Relative Races

Brigitte Fielder

ISBN 10: 1478011157 / ISBN 13: 9781478011156

Editore: Duke University Press, US, 2020

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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.

Codice articolo LU-9781478011156

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Relative Races
• Editore: Duke University Press, US
• Data di pubblicazione: 2020
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1478011157
• ISBN 13: 9781478011156
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: New
• Peso: 476 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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.

Informazioni sull'autore

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.