Miscegenation: Making Race in America

In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this amalgamation of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of whites with blacks, the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race.

Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word miscegenation was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

Author: Elise Lemire
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 05/22/2009
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780812220643

About the Author
Elise Lemire, Professor of Literature at Purchase College, State University of New York, is the author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.