Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire by Nadine Attewell (review)

Empire, as Ann Laura Stoler suggested in 2002, is an intimate business, and the “question of how ‘sentiments of a private nature’ … have not just facilitated imperial ambition, but serve as the very grounds for the creation and maintenance of imperial power” has in recent years become, as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton suggest, “a preoccupation among scholars.”¹ Nadine Attewell’s Better Britons: Reproduction, national identity, and the afterlife of empire joins the recent work of Stoler, Ballantyne and Burton, and many others in attending to the ways in which bodies are brought into intimate and affective relation in imperial space, to the methods of tracing the signs of those bodies in the imperial archive, and to the practices of reading and learning from the residual traces of those bodies and their intimate relations with each other. Reading specifically “the reproductive body as a locus for national definition” (4–5), Better Britons “reflects on the centrality of reproduction to settler and British projects of nation building” and “considers how an array of reproductive acts, imperatives, and experiments helped to constitute British and settler identity in the twentieth century” (4). Not focused on maternalism or maternity per se, Better Britons is concerned, rather, with the ways in which these “acts, imperatives, and experiments” operate in the reproduction of Whiteness and the concomitant erasure of Indigenousness that is, this book suggests, at the heart of the imperial project both in its inception and its “afterlife.”

Attewell assembles “a diverse reading archive” (19) of literary, cinematic and photographic materials, along with government memoranda and political speeches, bringing these texts “into conversation with feminist, queer, and Indigenous studies work on the reproductive grammar of belonging and citizenship” (5). The book is structured around the close reading of five “reproductive projects” (19) or a series of cases in which the reproductive body is at the centre of imperial policy and discourse. Attewell turns first to eugenics and the “utopianism of early-twentieth-century discourses of reproduction” (25), then to the “Australian state policy known as ‘breeding out the colour’” (26), to abortion and to apotropaic fictions—or fictions against future evil—returning in the end to eugenics or what she characterizes as the “afterlife of eugenics” (29)—questions of “biological citizenships under construction in the twenty-first century” (169). The return to contemporary eugenics in the end is significant, affirming as it does the book’s foundational premise that empire’s “afterlife” is both a matter of a series of legacies perceptible in the present (such, for example, as the suffering of generations of Indigenous people who experienced residential schooling in Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and a way to name the continued operation of versions of earlier imperial policy (such, for example, as eugenics).

Broadly cultural in its attention to matters of empire and in particular of imperial discourse, Better Britons is foundationally literary in its focus on a range of novels and other fictions and in its methodology, which Attewell describes as close reading. This description is compelling: for many years, until the very recent return to versions of close reading in literary studies and literature departments, literary analysis typically foreswore the practices of considering the ways in which a text’s formal elements constitute meanings. Here, it is a crucial part of the book’s encompassing revisioning—of imperial histories, of the continued effects of empire now, of archival citizenship and representation, of modernism in empire, of literature and popular fiction, of “high,” “low,” and “middlebrow” culture. Looking most closely at policy related to Australia and New Zealand, the book ranges widely across fictions and film from the context of empire from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. Thus Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), Steve Niles’s comic book 28 Days Later...