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  • Bodies that Deviate:From the Anomalous to the Wayward in Recent Studies of Race, Gender, and Nation
  • Elizabeth A. Bohls (bio)
Felicity A. Nussbaum . The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 336 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-81167-5 (cl); 0-521-01642-8 (pb).
Alys Eve Weinbaum . Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xi + 348 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8223-3303-1 (cl); 0-8223-3315-5 (pb).

Two recent studies by literary and cultural critics move feminist scholarship on race in different but equally exciting directions. Both are concerned with bodies: raced and gendered bodies, but other categories as well. Alys Eve Weinbaum's focus on the reproductive or maternal body in Wayward Reproductions enables important insights into the centrality of racialized reproduction to "the organization of knowledge about nations, modern subjects, and the flow of capital, bodies, babies, and ideas within and across national borders" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2). Felicity A. Nussbaum's The Limits of the Human begins with bodies that are deaf, blind, or otherwise nonnormative, claiming "the anomalous as critical to the formation of racially and sexually designated normalized modern subjects" (2). In the great age of travel and exploration that was the long eighteenth century, the limits of the human, Nussbaum argues, were negotiated domestically as well as at the peripheries of empire. The "geography of defect and race" is brought to bear on "corrupt femininity and masculinity in England" in ways that internalize the monstrous deep within the homeland (16).

These two scholars' common ground goes beyond their concern with the cultural construction of race and nation through representations of women and gender. Each of these two ambitious books embraces an innovative methodology, bringing together seemingly disparate materials in the drive to understand emerging constructions of raced and gendered subjectivity. The source base for Weinbaum's magisterial study, while dominated by theoretical heavy hitters—Nietzsche, Engels, Darwin, Freud, W. E. B. DuBois—juxtaposes these with less canonical choices, including American writers Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the [End Page 242] American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, on whose study of the Iroquois Marx and Engels drew heavily in their thinking about the family. She persuasively insists both that intellectual crosscurrents did not stop at the coast, since the "racialized reproductive logic of modern U.S. nationalism was conceived within a polyphonic, multinational crucible," and that reproduction as an object of knowledge "calls forth a new hermeneutic that implicitly challenges . . . the often unexamined hierarchization" of texts and authors (13, 11).

An Americanist, Weinbaum demonstrates a sophisticated grasp of the transatlantic dimension of modern U.S. culture—for example, in her consideration of the racial tracts found in Nietzsche's library on Italians and Celts, groups that emigrated in large numbers from the Old to the New World in the nineteenth century. The racial economy of the Genealogy of Morals, she argues, is best understood by examining its treatment of these groups, rather than focusing, as previous scholars have done, on "Germans' prototypical racial others (Jews) and German colonial subjects (Africans)" (52–53). Crossing the Atlantic in the other direction, Weinbaum explores DuBois's focus in his 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, on questions of the global and black internationalist thought. Rather than reading DuBois's works as indebted to nineteenth-century racial science and its biological conceptions of race, as have other scholars, Weinbaum reads this late work as moving beyond such essentialism to develop "non-biological strategies for articulating the internationalist connections" necessary for his "antiracist, anti-imperialist, anticolonialist" politics (225, 215).

In so doing, DuBois began to disentangle himself from what Weinbaum calls the "race/reproduction bind," a concept central to her argument, defined as the ways in which "race and reproduction are bound together within transatlantic modernity's central intellectual and political formations" (6). The representation of women's reproductive bodies, Weinbaum argues, has been indispensable to epistemologies of modernity: "The interconnected ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rest on the notion that race can be reproduced" (4). In...

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