In the US at the turn of the twentieth century, poor whites became objects of both fascination and empirical research by eugenicists and race scientists. Existing stigmas and stereotypes of poor whites were rarely challenged by these progressive reformers bent on improving American society though eugenic programs of human betterment. Researchers imagined and portrayed poor whites as a grave dysgenic threat to the racial purity of other whites. Their very existence was seen as inimical to the ideals of white supremacy that fueled the Social Darwinism of the era. As a result, poor whites were targeted for institutionalization and compulsory sterilization and durable stigmatypes of poor whites were formed.

Critical eating studies provides an important framework for understanding the construction of whiteness. This methodology allows literary critics to trace the material history of food, its marketing as well as its production, and the metaphorical valence of the body politic. Because of the tense relationship between white racial ideals and bodily pleasure, US literature often juxtaposes purity politics with the desirous, hungering body. This chapter gives an overview of major scholars at the intersection of food, literature, and race (Doris Witt, Anita Mannur, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) as well as readings of works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov that feature whiteness as an ideal impossible to embody and food as a challenge to its ineffability. Contemporary foodie culture reveals the appropriative impulses of whiteness, while satires by Ben Lerner and Jordan Peele perhaps show the way to bite back against the reign of biopolitical purity.

This chapter addresses both realism and race as epistemological categories. It probes the profound ways in which racial thinking has shaped the form of the novel and asks whether literary realism serves to solidify received racial ideas or offers ways to question and undermine such categories. After framing the debate through the work of critics like Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison, and Elaine Freedgood, the chapter turns to South African literature as a test case, suggesting that scientific racial theories were foundational to the rise of a distinctive form of the realist novel and that during apartheid South African literature was virtually constituted (as Leon de Kock notes) by writers working over a seam of racial difference. It also probes the Lukácsian idea of typicality and asks whether a typical character might be residual rather than emergent, extreme rather than ordinary. The chapter concludes with a discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s fertile reflections on both race and realism and a reading of the troubling novel Disgrace.

Against the background of prewar measures and plans, this chapter discusses the basics of and links between different strands of Nazi ethnopolicy based on “othering” (of Jews, “Zigeuner,” …), biosocial engineering (eugenics), and territorial expansionism (Lebensraum); identifies driving forces (the impact of war and expansion; central planning and local initiatives) for child “euthanasia,” “Aktion T4,” and other forms of organized mass murder; and reflects on historiography re the influence of “biologization of the social” for Nazi policy and the Holocaust.

This chapter examines Nazi policies that sought to “weed out” members of the population based on racial criteria (primarily targeting persons whom the Nazis classified as Jews, Sinti, or Roma), eugenic criteria (targeting individuals labeled as suffering from genetic diseases), or the criterion of deviance (targeting those whose deviance from social or sexual norms supposedly revealed their biological inferiority). The chapter argues that Nazi biopolitics was a contentious arena in which rivaling Nazi Party, state, and SS agencies competed for influence. This argument is developed by investigating three topics: Nazi sterilization policy; a protracted 1933−5 conflict between two competing racial theories and the impact of the conflict’s outcome on the drafting of racial legislation that culminated in the 1935 Nuremberg laws; and the 1937−8 turn to a biopolitical policy of “preventive detention” in concentration camps, on the orders of the police, which centralized efforts to round up “Asoziale,” a category that included beggars, vagrants, homeless persons, prostitutes, and potentially anyone exhibiting behavior considered socially deviant.

This chapter explores the evolution of racial ideas before and after the First World War, comparing German-speaking central Europe with the rest of Europe, the USA, or Japan. It analyzes nuances and tensions in German racial discourse between conceptions of Volk and Rasse, both of which might connote “race” in the broader English sense of the term; between Germandom, which privileged the idea of a pure Nordic race native to northern Europe, and Aryanism, which emphasized the racial superiority of multiple “Aryan” nations and peoples; and competing notions of eugenics, including concepts such as “Systemrasse” and “Vitalrasse,” with the former highlighting the differential quality of nations and races and the latter focused on improving the quality of a given population. Finally, it highlights the porous boundaries between conceptions derived from science and eugenics and those emerging from humanist, religio-mythological, and esoteric conceptions of blood and soil. Nazism drew equally on “scientific” eugenic and more “humanist” traditions, which were not unique to Germany but together created the syncretic apotheosis of race-thinking that undergirded the Holocaust.

