Not our memory: Contested visions of family at the turn of the American century (Henry James, Mark Twain, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Pauline E. Hopkins, Nella Larsen)

This project investigates the ways in which the trope of the "family" was deployed to consolidate a sense of U.S. national identity in five American novels: The American by Henry James, Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain, The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt, Contending Forces by Pauline Hopkins and Passing by Nella Larsen. While the dominant ideology in this period wanted to claim "family" as a metaphor for unequal power relations imagined as nonetheless benevolent---such as paternalistic relations between imperial authorities and colonized subjects, or patriarchally inflected fraternal relations between races---many individuals and groups of Americans falling into the less powerful categories wielded the same trope of family to argue for a place of security and even equality or freedom for themselves and others on the margins. This work draws upon race theory, gender and class theory and queer theory to read the claims made by marginalized writers upon the dominant power structures of their contemporary cultures. Each chapter takes as its theme, some position within the bourgeois family to illuminate the writer's rhetorical project.