Wayward
Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and
Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought
by Alys
Eve Weinbaum
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004
368 pp., illus. 3 b/w, Trade, $ 79.95;
paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3303-1; ISBN: 0-8223-3315-5.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
University Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
Wayward Reproductions is a dense
and erudite book that likely began life
as a Ph.D. thesis. Published in the series
Next Wave: New Directions in Women's
Studies, these disparate but related
chapters provide methodical analyses of
motifs rooted in nineteenth century (and
later) literature, the sciences, the social
sciences, and, finally, art.
"Genealogy Unbound: Reproduction and Contestation
in the Racial Nation" centers upon a Kate
Chopin story whose tragedy revolves around
a mixed-race child and climaxes in revealing
the dubious racial identities of all the
protagonists. In the story Chopin encapsulates
"the race/reproduction bind" and southern
anxieties (both antebellum and post-Civil
War) around reproduction of a white nation.
Early 1980s studies of nationalism by
Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson,
Etienne Balibar, and even Frederick Nietzche
provide critical stances from which to
view Chopin's work.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman proves a more
contradictory figure than many feminists
acknowledge, as Weinbaum notes Gilman's
odd fixation on genealogy and correspondence
with political eugenicists warning of
"race suicide". From its inception, psychoanalysis
carries notions of "wayward reproduction"
dating back through Sigmund Freud to Charles
Darwin. Weinbaum traces Frederick Engels'
writing on the familyfrom
notes left him by Karl Marx as part of
the greater Capital projectto
Marx's response to reading anthropologist
Lewis Henry Morgan on Native American
cultures.
In today's market-driven society, we tend
to forget that public intellectuals of
the past used the novel of ideas as well
as the essay in critique. W.E.B. Duboisan
organizer of the Niagara Falls conference
that founded the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People
(N.A.A.C.P.)developed black
internationalist intersections of gender
and reproduction in his 1928 novel Dusk.
Dubois remembered it as one of his favorite
works, its heroine confronting issues
of skin color as she attends a fictional
"Council of Darker Peoples of the World";
maybe it would be worthwhile to convene
such a global event today.
In the book's coda, the author notes contemporary
artists that use technologies and tropes
from biology and genetics to confront
reproduction issues. Eduardo Kac has used
genetic processes to artfully degrade
scriptural edicts defining the relationship
between the human and animal. Catherine
Chalmers photographs transgenic mice in
the laboratory with the attention given
to celebrities, which perhaps the critters
should be. The human-animal Photoshop
hybrids of Daniel Lee's "Judges" series
are racialized with Asian dress and facial
characteristics.
All of Weinbaum's essays explore a range
of texts with subtlety to reach nuanced
conclusions. Wayward Reproductions
is of interest to artists, writers, and
scientists for its thoughtful exposure
of historical roots of ideologies that
(mis-, or dis-) inform our assumptions
of race, gender, and society today.