AAAS 82.11 Reading Between the Color Lines in 19th-Century American Literature
How are persons racialized as both Black and White portrayed in nineteenth-century American literature? What cultural or political meanings do interracial experiences convey? And what hopes and fears are aroused by stories of people whose lives straddle a color line defined by slavery, racial capitalism, anti-blackness, border war, indigenous dispossession and genocide? Informed by Black Studies approaches to literary representations, this course examines life writing, short stories, poems, and novels about mixed-race, interracial, and biracial subjects of the nineteenth century, a period of tumultuous change for those misnamed by the racializing logics of the time as mulatto/mulatta, metis, mestiza/mestizo, quadroon, or octoroon. Assignments and readings in the course are designed to inspire students to question how these identities were central in shaping American racial imaginaries, cultural ideologies, material realities, and political possibilities.