On Christmas day, 1993, a 59-year-old British woman gave birth to healthy twins. In Italy the very same week, a black woman bore a white baby, produced from the semen of her white husband and an egg donated by a white woman. Heated debates ensued across the United States and Europe. Fifteen years ago the very idea of conception outside a woman's womb triggered science fiction fantasies and alarmist speculations. Today, thousands of babies are manufactured with the help of in-vitro fertilization and related technologies each year. The application of these procedures has continuously shifted the boundaries of conception and reproduction. In the public debate on new reproductive technologies, many voices have been heard: medical scientists hailing the new technologies as an unprecedented advance; feminists raising apprehensions about the way in which these technologies might rob a woman of her reproductive autonomy and bodily integrity; and ethicists, religious groups, and politicians expressing concerns about the social and moral implications of the new technologies. Mapping out the public debate in the three discourses which play the most significant role in the distribution of public meanings--science, journalism and fiction--Jos Van Dyck here traces the ways in which this public consent has been manufactured. This book examines important questions about the relationship between science, technology and popular culture.
Jose Van Dijck is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She is the author of Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent: Debating the New Repoductive Technologies, also available from NYU Press.
"Framed by an audacious pairing of 'presidential bookends' (Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama), "Representing the Race" forces us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the putative political value of African American literature. Jarrett draws our attention away from the legacy of Black Arts in the 1960s to a richly historicized set of case studies from the colonial era to the present."-Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University, and author of "The Practice of Diaspora" "In this tour de force, Jarrett offers us a strikingly fresh and powerfully cogent paradigm for African American literary history and historiography more generally. An exemplary model of interdisciplinary inquiry, "Representing the Race" deftly engages fierce historic and contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, culture and politics to bring us to new and nuanced understandings of them all. This latest scholarship of Jarrett's is not only field-defining; it stunningly redefines altogether what we think of as the field of African American Studies." -Michele Elam, author of "The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics"
