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 family––from notes left him by Karl Marx as part of the greater Capital project––to 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. Dubois––an 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.