Alys Eve Weinbaum

Wayward
Reproductions
Next Wave
New Directions in Women’s Studies
a se r i e s e di t e d by
inde r pa l g r e wa l , c a r e n k a pl a n ,
a n d roby n wi e gma n
Wayward
Reproductions
Genealogies of Race and Nation
in Transatlantic Modern Thought
alys eve weinbaum
duke universit y press
Durham & London 2004

© 2004 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
of America on acid-free paper
Designed by Rebecca Giménez
Typeset in Sabon by Tseng
Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-
in-Publication Data appear on
the last printed page of this book.
Acknowledgments for the use of
copyrighted material appear on
page 349 which constitutes
an extension of the
copyright page.
for my parents
Sandy and Shelly

Contents
Acknowledgments, ix
Introduction, 1
1. Genealogy Unbound: Reproduction

and Contestation of the Racial Nation, 15
2. Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte

Perkins Gilman and the Reproduction of
Racial Nationalism, 61
3. Engels’s Originary Ruse: Race and Reproduction

in the Story of Capital, 106
4. Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis:

Darwin, Freud, and the Universalization of
Wayward Reproduction, 145
5. The Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism:

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Reproduction of
Racial Globality, 187
Coda: Gene/alogies for a New

Millennium, 227
Notes, 247
Works Cited, 307
Index, 339
Acknowledgments
I have been working on the cultures and politics of reproduction

for well over a decade and thus this book has roots in ideas, ques-
tions, and conversations that captured my imagination long before
I began to conceive of it as a book. It is a pleasure to arrive at an
end of sorts, in no small part because it provides an occasion to ex-
press my profound gratitude to those who have guided, inspired,
and sustained me on an extended journey.
My mentors, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Priscilla Wald,
gave immeasurable gifts of teaching and scholarship, and continue
to give the friendship and support that mean so much to me. Gaya-
tri has modeled a feminist sensibility that I will always draw upon.
Priscilla, as is her wont, has given commitment new meaning. For
her boundless enthusiasm, wise counsel, and willingness to jump
in I thank Susan Gillman. For getting me started so many years
back I am deeply indebted to Neil Lazarus, Mary Ann Doane,
Elizabeth Weed, and Jacqueline Rose.
An extraordinary group of interlocutors have engaged this
book at each stage. For reading the entire manuscript and offer-
ing thoughtful and detailed suggestions for improvement I thank
Gail Bederman, Sarah Franklin, Susan Gillman, Miranda Joseph,
and Priscilla Wald. The members of my feminist writing group
at the University of Washington, Madeleine Yue Dong, Ranjana
Kahanna, Uta Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, and Lynn Thomas, of-
fered astute commentary on much of the manuscript. I hope these
readers find that my revisions reflect their contributions well. For
generously engaging various pieces of this project and offering
feedback on what worked and what needed more work I thank
Carolyn Allen, Tani Barlow, Bruce Burgett, Michael Denning,
Gary Handwerk, Nancy Hartsock, Paget Henry, Jeanne Heuving,
Andreas Huyssen, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Amy Kaplan, Rosa-
lind Petchesky, Ellen Rooney, Henry Staten, and Laura Wexler.
For talking Marx and sharing the vibrant reading group that gave
fruition to my chapter on Engels I thank Miranda Joseph and
David Kazanjian. And not least, for providing crucial forms of in-
stitutional support at the University of Washington I thank Kate
Cummings, Dick Dunn, Susan Jeffords, Mark Patterson, Caroline
Chung Simpson, Kathleen Woodward, and Shawn Wong.
I have been fortunate, and am grateful for awards and fellow-
ships that have supported the completion of this book. A postdoc-
toral fellowship at the Pembroke Center for Research and Teach-
ing on Women at Brown University allowed me to add chapters
to the original dissertation. A faculty fellowship from the Wal-
ter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the Univer-
sity of Washington provided timely support for further research
and a group of fellows who graciously commented on work in
progress. During the final stages of writing, a grant from the Roy-
alty Research Foundation at the University of Washington pro-
vided needed relief from teaching.
At Duke University Press my editor Reynolds Smith, along with
Sharon Torian and Justin Faerber, expertly shepherded this manu-
script. I am thankful for their attentiveness and good humor
throughout. My research assistants, Christina Miller and Anne
Wessel, helped with the details of manuscript preparation; Stefanie
Martin was mistress of indexing, and Jan Bultman the most dedi-
cated copyeditor I could hope for. Daniel Lee, Eduardo Kac, and
Catherine Chalmers generously granted permission to reproduce
their fascinating artwork in the coda.
Finally there are those people who have sustained me day by
day and made my life feel full. I thank Ranjana Khanna and Srini-
vas Aravamudan for first making Seattle home. I thank Chandan
Reddy for his radiant mind and abundant warmth, and Gillian
Harkins and Jodi Melamed for their unstinting kindness and per-
sistent critique. Together Chandan, Gillian, and Jodi—colleagues
and true comrades—have made the period during which I com-
pleted this book intellectually and politically rich and lots of fun.
I thank Kirsten Hudson for the gift of lifelong friendship, and the
nearly unflappable Michael Miller for always being there. Brent
Edwards and David Kazanjian have been my fellow travelers for
the duration. Each has, in his own special way, enriched my think-
ing and contributed greatly to my happiness. Words expressing ad-
x Acknowledgments
miration and solidarity are here inadequate. I thank my parents,
Sandy and Shelly Weinbaum, for sharing their deep sense of so-
cial justice, and the love that continues to inspire me. And, above
all, I thank Nikhil Pal Singh, my most challenging interlocutor and
companion in endeavors large and small. This book, like my life,
would not be what it is without him. His brilliance and emotional
honesty have been my ballast.
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
Crises occur when the social formation

can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the
pre-existing system of social relations.
—Stuart Hall
In its relatively short history the word ‘‘reproduction’’ has accrued

a variety of meanings. Today it is bandied about in discussions
on topics as wide-ranging as Marxist theory and photocopy ma-
chines, sound systems and human cloning. When dates are at-
tached to the disparate usages of the word, as they are in the Oxford
English Dictionary, a trajectory emerges in its transformation over
time. First used as a synonym for ‘‘resurrection’’ by seventeenth-
century theologians, in the eighteenth century ‘‘reproduction’’ mi-
grated from the religious realm to the secular, coming into vogue
within the emergent field of natural history.1 Initially ‘‘reproduc-
tion’’ replaced the term ‘‘regeneration,’’ especially of limbs and
other bodily appendages. It was not, however, until the latter part
of the eighteenth century that ‘‘reproduction’’ was decisively at-
tached to the notion of species reproduction—the sense of ‘‘re-
production,’’ biological and sexual, that became pervasive in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that so compelled
the transatlantic writers, intellectuals, and pundits whom I treat in
this book.
Although the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on ‘‘reproduc-
tion’’ can be mined to reveal permutations in the term’s usage,
what it cannot convey—invested as it is in the production of its
own authority and thus its distance from social, economic, and
political wrangling—is how changes in the definition of reproduc-
tion came about, and thus how the modern conception of repro-
duction, sexualized and biologized, was shaped by contests over
its meaning. In answering these questions the chapters that follow
analyze ideas about reproduction elaborated in a number of fields
of intellectual inquiry and within an array of cultural and politi-
cal discourses, including evolutionary theory, early anthropology,
Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. In so doing, these chap-
ters explore how competing understandings of reproduction as a
biological, sexual, and racialized process became central to the
organization of knowledge about nations, modern subjects, and
the flow of capital, bodies, babies, and ideas within and across na-
tional borders.
In situating reproduction as a quintessentially modern concept
and then creating an interpretive history of its transatlantic de-
velopment, throughout this book I treat ‘‘reproduction’’ as what
Raymond Williams has called a ‘‘keyword,’’ a linguistic unit that
functions as an overdetermined repository of social conflict and
contradiction of a decidedly historical character.2 For although
Williams excludes an entry for ‘‘reproduction’’ from his Vocabu-
lary of Culture and Society (as Keywords is subtitled), I have found
that it pervades the principal discursive fields that comprise trans-
atlantic modern thought. Like other keywords, ‘‘reproduction’’ is
a highly condensed sign that performs ideological work. In this
book I thus read the various representations of reproduction pro-
duced within the discursive horizon of modernity as so many stra-
tegic positions in a continuing struggle over meaning and power,
as diverse bids for control over reproductivity, over the power
that accrued to reproduction at the same historical moment that
the concept’s biological and sexual dimensions were consolidated,
and that reproductive processes began to be regulated by modern
states, and studied by scholars in the humanities and sciences.3
Keywords, Raymond Williams reminds us, do not stand alone.
They are intimately conjoined with other keywords in relation to
which they derive their meaning. In the case of ‘‘reproduction,’’
its relationships with ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘nation,’’ and ‘‘genealogy’’ have been
long and enduring. To fully expand our understanding of ‘‘repro-
duction’’ it is thus necessary to consider these related signifiers,
all of which have been shaped by the concept of reproduction just
as it has been contoured by them. And yet, whereas Williams ac-
cords relatively equal social and political weight to each of the key-
2 Wayward Reproductions
words discussed within his vocabulary, here I focus on how ‘‘re-
production,’’ ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘nation,’’ and ‘‘genealogy’’ constitute more
than one terrain of contest or site of historical crisis among others.
For, when taken together, this group of keywords constitutes a
privileged discursive cluster, the exploration of which sheds light
on the systems of domination and oppression that characterize
transatlantic modernity, especially its regimes of classification, op-
pression, and social control; namely, racism, nationalism, and im-
perialism. As this book demonstrates, this discursive cluster, more
than any other, expresses the raciological thinking that molded ex-
clusionary forces into their most violent and enduring forms.4
In earlier scholarship, reproduction has been associated all but
exclusively with women’s bodies and the domestic realm—with
private issues of fertility, childbearing, and motherhood, rather
than with politically charged issues of racism, nation building,
and imperial expansion. Because of this narrow association, repro-
duction has been subjected to one of two antithetical treatments.
On the one hand, reproduction and things reproductive have been
marginalized and pathologized for many of the same reasons that
‘‘women’s issues’’ in general are routinely regarded as less legiti-
mate topics of research: too ‘‘soft,’’ too unscientific, not important
to public (let alone global) events, not worth funding, or, most
damning, too unproductive. Symptomatically, even in Williams’s
Keywords women’s reproduction of the species is only discussed in
the entry for ‘‘Labour,’’ and even in this instance, it is not expressly
named but is instead invoked in the limited guise of ‘‘childbirth’’
and then subsumed within a wider argument about the association
of physical exertion and pain.
On the other hand, in rectifying this situation, in restoring
what has been excluded from dominant analyses of modern trans-
atlantic culture and society, feminists have rendered reproduction
a central and multifaceted concern. For some this has entailed
persistent attention to reproduction’s instrumentalization in the
subordination of women in patriarchal cultures. Many scholars
and activists have sought to rediscover and then reclaim reproduc-
tive bodies and labor from historiographies and political cultures
that have systematically omitted reproduction’s decisive social and
philosophical importance. In work ranging from Adrienne Rich’s
groundbreaking meditation on motherhood as experience and in-
stitution, Of Woman Born, and the French feminist celebration of
the maternal body and écriture feminine, to the Marxist feminist
Introduction 3
reassessment and valorization of women’s unremunerated work,
and analyses of the onslaught of reproductive technologies, a femi-
nist rejoinder to the earlier scholarly dismissal of reproduction has
been successfully launched.5
In significant ways this book contributes to the larger and on-
going project of feminist reclamation. It too prioritizes reproduc-
tion as an intellectual and political concern. But it also parts com-
pany with scholarship that reclaims and/or extols the maternal
body or romanticizes reproductive labor not only to reconstruct
but simultaneously to deconstruct the term with which it is pre-
occupied. Rather than reclaiming reproduction as a concept to
be naturally embraced by feminism as its own, I examine it
through a critical lens. Analyzing reproduction from the stand-
point of the present, I approach its past genealogically. And thus
although it is only in the coda that I treat what many have come to
regard as a highly problematical situation (one animated by cur-
rent debates about global population control, the proliferation of
reproductive technologies, the exponential growth of genetic engi-
neering, the emergence of biocolonialism and bioprospecting, an
array of political movements aimed at so-called fetal protection,
and that old standby so familiar to U.S. feminists, ‘‘reproductive
rights’’), I implicitly and continuously look backward from the
present to explore how the concept of reproduction became deeply
embedded within modernity’s nodal systems of classification and
social domination.6
The interconnected ideologies of racism, nationalism, and im-
perialism rest on the notion that race can be reproduced, and on
attendant beliefs in the reproducibility of racial formations (in-
cluding nations) and of social systems hierarchically organized ac-
cording to notions of inherent racial superiority, inferiority, and
degeneration. Two interrelated concerns thus form the broad arc
of my investigation: First, how has the representation of women’s
reproductive capacity been integral to the epistemological sys-
tems that are central to defining modernity? And, second, how
have various representations of reproduction within the modern
episteme played a part in winning assent to ideologies of racism,
nationalism, and imperialism?
In asking these questions Wayward Reproductions builds on the
work of scholars of nationalism who have sought to understand
the gendered dynamics of nation building (as I discuss in chap-
ter 1), critical race studies and feminist scholars who have focused
on the intersection of racism and sexism, and American studies
scholars who have sought to understand how national belonging
and ideas about gender, sexual, and racial identity articulate in
and through one another at different historical conjunctures.7 It
also enters into dialogue with a group of thinkers who, although
seldom positioned as interlocutors, are nonetheless engaged in
theorizing the centrality of reproductive thinking to modern trans-
atlantic social organization and cultural production. The mem-
bers of this group have two principal orientations. First are those
who have sought to transform political and social theory by fore-
grounding reproductive politics in a number of heavily canonized
texts. Their work, although varied in focus, reveals how repro-
ductive politics structure modern political and social conflicts, and
how human reproduction and kinship function as twinned mecha-
nisms that orchestrate inclusion in political societies. Second are a
handful of scholars who have returned to a range of literary texts
to explore how they embody reproductive politics and/or produce
formal innovation through refiguration of the intersection of ideas
about race and the maternal body.8 My present aims are in soli-
darity with this crucial work. This book examines the Western
philosophical and political tradition and centers the reproductive
ideas that exist within prevailing accounts of group affiliation and
social organization; it also reworks received understandings of lit-
erary texts to attend to their otherwise neglected reproductive and
racial figurations and themes.
At the same time Wayward Reproductions has a distinct goal:
the excavation of a persistent, if inchoate, ideological constellation
that I refer to as ‘‘the race/reproduction bind.’’ As I demonstrate,
this conceptual unit, rather than either of its parts alone, orga-
nizes the modern episteme—the complex of discourses that char-
acterize the modern historical epoch, expressing and subtending
its conflicts around meaning production within the United States
and within the larger transatlantic context that has been shaped by
the race/reproduction bind that simultaneously characterizes it.9
In this signal term the word ‘‘bind’’ expresses the inextricability
of the connection between race and reproduction—the fact that
these phenomena ought not to be thought of as distinct, though
they have all too often been analytically separated. ‘‘Bind’’ is also
instructive in that it conjures the double bind in which political
thinkers and philosophers have found themselves when they have
attempted to untangle race and reproduction by mistakenly mis-
Introduction 5
apprehending the tenacity and resilience of the mutually depen-
dent relationship that exists between the two. Given this bind this
book offers neither a new take on reproductive themes within lit-
erary modernism nor a new theory of reproduction’s role in cre-
ating the modern nation state but rather a defamiliarized account
of how race and reproduction are bound together within trans-
atlantic modernity’s central intellectual and political formations.
My hope is that this account will convince at least a few readers to
(re)orient knowledge production about these formations around a
new axis: race/reproduction.
From one perspective it might have made sense to begin this in-
vestigation with a treatment of Thomas Malthus and his discourse
on population, and to conclude it with examination of the eugen-
ics movement that swept through the United States and Europe
in the first decades of the twentieth century and reached an apo-
theosis in the genocide of World War II. Population control and
eugenics are clearly sites in which race and reproduction inter-
sect and become inextricable. In his Essay on the Principal of Popu-
lation (1798) Malthus sets the stage for much of the reproduc-
tive thinking focused on here. His thesis that population growth
and the control and containment of reproductive sexuality consti-
tute a major problem for modern societies with diminishing re-
sources was as hotly debated among the thinkers whom I discuss
(especially Marx, Engels, and Darwin) as among the first-wave
feminists involved in the birth control movement (here Margaret
Sanger immediately comes to mind).10 Similarly, the forms of eu-
genic thinking that arose in the early part of the twentieth cen-
tury pivoted on an understanding of the relationship of race to re-
production, and on notions of racial superiority and degeneration
that are similar to those that pervade the texts treated throughout
this book.
And yet, Malthus and the racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious
genocides of World War II haunt this study rather than bracket
it for a simple reason: I am less interested in discourses that treat
the race/reproduction bind on the level of manifest content than
I am in those that are shot through or permeated by ideas about
race and reproduction and yet are either seemingly unaware of
this fact, or commonly treated by scholars as if the race/repro-
duction bind did not constitute the foundation of theoretical ar-
ticulation and coherence. Thus, rather than focusing on the texts
of population control and eugenics, fascism, and genocide, this
book traces the lineaments of the struggles fought over the mean-
ing of reproduction by a number of thinkers who are central to
the articulation of transatlantic modern thought, but whose treat-
ments of reproduction and attendant ideas of race, nation, and
genealogy have not been the express object of critical attention
or are truly inchoate or subtextual. As successive chapters dem-
onstrate, modern transatlantic thought—that produced by mo-
dernity’s big systems builders and those who engaged them—is
consistently undergirded by the race/reproduction bind because
this conceptual unit has enabled the articulation of the modern
episteme.
Ideally at least a few of the often read texts I examine will be
familiar to readers. What will be unfamiliar is how each comes
to look when the race/reproduction bind that underpins the text
in question is excavated. In some cases, texts are defamiliarized
through readings that explore how they cement the relationship
between race and reproduction in the interest of consolidating
racial nationalism or imperial regimes of power. In others, defa-
miliarization proceeds through exploration of a textual struggle to
detach race from reproduction, and thus to think about national
identity and/or racial belonging as more than biologically repro-
duced inheritances. In still other instances, texts that have nothing
to do with reproduction on the level of manifest content are shown
to tacitly engage the race/reproduction bind in their production
of rhetorical and conceptual coherence. Thus, in addition to ad-
dressing the two touchstone questions already mentioned (How
are representations of reproduction integral to the epistemologi-
cal systems considered central to the articulation of modernity?
And how have such representations shored up racism, national-
ism, and imperialism?), I pose several others that are derivative of
these, but perhaps more generative because of their greater pre-
cision: How have modernity’s big systems builders inadvertently
bound race ever more tightly to reproduction? How have various
authors sought to produce representations of reproductive pro-
cesses and bodies that challenge the notion that race is some-
thing that can be reproduced? And finally, how have thinkers who
comprehend the incompatibility of racism and human liberation
sought to transcend the race/reproduction bind altogether by re-
thinking or reappropriating the concept of human reproduction to
antiracist ends?
Answers to these questions are proffered across five chapters
Introduction 7
that explore the overlapping textual strategies used to bring race
and reproduction into the text and either bind or unbind them
from each other. Chapter 1, ‘‘Genealogy Unbound,’’ elaborates
the connections among the cluster of keywords—‘‘reproduction,’’
‘‘race,’’ ‘‘nation,’’ and ‘‘genealogy’’—upon which the rest of the
chapters focus. It explains how racism and nationalism articulate
through each other and how ideas of reproductive genealogical
connection secure notions of belonging in those contexts in which
the nation is conceived of as racially homogenous. The chapter
develops genealogy as a concept that conjoins notions of racial
‘‘purity,’’ familial, and national belonging and then theorizes it as
a method of critical historical inquiry, a heuristic capable of iden-
tifying and subsequently cutting through the race/reproduction
bind that it subtends. The chapter treats several of the prevail-
ing theories of nationalism and engages the two principal modern
theorists of genealogy, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault.
Through close reading it unearths the unacknowledged racial and
reproductive dimensions of their formulations about genealogi-
cal inquiry. And although the nineteenth-century southern author
Kate Chopin has not before been situated alongside these two
well-known thinkers as a fellow philosopher, the chapter makes
recourse to her ideas about genealogical narration, rooted as they
are in the conflicts of the post-Emancipation United States, to re-
inforce the inherently racial and reproductive dimensions of the
diverse genealogical projects that have been orchestrated in the
Atlantic theater. Overall chapter 1 demonstrates that genealogy
is a self-reflexive methodological tool—the one I use throughout
the rest of the book to unpack the dependence of racist, nation-
alist, and imperialist thought on notions of descent, kinship, and
the reproduction of racial differences that more conventional ideas
about genealogy naturalize or consolidate.
Chapter 2, ‘‘Writing Feminist Genealogy,’’ builds on the previ-
ous chapter by analyzing how first-wave feminism and uncritical
second-wave celebrations of it are together ensnared in an unexam-
ined race/reproduction bind. It focuses on the work of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, the highly prolific turn-of-the-century U.S. femi-
nist, and on her vexed brand of maternalist feminism. The chapter
explores how her belief in the possibility of ‘‘purified’’ genealogi-
cal connection structured her thinking about national belonging
within the context of the massive post-Reconstruction effort to
imagine reunion of North and South and renegotiate the mean-
7032 Weinbaum / WAYWARD REPRODUCTIONS / sheet 21 of 362
ing of citizenship. It pinpoints the dependence of Gilman’s ar-

