2.3: What Is Genealogy?
Lead scholar-producer: Ryan McDermott
I. Literal Family Genealogy as a Starting Point [0:00-7:55]
Background: Cantor and congregation singing a setting of the Psalm, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?”
Ryan McDermott: Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, is one of America’s most prestigious universities. It was founded by the Roman Catholic order of Jesuit priests. Those priests owned enslaved people. In 1838, they sold 272 men, women, and children to a plantation in Louisiana in order to raise the funds to build the original Georgetown campus. Starting in 2015, a group of Georgetown alumni used DNA evidence and genealogical research to identify more than 8,000 descendants of the original 272 enslaved people. In 2017 the university held a service to express contrition for the sin of slavery.
Descendent of GU 272: “To be denied those things that rightly come from the labor of our bodies, to have our minds deprived of the tools to develop to their potential, to live under soul-crushing injustice, stress, and deprivation, surely these are sins against the Word of God and therefore God himself. These people, the 272 men, women, and children we remember today endured all of these. Their descendants are still experiencing them today.”
Ryan McDermott: In an effort to make some form of reparation, Georgetown offered preferential admission to descendants of the original enslaved people and in 2021 established an annual reconciliation fund of $400,000 to benefit “community-based projects that aim to have an impact on Descendant communities whose ancestors were once enslaved on Maryland Jesuit plantations.”
The history of the GU 272, as they are known, raises important questions about how the past bears upon the present. To what extent do living people bear responsibility for their ancestors’ sins? When is it better to let bygones be bygones and just move on? And how can learning about our past open up possibilities for healing and reconciliation?
These are questions that often motivate the academic study of the past, even if they are never stated out loud. If we’re concerned about how the past affects us personally in the present, one of our most valuable tools is genealogy.
In this episode, we’ll be talking about genealogy in two ways, literally and by analogy. Literally, genealogy is the study of how generations of living things relate to each other. Think about the evolutionary tree of life from your biology textbook, or Ancestry.com.
Before Charles Darwin adopted the language of evolution, he expressed what he called “descent with modification” using the word “genealogy.” Any phenomenon that remains recognizable, but also changes with each generation, can be studied through genealogical analysis: an examination of how each stage or “generation” of a phenomenon is connected to, but also different from, the one that came before, and of what caused the changes to occur.
This means we can also think, by analogy, of anything that changes over time in terms of genealogy. For example, thinking back to the first episode, we can talk about how climbing Mount Everest in 2023 is related to Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1341. What have today’s mountain climbers inherited from earlier generations? We’re not talking about actual genetic material, in this case. We’re talking about how ideas and feelings get passed down through the years. Climbers are always taking previous generations’ gear and techniques and imaginations and developing them for their own needs.
Genealogies of Modernity inquires about how modern phenomena and ideas about modernity are descended from earlier phenomena and ideas, and how they have been modified over time.
In the last episode, Michael Puett introduced two notions of modernity: two ways of dealing with the past that he described as quintessentially modern.
[04:40]
Michael Puett: So the one model is the one we've seen in China with the first Emperor, which is the claim that everything that existed before I'm going to reject. So, I am greater than the past. Everything that existed before is lesser and, indeed, really should be destroyed.
The second form of modernity that we have seen is not a rejection of the past, but rather a statement that we totally and completely control the past and we can build a single narrative genealogy that explains everything precisely by giving everything that happened in the past it's proper place, subordinate to us, and, when it was a good thing in the past, leading to us.
Ryan McDermott: The GU 272 seem to present us with a case where it’s impossible to make either of these two modernity claims. The DNA research team showed that this past history can’t be erased. Even if we completely blotted out the memory of the original 272 enslaved individuals, their genetic material would still live on in their descendants. And the whole complex history of slavery, race relations, and reparations in the United States shows how far we are from having ‘overcome everything bad’ in our past and carried on only the good.
But where modernity claims fail us, that’s where genealogical thinking can help us. In fact, genealogy inherently challenges modernity thinking. Where a phenomenon claims to be ‘modern,’ an invention of the present that represents a sharp break from the past, genealogy thinking uncovers the ‘lineage’ or ‘ancestry’ of this phenomenon, showing how it does descend from older phenomena and connects us, for better or worse, to the past. If we really want to overcome and repair what was destructive or oppressive in the past, the better way is to start by recognizing how it is still with us.
