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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 112–130

Chapter 7
Bio-graphies in the broad sense

Narrating the lives and genomes of the enslaved

To what extent do bio-graphical writings, which treat the body and its traces as historical archives in their own right, pose the same problems of interpretation and authorship as traditional biographies? This chapter focuses on the case of Hans Jonathan (1784–1827), whose story has recently been ‘written’ in two different forms: first, in the biography The Man Who Stole Himself (Gisli Palsson 2016); and second, through the scientific reconstruction of his genome. Our text explores the way biography (in the traditional sense) and various bio-markers (personal names, written genealogies, and DNA sequences) have been used to piece together Hans Jonathan’s life and trajectory and examines to what extent the genome can yield insights into the identities of the enslaved.
Keywords: biography, DNA, ancestry, genomics, writing slavery, archives, Hans Jonathan, Denmark, Iceland, Virgin Islands
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Marked by race: The ‘mulatto’ Hans Jonathan
  • Decoding the body
  • The issue of paternity: Archival sources, family narratives, and DNA
  • Competing evidence
  • Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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