Wayward Reproductions

Alys Eve Weinbaum is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

“Alys Eve Weinbaum offers an array of transformative reassessments of major canonical texts of literature, social theory, and science, marking the heretofore unrecognized centrality of what she calls the ‘race/reproduction bind’ to these texts. Wayward Reproductions is an important book with substantial political as well as scholarly implications.”-Miranda Joseph, author of Against the Romance of Community “I cannot imagine a more ambitious or important project. Wayward Reproductions provides new and exciting readings and interpretations of some of the foundational texts of modern intellectual thought. Alys Eve Weinbaum theorizes reproduction as a concept that weaves race and sex together and in so doing constructs or resists nationalism.”-Gail Bederman, author of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 “What is very brilliant about this book is the way it opens readers’ eyes to specific ways of seeing the work of racialization and its distinctive role in ideas of nationalism not only within a number of classic texts but also in the critical traditions built up around them. The object lesson here is a very politically powerful one.”-Sarah Franklin, coeditor of Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 11. Geneaology Unbound: Reproduction and Contestation of the Racial Nation 152. Writing Feminist Geneaology: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Reproduction of Racial Nationalism 613. Engels’s Originary Ruse: Race and Reproduction in the Story of Capital 1064. Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis: Darwin, Freud, and the Universalization of Wayward Reproduction 1455. The Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Reproduction of Racial Globality 187Coda: Gene/alogies for a New Millennium 227Notes 247Works Cited 307Index 339