guments about white women’s role in national reproduction on
anti-immigrant and racial animus, and on the idea that a racially
‘‘pure’’ population could be reproduced if interracial sex, or ‘‘mis-
cegenation,’’ could be avoided. Finally, considering the strength of
contemporary resistance to analysis of the grounding of Gilman’s
maternalist feminism in racism and nationalism by those who have
been committed to the recovery of Gilman as a foremother, the
chapter raises pressing questions about what it means to write
feminist history, to construct genealogies of feminism that are
antiracist—critical genealogies such as the one that both chapter 2
and the book as a whole seek to model.
Chapter 3, ‘‘Engels’s Originary Ruse,’’ extends the argument
about feminism by examining a partially analogous treatment of
race in Marxist and socialist feminist theorizing produced in the
1970s and 1980s, and then returns to Friedrich Engels’s Origin
of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), the account
of the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy that has, more
than any other, informed socialist and Marxist strands of femi-
nist theory. By returning to Origin the chapter charts an alterna-
tive feminist approach to Marxism that reveals the centrality of
ideas about race and reproduction to the development of capi-
talist society. For at core Engels’s ideas about private property
and the modern state are infused with nineteenth-century scien-
tific understandings of kinship, family, and tribe first found in the
work of Lewis Henry Morgan, the American anthropologist upon
whose studies of Native Americans Origin relies. Overall, chap-
ter 3 shows that reproductive and racial thinking saturate Marx-
ism’s highly influential origin story in a manner that has the poten-
tial to radically alter prevailing feminist readings of Marx and
Engels’s contribution.
If several of the writers treated in this book self-consciously
negotiate the race/reproduction bind, viewing it as integral to their
larger political projects, in the writings of others it is inchoate or
subtextual. In the discussion of Marx, Engels, and Morgan, as
in the subsequent one of Darwin and Freud, overlapping repro-
ductive and racial figures are shown to work not only with but
also against their authors’ manifest intentions. In tracking racial
and reproductive figures I thus discern how foundational texts by
modernity’s big systems builders can be read against the grain, as
evidence of the deep embedding of racialized reproductive think-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Introduction 9
ing within major modern thought systems. Chapter 4, ‘‘Sexual

Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis,’’ examines many of the
nineteenth-century ideas about family, kinship, and tribe iden-
tified in Engels’s Origin by turning first to Darwin’s theory of
‘‘sexual selection’’ and then to Freud’s early studies on hysteria.
The premise of the chapter is that Darwin’s now discredited
theory of sexual selection—the theory developed to account for
evolutionary processes of racial differentiation in The Descent of
Man (1871)—opened up extensive anxieties about the power of
the female of the species to alter the course of evolution through
the choice of her mate. Although Freud rarely engaged Darwin di-
rectly, the chapter juxtaposes Darwin and Freud to reveal Freud’s
theories about hysteria as implicitly in dialogue with ideas cen-
tral to nineteenth-century racial and evolutionary science, as well
as prevailing anti-Semitic ideas about race and reproduction. In
writing on hysteria Freud attempted, I argue, to redress popular
anti-Semitic views on wayward female desire and racialized re-
productive and sexual excess by reworking prevailing scientific
ideas about race and reproduction. In particular, a close reading
of Freud and Breuer’s case study ‘‘Anna O.’’—the case thought
to originate the ‘‘talking cure’’—reveals how Freud’s founding of
psychoanalysis depended upon successful reappropriation of ideas
about hysteria that were racially coded as Jewish. For, in crafting
his account of the origins of his new science and defending it from
racist scorn and stereotype, Freud universalized an array of anti-
Semitic stereotypes about Jewish reproductivity, effectively coun-
tering their racism.
Like Freud, the African American intellectual and activist
W. E. B. Du Bois attempted to reconstruct the relationship be-
tween race and reproduction in the interest of producing anti-
racist thinking—in this case about black belonging in the post-
Reconstruction nation and in the world. Chapter 5, ‘‘The Sexual
Politics of Black Internationalism,’’ extends the arguments about
Freud’s antiracist strategies by considering Du Bois’s attempts to
transcend the ideas of reproduction that underwrote notions of
racial belonging and citizenship in the United States. Through
exploration of the various representations of black maternity
created by Du Bois the chapter elaborates their rhetorical and po-
litical function in combating the racialization of national belong-
ing, on the one hand, and in articulating universal black citizen-
ship, or what I call racial globality, on the other. Beginning with an
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
analysis of Du Bois’s treatment of the connection between repro-

ductive politics and U.S. racial nationalism in The Souls of Black
Folk, the chapter proceeds by examining Du Bois’s international-
ist expansion of his argument through a reading of his romantic
novel Dark Princess and concludes with an analysis of key pas-
sages from the semi-autobiographical Dusk of Dawn. Overall, the
chapter moves from discussion of Du Bois’s critique of the ideo-
logical construction of the United States as a white nation repro-
duced by white progenitors to an examination of his figuration of
a black mother out of whose womb springs a black diasporic anti-
imperialist alliance.
In focusing on materials gathered from multiple national con-
texts and academic disciplines the archive that this book con-
structs and examines makes an argument: to study the race/
reproduction bind as a central feature of the modern episteme it
is necessary to engage in theoretically oriented work that refuses
to be nationally bound in scope. In insisting upon the juxtaposi-
tion of modernity’s big systems builders (Marx, Engels, Darwin,
Freud) and well-known philosophers (Nietzsche, Foucault) with
less widely recognized literary and political figures such as Gilman,
Chopin, and Du Bois, this book also makes a second argument:
the transatlantic racial formation is so complex, often so over-
whelming, that to study it one must explore not only the conflu-
ence of ideas across national contexts but their confluence across
textual sites that might otherwise seem unbearably heterogeneous.
In short, when reproduction is positioned as a central object of
knowledge it calls forth a new hermeneutic that implicitly chal-
lenges nation-based work, as well as the often unexamined hier-
archization of the broad array of texts and disparate authors by
whom they were produced. In constituting its archive as it does,
this book countermands the fraught connection between national
exceptionalism and the textual hierarchies that have predominated
within the study of modernity on both sides of the Atlantic.
With this last remark I do not mean to imply that by focus-
ing on the race/reproduction bind I necessarily disengage from
nation-based work—in this case, work broadly construed within
the purview of American studies. To do so would diminish the
fact that, regardless of the diverse national origins of the texts
this book treats, it is predominantly literary and Euro-American
in focus.11 Instead, I hope to underscore a slightly different set of
concerns. On the more mundane level, nations are ‘‘semiperme-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Introduction 11
able container[s]’’ whose cultural and intellectual formations are

always leaking out. Beginning in the 1870s and ending shortly
before World War II, there was a strong and continuous flow of
ideas and cultural products back and forth across the Atlantic
and across national borders within Europe. As historians such as
Daniel Rogers have argued, Europe and the United States were
as tightly bound together by trade and capitalism as by the ex-
change of ideas.12 As already indicated Marx and Engels’s theories
about the origins of private property and the modern state were
built out of knowledge about Native Americans provided by the
American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even though Dar-
win’s work is rarely considered alongside Freud’s, it had currency
in the Austro-German intellectual scene in which psychoanaly-
sis was crafted. And although Chopin and Nietzsche were prob-
ably entirely unaware of each other’s writings, their shared ideas
about genealogy and race render them unanticipated theoretical
interlocutors. Such intellectual crosscurrents are, moreover, often
actual. Du Bois traveled to Europe and to Africa on several occa-
sions in the early years of the twentieth century (and later as well),
and his novel Dark Princess explores the form of utopian black
internationalism made possible by his global circulation. Gilman’s
feminism was regarded as groundbreaking not only by the Ameri-
cans to whom she lectured, but also by the European feminists and
progressives she met on her sojourns abroad.
On a more analytical level, in framing Wayward Reproductions
transatlantically and in creating often uncomfortable juxtaposi-
tions of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated and less well-known
texts by big-name thinkers and perhaps unfairly marginalized au-
thors and political activists, I hope to suggest that thinking about
nations and nation formation is always caught within a racial-
ized reproductive logic about the propagation of national sub-
jects and citizens and is constituted through exchanges that take
place within an unwieldy, awkwardly shaped, and truly hetero-
geneous cultural horizon. It is not just big systems builders who
produce enduring ideas, just as it is not solely nationals who medi-
tate upon the forms of nationalism that characterizes the nations
in which they reside. In refusing to be nationally centered and in
electing to be somewhat heterodox in the manner in which it con-
venes texts, this book is intended to delineate the deep, historically
layered discursive context in which the relationships among race,
reproduction, and nationalism are rooted in the United States. As
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
will be evident I have taken my cues from others who have de-
veloped mind-opening rubrics including the ‘‘Black Atlantic,’’ the
‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ and the ‘‘North Atlantic World’’ to reveal and
contest the U.S. exceptionalism that often characterizes U.S. lit-
erary, historical, and cultural study; for in a similar spirit I em-
ploy a transatlantic frame to cut through the nationalism of nation-
based scholarship and to expose the racialized reproductive logic
of modern U.S. nationalism as it was conceived within a poly-
phonic, multinational crucible.13
Stuart Hall, one of the founders of British cultural studies, pro-
poses an understanding of historical crises that coincides, albeit
unintentionally, with the transatlantic flow of ideas and struggle
over meaning that this book documents. As Hall observes in the
epigraph to this introduction, ‘‘Crises occur when the social for-
mation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the pre-
existing system of social relations’’ (emphasis added). In crafting
this maxim Hall employs the concept of reproduction in a modi-
fied Marxist sense.14 Working through Antonio Gramsci’s earlier
ideas about historical crises, Hall suggests that social formations
fall into decline and are resurrected in new ways, that they are
composites of economic and social relations subject to transforma-
tion and reformation catalyzed by social and economic pressures
that continually threaten the hegemony of the dominant order. In
other words, in drawing on Marxist theory Hall updates a familiar
thesis: Crises occur when the processes of capitalist accumulation
are unable to function, when the relations of production can no
longer be reproduced.
The manner in which Hall’s formulation links the concept of
crisis directly to that of reproductive failure and situates both as
objects of cultural studies is immediately provocative. Like other
Marxist thinkers before him, Hall identifies reproduction as a piv-
otal historical process that palpably transforms and consolidates
social relations. But what if Hall’s formulation were interpreted
not only as an account of the processes by which historical crises
become manifest but also quite literally? What happens when re-
production is situated not only as a mechanism of historical change
but also as species reproduction, itself a crucial object of this his-
torically transformative process? This book explores reproduction
in just this two-pronged manner—as a structural mechanism of
change and as a specifically racialized and sexualized mechanism
of change—arguing that reproduction should be thought of as a
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Introduction 13
self-reflexive concept within the context of the cultural study of

transatlantic modernity. For, as the chapters that follow detail, re-
production is a figure for theory that is itself involved in a crisis.
This is a crisis precipitated by the failure of the social order, par-
ticularly the modern racial nation, to continually reproduce itself
without a glitch. In turn, it is an ongoing crisis in the meaning of
the racialized and sexualized concept of reproduction—a crisis in
the dominant racial and gender order that becomes visible in the
failure of reproduction to achieve a stabilized meaning, in nothing
less than reproduction’s becoming wayward.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Chapter One
Genealogy Unbound: Reproduction and
Contestation of the Racial Nation
Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial

imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense
positive faculty of repression.—Friedrich Nietzsche
The essence of a nation is that all individuals have

many things in common, and also that they have
forgotten many things.—Ernest Renan
Forgetting, like miscegenation, is an

opportunistic tactic of whiteness.
—Joseph Roach
‘‘Désirée’s Baby,’’ the turn-of-the-century story by the southern

author Kate Chopin, revolves around a white-looking, fair-haired
woman who is remorselessly disciplined for her alleged partici-
pation in the wrong kind of reproduction. The ironically named
Désirée is a foundling taken in and raised by a childless Louisi-
ana planter family. She grows up to be a Southern belle, and when
she comes of age, she marries a neighboring plantation owner,
who, although warned of her sketchy origins, throws caution to
the wind. A blissful marriage ensues until Désirée and Armand’s
first child arrives. Initially regarded as a blessing and a suitable
heir, it soon becomes apparent to everyone who lays eyes upon
the infant, and then finally to Désirée, that her son is not ‘‘pure’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
white. Subsequently, Armand casts Désirée off for shaming and

dishonoring his family name and decrees that Désirée is not her-
self white, as evidenced in her baby’s complexion. Although Dé-
sirée’s adopted mother begs her to return home, Désirée refuses,
choosing instead to disappear with her child ‘‘among the reeds
and willows that grow thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish
bayou.’’ 1 The tragedy does not end with Désirée’s disappearance
and the specter of infanticide, however, but with a characteristic
Chopinesque twist. As Armand burns Désirée’s belongings he also
destroys a fragment of a letter he has found at the back of one
of her drawers. This letter, written in Armand’s mother’s hand,
thanks ‘‘the good God for having so arranged [life] that [her] dear
Armand will never know that his dear mother, who adores him,
belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery’’ (176).
Recent critics have argued that this story testifies to the diffi-
culty of constructing racial categories, and to the power of male
prerogative—specifically white men’s ability to demarcate racial
boundaries in their own interest.2 The reading of ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’
offered here builds on this argument and suggests that the unstable
racial formation that the story explores can also be read as a pre-
carious national formation—for, as we shall see, Chopin’s tale is
as much about the difficulties of taxonomizing race as about the
problems that beset nation-states that depend on racial classifica-
tion in disciplining, organizing, and defining their populations as
national. Indeed, the reproductive body at the center of Chopin’s
text also resides at the center of the discourse on the composition
of the nation that the drama engages: Chopin represents race as
reproducible, national belonging as maternally orchestrated, and
the maternal body as the repository for imbricated racial and na-
tional identities. Although a cursory reading leaves readers assum-
ing that Désirée is white and Armand a so-called mulatto, a second
reading confounds this glib (il)logic, revealing that both parents—
the orphan woman (who can be read as a racial ‘‘wild card’’)3 and
the biracial man—as well as their visibly mixed-race child are all
equally implicated in an interrupted line of descent in which the
possibility of racial ‘‘purity’’ is perpetually deferred. Ultimately,
there are no white people in this text, whose deepest meaning piv-
ots on recognition of the pretense that neither the ‘‘pure’’ racial
origins of individuals nor those of nations can ever be discerned.
The vexed search for ontological certainty in which ‘‘Désirée’s
Baby’’ engages readers can also be read against the grain, as a
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
genealogical quest for information about descent, whose failure

allegorizes the difficulties of securing racial identity in a past that
cannot be accurately known. Whenever a white self fabricates a
coherent racial identity in Chopin’s tale, it is always already a
ruse, since racial ‘‘purity’’ emerges as a genealogical impossibility.
In depicting the problematic nature of genealogical inheritance as
one made visible on the surface of the body, Chopin’s story de-
fies readers who would label it ‘‘racist’’ or racially prescriptive in
any simple sense; for the faint traces and hints of color that are
readily discerned in Désirée’s infant’s complexion liberate an infi-
nite profusion of lost events that reveal the constructedness of the
notion of racial belonging, rather than the solidity of regimes of
racial ascription or the security of genealogical guarantees.
Armand and Désirée have each fabricated coherent selves (they
believe themselves white), but in Chopin’s narrative all selves are
products of interracial reproduction. Miscegenation is the over-
determined origin that is finessed by all projections of subjective
coherence that are grounded in the idea of a ‘‘pure’’ or knowable
origin or ancestor. The white subject’s ontological certitude con-
ceals nothing less than the pervasive history of racial mixing in the
United States. And even though this revelation does not mitigate
the story’s complicity in feeding racist anxiety about interracial
sex, it does suggest that the idea of genealogy can be deconstructed
such that race becomes an ambiguous category, and the racially
‘‘pure’’ nation a ruse.
I begin this methodological chapter with a reading of Chopin’s
allegory about racialized reproduction and racial nationalism for
two reasons. First, this story concisely assembles the major themes
that are treated by this book. These include the demarcation of
racial categories and the gendered and sexed power relationships
that underpin regimes of racial ascription; the centrality of notions
of genealogical inheritance to the construction of racial and na-
tional identities; the differential power of mothers and fathers
—reproductive vessels and inseminators—in shaping notions of
first racial and then national belonging; the politics of the figu-
ration of the maternal body as either a repository of racial iden-
tity or a racializing force; the dependence of modern national-
ism and notions of national belonging on the idea that race is
something that can be reproduced; and, finally, the centrality of
the conceptual pair—what I have previously referred to as the
race/reproduction bind—to those modern thought systems devel-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Genealogy Unbound 17
oped in the context of transatlantic racial nationalism as either

contestations or critiques of its logic. ‘‘Désirée’s Baby,’’ like the
range of texts treated in subsequent chapters, binds race and re-
production so tightly to each other that the figuration of the racial-
ized maternal body comes to index the mechanism and meaning of
the color line that characterizes and simultaneously contours the
nation in which that body resides.
The second reason this chapter opens with Chopin’s allegory is
that the story can be read against the grain, to theorize the method-
ology or reading strategy I mobilize throughout this book to ex-
pose and cut through the race/reproduction bind that subtends the
various texts I treat. In other words, in Chopin’s tale genealogy
is simultaneously an object of analysis, a concept to be explored,
and an active principal that allows for critical engagement with the
racial and reproductive logic of the text. Consequently the read-
ing of ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ offered here is self-reflexive and double-
edged: it exposes genealogy as a raced and reproductive object,
and it transforms genealogy into a critical theoretical tool that can
be used to contest the same biological ‘‘truths’’ that conventional
notions of genealogy claim to trace, identify, and sanction.
Maternal Allegories
When Chopin wrote ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ the instability of purport-
edly white and black bodies as visual markers of inclusion within,
or exclusion from, the newly unified nation had particular reso-
nance. In the 1890s, as racial violence and legal wrangling over
questions of race and citizenship engulfed the newly reunited
states, Chopin’s antebellum drama implicitly joined popular dis-
cussions, particularly those about the legal system’s dilemma over
how to classify and treat freedmen and freedwomen in the wake
of the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction. Although miscegena-
tion statutes date back to the 1660s, instructively the focus of juris-
prudence on miscegenation was most intense in the aftermath of
the Civil War.4 In fact, Chopin’s story comes on the heels of some
of the period’s watershed Supreme Court decisions regarding mis-
cegenation. In 1883 Pace v. Alabama upheld a ruling that favored
punishment for interracial sex, justifying this verdict by arguing
that it punished blacks and whites equally. In turn, Pace was one of
several cases that served as precedents for the ‘‘separate but equal’’
rhetoric that informed Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.5 In this sense
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Chopin’s story anticipates the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy,