Welcome to Genealogies of Modernity. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott. In this episode, we explore the meaning and value of genealogy—a way of thinking that will shape the rest of this series. We ask how different forms of genealogical thinking can reconnect us to the past without limiting our future to the past. We see how critical genealogy does the important work of challenging both of those kinds of modernity claims, which purport to leave the past behind, and noble origin stories, which claim a purely virtuous inheritance from the past. But we also see how recovering the past can offer possibilities for flourishing in the future. In Chinese ancestor rituals, medieval family trees, and modern reconciliation ceremonies, we see how communities use creative genealogy to open up new connections and new beginnings.
II. Literal Genealogy—Family History [7:55-15:05]
Ryan McDermott: Let’s start with literal genealogy. What do you know about your great-grandparents? I know from my family history and Ancestry.com that my great-grandparents lived in Ireland. Some of them were rural farmers. Some lived in Dublin, the capitol. I know their names and birth and death dates. But that’s about it. And if you’re like me and most Americans, you know almost nothing about the actual lives of your great-grandparents, or any relatives just four generations ago.
There are exceptions. They usually take the form of dramatic stories or famous ancestors. And for me, there’s the family lore about my great-grandfather John Whelan. The story goes that by day he was a Dublin taxi driver, and by night, in secret, he used his taxi to run missions for the revolutionary Irish Republican Army. He got caught by the British, interrogated and tortured for days, and left for dead in a ditch. But he survived, and fled to the United States in 1926. That’s where that line of my family picks up over here.
Growing up, that was a story my relatives told with pride. It was one of the many ways I was taught to think about our Irish identity.
But what if your family tree includes ancestors you want nothing to do with? That’s the position actor Ben Affleck found himself in when he went on the TV show Finding Your Roots in 2015.
ABC Anchor: We're gonna turn next tonight to actor Ben Affleck, now apologizing. He went on that show seen by millions called Finding Your Roots, and tonight admitting he asked producers not to reveal one of his ancestors owned slaves. ABC's [inaudible name] with his explanation tonight.
Ben Affleck: Yeah, I'm sure that there's so much of people's history that gets lost over time.
[10:00]
Reporter: Tonight, actor Ben Affleck admitting he tried to keep part of his own history hidden after learning he had a slave-owning ancestor on an episode of the PBS show Finding Your Roots that aired in October. Hacked Sony emails revealing that Affleck asked the show's executive producer and host, Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., to keep that information out of the show, which it was. In a Facebook post, Affleck is apologizing, saying, “I was embarrassed,” adding, “I lobbied Gates the same way I lobbied directors about what takes of mine I think they should use.” Affleck is one of several celebrities to make surprising discoveries through the show. As for Affleck, he's now identifying his ancestor as Benjamin Cole, tweeting, “He lived in Georgia on my mom's side, about six generations back.”
In a statement, Gates says they didn't include the slavery connection because they chose to focus on more interesting aspects of Affleck's ancestry. PBS is conducting an internal review to see if any editorial standards were violated.
Ryan McDermott: Ben Affleck’s genealogy story is about ideas. It’s about identity. Even though it’s based on DNA testing, Affleck wasn’t worried about literally inheriting slave-owner genes. He was worried that his genealogy would suggest an identity he didn’t recognize as his own.
The same goes for my family history, in reverse. My relatives were proud of John Whelan not because they thought they had inherited some kind of courage gene, but because of what his story symbolizes about Irish-American identity and the freedom achieved through immigration. Literal genealogy furnishes the characters and stories out of which we build identities.
But there is also reason to be suspicious of genealogies. Just because you have a family tree doesn’t mean it’s accurate. It could include a lot of wishful thinking or even willful deception.
For example, when we look at genealogies from the late Middle Ages and early modern period, we often find what historian J. Horace Round called “genealogical concoctions:” family trees that traced a family’s roots to illustrious origins were often works of fanciful imagination. In the absence of hard evidence, family historians felt free to speculate and fabricate.
Here’s my colleague Caro Pirri, a scholar of early modern England:
Caro Pirri: Sara Trevisan actually has a great story about genealogical fabrications. She’s working on the sixteenth century and in her research she talks about the Steward family—so that’s Steward with a “d” on the end—that took took the sound of their name as inspiration to discover their relationship to the powerful Stuart dynasty. The Stuarts with a T produced the royal line that ruled in Great Britain for a century, starting with James VI of Scotland in 1567. The Stewards-with-a-D had no such legitimate claim to nobility. But that didn’t stop them. They used a forged royal charter to establish their descent from the semi-mythical Banquo, a character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth who is prophesied to sire a line of kings. The Stuarts-with-a-T had played their own genealogical games. They had invented a long line of Scottish ancestors linking them back to Banquo. The Stewards-with-a-D joined in the game and claimed descent from the same ancestor. And in 1575, they actually managed to gain royal recognition of their claim to nobility.
