hard traditional structures of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English hyperlinks writers from either events to debates approximately eugenics within the innovative period. She argues that, within the Nineteen Twenties, the shape and content material of writings by way of figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen have been formed via anxieties concerning immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.
English's interdisciplinary strategy brings jointly the paintings of these canonical writers with fairly overlooked literary, social medical, and visible texts. She examines antilynching performs through Angelina Weld Grimke in addition to the provocative writings of white woman eugenics box staff. English additionally analyzes the Crisis journal as a kin album filtering uplift via eugenics by way of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.
English means that present scholarship usually misreads early-twentieth-century visible, literary, and political tradition by way of using modern social and ethical criteria to the prior. Du Bois, she argues, used to be truly extra of a eugenicist than Eliot. via such reconfiguration of the fashionable interval, English creates an allegory for the yankee current: simply because eugenics used to be, in its time, broadly authorised as a cheap, innovative ideology, we have to think about the long term implications of up to date genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and keep an eye on, and laws selling or discouraging family members growth.