in which the nation’s highest court upheld the constitutionality of
separate treatment of black and white citizens by defining black-
ness in terms of ‘‘one drop of black blood’’ and then effectively
transforming dual constitutional citizenship into dual racial citi-
zenship based on this ‘‘fact.’’
I situate ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ in relation to the legal debates by
which it was surrounded, to draw attention to the special tempo-
rality of fictions that meditate upon the intersection of race, repro-
duction, and nation. Set during slavery but written shortly after its
end, Chopin’s story negotiates a legally sanctioned political shift
in the relationship between nation and miscegenation from the
antebellum to the postbellum period. By reflecting and refract-
ing its moment of production Chopin shows readers the process
by which historical continuities between a mythologized past and
projected future are imagined. In ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ Chopin casts
the racial formation of the nation as continuously white and as
reproducible as such.
In his classic account of the 1880s and 1890s, the southern his-
torian C. Van Woodward argues that during the period of rec-
onciliation between North and South, the national literature was
Southern and Confederate in sympathy; the image of the South
often combined the New South with the Old: ‘‘along with the glit-
tering vision of a ‘metropolitan’ and industrial South to come de-
veloped a cult of archaism, a nostalgic vision of the past. One of
the significant inventions of the New South was the ‘Old South.’ ’’
Woodward insightfully includes Chopin among those authors re-
sponsible for the southern literary revival that recuperated and
celebrated the Old South and its aristocratic ways. He is at the
same time critical of Chopin and other revival authors for failing
to offer ‘‘a realistic portrayal of their own times.’’ 6
It is certainly evident that Chopin’s writings, which were pri-
marily patronized by northern literary establishments and readers,
provided a local view of the South that made it assimilable within
an emergent national logic insistent on southern absorption. It is
also possible to build on Woodward’s historical work by inter-
preting Chopin’s glance backward as a pointed commentary on
her present. From this perspective her text emerges less as a poor
reflection or myopic mystification of its moment of production
than as a literary narrative directly involved in the complex staging
of desire. In mingling a vision of the antebellum South with her
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
postbellum present, Chopin performs a historical straddling act

in which an immemorial past mingles freely with a mythologized
present and is then projected into a limitless future.7 In this way
Chopin’s story effectively, if never intentionally, reveals the violent
and continuous construction of the United States as a white na-
tion in the past, in the present, and in the projected future. In so
doing Chopin’s historically indeterminate tale highlights and then
theorizes the special temporality of nationalisms founded on re-
productive and racial thought.
In the 1850s, when ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ is set, legislation retained
slave status for interracial children, ensuring that all children
born to enslaved black women became slaves. In the 1890s this
same legislation began to function differently. In the aftermath of
the Civil War white southern property was assaulted: whites (in-
cluding Chopin’s family) lost their property, Confederate money
became worthless, land values dropped, and land redistribution
threatened. In other words, in the 1890s, although miscegenation
law again stabilized the holdings of white property owners, this
time rather than ensuring that a mother’s blackness rendered her
children salable (like her own body), the legal apparatus attended
to the complicated task of investing white blood with value—ren-
dering whiteness a rare inalienable commodity—and then arrest-
ing its circulation in the body politic. As legal scholar Cheryl Har-
ris observes, ‘‘The concept of whiteness was carefully protected
because so much was contingent upon it. Whiteness conferred on
its owners aspects of citizenship that were all the more valued be-
cause they were denied to others.’’ 8
The upshot of the broad legal and social valuation of white-
ness in which Chopin’s work participated was that so-called white
people were compensated for their losses with a new form of per-
sonal property. As Eva Saks explains in an important article on
miscegenation law, jurisprudence restricting interracial sex and
marriage always represents social practices as biological essences.
In unwittingly exposing the gap between social and legal defini-
tions of race and property, ‘‘the miscegenous body’’ that is the ob-
ject of miscegenation law comes to stand ‘‘for the threatening clash
and conjunction of difference: of black and white, of owner and
owned . . . of legal and social forms of representation itself.’’ 9 Ex-
tending this line of argument, Harris traces the transvaluation of
whiteness from skin color and/or blood to what she calls ‘‘status
property.’’ Whiteness, she notes, ‘‘shares the critical characteris-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
tics of property even as the meaning of property has changed over

time. In particular, whiteness and property share a common prem-
ise—a conceptual nucleus—of a right to exclude.’’ In the Recon-
struction and immediate post-Reconstruction period, Harris con-
cludes, ‘‘white identity became the basis of racialized privilege that
was ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property.’’ 10
Harris’s and Saks’s work has profound implications for the
theorization of U.S. racial nationalism and is amply backed by the
work of historians of whiteness such as Matthew Frye Jacobson
and David Roediger.11 Together these scholars show us that white-
ness, a concept initially used to differentiate the citizen from the
slave, became the basis of racial citizenship, such that ownership
of personal whiteness enabled one to claim membership in the
white nation. Where a white person’s ownership of property in
the form of land, animals, and slaves had been the criterion used
to differentiate those entitled to the benefits of citizenship from
those denied such benefits, after the Civil War, as blacks entered
the national population as citizens, property instead came to re-
side in the body in the form of whiteness. In the period in which
Chopin wrote, whiteness was no longer simply a matter of reputa-
tion but something that had retreated further out of reach through
its legal consolidation, such that whiteness understood as inalien-
able ‘‘status property’’ worked as a principal of exclusion of new
black nationals from the full entitlements that were their right as
a consequence of their recent enfranchisement.
Among the important corollaries of the valuation of bodily
whiteness as a form of personal ‘‘status property’’ that legal and
historical scholars sketch is one they leave open for further ex-
ploration—namely, the role of the maternal body in transmitting
racial property across time. Chopin’s story, which thematizes the
maternal body’s pivotal role in processes of racialization, is espe-
cially useful here, for it theorizes how the construction of bodily
whiteness as personal status property relies upon the consolida-
tion of a reproductive logic in which this form of property is under-
stood to be bequeathed not by deed or will but by one’s mother.
Indeed, Chopin’s fiction augments the existing legal and historical
scholarship: on the one hand, ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ suggests that after
the Civil War ‘‘miscegenous’’ bodies stood for and haunted the dis-
course of not only racial property but national belonging; on the
other hand, the story reveals the postbellum replacement of the
black maternal body (that was formerly negotiated as the source of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
alienable property) by the white maternal body—for in ‘‘Désirée’s

Baby’’ construction of a genealogical link to maternal whiteness,
however fictive, emerges as the ultimate guarantee of national be-
longing in a nation comprised of white property holders.
In meditating upon the transformation that was taking place in
the legal definition of race, in depicting the postbellum nation as if
its racial formation were frozen in time, stuck in a moment prior
to the transformation in the relationship between race and citi-
zenship that characterized the period in which ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’
was actually written, Chopin’s story transforms the Reconstruct-
ing nation into a white nation reproduced by white mothers. From
this perspective, it is thus not that Chopin fails to accurately por-
tray her present (as Woodward argued), but rather that her work
conjoins discourses of race, reproduction, and nation by project-
ing the present into the past as a wish, as a desire for a histori-
cal grounding for whiteness as a form of personal status property
that is maternally guaranteed and effectively reproduced. ‘‘Dési-
rée’s Baby’’ secures white nationhood in the ‘‘Old South’’ of the
past and the ‘‘Old South’’ of the present by projecting—simulta-
neously backward and forward—an old but infinitely flexible dis-
course in which mothers rather than fathers are viewed as the
source of racial identity and thus national belonging or exclusion.
Armand rejects Désirée’s child, not only because once black-
ened he cannot perpetuate ‘‘one of the oldest and proudest [family
names] in Louisiana’’ (174) but also because the act of rejection
allows Armand to pass off the blackness he perceives in the child’s
complexion onto its mother. When Désirée finally confronts Ar-
mand she insists that he interpret their baby’s appearance: ‘‘Look
at our child,’’ she pleads. ‘‘What does it mean? Tell me’’ (176).
Swiftly slipping from recognition of the child’s blackness to Dé-
sirée’s, Armand’s remarks that ‘‘the child is not white; it means
that you are not white’’ (176). In so doing Armand accomplishes
three displacements: he frees himself from potential enslavement
by misrecognizing himself in his child and in turn enabling dis-
avowal of his paternity;12 he secures his own passing act, even as
the child’s body shakes the foundations of the dominant scopic
economy of race on which his passing as white depends; and most
important, in accomplishing these two objectives he achieves a
third, he relegates blackness to the maternal body rather than lo-
cating it in his own.
Unlike Désirée’s initial misperception of her situation, Ar-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
mand’s misrecognition of his predicament structures both his story

and national history. His gender-specific dissociation of paternity
from the reproductive process is in this sense paradigmatic of the
constitution of modern racial nationalism and national belonging.
Maintaining his whiteness as an inalienable estate, propagating the
fiction of his racially ‘‘pure’’ blood, Armand grounds his subjec-
tivity in an assumed objectivity that refuses to examine what lies
closest. His gaze does not linger on his own body. His whiteness,
he insists, runs in his veins; and thus his color-blind recollections
of his past and parents amount to nothing more than a series of
misrecognitions in which the truth inheres as an ideological effect.
In such a situation a mother’s refutation of a father’s prerogative
is all but impossible. When to Armand’s accusation Désirée levels
a protest that appeals to the same bodily signifiers that her hus-
band’s attack destabilizes, she is unable to put power behind her
words: ‘‘It is a lie. . . . I am white!’’ she insists. ‘‘Look at my hair,
it is brown; and my eyes are gray . . . and my skin is fair. . . .
Look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand’’ (176). Désirée chal-
lenges Armand’s production of race as an essence bequeathed by
one’s mother, but to no avail. As Chopin mingles ante- and post-
bellum discourses of race and citizenship she conjures a nation that
is white—always has been and always will be—a nation in which
the blackened mother’s inclusion, like that of her child, is neces-
sarily rescinded.
Excavating the Race/Reproduction Bind

A survey of contemporary scholarship on nationalism reveals that
neither Armand’s color blindness nor his unconscious dependence
on the construction of the maternal body as a racializing force—
the two strategies that allow him confidently to claim membership
in the white nation—are unique or time-bound. In fact, similar
configurations of the relationship of maternity to racial and na-
tional belonging ground several of the most often cited theories of
nationalism. Even as contemporary theorists proclaim their work
as critical of processes of nation formation, their central formu-
lations often rely, as do Armand’s, on the mobilization of a set
of presuppositions that naturalize the connection between mater-
nity and the reproduction of racial and national identity. In their
dependence upon such grounding these theories maintain an un-
questioned connection between race and reproduction—the same
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
connection that consolidates the race/reproduction bind and thus

secures the forms of nationalism that most theorists of modern
nationalism wish to criticize or at least expose.
Although a number of treatises could be analyzed in elaborat-
ing these observations, I have found it productive to focus on the
work of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner.13 Their contribu-
tions are no longer the most current (both were first published in
1983), but together they unquestionably inaugurated a focus on
nationalism that has cut across the disciplines and continues to be
formative for an entire generation of scholars. As a review of the
bibliographies of books on nationalism readily reveals, few schol-
ars are as routinely cited in both the humanities and social sciences.
Within literary scholarship on nationalism, nations, and narrative,
this is especially pronounced: Anderson’s argument about nations
as discursively ‘‘imagined communities’’ retains pride of place as
one of the most ubiquitous, if controversial, arguments of the past
two decades. The remarkable endurance of Anderson and Gellner
is no doubt also related to the expansive abstraction and seeming
universal applicability of their theories to an astoundingly wide
variety of contexts on either side of the Atlantic and throughout
Europe, as well as in North and South America.
In stressing the foundational nature of Anderson’s and Gell-
ner’s contributions to contemporary scholarship on nations and
nationalism (and arguably to so-called postnationalist work that
invokes the nation even as it imagines its eclipse as the central unit
of analysis),14 I do not mean to imply that Anderson’s and Gellner’s
contributions have not already been roundly critiqued by others.
Implicitly and explicitly they have been taken to task by those
wishing to bring questions of gender and sexuality to the study
of nationalism, and/or by antiracist thinkers seeking to unpack
the relationship between national formations and racial forma-
tions. During the past decade a steady stream of books, antholo-
gies, and articles have criticized and then built upon these domi-
nant theories by exploring the intersections among gender, nation,
and race in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. Ground-
breaking book-length contributions by George Mosse (National-
ism and Sexuality) and Anne McClintock (Imperial Leather) stand
out, as do the various case studies collected in prominent feminist
anthologies such as Woman-Nation-State, Nationalisms and Sexu-
alities, Scattered Hegemonies, Between Woman and Nation, Danger-
ous Liaisons, and Gendered Nations among others.15 In short, my
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
arguments are enabled by the contributions of theorists of nation-

alism who have examined women’s role as biological reproducers
of nationals, as reproducers of the symbolic boundaries of nations,
and as transmitters of national cultures. I begin from the femi-
nist and antinationalist premise that, as McClintock has put it,
‘‘nationalism is . . . constituted from the very beginning as a gen-
dered discourse and cannot be understood without a theory of gen-
der power.’’ 16
At the same time as this book takes part in an ongoing feminist
dialogue about nationalism, with it I hope to offer a distinct and
complementary orientation. For in addressing the inadequacies of
gender and race insensitive studies I focus on how foundational
theories of nationalism are themselves constructed—on how the
most formative work on nationalism (that which presents itself
not in the form of a case study but as a generalizable theoretical
model) depends upon and is built out of ideas about the relation-
ship between race and reproduction that are similar to those that
subtend nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism. As
a detour through Anderson’s and Gellner’s treatises demonstrates,
the race/reproduction bind constitutes a hitherto overlooked epis-
temological unit that has been as instrumental in grounding theo-
ries about modern nations as in undergirding the array of histori-
cal texts that together comprise the modern transatlantic cultural
horizon.
Like those literary texts that consolidate the race/reproduction
bind, theories of nationalism that turn upon this conceptual axis
are characterized by two conceptual blind spots: the relationship
of race to nation and that of racial nationalism to sexism. These
aporia are neither discreet nor unrelated, but are produced by a
common set of presuppositions. For this reason, even as Ander-
son’s and Gellner’s analyses diverge, they possess a deep structural
similarity. In the epigraphs that begin each theorist’s treatise this
convergence immediately emerges. Each has selected a quotation
that brings gender to the fore and underscores the sexualized logic
on which the argument in question depends; at the same time their
chosen epigraphs, seemingly unwittingly, announce the gendered
and sexualized concepts that are elided by the arguments that the
epigraphs herald.
Gellner’s volume begins with the following quotation from the
turn-of-the-century Harvard philosopher George Santayana: ‘‘Our
Nationality is like our relations to women: too implicated in our
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
moral nature to be changed honorably, and too accidental to be

worth changing.’’ Santayana’s declaration resonates with Gellner’s
central formulation: nationalism is a form of false consciousness.
Like sexism (though tellingly Gellner never uses the term) nation-
ality and associated feelings of national belonging are so ingrained
that they are neither easily discerned nor readily altered. The epi-
graph is intended, moreover, to be at once humorous and ironic.
Gellner, after all, wishes to demonstrate that nationalist false con-
sciousness can be overcome when exposed to the blinding light of
analytical reason.
The principal difficulty with Gellner’s epigraph is that in his
preoccupation with exposing the irrationality of nationalism, he
elides the gendered, heterosexist, and reproductively oriented
form of false consciousness that enables Santayana’s and his own
formulation of the problem of nationalism. With the ‘‘our’’ pref-
acing ‘‘relations to women,’’ he casts nationality as a male pre-
rogative whose heterosexual presumptions require no investiga-
tion.17 Gellner’s treatise, moreover, never returns to the question
of whether women possess nationality (the quotation implies that
it is inconsequential whether they do or don’t, since nationalism
is quintessentially fraternal), or that of why nationality and men’s
heterosexual relations with women are so readily analogized. In-
stead, as in Chopin’s story, in which Armand secures his sense of
self by producing Désirée as the repository of race while simulta-
neously silencing her body’s ability to tell its own ‘‘truth,’’ Gell-
ner invokes the female body in order to launch his theory, even
as he neglects its enabling role. From Gellner’s perspective, as
from Armand’s, nationality is a definitionally male entitlement,
and nationalism an implicitly heterosexist theory.
Anderson’s epigraph is similarly instructive. The lengthy quota-
tion from Daniel Defoe’s The True-Born English-Man that prefaces
Imagined Communities reads:
Thus from a Mixture of all kinds began,
That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman:
In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot,
Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot:
Whose gend’ring Offspring quickly learnt to bow,
And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough:
From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came,
With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran,

Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their Rank Daughters, to their Parents just,
Receiv’d all Nations with Promiscuous Lust.
This Nauseous Brood directly did contain
The well-extracted Blood of Englishmen. . . .18
These lines portray the ‘‘True-Born English-Man’’ as a fiction con-
structed in the face of the reality of pervasive intermixture or
corrupted genealogy. They are effective because notions of ‘‘well-
extracted blood’’ and ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘pure’’ nationality are thrown into
question when provided with a history that exposes the active
construction of these identities. Anderson’s retention of Defoe’s
italicized appellations—‘‘Britton,’’ ‘‘Scot,’’ ‘‘Roman,’’ and so forth
—emphasizes this point. Myriad groups contribute to the Eng-
lishman’s ‘‘blood,’’ which can only be rendered ‘‘well-extracted’’
through the creation of a fictive genealogy that is naturalized and
systematized into what Anderson refers to as a ‘‘cultural system.’’
If nations exist, Anderson argues, someone has had to create the
narratives that constitute them. And thus, just as Gellner’s epi-
graph resonates with his book’s core argument, so too does Ander-
son’s: nations are imagined communities, collectively agreed-upon
fictions that fly in the face of the complex historical realities that,
if pursued, would patently contradict them. In Anderson’s view,
however, nationalism is not false consciousness (Gellner’s formu-
lation) but a form of imaginative invention that belongs ‘‘with ‘kin-
ship’ or ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’ ’’ or
other ideologies (15).
Although Anderson fleetingly notes reproduction’s role in the
imagining of the modern nation in several passages (as discussed
shortly), he does not engage the gendered and sexualized idea
his epigraph raises, namely that wayward reproduction consti-
tutes the motor of national belonging. As already indicated, in
making this point, I join a host of scholars who have enumer-
ated the problems with Anderson’s gender insensitivity.19 And yet
I am not principally concerned with omission of gender and sexu-
ality from Anderson’s work. Rather, I am interested in how gender
and sexuality are bound together through reproduction, and then
deeply embedded within his theory, even though reproduction is
not acknowledged as constituting its ground. For it is not so much
that gender and sexuality are missing from Imagined Communities
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
on the level of manifest content but that these interrelated ideas

silently constitute the (reproductive) condition of possibility for
theoretical elaboration.
The repressed reproductive mechanism of meaning production
that pervades Anderson’s text can be located in the vestigial traces
of the figure of reproduction in key passages. For example, in a
chapter entitled ‘‘Cultural Roots’’ Anderson invokes, but does not
name, reproduction three times. First, he suggests that a notion
of continuity is required to think the nation, for the nation ‘‘con-
cerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn,
[and with] the mystery of re-generation.’’ The same wonder is felt
at the birth of nations and children; both enable apprehension of
‘‘a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality’’ that is thought
of through the reproductive ‘‘language of ‘continuity’ ’’ (18). In the
second instance in which Anderson invokes but does not name re-
production, he uses reproductively laden notions of ‘‘continuity’’
and ‘‘re-generation’’ to underpin the oft-quoted lines in which he
declares that nations ‘‘always loom out of an immemorial past,
and . . . glide into a limitless future’’ (19). In short, he describes the
nation’s temporality throughout Imagined Communities as cyclic;
for the manner in which the national imaginary stretches back into
an ‘‘immemorial past’’ and forward into a ‘‘limitless future’’ de-
pends upon a biological notion of time and a related conception of
the nation as a reproducible, organic entity.20 In the third instance
in which Anderson invokes but does name reproduction, its role
in structuring his argument is paradigmatic of the structure of his
larger thought process and constitutive omissions: ‘‘With Debray
we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French;
but after all, France is eternal’ ’’ (19). The idea that one is born
French—or more broadly that nationals are reproduced—is natu-
ralized as the motor of national belonging; simultaneously, the re-
productive dimension of the nation’s ‘‘eternal’’ or cyclical tempo-
rality—that which enables the thinking of the nation as an entity
comprised of French-born citizens—is obscured.
‘‘Nation,’’ a word derived from natio (Latin, to be born), is
evidently shot through by a consistently unexamined reproduc-
tive logic. In the course of Anderson’s analysis of the two cultural
forms—religious community and dynastic realm—that are akin to
nationalism, he again invokes reproduction but glosses over its
importance to the production and coherence of his larger argu-
ment. Religious community and dynastic realm are like national-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
ism, because they too were once ‘‘taken-for-granted frames of ref-

