Corpus Nullius and the Traffick in Blood: Biocolonialism and Human Futurity in the Afterlives of Discovery Available to Purchase

Chapter 5 analyzes the discourse and political economy of the “Great Human Expedition,” a project of the Institute of Human Genetics at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, inaugurated at the 1992 celebration of the Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America. Indigenous organizations claimed that samples taken under the project’s auspices constituted biopiracy, or theft of biomatter, in which the profitability of their genetic coding was prioritized over their collective well-being. This chapter considers how contemporary bioprospecting operates as a kind of temporal governance, the regulation of genomic and reproductive futures and their generational possibilities. The result, it suggests, was denial of indigenous and black autonomy through the rendering of their biological matter as property, thereby extending the afterlives of fungibility of racialized populations established in the Era of Discovery and proliferated through the commodification of black and indigenous life in the political economies of slavery in the New World.