Includes bibliographical references (283-298) and index.
Contents:
Genealogies of Interracial Kinship -- Romance: Sexual Kinship -- Blackface Desdemona, or, the White Woman "Begrimed" -- Almost Eliza: Reading and Racialization -- Reproduction: Genealogies of (Re)Racialization -- Mothers and Mammies: Racial Maternity and Matriliny -- Kinfullness: Mama's Baby, Racial Futures -- Residency: Domestic Racial Relations -- Mary Jemison's Cabin: Domestic Spaces of Racialization -- Racial (Re)Construction: Interracial Kinship and the Interracial Nation -- "Minus Bloodlines": White Womanhood and Failures of Interracial Kinship
Summary:
"RELATIVE RACES surveys a body of 19th-century literature to trace alternative genealogies of racialization in kinship formations. Writing against the prescription of race as passed down from generation to generation, Brigitte Fielder argues that racialization occurs through adoption, sexual relationships, sibling associations, and other nonhereditary modalities, including the reflection of race from the child onto the parent. Race is constructed and reproduced through relationalities and in bodily connections. The genealogies of race are queer -- that is, race does not operate in a linear trajectory, but rather in "horizontal" and "backward" ways. The book is divided into three sections of two chapters each: Romance, Reproduction, and Residency. Chapter one discusses Desdemona, of Shakespeare's Othello, as a blackface character as a testament to complex theorizations of race and the non-normative genealogies by which race was imagined to be transferred. Chapter 2 is about reading and racialization in the mid 19th century. In this chapter, Fielder demonstrates how the racialization of characters within specific literary genres structures how people are "written" and "read" in their everyday lives. In chapter 3 Fielder discusses the slippages between mother and mammy relations, showing how both are racialized and racializing kinship relations in the text. Building on the discourses of sexuality and racial reproduction of the first half of the book, Fielder introduces the concept of "kinfullness" in chapter 4 describing not an absence but the fullness of kinship and its racializing powers, expanding our understanding of the relationship between kinship, race, and reproduction. Chapter 5 reads the cultural construction of a woman, Mary Jemison, born white who becomes Native by a process of racialization and re-racialization that is relational rather than generational and that is also informed by the domestic spaces she inhabits. The novels she discusses in this chapter depict interracial families in their specific context within and relationship to the interracial nation in the late 18th century. Fielder discusses the significance of queerly circular racialization as "racial reconstruction," acknowledging racial formation as never static or finished but always in the process of its own re-making. Ultimately, Fielder ends by stating that racial reconstruction occurs in illogical and unpredictable ways and cannot simply be willed, because it is not a matter of individual identification but of relation. She ends by stating that Whiteness must be urged toward a genealogical future that does not reproduce Whiteness, but moves towards a more radically inclusive future - a future that will necessitate kinship with those who are black and brown and indigenous and queer"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.