erence’’ (20). Offering the example of so-called barbarians who
were incorporated into China’s Middle Kingdom by painstakingly
learning to paint ideograms, Anderson argues that in this instance
community was bound together by shared and sacred spoken lan-
guage and written script.21 What is significant about this example,
however, is that as Anderson expands it the figure of reproduc-
tion rather than that of language becomes central. Quoting from
the early-nineteenth-century Colombian Pedro Fermin de Vargas,
Anderson observes that for this allegedly liberal policy maker In-
dian assimilation, like Middle Kingdom absorption of ‘‘barbari-
ans,’’ would best be facilitated by miscegenation: ‘‘it would be very
desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by miscegenation with the
whites, declaring them free of tribute and other charges, and giving
them private property in land’’ (21, original emphasis). Of this
proposal Anderson wryly remarks: ‘‘alongside the condescending
cruelty, a cosmic optimism: the Indian is ultimately redeemable—
by impregnation with white, ‘civilized’ semen, and the acquisition
of private property, like everyone else’’ (21, original emphasis).
Identification of the difficulties that beset Anderson’s recourse
to the figure of miscegenation is instructive. Unaccountably his ar-
gument shifts focus: it moves from discussion of religious com-
munities to that of Chinese ideograms; then from discussion of
the Middle Kingdom to that of nineteenth-century Latin America;
and finally from analysis of linguistic absorption (so-called bar-
barians learning to paint ideograms) to invocation of the figure
of miscegenation—a move that analogizes the roles of linguistics
and reproductive biology. When Anderson travels from discussion
of religious community to dynastic realm his argument’s reliance
on reproductive ideas becomes glaring: ‘‘one must remember,’’ he
writes, that ‘‘antique monarchical states expanded not only by
warfare but by sexual politics . . . [for it is] through the general
principal of verticality, [that] dynastic marriages brought together
diverse populations under new apices’’ (26, emphasis added). Hav-
ing arrived at a rather bald expression of the reasoning I wish to lay
bare, Anderson avers that ‘‘in fact, royal lineages . . . derived their
prestige, aside from any aura of divinity, from shall we say, mis-
cegenation?’’ (27, emphasis added). The glue that binds religious
communities and dynastic realms is one and the same: miscege-
nous or interracial reproductive sexuality.
Although from one perspective Anderson’s use of ‘‘miscegena-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
tion’’ is historically inaccurate (the term, as discussed in the final

section of this chapter, was not coined until1864, well after Fermin
de Vargas is reported to have used it, and well after the majority of
dynastic realms had reached for national cachet),22 it is nonetheless
to this concept that Anderson’s argument repeatedly returns, em-
ploying it as the conceptual tool or ‘‘concept metaphor’’ that best
describes the substance, the glue, that binds the various communi-
ties that pave the way for the nation form proper.23 Indeed, in mo-
bilizing a reproductive logic similar to that espoused by Armand,
on the one hand, and that proposed by Fermin de Vargas, on the
other, Anderson secures his argument: he (ab)uses the figure of re-
production in order to naturalize the notion of belonging, while
he simultaneously, if unintentionally, hangs his argument upon an
uncritical politics of extermination through assimilative processes
of orchestrated, often ritualized forms of ‘‘miscegenation.’’ 24
For Gellner, as for Anderson, reproduction is central to the
explanation of the social formations from which nationalism
emerges but goes missing in the discussion of nationalism proper.
Although the nation takes shape in the industrial period, Gellner
argues that it originates in an earlier agrarian one, in which a spe-
cialized clerisy provides the foundation for the national bureau-
cracy. While language is part of the power of the clerisy, whose
literacy is the precondition for the mass literary that characterizes
the modern nation, Gellner, like Anderson, implies that the power
of this group is as much reproductive as linguistic. As he explains,
in order that individual clerics are not swayed from ‘‘the stern path
of duty’’ or endowed with ‘‘too much power’’ the agrarian socius
is divided into two groups—the ‘‘gelded’’ and the ‘‘stallions’’—in-
structively labeled with terms borrowed from animal husbandry.
The ‘‘gelded’’ are prohibited from reproduction (and consequent
nepotistic corruption), while the ‘‘stallions,’’ the ruling elite, are
free to ‘‘reproduce themselves socially, and retain their positions
for their offspring’’ (15–16).25
If the reproductive logic of Anderson’s and Gellner’s seminal
(and I choose the word deliberately) arguments is central if in-
choate, the racial logic to which the reproductive logic is inex-
tricably bound is likewise submerged. To explore this connection
it is necessary to examine how ideas about race are complexly,
if never explicitly, conjoined with those about reproduction. In
Imagined Communities nationalism is made possible by the inven-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
tion in the nineteenth century of the Gutenberg printing press and

print capitalism on a mass scale. According to Anderson, wide-
spread use of print technology made it possible for universal liter-
acy to replace marriage, alliance, and kinship as the glue binding
together the community. Moreover, internationalization of print
technology made nationalism exportable—available for pirating
by states that may not have gone through the modernization pro-
cesses that European nations had but that were nonetheless united
as speakers and readers of a common language.26 Because Ander-
son never deviates from his print culture model of national imag-
ining, it is unsurprising that he actively dismisses race and racism
as possible factors in creating nationalism.27 And yet the manner
in which he wards off potential threats to his theory’s hegemony
is instructive. The chapter in which Anderson treats racism’s rela-
tionship to nationalism also addresses the affective pull of nation-
alism—‘‘the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their
imaginations’’ (129). Racism and nationalism are distinct, he af-
firms, because they appeal to different ideas and emotions:
The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of
historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contamina-
tions, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless
sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. Niggers
are, thanks to the invisible tar-brush, forever Niggers; Jews, the
seed of Abraham, forever Jews, no matter what passports they
carry or what languages they speak and read. . . . The dreams
of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather
than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among
rulers. . . . No surprise then that . . . on the whole, racism and
anti-Semitism manifest themselves, not across national bound-
aries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much
foreign war as domestic repression and domination. (136, origi-
nal emphasis)
Initially the incompatibility of racism and nationalism appears
self-evident; the idea that nationalism draws on feelings of shared
‘‘historical destiny’’ seems reasonable given Anderson’s prior ar-
gument about the temporality of nationalism. By contrast with
nationalism, racism draws on feelings of ‘‘loathsome’’ genealogi-
cal ‘‘contamination’’ and on biological rather than historical ideas
of temporality. To further separate racism and nationalism Ander-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
son joins world systems theorists in suggesting that racism origi-

nates in ideologies of class and concludes that racism (including
anti-Semitism) is manifest as an internal tension within the nation,
while nationalism results from the larger external tensions that are
used to ‘‘justify . . . foreign war.’’ 28 On closer inspection this argu-
ment about racism and nationalism is riddled with contradictions:
How are ‘‘historical destiny’’ and genealogical continuity distinct?
How is the vague idea of ‘‘historical destiny’’ discreet from that of
‘‘re-generation,’’ the concept that makes the imagination of the na-
tional community possible? Is the concept of ‘‘destiny’’ truly less
reproductive than that of genealogy? How does Anderson shift
from discussion of racism, a belief system he casts as superstruc-
tural (having its ‘‘origin in ideologies of class’’) to discussion of
race as a biological posit? How is it possible to argue that nation-
alism justifies ‘‘foreign wars,’’ and racism only internal domestic
conflicts? And, finally, how can Anderson in good conscience di-
vorce imperialism from the array of nineteenth-century racial sci-
ences that were routinely mobilized to justify conquest and colo-
nization? These questions are, of course, rhetorical. I enumerate
them to call attention to Anderson’s dissociation of racism and
nationalism as a strategy that obscures, if unintentionally, the mul-
tiple interconnections not only between race and nation but among
race, nation, and reproduction. Indeed, separation of nationalism
and racism obfuscates the workings of reproduction both as a
racialized biological process and as an ideological formation that
challenges the integrity, homogeneity, and universal applicability
of Anderson’s print culture model.
In the same way that ideas of race and nation are disassociated
within Imagined Communities, racial and national belonging are
posed as antithetical within Gellner’s work. In ‘‘Social Entropy
and Equality in Industrial Society,’’ Gellner treats the transition
from agrarian to industrial society—the transition from a stable
stratified social structure, to a ‘‘culturally homogeneous’’ society
characterized by ‘‘egalitarian expectations and aspirations’’ (73).
Within the latter, universalization of literacy makes cultural homo-
geneity and then nationalism possible. As Gellner notes, however,
‘‘entropy-resistant’’ populations who refuse to become ‘‘evenly dis-
persed throughout the entire society’’ always exist (64). Though
Gellner might have drawn on any number of ‘‘real life’’ examples
in making his point about the relationship of race to nation, he cre-
ates a hypothetical community whom he calls the ‘‘blue people’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
and describes as ‘‘by an accident of heredity, pigmentally blue’’

(65): ‘‘blue people,’’ he concludes, are constitutively inassimilable
within national culture. In fact, ‘‘blue people’’ allow Gellner to
bypass discussion of the multiracial British context in which he
writes, and simultaneously make plain the troubling idea that An-
derson implies but does not asseverate: It is not simply racism and
nationalism that are antithetical, but minoritarian racial otherness
and national belonging.29
According to Anderson’s theory anyone can become a national
so long as s/he can master the language; nations are democratic
organizations that hold out the possibility of formal equality to
all those who would learn to read. And yet, an ‘‘entropy-resistant’’
trait such as ‘‘blueness’’ or ‘‘conspicuous colour’’ (67) provides a
loophole within a theory of national culture as ideally inclusive. By
acknowledging the existence of unassimilable minoritarian racial
others, Gellner reveals the existence of populations who are not
absorbed into the nation within the terms of the general model that
is proffered (in Gellner universal literacy, in Anderson print cul-
ture). As Gellner concludes, unless ‘‘blue people’’ establish home-
lands or nations of their own, they are doomed to self-imposed
marginality within the nations in which they reside. It would seem
that in both Gellner’s and Anderson’s theories, it is not that na-
tional homogeneity requires the purging of those marked as ra-
cially other from within the national body, but that the construc-
tion of the modern nation requires the transvaluation of whiteness
into a dominant category that can be mobilized to racialize the ma-
jority as white. Contra Anderson and Gellner, what emerges from
this alternative vantage point is the possibility that there are no
nations that are race-free; rather, the issue is how particular racial
groups are constructed as dominant and thus national.
In retrospect neither Anderson nor Gellner treats the repro-
ductive and racial ideas their arguments, when juxtaposed, ad-
umbrate. Neither explores the repression of the racialized repro-
ductive logic of national belonging, and neither contends with the
racial politics that contour the reproductive politics that character-
ize not only prenational social formations but also nations. Neither
examines how racism invents the idea of racial difference in the
process of justifying both intranational hostilities and foreign wars.
Rather, each in his way represents racism and nationalism, race
and nation as antithetical, leaving unquestioned the myriad and
complex ways in which racialized reproductive ideas cement the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
ideology of nationalism and provide putatively homogeneous na-

tions with a form of memory that is both racist and sexist. Al-
though Anderson and Gellner touch on ideas of race and repro-
duction upon which their arguments about nation depend for
coherence, the relationship among race, reproduction, and nation
is never centered in their work as it is in a text such as ‘‘Désirée’s
Baby.’’
Toward a Theory of National Reproduction

The French Marxist theorist Etienne Balibar works within the so-
cial scientific tradition on which Anderson and Gellner draw and
to which they contribute, but his work inhabits this location dif-
ferently. In this section I build on Balibar’s contributions to de-
velop a theory of nationalism that renders the workings of the
race/reproduction bind transparent, and thus avoids complicity,
however unintentional, with nationalist thought. Although Bali-
bar’s primary concern is contemporary France, his work is ger-
mane to the postwar moment in which ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ was writ-
ten and the antebellum moment in which it is set. This is not
because Balibar’s theory is universalizable, but rather because it
prioritizes racism as an analytic category and carefully accounts
for the cycles of ‘‘historical reciprocity’’ that render racism and
nationalism overlapping structures. Of particular interest are Bali-
bar’s contributions to Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, a
volume composed of interlocking essays by Balibar and world sys-
tems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. In his chapters Balibar exam-
ines how populations reproduce themselves as nations ‘‘through
a network of apparatuses and daily practices’’ that project indi-
vidual members of a group into the weft of a collective whole.
Racism and nationalism, he argues, are engaged in cycles of
‘‘historical reciprocity,’’ such that the circumstances in which
nation-states establish themselves on historically contested terri-
tories require that one group of people produce themselves as a
dominant community, whose shared ethnic bonds (Balibar uses
the term ‘‘ethnic’’ interchangeably with ‘‘racial,’’ and I follow him
in this) take precedence over all other social divisions (48).
Although Balibar rarely discusses race (and never without quo-
tation marks around the word), he is expressly interested in racism,
for it is racism that naturalizes ‘‘race’’ in the process of producing
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
the nation. Starting from the antiessential premise that ‘‘race’’ does
not exist naturally and/or biologically, he argues that nationalism’s
dependence on ‘‘race’’ must be understood as ‘‘fictive.’’ Racism
produces ‘‘race’’ and not the other way around (as Gellner, for ex-
ample, suggests). The nation is always a majoritarian racial entity,
and the majoritarian memory of the nation is always racist: ‘‘It is
not ‘race’ which is a biological or psychological memory . . . [but]
racism which represents one of the most insistent forms of the his-
torical memory of modern societies. It is racism which continues
to effect the imaginary fusion of past and present in which the col-
lective perception of human history unfolds’’ (44).30 In sharp con-
trast to those who reify race as a legible biological sign (e.g., Gell-
ner’s ‘‘blue people’’), Balibar casts ‘‘race’’ as a historical process.
To conceptualize the nation, an understanding of the dialectic be-
tween processes of racism and nationalism is necessary. As Balibar
wryly comments, ‘‘the discourse of ‘race’ and nation are never far
apart,’’ though all too often they are only brought together ‘‘in the
form of a disavowal’’ (37). In retrospect Anderson’s and Gellner’s
theories, and Armand’s self-production as a white national, share
precisely such a posture of ‘‘disavowal.’’
Throughout his writings Balibar posits racism and national-
ism as ideologies. Such treatment implicitly challenges Anderson’s
conceptualization of nationalism as a ‘‘cultural system’’ (as op-
posed to an ideology) and Gellner’s understanding of national-
ism as false consciousness.31 On the one hand, Balibar’s view of
nationalism is resolutely materialist; on the other, it is nonecono-
mistic, or nondeterminist in its conceptualization of the role of
nationalist ideology in the development of productive forces. Bali-
bar’s is not an argument about base and superstructure; nation-
alism is neither immaterial nor a by-product of class relations.
Departing from world systems theory (and thus offering an alter-
native to Wallerstein’s approach) he explains the shortcomings
of the core/periphery model. In this model, racist ideology facili-
tates the domination of the states of the periphery by those of the
core by legitimating an international division of labor (North and
South) that is racial and imperialist in character. By contrast to
world systems theorists, Balibar considers racist ideology as par-
tially autonomous from global class relations and as possessing in-
dependent material effects. It is not solely the expansion of capital
that produces racism; rather, racism is sparked by the need of ex-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
ploiters and exploited alike to construct a shared ideological world

despite the antagonism between them. As Balibar explains, the his-
tory of market society is ‘‘a history of the reactions of the com-
plex of non-economic social relations [i.e., racism and all manner
of kinship systems], to the de-structuring with which the expan-
sion of the value form threatens them’’ (8).32 In the uneven univer-
sality created by global capitalism, racism emerges as a constant, a
‘‘paradoxical universality’’ within which nationalism (also a form
of universality) is embedded.33 In this sense, racism is simulta-
neously internal and external to nationalism. It is not a conse-
quence of the global splitting of core and periphery, as Waller-
stein would have it, nor is it reducible to an internal aspect of
nationalism. Whereas world systems theory inscribes the nation
as a racially unified social and economic entity within the field of
global class struggle, Balibar insists that racialized classes are in-
scribed within the nation form.
It is this last point that is important to my present argument;
for it is within the analysis of the relationship between racism
and nationalism that Balibar begins to clear space for theoriza-
tion of the manner in which racial nationalism grounds itself in the
race/reproduction bind. Even though Balibar painstakingly avoids
the term ‘‘reproduction’’—which he views as too overdetermined
within the context of Marxist theory—he speculates about the
intersection of racism, nationalism, and sexism, and the forms
of sexism that are exercised in the name of the state control of
women’s reproductive sexuality.34 In contrast to Anderson and
Gellner, who relegate reproduction to their epigraphs, Balibar ex-
amines the racism in which nationalism is grounded by making
visible the centrality of ideas about genealogical continuity to the
(re)production of notions of ethnicity and race, be such notions
‘‘fictive.’’ There are two passages that merit close reading. The first
discusses how racial nationalism draws upon sexism:
The phenomenon of ‘depreciation’ and ‘racialization’ which is
directed simultaneously against different social groups which
are quite different in ‘nature’ (particularly ‘foreign’ communi-
ties, ‘inferior races,’ women and ‘deviants’) does not represent
a juxtaposition of merely analogous behaviors and discourses
applied to a potentially indefinite series of objects independent
of each other, but a historical system of complementary exclu-
sions and dominations which are mutually interconnected. In other
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
words, it is not in practice simply the case that an ‘ethnic racism’

and a ‘sexual racism’ exist in parallel; racism and sexism func-
tion together and in particular, racism always presupposes sex-
ism. (49, original emphasis)
In positing sexism and racism as inseparable forms of racializa-
tion, this passage resonates with one of the principal arguments
of this book: racism and sexism cannot be thought separately pre-
cisely because reproduction is a racializing force. Indeed, although
Balibar self-consciously elects not to use the term ‘‘reproduction’’
I would suggest that his work implicitly comprehends that racism
and sexism converge within the concept of reproduction. Race and
reproduction are not biological entities but articulated ideological
structures—what Balibar refers to above as ‘‘historical system[s]
of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually
interconnected.’’
In contrast to Anderson, who argues that nations are special
types of communities that are ‘‘imagined,’’ Balibar insists that all
communities are imagined. The nation distinguishes itself by imag-
ing itself as racially homogenous, as having a single racial ori-
gin, ‘‘a concentrate of qualities which belong to nationals ‘as their
own.’ ’’ It is in the ‘‘ ‘race of its children,’ ’’ Balibar observes, ‘‘that
the nation contemplate[s] its own identity in a pure state.’’ 35 This
is the familiar projection of the fantasy of a ‘‘pure’’ national gene-
alogy examined in ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ and the type of race-based
nationalism that enables Armand’s belief in his whiteness. Accord-
ing to Armand, the true national has ‘‘pure’’ blood and a ‘‘pure’’
genealogy that can be traced back to an untainted origin. In effect,
Balibar’s formulation might be read as Armand’s motto: ‘‘it is
around race that [the nation] must unite, with ‘race’—an inheri-
tance to be preserved against any kind of degradation’’ (59).
To maintain itself as a genealogically ‘‘pure’’ entity, the nation
purges itself of unwanted elements by practicing both ‘‘internal’’
and ‘‘external’’ racism.36 It directs internal racism toward popu-
lations regarded as minorities within the national space. During
Reconstruction African Americans and Native Americans were
prime targets. In exercising internal racism, the United States iden-
tified all false, exogamous, ‘‘cross-bred,’’ or ‘‘miscegenous’’ ele-
ments and then defined itself in opposition to these disruptive
bodies. Armand’s assertion of his whiteness and unquestioned en-
titlement to citizenship are intertwined expressions of internal
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
racism: he produces himself as white through differentiation of his

body from those of his blackened wife and child. In fact, Armand’s
racism expressly animates his nationalism by supplying the abso-
lutely necessary fiction of filiation upon which his understand-
ing of nationalism’s ethos of ethnic unity, its ethnos, depends. In
‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ internal racism is the condition of possibility for
nationalism; it is not an aberrant expression of prejudice but an as-
pect of nationalism that is constitutive.
In contrast to internal racism, external racism manifests itself
as extreme xenophobia. One of the paradoxes of external racism
is its convergence with internal racism in its a priori requirement
of internal homogeneity in order to project external difference.
In his discussion of such homogeneity, or what he calls ‘‘fictive
ethnicity,’’ Balibar indicates the second way in which national-
ism presupposes sexism. In generating an idea of ‘‘the people’’ in
which each individual is instituted as homo nationalis, nationalism
draws on notions of home, family, kinship, and genealogy that are
racial and reproductive. Even as he avoids the term ‘‘reproduc-
tion,’’ it becomes clear that the national community distinguishes
itself from other imagined communities through particular repro-
ductive processes:
What we are solely concerned with here is the symbolic ker-
nel which makes it possible to equate race and ethnicity ideally,
and to represent unity of race to oneself as the origin or cause
of the historical unity of the people. . . . [T]he race community
dissolves social inequality in an even more ambivalent ‘simi-
larity’; it ethnicizes the social difference which is an expression
of irreconcilable antagonisms by lending it the form of a divi-
sion between the ‘genuinely’ and the ‘falsely’ national. . . . The
symbolic kernel of the idea of race . . . is the schema of geneal-
ogy, that is, quite simply the idea that the filiation of individuals
transmits from generation to generation a substance both bio-
logical and spiritual and thereby inscribes them in a temporal
community known as ‘kinship.’ (99–100)
The nation is a racial community that represents its ‘‘historical
unity’’ to itself as a function of its racial homogeneity. Existing so-
cial ‘‘antagonisms’’ are either erased by projections of racial unity
or prescribed as ethnic differences. In such a situation racial others
emerge as ‘‘ ‘falsely’ national,’’ and the racial majority as genuine.
As Balibar explains, the nation is little more than ‘‘one big family’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
(100), belonging within which is a function of ‘‘filiation,’’ ‘‘kin-

ship,’’ or more broadly, genealogical connection.
Despite Balibar’s principled refusal of the term ‘‘reproduction,’’
when his intuitions about the relationships among racism, nation-
alism, and sexism are fully expanded, racial nationalism, or more
pointedly, nationalist racism, emerges as a form of reproductive
nationalism, and the majoritarian racism that defines nationals as
an ideology of genealogical continuity or reproductive racializa-
tion. Unlike Anderson and Gellner, who relegate ‘‘sexual politics’’
to a prenational moment and imagine nationalism as distinct from
racism, Balibar helps us to see ‘‘sexual politics’’—or, as I prefer to
specify, reproductive politics—as the racialized foundation upon
which are built nations and those theories of nationalism that are
inattentive to the dynamics of racism.
The Racial Grounding of Genealogical Critique

