Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America - Softcover

Fielder, Brigitte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478011157 ISBN 13: 9781478011156

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2020

Synopsis

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.

About this title

About the Author

Brigitte Fielder is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and coeditor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478011157
• ISBN 13: 9781478011156
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328