The Descendants: A Novel

In her Academy project, Hubbard examines the ways Black people in the United States have historically been seen as an internal threat to public health and safety. Her novel-in-progress, “The Decendants,” places the 1980s “war on drugs” in dialogue with the history of African Americans subjected to drug trials and medical experiments. “Throughout US history, the justification for the use of Black people as research subjects has emerged from their variously constituted ineligibility for full rights of citizenship,” she writes. Since the country’s founding, this marginalized population has served as both a material and ideological resource. This history, dependent on both racism and sexism, has long and tragically mediated the social hierarchy in America. In her novel, Hubbard focuses on the parallels between the anxiety over the nation-state’s external borders and the internal segregation that has transpired by way of marginalization—via Jim Crow Laws, mass incarceration, and redlining (the systematic denial of services or goods through selective pricing). In Berlin, Hubbard will seek to experience other ideas of belonging, understand recent immigrants’ quest to fit in, and how cultural and racial differences are mediated in the German context. Doing so, she says, will help her further clarify what aspects of identity-making she explores in her novel are actually specific to the United States.