In concluding his remarks about sexism’s relationship to nation-
alism, Balibar wonders whether nations would be able to ‘‘re-
produce’’ themselves if the modern family—heterosexual, nuclear,
patriarchal, and biological in conception—were to be substantially
transformed such that the ‘‘relations of sex and procreation’’ that
currently characterize it were to be ‘‘completely removed from
the genealogical order’’ (102). This initial question sparks others
about the global socioeconomic and geopolitical formations that
might emerge in a situation in which the fiction of the family as a
racially homogeneous group—and thus the fiction of the racial na-
tion—was no longer tenable. In short, Balibar’s question asks us to
consider whether modern nations would cease to exist if genealogy
ceased to function as a guarantor of reproducible racial kinship.
Although Balibar appears unconcerned about the transforma-
tions wrought by the array of new reproductive technologies pro-
liferated globally, or the socialization of reproductive labor power
that has likewise become transnational, these phenomena that to-
gether transform the meaning of maternity, paternity, and the dis-
tinctions among generations might be considered in the course of
answering his question in our present moment.37 And yet, while
I will return to a discussion of contemporary scientific and so-
cial transformations in the meaning of reproduction in this book’s
coda, for my present purposes the answers to Balibar’s query that
can be proffered from a historical perspective are more compel-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
ling. For transatlantic history can be mined for family forms and
concepts of genealogy that exist outside of the genealogical order
of the nation; indeed, the history of American racial slavery pro-
vides one, perhaps unanticipated, answer to Balibar’s question
about genealogy.
When ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ is read for the shadowy figures that
haunt the narrative, historical precedent for the alternative family
form and type of maternity about which Balibar inquires emerge.
Désirée is not the only mother, nor hers the only family in Chopin’s
tale. When Armand accuses Désirée of being black, he does so
by invoking a black, enslaved woman who resides on his planta-
tion. To Désirée’s plea that he look at her hand, which she insists
is ‘‘whiter’’ than his own, Armand responds by comparing Dési-
rée’s purported whiteness to that of a light-skinned slave living
just beyond his front yard: your hand, he spits, is ‘‘as white as
La Blanche’s’’ (176). Readers can identify the ironically named
La Blanche for two reasons: first, because Chopin has indicated
that Armand can hear his child’s cry as far away as La Blanche’s
cabin (thus begging a question about why he might be in her
cabin at all). And, second, because Chopin reveals that La Blanche
is the mother of several children, including the ‘‘quadroon boy’’
who tends Désirée’s baby, fanning him with peacock’s feathers.
Taken together these details inform careful readers of Armand’s
mulatto concubine and second family; they also insinuate that La
Blanche and her child may be Désirée’s and her baby’s precursors,
a mother and child who, like Désirée and her baby, were regarded
as white until the postpartum moment that their blackness came
to mark them as property. Although initially Chopin’s narrative
leaves readers assuming that Désirée and La Blanche have little in
common—the former is a misunderstood white woman, the latter
a light-skinned slave—attention to La Blanche’s peripheral pres-
ence reveals that these mothers are doubles: La Blanche’s story is
also Désirée’s.
Not coincidentally it is while looking upon La Blanche’s son
as he tends her own that Désirée’s baby’s blackness is revealed
to her. In absently shifting her gaze from one child to the other
she notes a commonality. Does the so-called quadroon resemble
her own son in feature? Or does the similarity Désirée observes
reside in a shared hint of color? Is Désirée’s racial awakening
linked to her sudden awareness of the putative visibility of her
son’s racially marked body, to her ‘‘quasi-hallucinatory’’ recogni-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
tion of his blackness? 38 Or is her color consciousness triggered

by an intuition of literal kinship between La Blanche’s child and
her own? Although Chopin never directly answers these questions,
her overarching message is clear: Désirée’s descent from whiteness
into blackness places her in a position similar to La Blanche’s, no
more or less entitled to freedom than a white-skinned slave whose
progeny are the chattel of their father. As historian Barbara Fields
notes, the economic logic of slavery made it possible for white
women to give birth to black children, but never for black women
to give birth to white ones.39 In extending Field’s astute formu-
lation into the postwar period, I would add that in a nation that
imagines itself as white, it is at the moment of birth that white
mothers of black children are effectively blackened. As their repro-
ductive processes fail to reproduce the national genealogy, white
mothers are rendered national outcasts incapable of securing na-
tional belonging for their progeny.
When we return to Balibar’s suggestion that the racial nation
might be undermined by the existence of a form of family that
is ‘‘removed from the genealogical order,’’ we can see that black
mothers and their children have historically provided such an ex-
ample. Rather than redefine the meaning of ‘‘family’’ in the after-
math of the Civil War so that black families might be fully included
within its definition, the U.S. legal system, despite impassioned
protest by black men and women, went to great lengths to under-
mine and delegitimate the black family by denying it its rightful
role in the (re)production of nationals entitled to equal protec-
tion under the nation’s laws.40 In the antebellum South, as in the
white nation that is imagined to succeed it, black mothers did not
fully calculate as nationals; despite the promise of the Fifteenth
Amendment and the initial hopes that were pinned upon national
Reconstruction, they were unable to guarantee national belong-
ing for their progeny—though they could potentially subvert, or
at the very least challenge, the alleged ‘‘purity’’ of the national
genealogy.41
Although the case is seldom interpreted through either a re-
productive or genealogical lens, the Supreme Court’s watershed
ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson produced black maternity as anathema
to national belonging. In its decision to uphold the constitution-
ality of the Jim Crow doctrine of ‘‘separate but equal,’’ Plessy effec-
tively legislated black inequality by producing white racial iden-
tity as the signal criterion for full entitlement to citizenship. And
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
although Plessy does not dwell on issues of genealogical inheri-

tance, in implicitly sanctioning the disqualification of all those
with so-called black blood from fully equal legal protection, the
case put into play a number of implicit notions about reproduc-
tion, genealogy, and pedigree. To garner equal treatment one had
to prove one’s freedom from blackness and one’s possession of
white ‘‘status property.’’ Although Albion Tourgée, the lawyer for
the defendant, sought to reveal Jim Crow segregation (in this case
separate seating as truly unequal seating) as unconstitutional, in
constructing his defense of Homer Plessy’s right to ride in a ‘‘white
only’’ railroad car in Louisiana, he argued that Plessy, who was
‘‘seven-eighths white’’ according to the racial (il)logic of the day,
had a right to preserve his reputation, his claim to his whiteness
as ‘‘status property’’ because of his genealogical inheritance. In
other words, Tourgée’s argument relied upon the same genealogi-
cal notions of race that would prove to be the case’s undoing. In
an argument that was appropriated by the opposition and turned
back against Tourgée, he averred that nothing less than Plessy’s
‘‘pedigree’’ be regarded as a reasonable guarantor of his ‘‘race.’’ 42
Of course, Plessy’s invisible drop of ‘‘black blood’’ proved a stum-
bling block. As Harryette Mullen has argued, ‘‘ ‘Pure’ whiteness
has actual value, like legal tender, while the white-skinned Afri-
can American is like a counterfeit bill that is passed into circula-
tion, but may be withdrawn at any point that it is discovered to
be bogus.’’ 43 In the eyes of the Court, as in those of many U.S.
citizens, Homer Plessy possessed the wrong genealogy; he was a
fake in a nation in which full civil rights and thus truly equal treat-
ment were contingent upon inheritance of reproduced whiteness
and collective disavowal of racial equality.44
Even as Chopin’s story resecures the fiction of racial ‘‘purity’’
for its male protagonist, it refuses to foreclose the threat of racial
mixture that it unleashes. Given the instability that ‘‘Désirée’s
Baby’’ conjures and maintains, it can be argued that Chopin, if un-
wittingly, produced the competing ideas of genealogy that I discuss
at this chapter’s outset: the idea of ‘‘pure’’ genealogy (that which
is based upon the repression of interracial reproduction), as well
as a form of critical genealogy (that which apprehends the ruse of
racial ‘‘purity,’’ and thus the uncomfortable things selectively re-
pressed by would-be white nationals). For, in exposing Armand’s
whiteness as fictive, ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ allows a critical figuration
of genealogy to emerge alongside a conventional one. In the criti-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
cal version the contradictions inherent in the conceptualization of

race as a reproducible inheritance passed down over time can be
set to work in the interest of antiracist, antinationalist feminism. It
is not that Chopin, who never expressly allied herself with feminist
or antiracist politics, intended to produce feminist theory about
the intersections among race, nation, and reproduction, but rather
that when her work is read against the grain it theorizes genealogy
as a critical historical methodology that foregrounds the impossi-
bility of racial ‘‘purity’’ rather than the solidity of racial identity.45
In suggesting that ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ contains a form of gene-
alogical narration that dismantles the form of racial nationalism
that is predicated on the consolidation of the race/reproduction
bind, I position it as a theoretical text that can be placed into trans-
atlantic dialogue with the two principal modern theories of the
concept of critical genealogy, those proposed by the French post-
structuralist Michel Foucault and the nineteenth-century German
philosopher from whose writings many of Foucault’s ideas about
historical method are derived, Friedrich Nietzsche. My intention
is positioning ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ thus is not to elevate Chopin’s
‘‘local color’’ fiction as philosophy (as should be evident this book
mitigates against such entrenched hierarchies), but rather to use
Chopin’s story to bring questions of race to bear on dominant
theories of genealogy—those in which race plays a role, albeit one
that has rarely been foregrounded. To this end I propose a two-
way conversation about racial nationalism and critical genealogi-
cal inquiry: while Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s more recognizable
philosophical formulations about genealogy help foreground the
critical dimensions and potential theoretical uses of Chopin’s nar-
rative, Chopin’s express concern with ideas about race and re-
production likewise facilitates excavation of the race/reproductive
bind that subtends Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s formulations.46
In his various studies of the discursive operations of power and
the creation of knowledge and objects of knowledge, Foucault em-
ploys the genealogical methodology gleaned from his reading of
Nietzsche. In one of his best-known historical case studies, The
History of Sexuality, for example, he uses a genealogical method-
ology to reexamine prevailing pieties about Victorian sexuality.
The question of Victorian sexual repression (which preoccupied
literary historian Steven Marcus in his 1964 book, The Other Vic-
torians) is misguided.47 Rather, Foucault argues, the concept of
sexual repression must itself be placed under scrutiny, so that we
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
may analyze how the notion that sex was repressed came to consti-
tute a vector of power deployed by an emergent bourgeoisie seek-
ing to distinguish itself from the aristocratic class that preceded it.
In creating a narrative of modern bourgeois subject formation in
which the discourse of sexuality produces individuals and popu-
lations subject to sexually repressive regimes, Foucault inverts the
prevailing historical narrative: repression did not characterize the
Victorians; rather, the Victorians discursively produced their re-
pression in order to lend themselves the distinguishing aura of sex.
In so arguing, Foucault takes the historian’s own moment as an
object of investigation, asking how a set of arguments about the
past acquire the force of ‘‘truth’’ in the present. The question, he
insists, should never be ‘‘What really happened?’’ (or ‘‘Were the
Victorians really repressed?’’), for such questions can never be de-
finitively answered. Instead we must ask how objects of historical
inquiry become fulcrums of value that gain meaning for us as we
look back in time.
In his influential essay ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ Fou-
cault culls the genealogical methodology employed in the History
of Sexuality and in several other historical studies from its Nietz-
schean source.48 Nietzsche develops the genealogical method to
consider the ‘‘origin’’ of morality, asceticism, justice, and pun-
ishment; in the process he eschews the metaphysical search for
‘‘truth’’ that had captivated other philosophers inquiring into the
origin of values. Instead of searching for ‘‘truth,’’ Foucault ex-
plains, Nietzsche used genealogy to reject ‘‘the metahistorical
deployment of ideal significations’’ and to simultaneously reveal
difference, nonidentity, and dispersion. When Nietzsche ‘‘refuses
to extend his faith in metaphysics,’’ when he deploys a genealogi-
cal method, ‘‘he finds that there is ‘something altogether different,’
behind things . . . not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret
that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a
piecemeal fashion from alien forms’’ (78).
In opposing itself to the ‘‘search for origins’’ (77) and ‘‘invio-
lable identity’’ (79), in refusing the premise that a stable, originary
‘‘truth’’ can be found, Nietzschean genealogy challenges the basic
premises of historical inquiry as they have been traditionally de-
fined. Distinguishing the critical genealogical quest from a ‘‘tra-
ditional historical’’ one, Foucault gives Nietzschean genealogical
inquiry the alternative moniker ‘‘effective history.’’ The latter ‘‘cor-
responds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates and
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
disperses; that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal ele-

ments—the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decompos-
ing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man’s being through
which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the
events of his past’’ (87). Effective history refuses timeless constants
and thus evades metaphysics and the philosophical penchant for
empiricism. It refuses the certainty of absolute ‘‘truths’’ and re-
veals the historical object to be just as complexly and contradicto-
rily configured as the subjective lens through which the historian
views the archive. The purpose of effective history, Foucault con-
cludes, ‘‘is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit
itself to its [identity’s] dissipation’’ (95).49
In deconstructing Nietzsche’s writings, Foucault distinguishes
among the German terms used by Nietzsche to designate disper-
sion at the origin, the nonidentitarian ‘‘truth’’ uncovered by the
genealogist or effective historian. Of these, Herkunft is especially
relevant to the present discussion. Nietzsche uses Herkunft when
writing about an origin in relation to notions of ‘‘stock’’ or ‘‘de-
scent,’’ and develops the term as an equivalent of ‘‘affiliation to
a group [by] bonds of blood, tradition, or social class’’ (80). Be-
cause Herkunft is biologically freighted, Foucault argues, its in-
vocation involves Nietzsche in ‘‘consideration of race or social
type’’ (81). And yet, although Nietzsche understands the racial,
even eugenic, dimensions of Herkunft, Foucault adamantly insists
that Nietzsche never uses the term to indicate quantities that he
believes to be organic, knowable, or ‘‘pure.’’ By contrast to other
nineteenth-century thinkers who attempted ‘‘to master the racial
disorder from which they [the German people] had formed them-
selves’’ (81) by imagining that a neatly organized national gene-
alogy might be established, Foucault argues that Nietzsche used
Herkunft to expose how the supposedly ‘‘generic characteristics’’
that inhere in the concept of the ‘‘origin’’ of a people are in fact
subverted by it. Although Herkunft initially appears to mark a
terrain of biological origination in Nietzsche’s work, it does the
opposite: ‘‘far from being a category of resemblance,’’ Foucault
writes, Herkunft allows the study of ‘‘beginning—numberless be-
ginnings, whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by a
historical eye’’ (81, emphasis added).
Foucault never amplified fully the racial, reproductive, and na-
tional implications of his reading of Nietzsche, but these can be
inferred: genealogical analysis of descent results not in the exca-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
vation of the ‘‘pure’’ origin of the nation or its subjects, but in

the ‘‘dissociation of the self,’’ in recognition of ‘‘empty synthesis’’
(81). Rather than uncovering the solidity of German national iden-
tity, the genealogical quest liberates ‘‘a profusion of lost events’’
(81). Indeed, in Foucault’s hands, Nietzschean genealogy becomes
a form of critique of exactly the type of organic, finite, empirical
knowledge about the self that more conventional notions of gene-
alogy—and, in turn, notions of racial nationalism predicated on
the reproducibility of race—presume to designate:
Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and
does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow
the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in
their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute
deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors,
the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth
to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is
to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what
we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (81)
The search for descent undertaken by critical genealogists does not
produce knowledge about the ‘‘evolution of a species,’’ the ‘‘des-
tiny of a people,’’ or the ‘‘course of descent’’ but contributes to the
disruption of ‘‘evolution,’’ ‘‘species,’’ and ‘‘people’’ by fragment-
ing biological fields previously thought to be unified. If thinkers
have heretofore believed that genealogical inquiry into the past
reveals absolute ‘‘truths,’’ this is a grave mistake. In Foucault’s
reading, Nietzschean genealogical investigation exposes ‘‘disper-
sion,’’ ‘‘minute deviations,’’ ‘‘errors,’’ ‘‘false appraisals,’’ ‘‘faulty
calculations,’’ and other misconnections, misalliances, and ‘‘acci-
dents’’ that together constitute our forgotten history, the repressed
ground upon which we build our identities and our understandings
of who we are.
Although Foucault’s philosophical treatise and Chopin’s short
story might at first appear to be so stylistically incompatible and
generically distinct as to defy comparison, Foucault’s formaliza-
tion of the Nietzschean understanding of genealogy as a critical
historical methodology coincides with the critical understanding
of genealogy elaborated in ‘‘Désirée’s Baby.’’ Chopin’s narrative
figures genealogical confusion, exposes contamination at the ori-
gin, and details the vexed history of racial mixing in the United
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
States. Her story demonstrates that genealogical inquiry can tell

us more about the ‘‘dispersion’’ and ‘‘faulty calculations’’ that
characterize the past—particularly our personal histories and our
narrations of our familial genealogies—than the racial ‘‘purity’’
and coherent subjectivity that Armand insists is his birthright. In
Chopin’s tale, Armand’s forgetting of the history of miscegenation
in the United States and, more specifically, the racial mixture in
his own past, is a ‘‘positive faculty’’ of what Nietzsche, in the epi-
graph to this chapter, labels ‘‘repression.’’ 50 As in Foucault’s writ-
ings on Nietzsche’s genealogical quest for the origins of morality,
the genealogical quest that Chopin’s readers undertake is inher-
ently critical, for what is uncovered in the process of reading is the
waywardness of reproduction—the fact that there are no ‘‘pure’’
white people in ‘‘Désirée’s Baby,’’ nor, as is implied, in the recon-
structing nation whose racial formation the story allegorizes.
Insofar as it puts questions of race and reproduction front and
center, ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ offers readers insights into genealogy as
a critical historical methodology capable of coming to terms with
the racism and sexism of traditional historical narration—espe-
cially narration of the origins of the modern nation—in ways that
Foucault’s work on Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s own writings
might, if pushed, but on the level of manifest content and overt
aims do not. Indeed, just as Anderson’s and Gellner’s text are sub-
tended by the race/reproduction bind that they leave unacknowl-
edged, so too are Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s. As becomes appar-
ent when one rereads Foucault and Nietzsche with the foregoing
reading of Chopin in mind, both tacitly invoke notions of repro-
ductive racial mixing, especially at those points in Foucault’s and
Nietzsche’s texts in which they give form to abstractly designated
genealogical findings, those Foucault marks with ambivalent for-
mulations such as ‘‘empty syntheses’’ or ‘‘profusion of lost events.’’
When Foucault focuses on the human body as an ‘‘inscribed sur-
face of events’’ (83) to which ‘‘descent attaches itself’’ (82), race
and reproduction lurk just below the surface. In opening his essay
on Nietzsche, he writes of genealogy as ‘‘gray, meticulous, and
patiently documentary’’ and suggests that it operates ‘‘on a field of
entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been
scratched over and recopied many times’’ (76). Although ‘‘gray’’
conjures multiple things (archives, dusty books, gray mice, and
even Hegel and Minerva’s owl), genealogy is at least in part fig-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
ured as ‘‘gray’’ because it brings into view wayward reproduction

