Attewell, Nadine. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire

Attewell, Nadine. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. Pp xi, 324. CDN$65. Nadine Attewell's book Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire is interesting, impressively researched, and timely. In the face of rising Islamophobia, immigrant panic, and fears of winter, Attewell tracks how acts have signified at particular moments of the twentieth century (144) in order to trace the ways in which individuals and cultures envision themselves and pursue specific visions of desirable demographic continuity. book is divided into two sections of equal length, Beginnings and Endings, the first dealing with various imperial fantasies of origin, birth, re-birth, and permanence, and the second dealing with rupture, foreclosure, death, and defeat. uneasy intersection between the vainglorious notion of an Empire upon which the sun will never set and a nagging sense that the taint is always within us (that decline is inevitable) is clear enough in postcolonial studies, but Attewell does a nice job of demonstrating how human bodies intersect with the body politic. In Attewell's view, behaviours bear upon not only gender and sexual identities ... but civic, and racial ones as well (4). Within the rhetoric of Empire, national fortunes [are] taken to depend upon the reproductive behaviours of citizen-subjects (5). opening chapters focus on links between eugenicist visions of optimizing suitable ... strains of blood (11) and keeping bad blood (12) as central to totalizing utopian projects. In such a context, abortion registers not simply as an ethical issue to do with the sanctity of life but as a political one with serious demographic implications. Attewell pays particular attention to the motif of the island in utopian (and by extension imperial) projects. The for utopia, she writes, is simultaneously a desire for the enclave, self-sufficiency, containment and totality (39). As such, islands offer the tempting prospect of a contained, self-replicating civilization: free of taint and abounding in biological and social order. This, Attewell suggests, is true to different degrees of Imperial Britain, colonial Australia, New Zealand, Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World, Tempest, Prelude to Christopher (by Eleanor Dark), and several other real and fictional utopian projects. If the list above looks fine to you, you'll probably like this book. For me, it's problematic. Attewell sees her project in terms of an effort to disrupt the smooth narratives of settlement, repatriation, and homemaking (214) that inform and undergird imperial and post-imperial sensibilities, but the book suffers from its own to smooth out differences and marshal disparate signals into an ill-fitting overall design. A third of the way through the book, for example, Attewell attempts to yoke together photographs, newspaper articles, fiction, reports, and government memoranda (71) into a single discussion that cannot possibly account for the various contexts and iterations it invokes. As such, the diversity of Attewell's research material ultimately serves a centralizing, unifying function. She approaches several very different texts and ideas in terms of a fundamental sameness, and the heterogeneity she champions at the level of academic and political critique is contradicted by her own argumentative practice. This to smooth out differences that present problems for her design is most apparent in the section Attewell devotes to the policies of Cecil Cook, appointed protector of Australia's Aboriginal Peoples in the Northern Territory in 1927. Cook proposed breeding the colour in the Northern Territory, a process by which half breed women would be married to (or, more to the point, mated with) white settlers in an effort to address the conundrum of settler legitimacy, namely what Terry Goldie calls the impossible necessity of becoming indigenous (qtd. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.