Nuclear Alternatives: Interracial and Queer Families in AmericanLiterature, 1840-1905 Open Access
McCarthy, Maureen Terese (2013)
Abstract
Nuclear Alternatives: Interracial and Queer Families in American Literature, 1840-1905 explores various ways white Americans imagined black-white interracial and non-traditional families before and after the American Civil War. It moves through time, exploring what makes an interracial family visible, and analyzing how these families are constructed with regard to racial categorization and gendered expectations. Nuclear Alternatives contends that family is performative, meaning that it relies on repeated acts, social recognition, and particular performative speech acts such as naming. It argues that, throughout history, family is an idea separate from the bodies or structures that usually define it. My understanding of family encompasses visions beyond the nuclear, and is based on an understanding of family as a chosen, constructed, and action-based social bond. The families in this dissertation consist of persons who identify as white and those who identify as black, and often, they are not immediately legible as families. My families always stand at the site of some type of indiscretion or threat, in the realm of ambiguity and doubt, a circumstance I call "productive ambiguity." Where we find interracial families we also find category crises and ruptures, hybridity and amphibiousness that render queer family structures possible. Because interracial families disrupt the default monoracial concept of family in the United States, they represent a particularly fruitful site for exploring how families in general are formed, recognized, and interpreted.
I have found examples of interracial families in well-known literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred (1856), Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson (1894), as well as in archival finds such as minstrel show performer Thomas Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice's Otello (1844) and antisuffragist Rachel Baker Gale's No Men Wanted (1903). In each of these texts, I find "problem" families--families that seem not quite to fit into conventional definitions but still function the ways families are supposed to function: sharing resources, exchanging affection and care, building relationships that are presumed to be long-term. Current discussions surrounding same-sex marriage, transracial and international adoption, interracial families, and nontraditional familial structures make discussions of interracial families and an understanding their historical meaning more important than ever.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Nuclear Alternatives: An Introduction
Chapter 2 The Comedic Mulatto: T. D. Rice's Otello, Miscegenation, and Minstrelsy
Chapter 3 Amphibious Creatures: Domestic Alternatives in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Antislavery Fiction
Chapter 4 The Performative Family in Pudd'nhead Wilson
Chapter 5 Family Inaction: The Anti-Family in Rachel Baker Gale's No Men Wanted
Epilogue: Nuclear Alternatives in 2013
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