A Decolonial Plasticity? Diffracting Epigenetics to Reconnect Histories of the Body

A Decolonial Plasticity? Diffracting Epigenetics to Reconnect Histories of the Body

Indigenous peoples

Maurizio Meloni

University of Toronto Quarterly

Vol. 94

No. 2

2025

University of Toronto Press

Journal article

English

17125278

Canada

Restricted Access

In this article, I aim to move plasticity away from “modern,” or “Western” or “Euro-American,” networks of knowledge. I look at biological plasticity as it is emerging from epigenetics as a way through which contemporary science and social theory is rediscovering the embeddedness, sensitivity, permeability, and unboundedness of subaltern premodern, non-Western, and Indigenous body. I interpret the contemporary resonance of epigenetics in postcolonial settings as a symptom of this reconnection of fragmented histories of the body after the rise of modern biology and its imperial infrastructures of knowledge. If the history of Euro-American plasticity is provincialized, this opens up the space for a genuine global dialogue that has the potential to challenge social and epistemic injustice.

Jessica Alston