A Review of Ronald Walter Greene, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis

摘要

Malthus continues to haunt our future as the principle of population continues to define who we are in the present. The governing of procreation through the building of the population apparatus functions as an "othering machine" that differentiates each one of us around the norms and social categories of modern, healthy, and white. Although contributing to the differentiation of populations by allowing the act of reproduction to function as a form of cultural distinction, the population apparatus also territorializes us into a geography of scarcity. To generate forms of mobility that promise an escape from this geography of scarcity, the population apparatus offers the government of our reproductive behaviors. The danger made possible by the population apparatus is that this very promise of mobility works to reproduce the so-called satanic geography of a Malthusian world by coding some populations as worthy of prosperity while pushing others into ever more brutal forms of scarcity with nothing more than a contraceptive, (p. 243)