and the history of racial mixing that characterizes transatlantic
culture. In fact, a popular understanding of race as a body script
pervades the language, adopted from Nietzsche, in which Fou-
cault discusses the genealogist’s findings as bearing ‘‘faint traces
of color’’ that are manifest as epidermal alterations of the palimp-
sest that is the human body. Genealogy ‘‘establishes marks of its
power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies’’
(85), Foucault writes. Europe is ‘‘the land of interminglings and
bastardy,’’ and the nineteenth century, the period in which Nietz-
sche wrote, that ‘‘of the ‘man-of-mixture’ ’’ (92).
In arguing that the racial parameters of genealogy originate not
solely in Foucault’s writing but derive in large part from Nietz-
sche’s, I treat Foucault’s formulations genealogically, and argue
for a deeper, more palimpsestic understanding of the overdeter-
mined connection between the development of a critical genealogi-
cal methodology and nineteenth-century transatlantic discourses
on race. For the racial and reproductive ideas that haunt Fou-
cault’s writings are not strictly of Foucault’s invention so much
as syncretic formations produced as Foucault rereads and reworks
Nietzsche’s writings. And thus, even though Foucault does not ex-
pressly focus on race as an analytic category developed by Nietz-
sche, through his close and persistent attention to the details of
Nietzschean language and metaphor (including Herkunft), the ra-
cial discourses that circulate in Nietzsche’s text appear, get repro-
duced, and even augmented. The advantage of posing the issue of
the connection between the development of a theory of critical
genealogy and discourses on race in this way is that it becomes
possible to retain the historicity of Foucault’s thought, while at the
same time acknowledging the traces of the historical discourses on
race by which Nietzsche was surrounded. In so doing the historical
grounding of Nietzsche’s text begins to undercut and in the pro-
cess challenge Foucault’s own sense of the historical, productively
interfering with Foucault’s understanding of Nietzsche outside of
the confines of Foucault’s express reading of him.
Not surprisingly, figurations of race, racial mixture, and gene-
alogical corruption become that much more unavoidable when we
return to On the Genealogy of Morals. When we read closely, with
attentiveness to Nietzsche’s figures and metaphors, a linkage be-
tween genealogy’s grayness, its color coding, and the racial coding
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
of morality becomes apparent. Nietzsche alerts us to the structure

of this metonymic chain in his preface:
The [genealogical] project is to traverse with quite novel ques-
tions, and as though with new eyes, the enormous, distant, and
so well hidden land of morality—of morality that has actually
existed, actually been lived; and does this not mean virtually
to discover this land for the first time? . . . It must be obvious
which color is a hundred times more vital for a genealogist of
morals . . . namely gray . . . [for] what is documented, what can
actually be confirmed and has actually existed, . . . [is] the en-
tire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral
past of mankind! (21)
This passage, written just three years after Germany’s entrance
into the colonial contest, reverberates with the language of dis-
covery and conquest of foreign lands. Evidently it is the passage
to which Foucault refers when he denotes the genealogical object
as ‘‘gray.’’ The genealogist, Nietzsche tells his readers, possesses
visual powers that make discovery of what has not been seen or
known before possible. This is not because the ‘‘land of morality’’
has before been too ‘‘distant’’ or ‘‘well hidden’’ but rather because
previous viewers have not known on what to focus their searches.
When it becomes evident that it is neither black nor white but
a potent combination of the two that marks the newly discern-
ible object of inquiry, Nietzsche identifies ‘‘gray’’ as the color that
best denotes the genealogist’s object. Extending the metaphor fur-
ther he suggests that ‘‘gray’’ also characterizes the ‘‘hieroglyphic
record,’’ the ancient Egyptian system of signs that is ‘‘so hard to
decipher’’ because previous viewers have not known how to make
meaning of this writing, distinct as it is, from more familiar marks
etched in black ink on white paper.
Although in his preface Nietzsche does little more than color-
code the genealogical object, in the first of the three essays that
comprise his treatise the constituent elements of gray—black and
white— repeatedly figure racialized bodies, the ‘‘true’’ identities
of which, like the coordinates of ‘‘the hidden land of morality,’’
are known to the critical genealogist but unknown to those who
have not yet learned how to interpret the raced body’s message. As
Nietzsche cogently explains, the search for the origin of morality
or ‘‘the value of existing valuations’’ (55) begins with the distinc-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
tion between master and slave morality, for relative moral systems
are built out of the opposition that is produced between ‘‘the well-
being of the majority and the well-being of the few’’ (56)—groups
that have, in turn, been repeatedly cast as racially distinct.
According to Nietzsche the best way to commence investiga-
tion into the origin of the racialized distinctions within systems of
valuation is to set out upon the heretofore untried path of linguis-
tics, or etymology. ‘‘The right road,’’ he writes, ‘‘was for me the
question: What was the real etymological significance of the des-
ignations for ‘good’ coined in various languages?’’ (27). Nietzsche
is driven by the idea that it is possible to trace the ‘‘evolution of
moral concepts’’ (55) by looking at language itself, as comparative
etymology demonstrates the arbitrariness of the accepted linguistic
organization of (moral) reality by foregrounding language’s status
as metaphor.51
In the course of his investigation Nietzsche finds that ‘‘noble,’’
‘‘aristocratic,’’ and like designations of social rank have been con-
sistently connected to basic concepts of ‘‘ ‘good’ in the sense of
‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with a soul of high order’ ’’—a
development that he argues ‘‘runs parallel to’’ that in which ‘‘com-
mon,’’ ‘‘plebian,’’ and ‘‘low’’ form the basis for ‘‘bad’’ (28). And
yet it was not simply by referring to themselves as ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘su-
perior’’ (masterful, noble, and commanding) that the dominant so-
cial group (variously designated as ‘‘nobles’’ and ‘‘masters’’) estab-
lished their goodness, but rather by calibrating these laudatory
self-assessments to ‘‘typical character trait[s]’’ thought to inhere in
individuals by birth. Spinning his discussion of ‘‘bad’’ out of the
Latin root for the word black, Nietzsche explains:
malus [bad] (beside which I set melas [black or dark]) may des-
ignate the common man as the dark-colored, above all as the
black-haired man (‘‘hic niger est—’’), as the pre-Aryan occupant
of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from
the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his color; Gaelic, at
any rate, offers us a precisely similar case—fin (for example in
the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word for nobility, finally
for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed,
in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabi-
tants.
The Celts . . . were definitely a blond race; it is wrong to as-
sociate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
on the careful ethnographic maps of Germany with any sort of

Celtic origin or blood mixture. . . . [I]t is rather the pre-Aryan
people who emerge in these places. (30)
The metonymic chain, the links of which Nietzsche gives form
to one by one, is here finally completed. The color coding of the
genealogist’s object that commences in Genealogy’s preface with
its designation as ‘‘gray’’ is, in the course of the first essay, consti-
tuted through a historically and etymologically reciprocal relation-
ship with the racial coding of morality. On the one hand, ‘‘bad’’
is blackened and ‘‘black’’ racialized; on the other, alleged ‘‘charac-
ter traits’’ such as ‘‘black-haired’’ and ‘‘dark-colored’’ are morally
coded as ‘‘bad,’’ and thus blackened. Conversely, that which is
good is whitened, purified, and designated as ‘‘Aryan’’ and/or
‘‘blond.’’ These color-coded distinctions between Aryan and pre-
Aryan, good and bad are based not solely upon analogical relation-
ships but also upon a complex signifying system, the contours of
which reveal as much about language’s function as a repository for
social meaning as about the imbrication of systems of moral valua-
tion and nineteenth-century racialist thought. Indeed, in elabo-
rating the connection between power differentials and racial dis-
tinctions, Nietzsche taps into a long tradition with deep roots in
German romanticism and romantic nationalist discourses in which
power imbalances and the subordination of the laboring, com-
mon, and servant classes found justification in the racial coding
of the distinction between the vanquished and the vanquishers. As
Laura Doyle has contended, ‘‘What one may call ‘domestic’ race
distinctions—between Gaul and Frank, Celt and Norman, Nor-
man and Frank—not only shape[d] Romantic thought, but also
form[ed] the seedbed for colonial racial thought.’’ Though sel-
dom acknowledged, these racial distinctions, most often cast in
the language of blood, shaped how contemporaries understood
events like the French Revolution, which was sometimes regarded,
as Doyle points out, ‘‘as a racial or ethnic conflict as much as a
class war,’’ since noble and common classes were thought ‘‘to de-
rive from different races.’’ 52
While what might be termed the racial unconscious at the heart
of German romanticism certainly helps us to begin to historicize
Nietzsche’s racialist meditations on the genealogy of morals, in
attempting a precise contextualization of the racialized discourse
that saturates the passage in question I initially made recourse to
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
prevailing approaches to ideas about race in Nietzsche’s philoso-

phy. By invoking ‘‘black’’ to denote ‘‘bad’’ Nietzsche partakes in a
long and well-documented philosophical tradition in which race is
used to give expression to moral conceptions of judgment, ratio-
nality, and ethical subjectivity. As scholars such as Sander Gilman,
David Theo Goldberg, and David Lloyd have argued, Western phi-
losophy (and particularly German philosophy, including those pil-
lars of thought to whom Nietzsche responded: Kant and Hegel)
depended upon the figuration of enslaved blackness to demarcate
that which lies outside the realm of the aesthetic, the rational, the
‘‘civilized,’’ and the moral.53 The invocation of blackness in Nietz-
sche’s passage on melus might also be considered in relation to the
history of German imperialism at end of the nineteenth century. As
historians have begun to demonstrate, although many ideas about
blackness in German thought were ‘‘uncontaminated by reality’’
prior to German forays into Africa beginning in 1884 and 1885,
there was nonetheless a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tra-
dition of racialist thinking (including the romanticist thought dis-
cussed above) upon which Germans drew as they readied them-
selves for their belated scramble for colonies.54 As recent Nietzsche
scholars have maintained, Nietzsche himself negotiated a complex
personal and political stance in relation to German imperialism, a
geopolitical and economic formation that budded and then blos-
somed its gruesome flower as he composed his philosophy and
managed a painful split with his beloved sister Elisabeth, who had,
to his deep dismay, married a colonist and Aryan-supremacist.55
Yet still other scholarship on race and racism in Nietzsche’s writ-
ings—and this is undoubtedly the principal forum in which discus-
sions of race arise—focuses on Nietzsche’s figuration of Jews and
Jewishness, and on coming to terms with his vexed relationship
to anti-Semitism and the genocide committed in its name during
World War II.56
Understanding something of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism, his
views on European colonialism and German imperialism, his
treatment of the philosophical tradition’s figuration of blackness,
and of the race-laden romantic nationalism on which he draws
are all extremely helpful in elucidating his views on race in gen-
eral. However, existing scholarship does not answer one of the
pressing questions begged by Nietzsche’s particular discourse on
melus/malus—that is, how notions of black and bad related in the
period in which he wrote, not only to ideas about Germans’ proto-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
typical racial others (Jews) and German colonial subjects (Afri-

cans) but also to ideas about Italians and Celts. To understand how
Italianness and Celticness signify in Nietzsche’s theorization of the
genealogy of morals I have found it useful to shift the terms of the
discussion of race in Nietzsche’s work off German soil and out of
German colonies.57 For in accounting for the racial economy of
the text it is necessary to consider transatlantic ideas about Italian-
ness and Celticness that circulated in the period in which Nietz-
sche wrote. For it is these racialized figurations that rhetorically
move Nietzsche’s argument along and that reverberate within and
through the philosophical formulations that Nietzsche’s passage
elaborates.
According to historians Nietzsche’s library was replete with
racial scientific tracts—with texts that, following Paul Gilroy, I
label with the shorthand raciology. In such works the same ‘‘char-
acter traits’’ (such as hair type and skin color) that Nietzsche uses
to designate bad and good repeatedly appear as race traits, in-
dices of difference commonly cited on both sides of the Atlan-
tic in the quickly growing body of Euro-American literature that
was invoked to justify the construction of racial taxonomies and
to assign racial belonging.58 This literature produced and devel-
oped the language of racism, that of species, types, craniometrics,
and phrenology. For such raciology was preoccupied with the idea
that race could be seen, scientifically measured, and quantified,
and with the fantasy that racial mixture or wayward reproduction
etched its mark directly on the body. In selecting Italians and Celts
as his principal examples, Nietzsche joined a well-established con-
versation about the racial classification of these peoples, who were
in the middle and late nineteenth-century emigrating in great num-
bers from the Old to the New World, and there mixing with the
so-called Anglo-Saxon population. And thus, while it may appear
that we have strayed far from Chopin, Nietzsche’s discussion of
the racial coding of morality compels us to circumnavigate the
Atlantic and briefly sketch the scene—one that was transatlantic
in character—in which Nietzsche, like Chopin, his near contem-
porary, wrote.
As scholarship on nineteenth-century racial science and the ra-
cialization of Europeans, including Irish (used interchangeably in
the U.S. context with Celts) and Italians has repeatedly demon-
strated, both were viewed as distinct from Northern Europeans
or Anglo-Saxons by virtue of their race. Beginning in the 1850s
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
John Beddoe, an influential British doctor and ethnologist, de-

voted nearly thirty years to measuring the ‘‘index of nigrescence’’
among the peoples of greater Britain and not unexpectedly found
it highest for the Irish. In 1880 the term ‘‘white Negro’’ was coined
in reference to the Irish who were described in period terminology
as ‘‘Celtic Calibans.’’ 59 In the mid-1840s, in response to the Great
Famine, nearly two million people left Ireland, many arriving in
the United States. The animus directed toward these immigrants
did not express itself as restrictionism (which had not yet gained
full force at mid-century) but as a fear of job usurpation, as an
anxiety about reproductive intermixture, and as a suspicion that
so-called Celtic peoples possessed kinship with blacks.60 In the
years leading up to the Civil War, Irish communities were ghetto-
ized and Irish people’s impoverished lives depicted as less than
human, as simian. On both sides of the Atlantic the popular press
routinely characterized the ‘‘Celtic physiognomy’’ by a ‘‘small
and somewhat upturned nose’’ and a ‘‘black tint of the skin’’;
conversely, ‘‘smoked Irishman’’ was common nineteenth-century
slang for ‘‘Negro.’’ 61 As historian David Roediger relates, adjec-
tives used in describing the Irish consistently coincided with those
used to designate and denigrate African slaves: ‘‘low-browed,’’
‘‘savage,’’ ‘‘groveling,’’ ‘‘bestial,’’ ‘‘lazy,’’ ‘‘wild,’’ and ‘‘sensual.’’ In
short, the Irish were often regarded as a separate race, perhaps
originating in Africa.62
Like the Irish, Italians (particularly Sicilians) were portrayed in
late-nineteenth century raciology as dark racial others and located
as a source of acute anxiety. Particularly in the U.S. South, Ital-
ians, who often shared with blacks a niche in the labor market,
freely fraternized with blacks, and sometimes intermarried with
them, were thought of not as white, but as ‘‘Dagoes’’ or ‘‘white
niggers.’’ They were cast as swarthy, often as virtually black in
complexion. In a Harper’s Magazine piece Italian ghetto dwell-
ers in New York are distinctly Africanized: ‘‘it is no uncommon
thing to see at noon some swarthy Italian . . . resting and dining
from his tin kettle, while his brown-skinned wife is by his side.’’ 63
According to historian John Higham, when anti-Italian violence
reached its height in the 1890s, attaining a fever pitch in the lynch-
ings of eleven Italian immigrants residing in New Orleans, wide-
spread animus was filtered through racialized stereotypes of Ital-
ians as bearing ‘‘the mark of Cain’’ and suggesting ‘‘the stiletto,
the Maffia,’’ and deeds ‘‘of impassioned violence.’’ 64
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
When we inspect Nietzsche’s passage closely, we see that while

he follows the dominant trend and racializes as black those to
whom he refers as the ‘‘pre-Aryan’’ occupants of Italian soil, he vo-
ciferously defends against the classification of Celts as black, argu-
ing that this association mistakes the ‘‘blond-headed’’ conqueror
race with the ‘‘pre-Aryan’’ occupants of ancient lands (including
Germany) who were dark-haired and of ‘‘mixed blood.’’ 65 Thus,
while Nietzsche evidently engages the dominant sociolect in which
it was debated whether Italians and Celts were black, it would
be inaccurate to conceive of the notions of blackness that he dis-
cusses as either entirely complicit with this discourse, or as uni-
form. Rather, it is precisely Nietzsche’s deviation from the popular
ideas about Celtic ‘‘nigrescence’’ and Italian blackness (even as he
takes these ideas as his point of departure) that embodies his philo-
sophical challenge. As he argues by way of his shifting and shifty
racial and racist metaphors, categories of goodness and badness,
like those of whiteness and blackness, were highly variegated and
constantly changing. As in romantic racialist discourse, when a
group is cast as masterful and conquering it gains ‘‘blond-headed’’
Aryan status but loses this status when it becomes, through a turn
of historical events, the conquered or common class and thus ‘‘ab-
original’’ or ‘‘pre-Aryan.’’
Through figuration of Italianness and Celticness as at one his-
torical moment white or ‘‘Aryan’’ and at another black or ‘‘pre-
Aryan,’’ Nietzsche undermines the consistency of racial categories
and the solidity of notions of racial belonging. Through revela-
tion of the instability of racialized conceptions of the vanquished
and vanquishers, the arbitrariness of racial designations and the
moral valuations that are built out of them is revealed. For the
shifts and changes in racial formations of which Nietzsche writes
index the arbitrariness of accepted linguistic organizations of both
morality and reality. With the figures of the Italian and the Celt
Nietzsche tells readers that ‘‘bad’’ like ‘‘black’’ is a metaphor—
one employed by a romantic nationalist tradition to justify domi-
nation, among other aims. And thus while Nietzsche explicitly and
uncritically engages the racial sciences of his day in crafting his dis-
course, he nonetheless transgresses raciology’s principal findings.
If the ‘‘hidden land of morality,’’ like the Egyptian ‘‘hieroglyphic
record’’ of which Nietzsche wrote in his preface, is best charac-
terized as ‘‘gray,’’ this is because this record and this land, like the
racially marked body that figures the moral system whose geneal-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
ogy Nietzsche sketches, lacks clear-cut antecedents and a purified,

static point of origination.
The choice of the hieroglyph as a textual figure, like that of Ital-
ians and Celts, is historically overdetermined. As Nietzsche wrote,
Egypt emerged as a focal point for imperialist anxieties and pas-
sions and the field of Egyptology rapidly expanded. As Edward
Said has amply demonstrated, within nineteenth-century oriental-
ist discourse the hieroglyphs of Egyptian history and the mysteries
of ancient religious practices symbolized the unknown, the radi-
cally other. Like Italians and Celts, Egypt and things Egyptian
were, by the 1860s, repeatedly invoked in heated debates about
racial belonging, purity, and mixture.66 In particular, the discus-
sions that swirled around the question of whether blacks were a
civilized race or a distinct race with a separate point of origin often
hinged upon ideas about the nature of ancient Egyptian civiliza-
tion.67 If it could be proven that Egyptians were black, raciologists
such as Beddoe, Robert Knox, Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau,
Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon argued, then it could be proven
that blacks were civilized. Conversely, if Egyptians were white, this
would substantiate claims about black racial distinction and inferi-
ority. Though several of these thinkers held diametrically opposed
views on these questions, they agreed that the associated repro-
ductive question had to do with whether the hybrid offspring of
unions between different races were fertile or infertile. If fertile,
this would show that blacks and whites were of the same species
from the beginning of time; if infertile that they were of separate
origin and that racial mixing had produced degeneration of entire
populations, posing a particular threat to nations such as America,
in which black and white were especially prone to intermingle.
Among those writing on these issues, Nott (a southern slave-
holder and professor of anatomy at the University of Louisiana)
and Gliddon (an English Egyptologist who had lived most of his
life in Cairo) were especially eager to collaborate in bringing to-
gether Egyptology and reproductive biology. In a series of pub-
lications in the 1840s and early 1850s they stridently argued that
the ancient Egyptians were Caucasian, and that study of Egyptian
civilization provided unequivocal evidence that blacks and whites
had been separate races throughout recorded history. If Egyptians
had been racially ‘‘hybrid,’’ they argued, their world would have
faltered rather than flourished. As Gliddon averred, ‘‘I am hostile
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
to the opinion of the African origin of the Egyptians, I mean of

