1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910463480803321

Autore

Attewell Nadine

Titolo

Better Britons : reproduction, national identity, and the afterlife of empire / / Nadine Attewell

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

1-4426-6706-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (337 p.)

Disciplina

304.6094109/04

Soggetti

Human reproduction - Government policy - Great Britain - History - 20th century

Human reproduction - Government policy - New Zealand - History - 20th century

Human reproduction - Government policy - Australia - History - 20th century

National characteristics, British - History - 20th century

National characteristics, New Zealand - History - 20th century

National characteristics, Australian - History - 20th century

Decolonization - Great Britain - Colonies - History - 20th century

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One. An Island Solution: Utopian Forms and the Routing of National Identity -- Chapter Two. Whiteness for Beginners: An Australian Experiment -- Chapter Three. “I kept on dreaming about the sea”: Foreclosure and the Aborting Woman -- Chapter Four. Apprehending Loss: Maternity at the Margins -- Chapter Five. Shrunk in the (White)wash: Britain at World’s End -- Envoi -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his famous novel about a future in which humans are produced to spec in laboratories. Around the same time, Australian legislators announced an ambitious



experiment to “breed the colour” out of Australia by procuring white husbands for women of white and indigenous descent. In this study, Nadine Attewell reflects on an assumption central to these and other policy initiatives and cultural texts from twentieth-century Britain, Australia, and New Zealand: that the fortunes of the nation depend on controlling the reproductive choices of citizen-subjects.Better Britons charts an innovative approach to the politics of reproduction by reading an array of works and discourses – from canonical modernist novels and speculative fictions to government memoranda and public debates – that reflect on the significance of reproductive behaviours for civic, national, and racial identities. Bringing insights from feminist and queer theory into dialogue with work in indigenous studies, Attewell sheds new light on changing conceptions of British and settler identity during the era of decolonization.