Relative Races

In <i>Relative Races</i> 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.