Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire by Nadine Attewell

Reviewed by: Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire by Nadine Attewell Eddy Kent Nadine Attewell. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 324pp. $65.00. On 12 March 2016, Leilani Muir died at her home in Devon, Alberta, leaving no heirs. Muir came to national attention in 1995, when she sued the government of Alberta for wrongful sterilization, forcing Canadians to acknowledge the extent to which the state actively intervened in the reproductive lives of its citizens. Muir herself was sterilized in 1959, and the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act was not repealed until 1972, nearly five years after a young Pierre Elliot Trudeau uttered his famous phrase, which has since become an integral part of Canada’s self-image as a nation of liberal toleration: “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” (“There’s no place”). The frightening durability of eugenicist policies within putatively advanced Western liberal democracies is the occasion for Nadine Attewell’s Better Britons, which in five chapters evaluates the imbrication of reproductive crises in cultural and political responses to Britain’s imperial future beginning at the fin de siècle. At this time, serious conversations began about imperial decline. Duncan Bell’s The Idea of Greater Britain (2007) [End Page 125] describes how many were attracted by the idea of uniting the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa into a globe-spanning political community of “Anglo-Saxons” (see Bell). Better Britons moves across this landscape—focusing mainly on Australia and New Zealand—reflecting “on the centrality of reproduction to settler and British projects of nation building” (4). Skilfully weaving postcolonial with feminist, queer, and critical race theory, Attewell explains how decolonizing settler colonies felt “a crisis of inheritance” over the shape of their postcolonial national identity. To understand that crisis, she assembles a diversity of documents, including not only fiction and film but also official memoranda, speeches, photographs, and newspaper reports aimed at manufacturing “better Britons” worthy of inheriting the postcolonial future. Chapter one identifies a paradox: whilst fictions that explore eugenicist fantasies are still read—and read widely!—today for their “prophetic relevance” (36), the contemporary state policies designed to manage reproduction are consigned to a quiet section of the history books. By returning the literary texts to their historical contexts, Attewell brings key elements of both into sharper relief. Here attention rests upon Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher (1934). For Attewell what unites these texts is their shared interest in representing the crises of reproduction both within the colony and across the empire in the utopian form. In each, “the voyage out, to an insular site marked out … for colonization, occasions a voyage in, to an insular site marked as metropolitan” (37). This places Attewell’s book within scholarship that resists the centre-periphery model of imperialism and rather views the Empire as a circuit, across which ideas, commodities, and bodies traffic with increasing ungovernability. Chapter two examines a specific reproductive project of the early twentieth century. The “White Australia” policy encompassed attempts by the nascent Australian state to manage its population biopolitically, through legislation like the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and the rhetoric of politicians like James Deakin, the prime minister who believed his nation was animated by “the desire that we should be one people, and remain one people, without the admixture of other races” (84). These are instances of conservative biopolitics—that is, attempts to manage the gene pool by reducing intercourse between races. Attewell approaches “White Australia” quite differently, by focusing on its radical counterpart: the so-called “breeding out the colour” project practised in Australia’s frontier jurisdictions. This project practises radical biopolitics insofar as, [End Page 126] instead of restricting, it encouraged intercourse, “an attempt at [the] biological absorption” of the Aboriginal population into the (white) national body politic (71). By returning to the official archives, Attewell recovers a series of memoranda replete with rhetorical gymnastics that attempt to justify this...

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