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Reviewed by:
  • Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought
  • Susan Squier (bio)
Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. By Alys Even Weinbaum. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.

Alys Eve Weinbaum's accomplishment in this dense scholarly study is to explore the matrix of meanings springing from the linguistic unit reproduction. Drawing her inspiration from Raymond Williams's notion of the keyword, "a linguistic unit that functions as an overdetermined repository of social conflict and contradiction of a decidedly historical character," Weinbaum examines the wayward meanings of her keyword, reproduction, in transatlantic modernity (2). Feminist scholars will find Weinbaum's approach an illuminating alternative to the treatment that Weinbaum argues reproduction usually receives from scholars. As she frames the sad customary choices: either reproduction is marginalized and pathologized as an issue uniquely relevant to women and thus of less research significance or reproduction is overemphasized as the sole determinant of modern culture and society. In either case, reproduction is unproductively held apart in the private realm, as if it were either too abject or too pure to interact with other structuring ideologies and practices.

Weinbaum's volume offers an alternative approach, investigating two intertwined issues: (1) how the representation of "women's reproductive capacity" has formed an integral part of the epistemological systems of transatlantic modernity, and (2) what role notions of reproduction have played in the success of racist, nationalist, and imperialist ideologies in the modern era. Arguing that the overvaluation of an essentialized reproduction misses its imbrication with issues of race, nation and empire, Weinbaum instead advances the notion of a "race/reproduction bind": "the intextricability of the connections between race and reproduction—the fact that these phenomena ought not to be thought of as distinct, though they have too often been analytically separated" (5).

This ambitious book weaves its way through what she calls the "big system builders" of modernity, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Freud, as well as modernity's signal philosophers, Nietzsche and Foucault, to trace how the model of reproduction to which each thinker subscribes subtends the vision of race, society, nation, and species put forth in his work. Her methodology thus troubles the familiar notion that issues of race and nation can be explored without considering the prior impact of reproduction. Significantly, her book challenges as intellectually inadequate investigations that limit themselves by observing national or generic boundaries, textual or authorial hierarchies. The slight timidity in Weinbaum's phrasing of this challenge should not obscure its force. She is calling into question the narrowly framed scholarship reproduced through the disciplinary structures of academic departments, and critiquing the [End Page 194] disciplinary conventions that permit humanities scholars to ignore the impact of science, as a set of material practices, on our field of study. Reproduction is a "self-reflexive concept within the cultural study of transatlantic modernity," she argues: it both enables and performs the changes inherent in modernity, and it figures race and sexuality as integral to (indeed inextricable from) the precise reproductive mechanism of those changes. In short we cannot think racism and sexism separately from each other, because "reproduction is a racializing force" (37).

In the course of Weinbaum's transatlantic, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical itinerary there are moments when one wishes for more elaboration on the phenomenon that she labels, in a kind of shorthand, the "race-reproduction bind." For example, a reader interested in disability studies issues may wonder how the stress on reproduction as a racializing process is complicated by its function in enforcing normativity. So nineteenth-century U.S. immigration restrictions not only grew out of racist and classist ideologies, but also reflected the eugenic anxiety that immigrants might give birth to mentally disabled children, as James Trent (1995) has pointed out.

Yet Weinbaum does much to illuminate the entanglements created as writers and activists mobilized and contested notions of race and reproduction to imagine a modern self and a modern nation. She unearths the racism and nationalism underneath Kate Chopin's feminism, showing how in Desiree's Baby and Herland, Chopin creates a gender politics built on a racialized and nationalistic genealogy. And contesting the second-wave feminist reading...

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