Speculative Futures: Race in Watchmen's Worlds

The Human Genome Project (1990-2003), an international collaborative effort to sequence the complete set of DNA base pairs making up the Homo sapiens genome, is frequently described as a mapping endeavor. "Rather than an outward exploration of the planet or the cosmos," states the project's website, "the HGP was an inward voyage of discovery," one that "gave us the ability, for the first time, to read nature's complete genetic blueprint for building a human being" (National Human Genome Research Institute 2019). To characterize the advances in genomic research that both produced the HGP and followed from its success as a cartographic accomplishment ("one of the great feats of exploration in history") is to highlight, first, the human genome's vast expanse (roughly 3 billion DNA base pairs) but also the structures devised to hold such a massive data set, as well as the techniques required to "read" the finished "blueprint," to turn the collected data into a legible guide for future travelers.

But while genomic research does indeed involve discovery, its projects are also, and importantly, world-making. Genomics participates in shaping and reshaping epistemological, ethical, and political horizons, in shifting understandings of the past and the future, of what constitutes a planet or a cosmos and how we do—or should—live in the world. Increasingly, the world, in the genomic era, is conceived as springing from DNA, whose analysis both reveals history and points the way to the future. "The body," Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee point out, comes to be seen as "a microcosm of the past," a window or "portal" onto knowledge that can be marshaled "to investigate and adjudicate issues of social membership and kinship; rewrite history and collective memory; arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and open new thinking about health and wellbeing" (2012, 1). To take the body as a window onto knowledge of the universe it contains in miniature is to mistake it as furnishing at once a map of the world and the key to that map. Such a vision of the body evidences a hunger for legibility we might describe as a "passion for the real," a desire to experience reality without mediation, to walk the arc of time as a smooth pathway from past to future.¹

I ask in this essay how such a passion for the real, as manifested in the production and consumption of genomics research, shapes contemporary epistemologies of race and community. The revival of "race thinking" in genetics research (Wailoo et al. 2012, 3)—as well as the resurgence of biological racism in twenty-first-century public discourse—raises alarming questions about the contraction of the "world" to which we confine ourselves, and the constriction of the "we" who are permitted to inhabit it, or not. To approach these questions, I take up a genre, speculative fiction, which has long explored the intersections of biology, technology, and ethics. I look more specifically at a recent exemplar of the tradition that engages race thinking and the passion for the real in particularly intricate, pointed, and fruitful ways: Damon Lindelof and team's 2019 HBO series, Watchmen.

The term speculative fiction commonly designates particular literary genres that foreground the explicitly counterfactual—alternative worlds, pasts, and futures that recognizably depart from our own and draw attention to that fact. As a world-making activity of its own, speculative fiction shapes horizons, but its key mode—speculation—differs markedly from the extrapolative reasoning at work in genomics and the worlding projects that take genetic information as their foundation. "Where extrapolation is grounded in probabilistic reasoning," writes Steven Shaviro, "speculation is rather concerned with possibilities, no matter how extreme and improbable they may be" (2019, 1). To extrapolate is to follow a trend, that is, to extend the logic governing relations between points in a series, staying within its groove. By contrast, Shaviro argues, "speculation picks up just at the point where extrapolation falters and fails…speculation seeks to imagine what happens when a trend exceeds its potential, and pushes against or beyond its own limits" (1). Speculation's capacity...