Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America by Brigitte Fielder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America by Brigitte Fielder Tabitha Lowery (bio) Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America brigitte fielder Duke University Press, 2020 308 pp. Brigitte Fielder's Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America expertly navigates new discussions centering on nineteenth-century representations of racialization in the United States. Particularly, Fielder unpacks constructions of race to show their relations between racialized bodies and domestic spaces of family and nation. Race should not merely be traced biologically, she argues, but [End Page 267] through "interpersonal relations at multiple scales" (4). She builds on the critical race scholarship of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Omi, and others who have paved the way for critical attention to the social constructions of race. Literature and visual culture from the nineteenth century show how constructions of race did not simply follow genealogical lines of descent. White women in particular could have their racial identities questioned due to the racialization of their child. Additionally, constructions of race in the nineteenth century also followed nonbiological relations of adoption, which often reproduced race based on white women's adoption into Native American communities. Fielder aptly describes this trajectory as "horizontal kinship," which allows a deeper exploration into the complexities of race formation in the nineteenth century. Kinship relations expand our comprehensions of race as it shows the "taxonomic project of comparison and the importance of kinship relations for assigning bodies to racialized groups" (5). With guided introductory materials before each chapter, the book lays out the critical theory that Fielder successfully employs throughout. Her focus on the theoretical underpinnings of race provides a refreshing take on the ways we ignore the complexities of historical representations of race in contemporary race theory. A welcomed feature of Fielder's book is the attention to the acknowledgments page. Exemplifying the ways relationships and networks influence lives, she urges readers to consider how important relations to biological and nonbiological family and colleagues are. She acknowledges the "academic generosity" of many of her colleagues, mentors, parents, and partner while identifying how each of these groups and individuals helped shape her projects and thinking. Building and sustaining ethical communities, she explains, is an important feature to academic life and can be observed from acknowledgment pages. Ultimately, Fielder brings to the fore an important but often neglected style of writing that proves very useful to audiences unfamiliar with the scholars in any field. She explains, "My life and work and learning and writing about any of the things I discuss in this book have always been done—and will continue to be improved by—relation to others" (ix). The acknowledgments page exemplifies the comradery that academics should create when ethically sustaining communities of learning. The introduction begins with Kate Chopin's well-known "Désirée's Baby" to show how race follows a queer genealogy. This section establishes [End Page 268] one of the main tenets of the book's argument—that racial transfer can move "backward" from child to mother. After Armand sees his and Désirée's baby is visibly Black, he assumes Désirée must be racially mixed. Even though Armand eventually learns of his own Black ancestry, he presumes his whiteness while reracializing Désirée because of her relation to her child. The queer genealogy of race is a significant contribution to critical race studies as it suggests that race in the nineteenth century was read in more ways than through biology. Indeed, Fielder suggests that race in the nineteenth century was not as fixed and was instead changeable through its relations. Consequently, she critiques discussions surrounding nineteenth-century white womanhood that center around white woman's purity and ability to (re)produce whiteness. Fielder seizes the opportunity to show the precarious nature of white womanhood in the nineteenth-century literary context using figures from personal narratives, novels, plays, images, and other media sources. Queer genealogies of race ultimately deconstruct "settler colonialist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative frameworks with which racialization has most often been imagined in the United States" (15). Theoretical frameworks from Black feminism, Native studies, and queer theory guide...