May 15, 2023
Yale University Press editor Banks’s provocative debut explores what it might mean to center human experience in natality, the idea that birth “indelibly shape human life from beginning to end,” rather than in mortality. Contending that “what people experience in birth... can shape their lives, deeply impact their societies, and even alter the course of history,” Banks spotlights seven thinkers who “derived great meanings from birth.” Philosopher Hannah Arendt, who coined the term natality, understood birth as symbolic of the “supreme capacity of man” to start over—a poignant observation given the Jewish philosopher’s escape from 1930s Germany. “A different beginning was always possible,” Arendt believed , including a “renewal of human dignity, freedom... and democracy.” Novelist Toni Morrison, whose “entire oeuvre is framed by birth,” believed “human birth... connects us, is part of what makes us whole beings,” though her work is unsparing in its depiction of birth under “the most difficult and morally compromised circumstances.” Banks highlights moments when her subjects’ writings were in dialogue—for example, poet Adrienne Rich’s critique of Arendt’s The Human Condition—but largely builds those connections herself through unusual biographical juxtapositions, making for a layered, introspective study. This is an enlightening look at “what it means to be born human.”