apparently racial biological characteristics), and how Rushdie's interrogation of the relationship between the imaginary and reality reveals how fiction might be brought to bear on the science of epigenetics.