{"id":5215,"date":"2010-02-14T00:26:05","date_gmt":"2010-02-14T00:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=5215"},"modified":"2010-02-14T00:34:44","modified_gmt":"2010-02-14T00:34:44","slug":"unnatural-selections-eugenics-in-american-modernism-and-the-harlem-renaissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=5215","title":{"rendered":"Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of North Carolina Press<\/a>
\nApril 2004
\n288 pages
\n6.125 x 9.25, 19 illus., 2 charts, notes, bibl., index
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2868-7
\nPaper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5531-7<\/p>\n

Daylanne K. English<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English & Chair
\nMacalester College<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> and American modernism<\/a>, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics<\/a> in the Progressive Era<\/a>. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a>, T. S. Eliot<\/a>, Gertrude Stein<\/a>, and Nella Larsen<\/a> were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.<\/p>\n

English’s interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimk\u00e9<\/a> as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis<\/em> magazine<\/a> as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.<\/p>\n

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot.<\/strong> Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance University of North Carolina Press April 2004 288 pages 6.125 x 9.25, 19 illus., 2 charts, notes, bibl., index Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2868-7 Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5531-7 Daylanne K. English, Associate Professor of English & Chair Macalester College Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,459,1196,8,17,394,20],"tags":[2131,2129,1237,55,87,2130,667,122],"class_list":["post-5215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-angelina-weld-grimke","tag-daylanne-k-english","tag-gertrude-stein","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-nella-larsen","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-university-of-north-carolina-press","tag-w-e-b-du-bois"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}