The modern papacy emerged from the clash with the values of Enlightenment and the pope’s loss of temporal power. In a way, popes established themselves as a renovated source of moral authority on bioethics. This chapter aims to trace the history of papal pronouncements on contraception and abortion. It examines the historical roots of Christian sexual ethics from antiquity. It focuses on the early modern origin of the questions concerning the beginning of life and on the modern idea of immediate ensoulment. It shows how modern medical knowledge and eugenics contributed to a new view of reproduction as separate from sexuality, which called into question the traditional sense of marriage and gender roles. In this context, in which anti-modernism certainly played a role, popes condemned birth control, abortion, and women’s emancipation, revealing a huge hiatus between the experience of laity and the inflexible authority of the Catholic Church.

From the Enlightenment, liberal political economic thought, and the history of science, to the nation-building, ideas of citizenship, and border-setting that have defined European political and geographical space, and to racial capitalism and imperialism’s foundational role in shaping modern European economies, politics, law, and modernity, race has been central to modern Europe’s history, including its most painful episodes, and to the “global turn” in writing European history. Antiracism associated with internationalism, anticolonialism, and decolonization has also profoundly shaped European history and its writing – especially the “global turn.” Yet, considerations of economic, intellectual, political, religious, and other aspects of European history continue to neglect race and racial thought. This chapter examines the literature produced by the global turn on the role of race and racism in European history and reflects on its persistent marginalization in narratives of European history.

This chapter studies the first Hall of Fame established in the United States: NYU’s Hall of Fame of Great Americans in 1900. The episode shines a light on the American conception of greatness and how that relates to fame. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States faced an “inflation” of fame while greatness became a scarce resource. To understand the complex differences between greatness and fame, this chapter’s narrative weaves together the European tradition of status, the seedy transatlantic history of eugenics, and the unusual Hall of Fame candidacy of Edgar Allan Poe.

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

Several versions of ‘social Darwinism’ flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with ideologies derived from non-Darwinian evolution theories. They exploited discoveries of fossil hominids including Neanderthals and the Piltdown fraud to construct rival explanations of the emergence of human characteristics that might shape social development. The linear hierarchy of races erected in the nineteenth century remained the basis of many popular accounts, even though professional anthropologists began to turn their backs on it. Ideologies based on national or racial competition were advocated even by writers who did not accept the Darwinian theory of competition within populations. Fear of racial degeneration fuelled the eugenics movement’s calls for the elimination of ‘harmful’ characters, although the input from genetics encouraged an analogy with artificial rather than natural selection.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

This chapter argues against the narrative that posits a pre-twentieth century past, where the mother and fetus were one, in contrast with the present, where the fetus is visible and autonomous. I complicate this narrative by showing that the maternal–fetal relationship was redrawn and reinterpreted multiple times in the twentieth century. The ‘fetal parasite’ era was informed by the hereditarianism of the early 1900s. The notion of a developing organism sensitive to external influences was replaced by a remarkably sheltered fetus. In contrast, concerns around the physical and psychological trauma following the Second World War supported the notion of ‘critical’ periods, responsive to external influences mediated by the mother. Yet soon thereafter, the language and imagery of an autonomous, self-sufficient fetus became prevalent amidst political battles over abortion. The notion of the autonomous fetus is linked to evolutionary biology’s 1970s concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ – with the ‘selfish’ fetus pitted against the mother in the struggle over scarce resources. By the 1990s, the rise of DOHaD and epigenetics signalled a return of the maternally mediated environment to the science of human development. While some interpreted this as a return to the pre-modern model, there is a significant difference. Here maternal experiences and surroundings have to be rendered accessible to an experimental, molecular approach and to show evidence of a quantifiable change in observed parameters.

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

Berlin is often described as the site of sexual innovation in both popular and scholarly accounts of the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. Particularly in the inter-war period, the metropolis became an iconic symbol of gender-bending nightlife, an organizational centre for myriad movements of sexual emancipation, and a nexus of scholarly efforts to catalogue and understand human sexual comportment and identity. This chapter argues, however, that while there was certainly an explosion of public, literary, and medical interest in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity in early twentieth-century Berlin, the terms ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ can oversimplify what was actually a very complex and contentious historical process. Focusing on a few examples of the divisions within queer communities – particularly the conflicts between feminist, lesbian, and transgender activists and the arguments emanating from the masculinist branch of the gay rights movement – it tracks how discourses about the morality of prostitution, the social impact of same-sex love, and racialized biological knowledge shaped definitions of citizenship in ways that still resonate and are still debated. It is this debate, rather than some kind of definitive invention of sexual identity, that makes this period relevant for our present.