Alys Eve Weinbaum (She/her)

Activities and Interests

I am a feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist scholar of modern and contemporary transatlantic literature and culture.  I teach courses on feminism, gender and sexuality, Marxism, race and racial formation, racial capitalism, African American literature, slave and neo-slave narratives, speculative fiction, the reproductive body and labor, narrativization of historical trauma and memory, and reproductive cultures and politics, past and present.

My most recent book, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery:  Biocapitalism and Black Feminism's Philosophy of History investigates the resonance of Atlantic slavery in the cultures and politics of human reproduction that characterize contemporary biocapitalism.  It demonstrates the persistence of what I call "the slave episteme" in our time and its treatment in a range of texts produced by Black feminists writing in multiple idioms.  My first book, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought theorizes what I term "the race/reproduction bind"--the constitutive connection between ideas about human reproduction and racial belonging that were expressed in 19th and 20th century thought-systems including first-wave feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, Darwinism, and various forms of anti-imperialism and internationalism.  

My current project focuses on speculative, most often dystopian representations of human reproduction in contemporary novels and films.  Here I am concerned with how dystopian fiction functions as a form of historiography that compels consciousness of the inner solidarity that exists among neoliberalism, fascist totalitarianism, slavery, and settler colonialism.

I am co-editor of Next to the Color Line:  Gender, Sexuality and W. E. B. Du Bois, a collection of feminist and queer studies contributions to scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois, and a co-author of The Modern Girl Around the World:  Consumption, Modernity and Globalization, a  study of the forms of modern femininity that emerged around the globe in the early twentieth century.  I am currently involved in two additional projects:  an anthology on "Reproductive Racial Capitalism" based on my longstanding collaboration  with Jennifer Morgan (NYU); and, a project on embodied memory and questions of historical transmission of memory and history in and through the reproductive body and its representation.  This second project is with Julia Wurr (Oldenburg, Germany) .