the high caste—kings, priests, and military. . . . We, as hieroglyph-
ists, know Egypt better now, than all the Greek authors or the
Romans.’’ Concurring with his colleague, Nott added that ‘‘his-
tory, the Egyptian Monuments, her paintings and sculptures, the
examination of skulls . . . and everything else connected with this
country, combine to prove beyond possible doubt, that the Ancient
Egyptian race were Caucasians.’’ 68 Apparently, in characterizing
the genealogist’s object as ‘‘gray’’ Nietzsche again took racial sci-
ence as a starting point, if only to manipulate its findings to ar-
gue for the ‘‘impurity’’ of the origins of systems of valuation. As
his figure of the gray ‘‘hieroglyphic record’’ attests, the origin of
things Egyptian is neither white nor black, but better characterized
as impure, mixed, at best indecipherable.
The debates about the racial origins of Egyptians are, not co-
incidentally, connected to the etymology for a term coined to de-
scribe racial mixing several years prior to Nietzsche’s writing of
On the Genealogy of Morals. ‘‘Miscegenation,’’ a neologism built
out of the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race)69 that was in-
tended to replace the previously pervasive designation, ‘‘amalga-
mation,’’ was invented in 1864 by the authors of an anonymous
pamphlet published on the eve of the U.S. presidential election.
These pundits, rabid antiabolitionists, hoped to conjure the threat
of national ‘‘mongrelization’’ that would result if abolitionists were
to prevail in the Civil War, by posing as scientifically informed
advocates of a racially mixed nation: a miscege(nation). In inten-
tionally incendiary passages such as the following, they cast inter-
racial reproduction as the fervent desire of the abolitionists and as
the central tenet of their plan for national salvation:
It is clear that no race can long endure without a commingling
of its blood with that of other races. The condition of all human
progress is miscegenation. The Anglo-Saxon should learn this
in time for his own salvation. If we will not heed the demands
of justice, let us, at least, respect the law of self-preservation.
Providence has kindly placed on the American soil for his own
wise purposes, four millions of colored people. They are our
brothers, our sisters. By mingling with them we become power-
ful, prosperous, and progressive; by refusing to do so we be-
come feeble, unhealthy, narrow-minded, and unfit for nobler
offices of freedom and certain of early decay.70
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Although the pamphlet’s authors drew on several prevailing ideas

about hybridity in arguing for the benefits of a national policy
of miscegenation, near the center of their text is a chapter—
‘‘The mystery of the pyramids—the sphinx question answered’’—
in which they, like Nietzsche, invoke Egypt and things Egyptian
as ultimate proof of civilization’s mixed origins. Expressly contra-
vening the earlier findings of Nott and Gliddon, they write:
Historians have given us different accounts of the color of the
Egyptians. Herodotus states that they were black and wooly-
haired; still other Greek writers have said they were dark
colored but with straight hair, among mummies are found all
varieties except the pure white. It is clear, therefore, that the
Egyptians were a composite race. It was here that civilization
dawned, because it was here that first conditions for civiliza-
tion existed . . . the judicious intermingling of divers tribes
from different parts of the earth, produced an intelligent, brave,
and progressive people, the like of which has probably never
since appeared upon the planet . . . the arts of which have
made Greece famous were all undoubtedly of Egyptian origin;
the philosophy that is still discussed in our schools, was first
evolved from the miscegenetic mind developed upon the banks
of the Nile. (21)
Although the miscegenation pamphlet was as hotly debated in
Europe as in the United States (it was an editorial in the pro-
Southern London Morning Herald that first exposed the pam-
phlet as an antiabolitionist hoax), there is no evidence that it fell
into Nietzsche’s hands.71 Nonetheless, its claim about the ‘‘inter-
mingling of divers tribes’’ and of the ‘‘miscegenetic mind[s]’’ of
those who inhabited the ‘‘banks of the Nile’’ are of a piece with
Nietzsche’s figuration of the Egyptian hieroglyphic record as best
characterized as ‘‘gray.’’ Expressing the central argument in the
terms later echoed in the color-coded language that pervades On
the Genealogy of Morals, the miscegenation pamphlet’s authors
conclude that Americans must ‘‘accept the facts of nature [and]
. . . become a yellow-skinned, black haired people—in fine . . .
miscegens.’’ 72
Evidently, ideas about race and reproduction are as deeply em-
bedded within Nietzsche’s philosophy as within Chopin’s narra-
tive. As I have argued, the racial and reproductive resonance of
‘‘gray’’ as a figure for impurity at the origin becomes pronounced
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
when we consider the wider transatlantic context in which Nietz-

sche, like Chopin, wrote—that in which the emergent raciological
discourse inscribed race within a visual economy of physiologi-
cal differences that indexed moral and social worth, and in which
interracial reproduction was thought to have left traces on the sur-
face of the bodies that were its legacy. In such a context ‘‘race’’ was
not only a conception, but also a perception, something that was
thought to be tangible and knowable because it could be seen.73
In revealing the imbrication of Nietzsche’s and Chopin’s thought
with the raciology of their day, I have sought to identify a deep con-
nection between racial science and genealogical thinking—think-
ing, that as I have been arguing, can be read as racist, but might at
the same time be mined for its critical potential. For even as Nietz-
sche’s and Chopin’s genealogical narratives drew upon racialist
and often racist discourses about ‘‘purity’’ and the corruption pro-
duced by wayward reproduction, both simultaneously elaborated
a critical form of genealogy, one that can be used to cut through
the race/reproduction bind that subtends discussions about racial
‘‘purity’’ and reproductive mixing.
In this chapter I have also shown that it is precisely because
the concept of genealogy is imbricated with ideas about race and
reproduction that it constitutes a privileged lever for critiquing
racial nationalism and for undoing the race/reproduction bind that
structures ideologies of racial nationalism that have been perva-
sive in the transatlantic context. As I explore in the chapters that
follow, the idea that racial ‘‘purity’’ can be reproduced is a ruse.
Indeed, from the vantage point of critical genealogical inquiry, it
is an idealization of reality that can only be produced by disavow-
ing what is all too well known, and by repressing or otherwise
manipulating the dimly, sometimes unconsciously perceived com-
plexity of our racial and reproductive histories. For this reason,
while racial nationalism depends on what Nietzsche labeled ‘‘the
faculty of repression’’ and is subtended by conventional notions
of belonging grounded in ideas of genealogical inheritance, racial
nationalism is at the same time an idea we, critical genealogists, are
in a unique position to set aside. For when genealogy’s entangle-
ment within the race/reproduction bind is turned against itself and
set to work—as it is throughout this book— it can be used to ex-
pose and then undo the destructive interdependence of the racial
and reproductive dimensions of transatlantic modern thought.
As Foucault reminds us, the common conception of genealogy
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
as a quest for ‘‘pure’’ origins can be transformed into ‘‘effective

history’’ by introducing ‘‘discontinuity into our very beings—as it
divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body
and sets it against itself’’ (88). Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s ideas of
genealogy instruct us in the performance of such dramatic proce-
dures of division and multiplication. In turn, Chopin’s genealogi-
cal narrative introduces us to the discontinuity that lies at the heart
of ‘‘our very being’’ and thus at the heart of the modern racial na-
tion and the identities of the racially ‘‘pure’’ nationals who com-
prise it. Specifying the power of genealogical critique, Foucault
writes, ‘‘Genealogy will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissi-
tudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and
accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously
attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once
unmasked, as the face of the other’’ (80). Reading this passage for
what I hope is now its evident racial residue, we can conclude that
genealogy traces the ‘‘vicissitudes of history,’’ the misalliances, and
the ‘‘miscegenous’’ encounters, and ‘‘await[s] their emergence’’—
nothing less than their manifestation in the form of a disrupted
pedigree that the critical genealogist can apprehend in the unfa-
miliar ‘‘face of the other.’’ This is the face of the individual who
is inadmissible within the confines of the racial nation, namely the
black mother and her progeny—the La Blanches and Désirées and
the children to whom they give birth—those subjects whose way-
ward reproduction threatens to disrupt even the most reputable
lineages.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Chapter Two
Writing Feminist Genealogy:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the
Reproduction of Racial Nationalism
In one of the stranger passages in her autobiography, the turn-

of-the-century feminist writer, reformer, and activist Charlotte
Perkins Gilman humorously registers her concerns about wayward
reproduction while in the process of confessing half-seriously that
she has never felt completely confident in regarding herself as a
true American because of her symbolically inauspicious birthday.
Noting that her arrival into the world on 3 July 1860 was untimely,
she laments, ‘‘If only I’d made it to the glorious fourth! This may be
called the first misplay in a long game that is full of them.’’ 1 Here,
as in much of her work, Gilman informs readers that the ideal na-
tional is hard to reproduce, for the perfect American citizen must
be free of the various forms of ‘‘misplay’’ to which reproduction
is prey in current form.
The idea that something was terribly wrong with the national
reproductive process was, this chapter argues, the issue that most
compelled Gilman. The diagnosis of the ravages on the United
States effected by wayward reproduction across racial lines, and
the proposal of an array of solutions, were her life’s work. In acid
political polemics, parables drawn from experience, and decep-
tively playful fiction, Gilman repeatedly expressed her hope for the
creation of women who were conscious and capable of reproduc-
ing a better national body and a purified national genealogy.
Curiously, despite the pervasive racial and national politics
that undergirded Gilman’s corpus, her reception by most femi-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
nist scholars, although persistently engaged, has been largely un-

critical of the most troubling aspects of her work. As this chapter
details, neither those scholars who originally recovered Gilman’s
writings in the 1970s nor many of those who have subsequently
written on Gilman in the past two decades have found it nec-
essary to contend with the centrality of racialized reproductive
thinking to her feminism, or to her maternalist racial national-
ism. In addressing the most vexed aspects of Gilman’s feminism,
I forge an alliance with a small and increasingly vocal cohort of
thinkers who have bucked the scholarly trend and begun the con-
tentious task of excavating Gilman’s racism and nationalism. At
the same time, in this chapter I explore the implications for the
forms of contemporary feminism(s) to which we all contribute
of the troublingly pervasive approach to Gilman—namely cele-
bration of Gilman as a so-called foremother who, despite seri-
ous flaws, nonetheless continues to be situated uncritically at the
origin of a genealogy of feminism of which we are the alleged
inheritors.
In assessing the relationship between scholarship that has
sought to recover and reclaim Gilman’s feminism and Gilman’s
own writings, this chapter locates conceptual continuities between
Gilman’s theorizing and the theory of the history of feminism that
is implicitly reproduced by Gilman scholars who are engaged in
recovery and/or celebration of Gilman’s work. In tracking the per-
sistence of reproductive and genealogical ideas within Gilman’s
writings, this chapter simultaneously draws attention to the rela-
tionships among racism, nationalism, and imperialism within con-
temporary feminist knowledge production. And yet it should be
stressed at the outset that revelation of the grounding of this domi-
nant strand of contemporary feminism in older forms of racism
and nationalism is not the principal reason I return to Gilman—
though this is an important project unto itself. Rather, I return to
her in order to explore how the gender politics that Gilman ex-
pressly advocated were constituted through an all but completely
neglected sexual politics that was racial in character. For, as we
shall see, the sexual dimensions of Gilman’s feminism have re-
mained unavailable to readers who have neglected Gilman’s racism
and nationalism. Indeed, as the concluding section of this chap-
ter demonstrates, in uncritically reclaiming Gilman’s feminism
as a precursor of contemporary feminism the decidedly ‘‘queer’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
sexual politics that Gilman constituted in and through her relent-

less racial nationalism have been obscured.
As in the previous chapter, within the present one genealogy
emerges as a pivotal concept—as both the object of analysis and
the principal method of inquiry. Within Gilman’s substantial cor-
pus, the concept of genealogy is pervasive. Repeatedly Gilman as-
sociates ideas about the perfection of national reproductive pro-
cesses with ideas about white women’s role in the purification of
the national genealogy. Her nonfiction argues that women’s work
should not be solely in the home but also in the reproduction of a
robust, racially ‘‘pure’’ nation; likewise, her fiction offers utopian
reproductive scenarios and outlines an alternative social vision
based upon the transformation of maternity. And thus of Gilman’s
writings I ask: How are conventional notions of genealogy used
to buttress accounts of ancestry and of the history of reproduc-
tive relationships? How are issues of pedigree, descent, and the
reproduction of populations treated? How do ideas about repro-
duction inflect concerns about nation building? And finally, how
are racialized ideas about nation building conjoined within those
about sexuality?
If the reproductive and racial themes that obsessed Gilman lead
me to situate genealogy as my central object of inquiry, the trou-
bling rhetoricity of much of the most influential scholarship on
Gilman compells me to choose genealogy as my methodology. As
in chapter 1, in this chapter I again turn to Nietzsche and Foucault.
In the opening lines of his philosophical treatise On the Genealogy
of Morals, Nietzsche avers that genealogy is a critical philosophical
tool. Genealogy—conventionally defined as a quest for origins in
terms of descent from ancestors, as the elaboration of a pedigree—
can also be regarded as a critical knowledge project. Address-
ing his fellow philosophers, Nietzsche articulates the problem of
epistemological reorientation that the adoption of his genealogical
methodology entails: ‘‘We are unknown to ourselves . . . and with
good reason,’’ he asserts, for since ‘‘we have never [previously]
sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find
ourselves.’’ 2 If we follow Nietzsche’s reasoning it becomes clear
that feminist knowledge seekers will only gain self-knowledge,
if we stop searching for long-lost progenitors and instead create
new relationships with familiar objects of knowledge by posing
questions that may be uncomfortable but are nonetheless urgent.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Writing Feminist Genealogy 63

These include questions about the racism and nationalism that

are endemic to Gilman’s feminism; those about the desirability
of discovering in Gilman’s feminism an antecedent for contempo-
rary feminism; those about the structural resonance between the
drive to recover a genealogy of feminism that stretches back to
Gilman and Gilman’s own quest for a ‘‘pure’’ national genealogy;
and, perhaps most important, questions about the conjoining of
Gilman’s maternalist racial nationalism and her inchoate sexual
politics. In short, the critical genealogical questions this chapter
raises neither presuppose the existence of a feminist ‘‘foremother’’
nor of a ‘‘pure’’ genealogy of feminism waiting to be unearthed;
rather, they interrogate the origins of contemporary feminism and
explore how such origins are constructed and reproduced. For a
genealogical inquiry questions ‘‘the value of the origin of value’’
within the history of feminism.3
In addressing the questions enumerated above I contribute to
the work of those who have eloquently argued that race animates
Gilman’s thinking and that Gilman (like other first-wave femi-
nists) was involved in shoring up an evolutionary discourse about
white civilized womanhood.4 I also augment this scholarship in
two ways: first, by elaborating the metacritical claim that issues of
pedigree, descent, ‘‘purity,’’ and kinship—all conventional gene-
alogical notions—ground both Gilman’s feminism and that of
those who have sought to reclaim it; and, second, that blockage
to knowledge about feminism’s historical relationship to racism
and nationalism has the perhaps unintended consequence of pro-
mulgating a type of gender-focused feminism that obscures con-
sideration of sexuality. For, as this chapter demonstrates, Gilman’s
racism and nationalism are articulated in heterogeneous ways not
only in and through her gender politics, but also in and through
central if less overt sexual politics that are inseparable from her
gender politics.5
In teasing out and identifying the sexual politics that pervade
Gilman’s maternalist racial nationalism, this chapter hopes to in-
vigorate forms of antiracist and antinationalist feminism. It draws
attention to the work of the race/reproduction bind that lies at the
foundation of the type of feminism that Gilman advocated, and the
feminism that seeks to recover her work. For so long as an unself-
reflective portrait of Gilman remains dominant, Gilman’s disturb-
ing ideals will continue to haunt feminist self-conception and pro-
mulgate the mistaken belief that it is possible for a feminism that
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
does not account for the racialization of gender and sexual forma-
tions to be truly liberatory.
Gilman’s Genealogy
On first leafing through the biographies and bibliographies that
record Gilman’s accomplishments, it is easy to comprehend the
designation of this formidable woman as a ‘‘foremother.’’ In the
prime of her life Gilman lectured widely; wrote fiction, poetry, so-
cial analysis, and political polemic; single-handedly produced her
own journal, The Forerunner (1909–16); published eight novels,
171 short stories, nine book-length nonfiction manuscripts; and
was the author of over one thousand essays.6 Gilman was a trans-
atlantic phenomenon with wider geographic cachet. When H. G.
Wells came to the United States Gilman was the one person
with whom he requested a meeting; when she traveled to Eng-
land she was welcomed into Fabian circles. Comparing Gilman
to the famous British luminary, an American editor dubbed her
‘‘the George Bernard Shaw of America, unless we prefer to call
Mr. Shaw the Charlotte Perkins Gilman of England.’’ Women and
Economics, Gilman’s bestseller, was heralded as among the most
groundbreaking philosophical arguments on women’s rights ever
written. William Dean Howells insisted that with it Gilman antici-
pated the radical economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen. The
London Chronicle argued that Gilman’s masterpiece rivaled John
Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women.7 And, not least, Gilman’s writ-
ings were translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Hun-
garian, and Japanese and used as textbooks in a number of college
classrooms. In a eulogy Zona Gale, a colleague, aptly captured the
feeling among period intellectuals: ‘‘In the long, slow development
of our social consciousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has flamed
like a torch. This seems the right simile, for she has burned her
way around the world.’’ 8
If Gilman lived in the limelight for the better part of her life, by
its end she was no longer in its glow. Her numerous works were
out of print, and her contributions were nearly forgotten. Not sat-
isfied to leave her posthumous fame in other hands, in an attempt
to emerge from what has in retrospect proved a fleeting moment of
obscurity, Gilman restarted her autobiography. Aware of a spread-
ing cancer, and of the fact that her first autobiographical musings
had serious shortcomings, Gilman tried to persuade a biographer
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

to do the job of writing her story for her; when she was refused she
was forced back on herself. Though she reworked the manuscript,
finished the proofreading, and selected the photographs and cover,
she did not live to see The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in
print.9 As she heroically professed in a note appended to the book’s
last page, ‘‘When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of un-
avoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights
to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible
one. . . . I have preferred chloroform to cancer.’’ 10
Despite her persistence in recording her life right up to her own
death, Gilman’s meticulously crafted portrait reveals deep ambiva-
lence about writing her story. Lack of enthusiasm for a project that
involved recollection and introspection (as opposed to Gilman’s
favored genres: polemic about the present or vision for the future)
partially explains the final manuscript’s shortcomings. This was
not the sort of book she liked to write; it was not useful in the im-
mediate way that a political manifesto or prescription for a better
world can be. And thus, in a forced effort at least to make her
story exemplary, Gilman produced a strangely lackluster book. As
Gilman’s biographers concur, the book’s ‘‘greatest disappointment
is that it does not have the author’s heart in it’’; ‘‘it has an un-
finished quality’’ and is full of ‘‘self-deceptions’’ and ‘‘purposeful
misreadings.’’ 11
Though it is difficult to disagree with the consensus, the book’s
dearth of literary brilliance and historical accuracy are nonethe-
less compelling. The uncomfortable, self-conscious, and often self-
serving passages that pervade Living can be read against the grain
to reveal ideas about nation and race caught within the maze of
Gilman’s autobiographical maneuvers. As in the birthday passage
with which I began this chapter, in the opening pages of her auto-
biography Gilman announces the heart of her conceptual edifice,
dwelling on the reproduction of highly perfected human beings
and reiterating her belief that racial and national belonging ought
to intersect in the reproduction of citizens. Gilman may not have
been born on ‘‘the glorious fourth,’’ but, she insists, her exemplary
pedigree itself instructs.
Although Gilman’s father had wryly warned her, ‘‘There are a
great many persons between you and the throne and I should not
advise you to look forward to it,’’ at fifteen Gilman defiantly began
an investigation into her forebears.12 In a chapter of Living entitled
‘‘Background’’ she traces in abundant detail her ‘‘extremely remote
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
connection to English royalty.’’ In a volume of American Families of

