ABSTRACT
The chapter examines how Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) interrogates the emerging science of epigenetics through literary form and content. Taking a cue from Josie Gill’s Biofictions (2020), I argue that Gyasi’s neo-slave narrative, like Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, models “in its narrative structure, a way of living with ‘a new form of racialization based on processes of becoming rather than on pre-given nature’” (134). By presenting the characters’ experiences through various spatiotemporal junctures, Homegoing offers a means of comprehending the effects and affects of slavery, colonialism, and institutionalized racism, and it furthers readers’ understanding of the embodied and emotional consequences of anti-Black racism. Drawing on Patrick Colm Hogan’s account of “affective narratology,” the chapter pays special attention to how Gyasi’s representation of her characters’ affective experiences lays bare the consequences and possibilities of epigenetic transmission of both trauma and resilience. Studying the ways in which Homegoing negotiates the legacies of slavery and racism that reverberate across generations not only offers a way of making sense of the implications of epigenetic findings, but it also points to the relevance of ethnic American fiction in shaping the stories we tell about epigenetics and race.
