Search results
control policies had caste, religious and ethnic underpinnings in India, in South Africa the conversation around population control is deeply embedded in racial politics and apartheid policies. But, much as the chequered history of contraception in India does not start and end with the British impetus, the history of birth control in South Africa starts before the National Party's (NP – Afrikaner ethnic nationalist party that designed and implemented the apartheid state) preoccupation with apartheid and population control. An emphasis on selective reproduction, by race
This book analyses the world of selective reproduction – the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future – by a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of ‘controlling’ birth: contraception, reproductive violence, and repro-genetic technologies. The premise is that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies, for instance those that assist conception and/or allow genetic selection, may appear to be the antithesis of violent versions of population control, the book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. Much as all population control policies target and vilify (Black) women for their over-fertility, and coerce/induce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance, assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies have a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class, and caste. The book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations – South Africa and India – where the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets allow for some parallel moments of selecting who gets to legitimately reproduce the future. The book provides a critical interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly ‘post-population control’ era. The contributions range from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics, science and technology studies, to theology, public health, epidemiology and women’s health, with the aim of facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.
Darwin's cousin and the now controversial, Francis Galton. The cousins influenced each other in the founding of origin of the species, eugenics and selective breeding. When supporters of these, once iconic, scientists tussle with protestors over whether they were racists or not (Coyne, 2021 ; Roberts, 2020 ), they overlook the critical point that eugenics and selective reproduction have always underlined theories that surmise the limits of population. Darwin and Galton, for instance, were also keenly influenced by the work of the classic population pessimist Thomas
homogenisation. Rather, Sternberg identifies a number of intermediate procedures which may be more readily incorporated into representational strategies: ‘selective reproduction’, ‘verbal transposition’ and ‘conceptual reflection’. ‘Selective reproduction’ is the ‘intermittent quotation of the original heterolingual discourse’. 11 We might identify the sporadic use of Latin, the presumed lingua franca of all
This passage exemplifies a number of the discursive tropes which have featured prominently in this book's exploration of the overland route and its place in nineteenth-century imaginative geographies of empire. The steamship is presented as a microcosm, a familiar (and highly selective) reproduction in miniature of the wider world, in contrast to which the geography of the East, a region ‘bordering’, the article notes, ‘on the highway of commerce’, is portrayed as strange, savage, untouched by modern civilisation. 2
regulations; and on the level of geopolitics and global power relations. Foucauldian biopolitics are thereby re-actualised as they are at the same time scaled down and up. Notwithstanding those changes I argued that the logics of selective reproduction through ART need to be seen as a continuation of eugenics, understood as a set of interventions in order to maximise the health and wellbeing of the national body, under new premises. I hence share the concern of scholars like Amrita Pande ( 2014 ) over the emergence of a new form of subtle, ‘positive eugenics’ linked to
of significant attention capital posed particular problems for popular politicians, many of whom were denied access to the amplification supplied by a seat in Parliament. One solution to this was for leading figures to bring themselves regularly before the public at events which could be reported in the local press and then retransmitted to potential admirers across the country through networks of local, regional and metropolitan newspapers which constituted an echo chamber of selective reproduction. Journalists themselves were only too happy to collaborate in this