Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. By Daylanne K. English. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 267. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5531-6; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2868-8.)

The title of this book does not adequately convey the scope or ambition of Daylanne K. English's argument. In a well-crafted introduction, English explains that she intends "to provide an inclusive cultural context for studies of the modern United States" by examining how Americans across lines of race and gender drew on a shared cultural context--the ideology of eugenics--in different ways (p. 22). Eugenics, English argues, was something more complicated and flexible than simply a tool for labeling those outside the white middle-class as biologically inferior. It could be used to explain almost any conceivable form of human difference, including class and gender within the African American community. English offers a diverse series of case studies in how Americans in the 1910s and the 1920s drew on eugenic discourse to frame their own particular perspectives on issues of race, class, gender, and modernity. There are chapters on W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, antilynching literature by Angelina Weld Grimke and others, and white women's work as field researchers for the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

With the notable exception of the chapter on white women's eugenic fieldwork, this is primarily a work of literary analysis, though well grounded in historical context. The chapter on eugenic fieldwork is likely to be of particular interest to women's historians. English carefully situates her analysis within the historiography of the New Woman and Progressive-era maternalist social reform. She argues that historians could benefit from closer attention to conservative women as complicating examples of how middleclass women used their class and gender identities to advance their professional careers and political agendas. Historians are also likely to be interested in the chapters on eugenic thinking in the works of Du Bois, Grimke, and other Harlem Renaissance figures. Relying on Du Bois's writings in the Crisis and elsewhere, English makes a convincing case that Du Bois's concern for nurturing the so-called Talented Tenth of educated African Americans shaded into a loosely eugenic understanding of class distinctions among African Americans during the 1920s. English is somewhat less convincing in her assertion that African American women's antilynching plays, which often centered around issues of African American motherhood and reproduction, should be understood as commentaries on the impossibility of producing a truly fit, biologically sound African American race in a context of racism and violence.

English never clearly defines what she means by eugenics, and she sometimes pushes far beyond any conventional definition of the term. In some cases, quotations meant to show eugenic thinking seem to illustrate much more general concerns about reproduction and family quality. Even when the evidence is stronger, it is often unclear what English's subjects really believed about heredity and genetics. Popular eugenics in the U.S. came in several competing versions, with very different implications for social reform. In the 1910s and, to a lesser extent, the 1920s, many still accepted the pre-Mendelian theory that heredity could be improved or worsened by environmental conditions. English offers her work as a model for writing the history of broad trends in American literature and culture without losing sight of crucial issues of race and gender. The result illustrates both the rich potential of this form of cultural history and the dangers of trying to trace such vaguely defined trends across so many different contexts.

Duke University

KATHERINE CASTLES