The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery

“In this innovative and ambitious book Alys Eve Weinbaum expands our understanding of the black radical tradition while pushing it in a distinctly feminist direction. The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery is an important work that will have major reverberations in black studies, literary studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies.” - Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

“In this sophisticated and erudite study Alys Eve Weinbaum demands her readers engage with the history of slavery, new reproductive technologies, dystopian literatures, and black feminist theory in ways that render them all both as unsettling and as generative food for thought. This work's political urgency will call out to a wide audience of scholars and students.” - Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

"The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery provides several insights to scholars invested in teasing out how colonial logics continue to shape reproductive technologies and biocapitalism. . . . Weinbaum brings to light how racialization and dehumanization motivate biocapitalism, even in the absence of black women. Ultimately, this argument prompts consideration of how neoliberalism entraps us all, weakening our resolve to resist the persistence of the slave episteme into present day." - Melissa Brown, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Weinbaum's book is both a contribution to a rich Black feminist theoretical archive on reproductive politics and a celebration of work by Black feminist scholars—particularly Black feminist legal scholars, including Dorothy Roberts and Anita Allen—who have long considered the intersections of surrogacy, slavery, and logics of property.… Weisenbaum's original and incisive text gives us new tools to think about reproductive freedom and reminds us that any idea of reproductive freedom requires Black feminist theoretical innovation and imagination." - Jennifer C. Nash, Modern Language Quarterly

"Ultimately, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery does not disappoint. It does the job of demonstrating the complex connections between the gendered and racialised reproductive exploitation and extraction during the historical Atlantic slave trade period and today exceedingly well." - Gina Marie Longo, Feminist Encounters

"The book offers much-needed critical perspectives on the racializing processes at the center of reproductive labor and commodification. . . . Ulitmately, Weinbaum's analysis shows the importance of thinking historically and offers insights into the ways in which gendered, racialized, and sexualized forms of oppression that have roots in slavery continue to motivate biocapitalism today." - Daisy Deomampo, Catalyst