Ewa Barbara Luczak - Böcker

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with “the self” often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three parts, this study focuses on works of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this study includes an analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the United States.

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with “the self” often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three parts, this study focuses on works of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this study includes an analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the United States.