So despite the fictional nature of these genealogies, the prophecy and the families’ ambitions were fulfilled. The Stuarts-with-a-T became a royal lineage and the Stewards-with-a-D were now officially part of that lineage.
Ryan McDermott: The work of modern scholars such as J. Horace Round and Sara Trevisan has exposed the Stuart and Steward genealogical claims as fabrications. What centuries of English people took as history, modern scholars have exposed as myth.
Literal genealogies—the lineages of biological families—give the lie to the first type of modernity claim, which says that we are completely separate from the past. At the very least, our ancestry forces us to acknowledge how the past produced us. But the story of the fabricated Steward lineage suggests how genealogy also pushes back against the second type of modernity claim. The Stewards put forward a story that traced their family back to a noble origin, a royal ancestor. Genealogical work on this family tree revealed that origin point to be a myth. Non-literal genealogy—genealogy as a way of doing history—does a similar kind of work. It examines and challenges our myths and modernity stories, the ones that claim we have overcome everything bad in the past and retained only the good—those stories that link us back to noble origins.
III. Theory Bridge: Genealogy Used as Analogy for History [15:05-23:27]
Ryan McDermott: Whenever we study the past, we draw on analogies. The most prominent analogy is story, the root of our word “history.” When we use the analogy of story to think about the past, we prioritize plot, character, and action. The will of an individual within a lifetime can make all the difference to the story.
Or there’s the analogy of archaeology, where we can dig down and see the layers of different eras, but we don’t see what happened in between, and how one era led to another.
None of these analogies is wrong. Each opens up different ways of understanding the past, and each has its limitations.
Genealogy itself invites multiple analogies, and each aspect has its affordances and limitations. In contrast to the story analogy, one way of thinking about genealogy focuses on genetic material or traits that are handed down across generations, regardless of the characters’ own choices. Another aspect of genealogy is inheritance, the way that property gets handed down through time across a lineage.
When Americans use the phrase “Founding Fathers,” they’re setting up an analogy between history and genealogy. The phrase doesn't mean that all Americans are biological descendants of Jefferson, Adams, and the rest. It means that this group of people created, or “begat,” certain ideas about freedom, rights, and government that continued to influence later generations of Americans who ‘inherited’ these ideas.
That genealogy of freedom points to noble origins. It’s a genealogy of liberation that maps onto my own McDermott family genealogy, the story of John Whelan’s immigration to the US and liberation from British oppression.
But what if we ask about the ancestry of oppression in the United States? The New York Times’s 1619 Project offers a different genealogy, one that begins with the arrival of the first enslaved African in North America. African Americans who undertake literal genealogy often have to trace their ancestry not through baptism and immigration records, but through the bills of sale of white slaveowners. If we look at the genealogy of American freedom from this perspective, we do not find a noble origin. We find an ignoble origin that raises disturbing questions about what present-day Americans have inherited. Noble origin stories will often try to cover up these disturbing parts of the past, like the Stewards who covered up their true, non-elite origins. Critical genealogy works to un-cover them again.
The late 20th-century philosopher Michel Foucault turned to genealogy as a way to think about change in history. Foucault drew an analogy between literal genealogical debunking, like the debunking of the Steward lineage, and any kind of inquiry into the past. Foucault was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s book On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche was writing during the early years of evolutionary theory, when Charles Darwin and others were using the language of genealogy to talk about what Darwin called “descent with modification.” Some philosophers adapted Darwin’s thought to morality, arguing that humans were becoming progressively more moral. Nietzsche thought this was bunk and wrote his book to debunk a genealogical or evolutionary account of human morality. He wanted to demonstrate that modern morality was just a mask for the will-to-power, and this mask depended on a fabricated genealogy of moral progress.
