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Enlightenment biopolitics : a history of race, eugenics, and the making of citizens / William Max Nelson

Author
Nelson, William Max, 1976-
Published
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Copyright Date
©2024
Physical Description
vii, 311 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

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Series
Contents
Introduction: Becoming biopolitics -- Organizing the swarm of being -- Enlightenment eugenics -- Making men in the colonies -- In society, but not of it -- New citizens, new slaves -- Making the new man -- An evolving constellation -- Conclusion.
Summary
"In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment, when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. These did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was marked by a proliferation of discourses on shaping, harnessing, and "organizing" the minds and especially the bodies of citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations over time, Nelson examines the often shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, the supposed "improvement of the human species" and practices of dehumanization"--
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ISBN
9780226825564 hardcover
0226825566 hardcover
9780226825588 paperback
0226825582 paperback
9780226825571 electronic book
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Endowment Note
Paterno Libraries Endowment (Campus College Libraries)
View MARC record | catkey: 44285257