Alys Eve Weinbaum

By moving across an array of academic disciplines and national contexts, Alys Eve Weinbaum reshapes our thinking about the role of race and reproduction in the formation of national identity. Weinbaum draws from a vast selection of transatlantic modernity’s foundational thinkers including big systems builders (Marx, Engels, Darwin, and Freud), philosophers (Nietzsche, Foucault), and literary and political figures (Gilman, Chopin, and Du Bois). In her analysis, Weinbaum successfully demonstrates the mutually dependent relationship of race and reproduction in intellectual and political formations, what she calls the race/reproduction bind. The race/reproduction bind, according to Weinbaum, is an essential feature of our modern episteme and a valid category of analysis despite recent advances in genomics. Contemporary scientific evidence has called into question the existence of “race.” However, as Weinbaum effectively argues, it matters less that “race” is a biologically knowable essence than that “race” remains a social and political reality that structures national development and reproduction in the transatlantic world.

Full review available from Itinerario, 2005.… (altro)