Description
Book SynopsisFiguring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic facts that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion. This narrative was popularized in the 1970s in Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book The Population Bomb, which pathologized population growth in the Global South by presenting a doomsday scenario of widespread starvation resulting from that growth. Carole McCann uses an archive of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and organizational records to reveal the gendered geopolitical grounds of the specialized mathematical culture, bureaucratic organization, and intertextual hierarchy that gave authority to the concept of population explosion. These demographic theories and measurement practices ignited the population crisis and moved nations to interfere in women's reproductive lives. Figuring the Population Bomb concludes that mid-twentieth-century demographic figures remain authoritative to this day
Trade Review"McCann’s work is a masterly reading of sources, theory, and history. She employs a range of disciplinary tools and methods, thinking not only as a historian but also as a demographer, feminist theorist, and textual and cultural analyst."
* Journal of American History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Matters of Vital Importance: Demography and the Mid-Twentieth-Century Population Imaginary
2. Rereading Malthus: Population and Masculine Modernity
3. Narratives of Exclusion, Mechanisms of Inclusion: Demographic Boundary Work
4. Remaking Malthusian Couplings for the Contraceptive Age
5. Demographic Transitions and Modern Masculinities
6. “Second Sight” and “Fictitious Accuracy to the Numbers”
Conclusion: Demographic Convictions and Sound Knowledge
Notes
References
Index