Foucault extended Nietzsche’s method to any aspect of culture. He argued that humanities scholars need to approach history like suspicious genealogists. Instead of searching for noble origins in the family tree of history, Foucault argued that they should be looking for fabrications and they should be exposing ignoble origins. When humanities scholars talk about doing genealogy, they often mean using historical research to reveal the true roots of how present-day ideas or institutions came to be. When those ideas present themselves as simply “timeless truth,” scholars uncover a genealogy of those ideas to show how and why we came, historically, to accept them—including reasons that have more to do with ideology and self-interest than with truth. When institutions tell noble origin stories, a genealogy might show how their origins lie also in power imbalance and oppression. Let’s call this sort of work critical genealogy.
[20:02]
Take, for example, the idea of American liberty. It’s widely understood to be inherited from the noble origin of the Founding Fathers and their Enlightenment ideals of human dignity. The critical genealogist would do archival research to reveal a different story—one that shows how the Founding Fathers compromised on the question of slavery and how that compromise still affects countless Americans today. It was critical genealogy, alongside literal genealogy, that made known the story of how Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, conceived children with an enslaved servant and kept those children enslaved.
Since the 1990s, genealogical suspicion has animated humanities scholarship on the past. And for good reason. Critical genealogy can be a powerful and important approach to understanding the past and the present. Critical genealogy can challenge the kind of strong modernity claim that wants to master the past and make it a noble origin. But it is not the only way we should be drawing on the resources of genealogical thinking.
Michael Puett points out that even Michel Foucault, the philosopher whose name is most commonly associated with critical genealogy, was not content to stop with the work of unmasking power and oppression.
Michael Puett: So in the 1970s, Foucault was trying to do these genealogies to make us rethink things we take for granted as being good. So we've created the modern, liberated subject living in a good liberal world where we each accept the importance of individuals around us, and he gives a genealogy to show the danger of that view that's often missing us. That's the purely critical version. Then he shifts toward what we sadly know to be the end of his life, and at the end of his life, then he's saying, “Well, what are other practices that we could be doing that would be altering these dangerous forms of practice that we have come to accept is the “modern world.”
So what you're seeing, even in that brief arc, or the brief quick summary of that arc, is a figure who's kind of doing what we're talking about, doing the critique to try to critique the world, but then not stopping there, but then saying, “And how then could we learn from the past once we've done these critiques to show the dangerous ways we've construed the past and how do we work with the past in a new way?” And regardless of whether one always agrees with his answers, I think in practice that's an incredibly powerful way of seeing what we could be doing in a work of endless genealogy that's constantly seeing our genealogical work will be creating yet more dangers.
Ryan McDermott: The danger of just focusing on critical genealogy is that we will overlook ways to repair the past, and miss resources from the past that are vital for flourishing in the present. To help us think creatively about the possible uses and abuses of genealogical thinking, let’s look more closely at medieval and early modern practices of genealogy.
IV. Medieval Genealogy and the Reconciling Imagination [23:27-29:05]
Ryan McDermott: In the Middle Ages, genealogists developed a visual tool to analyze the degrees of relationship between cousins. This was a diagram called the “Tree of Consanguinity,” meaning “tree of shared blood.” The Tree of Consanguinity is a chart shaped a bit like a Christmas tree. There is a pyramid made up of rows of boxes.
If you wanted to analyze your own relationships, you would put your name in the box at the center of the diagram. Above you, the first row of the pyramid represents your mothers and father's relations across 14 boxes in the row. The next row up represents your grandparents' relations, across 12 boxes in the row. Picture five rows above that narrowing to the top of the Christmas tree.
There's a purpose to creating a tree in this fashion. It's to assess when marriage and procreation is permitted between two people. The basic principle of the Tree of Consanguinity is that only persons in the outer fringe of the tree can marry each other. They're the ones who have the requisite seven degrees of separation from each other.
Marriage between anybody further inside the tree would be incestuous. But the main goal of the diagram is not to call out incest. Instead, its goal is to illustrate how and when new unions become possible. We often think of family trees as static representations of our own ancestry, but our family relations are in constant motion, as new generations are born and marriages are formed or dissolved.
The Tree of Consanguinity allows us to imagine this generational motion. In medieval manuscripts, the trees of consanguinity are accompanied by instructions that invite you to imagine the tree in motion. And that's why we've made an animated video to help you visualize how the Tree of Consanguinity works.
You can find a link to it in the show notes, and you might wanna pause here to watch it before continuing.
[25:25]
So go back to your mental picture where you were at the base of the Christmas-tree shaped pyramid, and now let's imagine it in motion as new generations are produced. If you have a child, your child's name would replace yours and you and your child's other parent move up into the first row of the pyramid.
