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

Nadine Attewell’s book Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire is interesting, impressively researched, and timely. In the face of rising Islamophobia, immigrant panic, and fears of “demographic winter,” Attewell tracks how “reproductive acts have signified at particular moments of the twentieth century” (144) in order to trace the ways in which individuals and cultures envision themselves and pursue specific visions of desirable demographic continuity. The book is divided into two sections of equal length, “Beginnings” and “Endings,” the first dealing with various imperial fantasies of origin, birth, re-birth, and permanence, and the second dealing with rupture, foreclosure, death, and defeat. The uneasy intersection between the vainglorious notion of an Empire upon which the sun will never set and a nagging sense that the taint is always within us (that decline is inevitable) is clear enough in postcolonial studies, but Attewell does a nice job of demonstrating how human bodies intersect with the body politic. In Attewell’s view, “reproductive behaviours bear upon not only gender and sexual identities . . . but civic, national and racial ones as well” (4). Within the rhetoric of Empire, “national fortunes [are] taken to depend upon the reproductive behaviours of citizen-subjects” (5). The opening chapters focus on links between eugenicist visions of optimizing “suitable . . . strains of blood” (11) and “keeping out bad blood” (12) as central to totalizing utopian projects. In such a context, abortion registers not simply as an ethical issue to do with the sanctity of life but as a political one with serious demographic implications. Attewell pays particular attention to the motif of the island in utopian (and by extension imperial) projects. “The desire for utopia,” she writes, is simultaneously a “desire for the enclave, self-sufficiency, containment and totality” (39). As such, islands offer the tempting prospect of a contained, self-replicating civilization: free of taint and abounding in biological and social order. This, Attewell suggests, is true to different degrees of Imperial Britain, colonial Australia, New Zealand, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World, The Tempest, Prelude to Christopher (by Eleanor Dark), and several other real and fictional utopian projects.

If the list above looks fine to you, you’ll probably like this book. For me, it’s problematic. Attewell sees her project in terms of an effort to disrupt the “smooth narratives of settlement, repatriation, and homemaking” (214) that inform and undergird imperial and post-imperial sensibilities, but the book suffers from its own desire to “smooth out” differences and marshal disparate signals into an ill-fitting overall design. A third of the way through the book, for example, Attewell attempts to yoke together “photographs, newspaper articles, fiction, reports, and government memoranda” (71) into a single discussion that cannot possibly account for the various contexts and iterations it invokes. As such, the diversity of Attewell’s research material ultimately serves a centralizing, unifying function. She approaches several very different texts and ideas in terms of a fundamental sameness, and the heterogeneity she champions at the level of academic and political critique is contradicted by her own argumentative practice.

This desire to “smooth out” differences that present problems for her design is most apparent in the section Attewell devotes to the policies of Cecil Cook, appointed protector of Australia’s Aboriginal Peoples in the Northern Territory in 1927. Cook proposed “breeding out the colour” in the Northern Territory, a process by which “half breed” women would be married to (or, more to the point, “mated” with) white settlers in an effort to address the conundrum of settler legitimacy, namely what Terry Goldie calls the “impossible necessity of becoming indigenous” (qtd. in Attewell 15). That is, faced with aboriginal territorial precedence, the settlers could “whiten” aboriginal bloodlines and consequently dilute aboriginal claims to territorial priority. This is imperialism enacted at the level of blood, territorializing the bloodlines of indigenous peoples en route to a more persuasive claim to their literal territory...