Description: Making Us New examines both explicit and implicit debates about eugenics and transhumanism that suffused literature and culture during the early 20th century. While both projects aimed to shape and control human evolution, they had distinct social and political implications. Maren Linett's study is divided into four main chapters: Eyes, Womb, Skin, and Gills, each centering on a debate within eugenic and transhumanist thought and playing out in modernist literature and culture. It attends throughout to the dehumanizing-and prehumanizing, since eugenics was obsessed with evolutionary timelines-of racialized, disabled, and disadvantaged human beings.
