The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery

In The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery, Alys Eve Weinbaum integrates literary theory and criticism, Black feminist thought, Marxist political economy, and Walter Benjamin's historical materialism to compellingly argue for a reading practice of contemporary racialized biocapitalism. Weinbaum shows why, in the context of neoliberalism, we need to read for innovative deployments of history as grounds for resistance, and perhaps more importantly, for disavowals of said history. The book is admirably interdisciplinary, and Weinbaum is impressively successful in achieving the book's ambitious goals of correcting for, and spelling out the stakes in, biocapitalism scholars' inattention to what she calls the “surrogacy/slavery nexus.” Weinbaum opens the book with chapters on slavery and racial capitalism and on black feminist legal scholars' analyses of surrogacy controversies. Following chapters engage, from a cultural studies perspective, a variety of novels and films that depict, on the one hand, the role of insurgency in constellating past

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Capitalism · Context (archaeology · Criticism · Epistemology · Feminism · Feminist theory · Literature · Marxist philosophy · Materialism · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Reproductive Health and Technologies