You become the mom and the dad. That bumps your parents up into the next row, the grandparents row and every other row moves up. The pyramid remains the same shape and size, but as each new generation is born, the people in the boxes move up the rows, and because each row gets narrower as it goes up, the people on the edges then get bumped out of the diagram.
As new marriages are formed and as they produce new generations, the Tree of Consanguinity allows us to recognize new opportunities for family formation. One manuscript notes that the tree gradually unrolls within it itself until it goes along to the extremities right up to the sixth degree. At this point, all relationship ceases completely. Unions are allowed and thus marriage is restored. The fringes of the pyramid, the boxes at the outer edges show the seventh degree of relation. This is where marriage is allowed.
This approach to genealogy is meant to identify opportunities for new unions—not only between the marital partners but between communities. In the Middle Ages, an important function of marriage was to reconcile conflict between clans. A famous example is the marriage of Henry VII in 1486. England had been ravaged by the Wars of the Roses, the bloody feud between the houses of Lancaster and York. Henry, who was a Lancaster, married Elizabeth of York, and united the two warring factions in one family.
If we analogize from this kind of genealogy to how we study history, we realize that one important function of genealogy is to identify opportunities for reconciliation. Let’s call this creative genealogy. Medieval genealogy was used to identify opportunities for literal procreation in marriage. By analogy, creative genealogy is any study of our connections to the past that asks how we can use those connections to correct past errors and create new forms of connection, union, and healing today.
That is what is going on in the Georgetown University Liturgy of Reconciliation that we heard at the top of the episode. That liturgy is one example of what sociologist Alondra Nelson calls “reconciliation projects” based on genetic research and genealogy.
Alondra Nelson: My name is Alondra Nelson. I'm the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science here at the Institute.
Ryan McDermott: Nelson has studied how African Americans in recent years have used literal family genealogy to grapple with the analogical genealogy of the idea and experience of American freedom and oppression.
Like the medieval trees of consanguinity, modern tools based on DNA analysis can be used, in Nelson’s words, “to bring together estranged communities.” To help us understand how this works, Nelson tells the story of how descendents of enslaved Africans have used genealogy and DNA testing to visualize opportunities for healing, reconciliation, and reparation.
V. Genealogy for Reconciliation [29:05-38:58]
Ryan McDermott: In the early 2000s, Alondra Nelson started hearing about direct-to-consumer DNA-based genealogy services. The pioneer of genetics-based genealogy for the average citizen was African Ancestry, Inc., founded by Howard University researcher Rick Kittles in 2003—seven years before 23andMe targeted the broader market.
Promotional video for African Ancestry, Inc.: Hey, gorgeous! Yes, I'm talking to you with all that melanin popping. Listen, I know there are a lot of misconceptions out there about ancestry tests. And we'd like you to get to know us. We're African Ancestry and we are the only ancestry company designed by black people for black people. The only ancestry company that can provide the actual African country of origin and ethnic group. Founded in 2003 by Dr. Rick Kittles—Hello!—and Dr. Gina Page—Hi, there!—With over 30,000 samples, African Ancestry has the largest and most comprehensive database of DNA of African lineages. I'm talking Yoruba, Ashanti, Mende, Phong and more.
Ryan McDermott: For the descendents of enslaved people, DNA testing promised to leap across the Middle Passage and provide them with a genealogical identity where conventional archival genealogy was at a loss. The institution of slavery was designed to erase natural family lineages and replace them with records of ownership. DNA testing could be a way to overcome that erasure.
Nelson wanted to understand the before-and-after of the discovery of African heritage. What difference would it make for Black Americans to discover that they descended, for example, from people who had lived in what is now Sierra Leone? And given that knowledge, could they do anything to change their relationship to the history of slavery?
Here’s Nelson speaking at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell in 2018:
Alondra Nelson: So as I followed the consumers of genetic ancestry testing—the African-American consumers of genetic ancestry testing, it also became the case that they weren't only using the genetic ancestry test results for the kind of small family history questions that were often understood that they're about, right? And that they came to sort of start trying to ask bigger questions about the world and about their lives. I came to use the phrase, “reconciliation projects” to sort of try to conceptualize and think about a use of genetic analysis that extends beyond what some anthropologists called humanitarian DNA—although that would be part of this—but extends to just the various ways that we try to use genetic analysis to resolve controversies or answer questions about the past.
