Making Us New : From Eugenics to Transhumanism in Modernist Culture

Making Us New argues not only that modernist writers were influenced by eugenic and early transhumanist thinking, but that Anglo-American modernist culture was saturated with ideas and shaped by debates about making humans new. Maren Linett explores cultural expressions of, and interventions into, eugenic and transhumanist thought by excavating and analyzing four key sets of debates between and among eugenicists and transhumanists. The first set of debates relates to the body: what sorts of bodies, and especially what sorts of sensory organs, should improved people have? The second set surrounds reproduction: how might we produce new human beings via reproduction? The third set concerns racial difference: in what ways will race be transformed for future people? And the final set involves animality: how might animality be either left behind by or useful for these improved people? Linett carefully distinguishes between the two modes of human improvement and their ethical and political implications, while viewing both eugenics and transhumanism as simultaneously utopian and oppressive—oppressive not only because of their real-world applications but because of their false assumptions about human worth. The study foregrounds the fundamental aims of eugenic and transhumanist thought—to shape and control human evolutionary futures—contending that eugenics and transhumanism are part of the larger modernist quest to make it new.