Making Us New

Making Us New argues not only that modernist writers were influenced byeugenic and early transhumanist thinking, but that Anglo-American modernistculture was saturated with ideas and shaped by debates about making humans new.Maren Linett explores cultural expressions of, and interventions into, eugenic andtranshumanist thought by excavating and analyzing four key sets of debates betweenand among eugenicists and transhumanists. The first set of debates relates to the body:what sorts of bodies, and especially what sorts of sensory organs, should improved peoplehave? The second set surrounds reproduction: how might we produce new human beingsvia reproduction? The third set concerns racial difference: in what ways will race betransformed for future people? And the final set involves animality: how mightanimality be either left behind by or useful for these improved people?Linett carefully distinguishes between the two modes of human improvement andtheir ethical and political implications, while viewing both eugenics and transhumanismas simultaneously utopian and oppressive--oppressive not only because of their real-worldapplications but because of their false assumptions about human worth. The studyforegrounds the fundamental aims of eugenic and transhumanist thought--to shapeand control human evolutionary futures--contending that eugenics and transhumanismare part of the larger modernist quest to make it new.