Ryan McDermott: Nelson connected with a group that had used DNA testing to trace their ancestry back to the region of West Africa that is now Sierra Leone.
Alondra Nelson: One of these was the actor Isaiah Washington who in 2004 was one of the very first consumers of African Ancestry’s to consumer ancestry tests. He had received the test kit as a gift. He had won an award at a pan-African film festival in Los Angeles and that was kind of in his swag bag. He took the test, was linked to Sierra Leone on the mother's side through mitochondrial DNA analysis, and from that point forward referred to himself as a DNA Sierra Leonean.
Ryan McDermott: So what can you do with this new information? One use of genealogy is to establish citizenship. The nation of Sierra Leone created a dual citizenship program for Americans who could demonstrate Sierra Leonean ancestry through DNA testing.
[Audio of new citizens taking Sierra Leonean Pledge of Allegiance]
Ryan McDermott: In 2010, Isaiah Washington became a citizen of Sierra Leone through this program.
Alondra Nelson: I took this picture of Isaiah's passport at an event we were at in Atlanta in 2010 and I said why are you—he'd only had it for about five months and it was totally dog-eared—and I said, “Why are you carrying this in Atlanta?” and he said “These are my freedom papers.”
Ryan McDermott: Even though Isaiah Washington is technically a free citizen of the United States, that citizenship is shadowed by a genealogy that includes generations of enslaved ancestors. Without erasing that history, Washington’s dual Sierra Leonean citizenship symbolizes an origin of a different kind of freedom.
But there’s more to freedom than citizenship. Nelson’s research led her as well to the religious or spiritual dimensions of freedom, which is the context in which she first met Isaiah Washington.
Alondra Nelson: So I found myself in 2008 on the banks of the Ashley River just outside of Charleston with a group of about 25 people who called themselves DNA Sierra Leoneans based on genetic ancestry testing and they were there to do a Sierra Leonean—to carry out a Sierra Leonean, traditional Sierra Leonean ceremony called a “Sara,” which is a ceremony of remembrance to rest the souls of ancestors who've been lost, that typically happened at one year and seven year intervals in Sierra Leone. So in this case you have people who have descendants, or I mean ancestors lost centuries ago, who are turning to a Sierra Leonean ceremony of remembrance that they feel is made available to them now because of this genetic analysis.
[35:03]
Ryan McDermott: Among the participants in the ceremony of remembrance was Thomalind Martin Polite, an eighth-generation descendent of Priscilla, a 10-year-old girl who was enslaved by American merchants in Sierra Leone and brought to this very spot off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina in 1756. Thomalind Polite and her family are the only living Americans who can trace their genealogy back to a named person born in Africa.
In 2005, Thomalind was invited by the government of Sierra Leone to represent her ancestor Priscilla in a series of ceremonies meant to bring her home to rest. According to Nelson, “A ritual was performed in which African Americans and Africans called upon their “common ancestors” as a way to restore their broken families” (Social Life of DNA).
[Audio of Catholic ceremony]
Thomalind Polite: I feel that sense of pride and joy right now. And I’m glad I have the strength that she had to endure and to be here before you today [clapping].
This is truly an honor, an unexpected honor. I am a Catholic woman, I’m a strong Catholic woman. And I’m glad to represent my family, who is also Catholic, here today. Thank you so much for welcoming me home.”
[Audio of Sierra Leonean Catholic music]
I feel it’s a homecoming because, although I’m not Priscilla, I’m her descendent, and I’m at least able to go back to my ancestors, to where they are, and her family is over there, lived there. Although I’m not Priscilla, I’m a member of her family going home. I can just only hope that her spirit is watching and she’s with me now, and she’s proud to know the history is being told.
Ryan McDermott: Back in South Carolina, in 2009, Thomalind and Isaiah Washington took part in a ceremony rooted in Sierra Leonean culture. Nelson writes: “While solemnly singing, the small group passed around a white floral wreath until it came back to Washington, who gently placed it into the river. A Sierra Leonean spiritual leader performed an ancestral sacrifice (or “Sara”). He asked the ancestors to join the group, welcomed their arrival, and offered them comfort by providing them with a little of their homeland represented by sand… and rocks from Sierra Leone, which were dispersed into the Ashley River. This material symbolized the return of the lost West African homeland to the Sierra Leoneans taken captive generations ago.”
