ABSTRACT
This chapter traces that Steve Jones' use of metaphors of language and literacy and his claims for an anti-racist genetics produce the seductive image of a science harnessing nature in the service of democracy and social progress. Given the historical centrality of 'received pronunciation' to the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC's) construction of Britishness, the language and literacy metaphors that permeate Jones' interpretive framing of genes take on a particular resonance. The tensions in Jones' Lectures surrounding the representational economies of language and literacy inform a similarly ambivalent evaluation of the relationship of genes to questions of race, racism and nation. Genes inscribe a precise taxonomy of racial-ethnic origins. The claims for an anti-racist genetics, however well-intentioned, emerge as essentially rhetorical, window dressing, a contradiction in terms as the foundationalist notions of race and nation which Jones appears to dismiss are also powerfully reinscribed. Here racial, ethnic and national identities elide, emerging as definitive homogeneities.