VI. The Endless Work of Genealogy [38:58-45:43]
Ryan McDermott: Nelson’s work on reconciliation projects inspires me with possibilities not only for literal genealogical work, but also for any inquiry into the past. To take a reconciling approach to the past refuses the two kinds of dangerous modernity claims that Michael Puett identified in the previous episode.
In the first kind of modernity claim, people assert a radical break from the past and try to erase the past from memory. It’s something like Ben Affleck’s initial response to discovering that he had a slaveholding ancestor: he tried to cover it up.
The second kind of modernity claim asserts that the present is the fulfillment of the past. All of history has been working toward this modernity. The problems of the past have been resolved and everything good from the past can be carried forward in a perpetual modernity. Critical genealogy can debunk such claims by revealing how the problems of the past continue to shape our institutions and our ideas. But the past isn’t just a manacle shackling us to past mistakes. The past is also a resource for creative possibilities, for new relationships, new stories.
The past is also alive, fruitful; it’s a ground of possibility. Like the Cathedral of Learning, the past is a space where you can walk in your ancestors’ footsteps but also think new thoughts. And as the medieval trees of consanguinity remind us, our connection with the past is actually dynamic, in motion, because genealogy is always in motion. As Alondra Nelson points out, so much depends on where we choose to start our genealogical inquiries.
Alondra Nelson: It's always about making choices about how you want to narrate the past and how you want to deploy it in the present or the future. So any of our given pedigree charts—like, if you think of them as being, “Us” are here, and then it sort of goes up, and there's all these people in here, and what's interesting about genealogy is that the “Ego,” the one, the genealogist is making a choice about which of these lines to follow.
Ryan McDermott: When Nelson says, “Ego,” she is using the Latin word for “I”, which is how genealogists refer to the center point of any family tree, that space in the tree of consanguinity that joins the trunk to the tree above, that individual whose ancestry you are trying to construct. Every “Ego,” every person in history, represents a different set of genealogical possibilities.
Nelson: It gets sort of played out differently with the genetics because admixture testing gives you percentages of Neanderthal, Nigeria, sub-saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. And, like, all of those open thresholds to different stories and different social practices to the “Ego” who wants to use them or not use them.
[41:54]
Ryan McDermott: History can never be put to rest because it is always in motion. When we look to the past, we are at the threshold of a multitude of possible stories we might recover and retell, and as history moves on, as older generations depart and new ones come into being, the possible stories multiply. Creative genealogy studies how each new generation creates possibilities for new relations, new marriages, new reconciliations.
Alondra Nelson: It creates a scope for redress, right? I mean, I think that when we live in a society of amnesia and part of what I try to write about—probably not as successfully as I would have wished in this book – is that at a moment of sort of the high-water mark of colorblind racism, that genealogy is a tool that allows you to say, “This happened. This racial travesty, this racial transaction, this chattel slavery system happened.” And so it does so maybe we would say—not creating the scope, but opening a conversation for redress that might have otherwise been ignored or bypassed.
Ryan McDermott: In the rest of this series, we will hear from scholars engaged in genealogical thinking about what it means to be modern. Genealogical inquiry starts by recovering the details of how present-day ideas, institutions, and cultural forms changed over time and tracing their ancestry. We’ll see how genealogical thinking can illuminate all kinds of phenomena that shape our contemporary modern world. We’ll see over and over how one part of genealogical thinking is critical, challenging the dangerous kinds of modernity claims that want to erase or neutralize the past, and obliging us to confront those parts of the past that we’d rather not see. But the other, even more crucial approach is creative. These episodes think genealogically about opportunities for reconciliation, redress, and new unions. We approach the past attuned to opportunities for new beginnings.
And there are some great stories ahead. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, we’ll meet a pacifist gunmaker in England coming to terms with the changing role of technology in modern warfare. Then, secularization and colonization are intertwined in two episodes that take place in the Spanish New World, where nascent concepts of race, racism, and antiracism emerge in vigorous theological debates and vivid art history. And we’ll look at the life stories of 20th-century novelist David Foster Wallace and the 18th century Samuel Johnson—each of them grappling with the sense that morality itself might no longer be possible under the conditions of modernity.
In all of these stories, we approach the past attuned to opportunities for new beginnings. Stay tuned for the next episode, where we’ll go to the Jamestown settlement of 1607 to help understand what the so-called “traditional” nuclear family means in modern American life.
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