Royal Descent found in Providence, Rhode Island’s public library,
she claims to have pursued her lineage through ‘‘a bunch of New
Englanders’’ to their relatives in Essex and then to a truly signifi-
cant ancestor, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, son of
Edward III and Phillippa of Hainault, who were in turn descended
from ‘‘that universal progenitor, William the Conqueror.’’ When
in Europe, wherever Gilman casts her gaze she discovers her con-
nection to aristocracy, if not to royalty, never once encountering a
name to which she does not find it fitting to lay claim.
By contrast, when Gilman crosses the Atlantic and shifts her
sights to her American ancestors her approach changes markedly.
On these newer shores her forebears are identified as persons of
‘‘piety and learning,’’ but she cannot be bothered to record their
names ‘‘glutted’’ as she already is ‘‘with [her] list of remote glories’’
(2–3). In America Gilman noticeably limits her claim of filiation
to the previous two generations, to ‘‘the immediate line [of which
she is] really proud . . . the Beecher[s],’’ a family of ‘‘world servers’’
that includes theologian Lyman Beecher, his minister sons, and
Gilman’s great-aunts, author/abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe,
reformer Catherine Beecher, and the less famous but no less civic-
minded Isabella Beecher Hooker. How do we make sense of Gil-
man’s transatlantic heritage and of the divergent approaches taken
to Old and New World relations? How should we interpret the un-
even genealogical sketch that Gilman offers as ‘‘Background’’ to
a life story the unfolding of which she defers until a subsequent
chapter ironically entitled ‘‘Beginnings’’?
In Gilman’s view genealogical background was as important
as life experience. As a reformer committed to social change she
was caught up in period ideas of ‘‘social evolution’’ and, like other
Age of Reform intellectuals, she often conflated these concerns
with those about evolution proper, biological and Darwinian.13 Al-
though there is little doubt that readers are intended to humor will-
ful young Charlotte when she testifies to her delight in discover-
ing her connection to William the Conqueror, it is just as impor-
tant to take Gilman at her word. In recollecting youthful antics she
ensures recognition of her noble roots. In furthering her link to
royalty and empire she situates herself as an inheritor of a legacy
of imperial conquest and assures skeptics that she is of old stock,
an exceptional individual who can lay claim directly to Old World
breeding. No new arrival but a great-grandniece of the revolution,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Gilman is not to be confused with a new immigrant from Asia

or Southern or Eastern Europe. And thus, following other nativ-
ists, she refers to her ‘‘Englishness’’ with paradoxical effect: she
renders her Old World genealogy that of a ‘‘true’’ American. Her
autobiography is useful not only because of the good breeding it
exhibits as a life lived, but also by virtue of the self-proclaimed
good breeding that it proffers as guarantor of her pedigree.14
Maternalist Feminism and ‘‘Race Suicide’’

Recognition of Gilman’s ancestry is not all that her genealogi-
cal narration demands. William the Conqueror was of course also
known as ‘‘William the Bastard,’’ the son of a nobleman and his
consort Arlette (variously known as Herleva or Arlotta), a low-
born daughter of a tanner from whose name the word ‘‘harlot’’
derives.15 It is thus not surprising that Gilman’s sense of pride in
her esteemed lineage coexists with acute anxiety about the accu-
racy of any genealogical claim, such that her assertion of pro-
digious origins mingles with pronounced fear about ‘‘purity’’ of
stock. Far from deceiving herself about the coexistence of contra-
dictory impulses, Gilman foregrounds the conundrum by trans-
forming it into an object lesson: ‘‘Unfortunately, as one learns to
lay out one’s ancestors in concentric circles, doubling the number
with each ring after the simple ‘Father and Mother’ in the first,
glittering lines leading to far off dignitaries shrink to mere isolated
threads, and are overwhelmed by crowding multitudes of ordinary
people—or worse. . . . When we reach the Kings, Edward being in
the seventeenth circle, there are 131,072 ancestors—and only one
King!’’ 16 Recognizing that recovery of ‘‘pure’’ origins is an inher-
ently flawed project, in which definitive connections are detoured
by the confusion imposed by ‘‘crowding multitudes of ordinary
people,’’ Gilman acknowledges that for every king she locates she
might have turned up ‘‘worse.’’ Indeed, Gilman’s anxiety about
the discovery of wayward reproduction was pervasive and long-
standing.17
In a curious genealogical parable written two decades before the
autobiography, Gilman’s fact-based ‘‘Background’’ chapter finds
precedent in fiction. In ‘‘My Ancestors’’ Gilman relates a dream
from the perspective of ‘‘a Captain of Industry of no mean posi-
tion,’’ a new urban bourgeois American who has been ‘‘taught to
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
revere’’ his forefathers and sees himself, as does Gilman, as the

rightful heir to the nation. This narrator, who has a nighttime visi-
tation from a ‘‘Shadowy Huge Form’’ who asks him ‘‘Wouldst
Thou see thine Ancestors?’’ bravely answers in the affirmative.
While Gilman amplifies her genealogical purview with the aid of
an edition of American Families of Royal Descent, her narrator
magically acquires a form of vision that enables him to see in a
‘‘marvelously magnified’’ manner all of the people who radiate for
‘‘mile on mile . . . without limit’’ from the center of a genealogical
web whose most interior point he occupies.
Gilman and her fictional counterpart invoke the same meta-
phor of concentric circles to give form to their genealogical find-
ings. Even though the Captain of Industry discovers a few Kings
amongst the dross, he, like Gilman after him, observes that the
outer rings of the trunk of his family tree are so densely popu-
lated that it is not hyperbolic to state that he bears a connection
to the entire population of the globe. And again, as with Gilman,
this alarms: the people whom he finds are not only ‘‘unfamiliar,’’
but he is ‘‘forced to admit,’’ decidedly ‘‘less desirable.’’ For his
genealogical landscape is comprised of ‘‘that great mass of human
beings,’’ and he is ‘‘shamed to the soul’’ to realize that the re-
moter the region, the greater the likelihood that it is populated
by ‘‘every grade, not only Kings, but slaves. Not only those proud
pure ladies in their ruffs and stomachers, but others not proud, not
ladies—not even pure.’’ 18 As Gilman herself would come to con-
fess, the ‘‘crowding multitudes,’’ the members of the population of
the globe whom she would later designate with the damning adjec-
tive ‘‘worse,’’ rapidly encroach. But to exactly whom do Gilman
and her fictional predecessor allude?
Where Gilman’s autobiography vaguely invokes the specter of
genealogical misfortune the narrator of ‘‘My Ancestors’’ forges on
unabashed. Embellishing and thus giving form to the purported
misalliances that he locates, the Captain of Industry emerges as the
more reliable narrator; in moving beyond the metaphoric language
of concentric circles, webs, tapestries, and fine threads he names
the knots or crossings of fibers, the illicit points of contact that
corrupt his genealogy. While in Gilman’s ‘‘Background’’ chapter
the Beechers alone comprise ‘‘the beaded fringe,’’ in ‘‘My Ances-
tors’’ the narrator admits that his own ‘‘beaded fringe of modern
dignitaries seemed but the merest edge on the border of civiliza-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

tion . . . [a] border that narrowed momently in contrast to the long,

dark web of life behind.’’ (75) As he elaborates, ‘‘Mixtures of race,
I found, scarce any in the world not represented. . . . [T]here was
a Spanish ancestor, a Moorish ancestor . . . with darkening skin
and thickening lip—a Nubian line. In my veins ran the blood of
Ethiopia! Strange cousins had I, Javanese and Jew, Russian, Mon-
golian—there was no limit to their range in race’’ (74).
Needless to say, the relations identified are not randomly se-
lected. From 1890 to 1930—during the years Gilman was active
as a writer, journalist, and women’s rights advocate—the United
States entered a period of unprecedented expansion of its immi-
grant, foreign-born population, a situation that incurred wide-
spread concern about the birthrate of ‘‘white’’ Anglo-Saxons and
an accompanying intensification of anti-immigrant animus. Start-
ing in the 1880s debates over immigration, deportation of for-
eigners, implementation of restrictive immigration legislation, and
demographic changes in the population shaped the national scene
as it responded to outbursts of intense anti-immigrant violence and
the extensive transformation of labor markets and urban centers.19
In 1891, just after Gilman began writing, Francis Amasa Walker,
an outspoken restrictionist, compiled the first comprehensive sta-
tistical case documenting what came to be known as ‘‘race sui-
cide.’’ What Walker observed was the beginning of a discrepancy
between the birthrates among newly arrived immigrants and ‘‘old
stock Americans,’’ which led him to conclude that there was a di-
rect correlation between immigration from abroad and the fall-
ing birthrate among the native born.20 In Poverty, published nearly
fifteen years later, Robert Hunter expressed an extreme and in-
creasingly popular conclusion: one kind of people, those hastily
lumped together by Gilman with the catch-all adjective ‘‘worse,’’
were replacing the ‘‘better’’ kind of people, who, in a paradoxical
twist in the term’s meaning, came to refer to themselves as ‘‘Native
Americans.’’ By 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt condemned the
trend toward smaller native families as a sign of national deca-
dence and moral decay, the discourse of ‘‘race suicide’’ had reached
its apogee.21
The term ‘‘race suicide,’’ although popularized by Walker, was
coined by E. A. Ross, a prominent sociologist with whom Gilman
conducted a life-long correspondence and on whom she relied
to supply her with the readings that kept her abreast of debates
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
within the social sciences.22 In his influential essay ‘‘The Causes

of Race Superiority,’’ Ross details the various human personality
traits that he regards as ‘‘race traits.’’ ‘‘Climatic adaptability’’ is
not common to Anglo-Saxons, he argues, a fact that has rendered
them poor colonists of geographic regions plagued by fever, heat,
and tropical weather. This said, Caucasians are a race of such
high ‘‘energy’’ that they are perfectly suited to the pursuit of colo-
nizing temperate zones and expanding westward into the Ameri-
can wilderness. Indeed such energy, ‘‘stimulated to the utmost by
democracy,’’ has the added advantage of ensuring ‘‘self-reliance,’’
as is evident in the exemplary case of Daniel Boone, not to mention
Ralph Waldo Emerson. In sum, so-called racial traits are worth
possessing if they are Anglo-Saxon, undesirable if characteristic of
‘‘lesser races,’’ and arguably a ‘‘function of association’’ rather than
‘‘race’’ if desirable but uncommon among whites.
Ross’s purpose in writing his essay, first addressed to the Ameri-
can Academy of Political and Social Science, was not simply
to catalogue the ‘‘superior racial’’ heritage bequeathed to ‘‘true
Americans’’ but also to urge whites to preserve these traits for
posterity:
The superiority of a race cannot be preserved without pride of
blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races.
In Spanish America the easy going and unfastidious Spaniard
peopled the continent with half-breeds and met the natives half
way in respect to religious and political institutions. . . . In
North America, on the other hand, the white men have rarely
mingled their blood with that of the Indian or toned down their
civilization to meet his capacities. . . . [T]he net result is that
North America from the Behring Sea [sic] to the Rio Grande
is dedicated to the highest type of civilization; while for cen-
turies the rest of our hemisphere will drag the ball and chain of
hybridism.
In Ross’s view the situation still bade well. Anglo-Saxons had not
yet degenerated; Indian extermination had been a ‘‘success,’’ and
thus interbreeding of Anglo-Saxon ‘‘Natives’’ and Native Ameri-
cans was negligible. Silence on the issue of African Americans sug-
gests that in Ross’s mind black/white and black/red mixing were
either unspeakable and/or so successfully repressed that they did
not trouble his reasoning. And yet, for all his rationalizations,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Ross’s ideally ‘‘pure’’ national genealogy was haunted by the spec-

ter of reproductive mayhem. He played on fears of ‘‘Yellow Peril’’
as he built the case for impending doom: ‘‘Asiatics flock to this
country and, enjoying equal opportunities under our laws, learn
our methods and compete actively with Americans . . . but if their
standard of life is only half as high . . . the Asiatic will rear two
children while his competitor feels able to rear but one.’’
Reproductive competition, Ross argued, could have but three
possible results: The American might lower his standard of life
to match that of the Asiatic; the Asiatic might raise his standard
and thus halt his rapid increase; or—and this is the scenario that is
heralded and feared—the Asiatic (referred to at this point as ‘‘the
Chinese’’) may refuse to assimilate, thereby causing Anglo-Saxons
to ‘‘wither away before the heavy influx of a prolific race from
the Orient.’’ 23 Although Ross did not advance policy recommen-
dations, the implications of his essay are transparent: immigration
of unassimilable elements must cease; meanwhile, Anglo-Saxons
must reproduce a racially superior nation with haste.
Gilman’s ideas about genealogy should be situated within the
context of the larger debates among the nativists and restriction-
ists with whom she was in dialogue, especially Ross. Although
her writings on immigration were not as popular as were his or
those written by other well-known figures—for example, Madison
Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stod-
dard’s The Rising Tide of Color, against White World-Supremacy
(1920)—she elaborates closely related prejudices and employs sty-
listically similar forms. In a 1923 polemic, ‘‘Is America Too Hospi-
table?’’ Gilman states that ‘‘there is a question [that is] sneeringly
asked by the stranger within our gates: ‘What is an American?’ ’’
In crafting an answer to this query, first posed by the Frenchman
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Gilman reveals her narrow re-
strictionist vision:24 ‘‘The American who knows he is one but has
never thought of defining himself . . . is rather perplexed by the ques-
tion [what is an American? For to this person] a simple answer is
suggested: ‘Americans are the kind of people who make a nation
which every other nation wants to get into.’ ’’ Gilman’s hostility
escalates as she continues:
Our swarming immigrants do not wish for a wilderness, nor
for [savage] enemies. They like an established nation, with free
education, free hospitals, free nursing, and more remunerative
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
employment than they can find at home. . . . The amazing thing

is the cheerful willingness with which the American people are
giving up their country to other people, so rapidly that they
are already reduced to scant half of the population. No one is
to blame but ourselves. The noble spirit of our founders, and
their complete ignorance of sociology began the trouble. Con-
sequently they announced, with more than royal magnificence,
that this country was ‘‘an asylum for the poor and oppressed of
all nations.’’
Initially Gilman insists that true Americans need not countenance
the self-evident ontological question, but she then proceeds to
contradict herself. The founding fathers—the most American of
Americans—were unable to envisage a strategy for keeping Ameri-
cans American because they were unable to comprehend that not
all people were assimilable. Baldly placing herself in a line of direct
descent from the founding fathers Gilman claims that Americans
have no one to blame for the immigrant influx save themselves,
for it is ‘‘we’’ who have been shortsighted in the sacrifice of ‘‘the
good of the country to private profit,’’ a sacrifice that has required
the scouring of Europe for cheap labor and ‘‘the resultant flood of
low-grade humanity.’’
If it appears that Gilman is primarily troubled by the influx of
foreign labor and the greed of private enterprise, the genealogi-
cal and reproductive issues constitutive of her nativism quickly
surface: ‘‘We [Americans] used fondly to take for granted that
the incoming millions loved the country as we did. . . . Some of
them do. Enormous numbers do not. It is quite true that we our-
selves are a mixed race—as are all races today—and that we were
once immigrants. All Americans have come from somewhere else.
But all persons who come from somewhere else are not therefore
Americans. The American blend is from a few closely connected
races.’’ 25 With predictable precision Gilman identifies those who
comprise the particular blend that engenders the ‘‘true American’’
and naturalizes it. Taking cues from Ross she avers, ‘‘the Eurasian
mixture is generally considered unfortunate by most observers’’;
among ‘‘European races some seem to mate with better results
than others . . . [for] where there is a complete and long-standing
mongrelization . . . the result is not an improved stock.’’ Asians
and Southern and Eastern European immigrants appear to pose
the greatest threat, for ‘‘the American People, as a racial stock are
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

mainly of English descent, mingled with the closely allied Teutonic

and Scandinavian strains’’ (291–93). All other mixtures, Gilman
concedes, are patently disastrous.26
In hierarchizing various kinds of ‘‘mixture,’’ Gilman attacks the
idea of the American ‘‘melting pot.’’ This ‘‘misplaced metaphor,’’
as she calls it, stands for the indiscriminate blending of races.
Far from agreeing with the liberal benevolence of contemporaries
Horace Kallen or Israel Zangwill, Gilman argues that the melting
pot is a ‘‘crucible . . . [that] has to be carefully made of special ma-
terial and carefully filled with weighted measured proportions of
such ores as will combine to produce known results.’’ If one is too
shortsighted—by implication, as are proimmigrant reformers and
founding fathers alike—and ‘‘put into a melting pot promiscuous
shovelfuls of anything that comes in handy, you do not get out of it
anything of value, and you may break the pot’’ (291).27 Transpos-
ing this thought into sexually charged and scientifically authorita-
tive language, Gilman pinpoints the specter of reproductive chaos:
‘‘since genus Homo is one species, it is physically possible for all
races to interbreed, but not therefore desirable. . . . We are per-
fectly familiar in this country with the various blends of black and
white and the wisest of both races prefer pure stock.’’ 28
In specifying ‘‘mixture’’ of black and white as a familiar index
case Gilman imbricates the discourse of ‘‘race suicide’’ with a
long-standing discourse about black/white miscegenation. Nearly
fifteen years prior to writing ‘‘Is America Too Hospitable?’’ she
elaborates this connection in an essay that specifically treats the
question of the entry of freemen and freewomen into the nation
after Reconstruction. In ‘‘A Suggestion on the Negro Problem’’
she focuses her anxiety on the ‘‘transfusion of blood . . . [and]
civilization’’ that has occurred and laments, ‘‘if we had left them
[Negroes] alone in their own country [the] dissimilarity and in-
feriority [of the Negro] would be, so to speak, none of our busi-
ness.’’ 29 However, because ‘‘we’’ (Anglo-Saxon Americans) are at
‘‘fault’’ in producing the current state of affairs, ‘‘we’’ are obliged
to solve the dilemma. By contrast to immigrants who could be di-
rectly prohibited entrance into United States, Gilman felt it neces-
sary to claim responsibility for the black population. And yet, even
as she waived her impulse to restrict residence for former slaves
and their descendents, her overriding concern with reproductive
control of immigrants and reproductive control of freedwomen
and freedmen converged.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Offering nothing less than a proposal for internal colonization,

Gilman built on Thomas Jefferson’s schema as set forth in Notes
on the State of Virginia. In ‘‘Query XIV: Laws,’’ Jefferson proffered
a three-part plan for the treatment of blacks after emancipation,
the first of which prefigures Gilman’s argument. Motivated by fear
of revenge for the myriad injustices of slavery, Jefferson hoped to
stave off civil war by colonizing ‘‘all formerly enslaved blacks as
the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending
them out with arms, implements of household and of the handi-
craft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &C’’ and
then extending protection to them until such time as they might
be removed from America and replaced ‘‘with an equal number
of white inhabitants.’’ Jefferson’s proposal of internal coloniza-
tion, exportation, and eventual population replacement was not
driven solely by fear of black rage and belief in black inferiority
but also by anxiety about black/white miscegenation—an anxiety
no doubt catalyzed by reflection on his personal desires, sexual
habits, and abuses. In the closing sentences of his query Jefferson’s
terror of a ‘‘mixed’’ national body commands his reason. Compar-
ing (white) Roman slaves and (black) American slaves he writes:
‘‘Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The
slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood
of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to his-
tory. When freed, [the American slave] is to be removed beyond
the reach of mixture.’’ 30 Jefferson imagined an end to the ‘‘stain-
ing’’ of the ‘‘master’’ race’s ‘‘blood’’ through containment and re-
productive control of the black population.
The continuities and discontinuities between Jefferson’s and
Gilman’s formulations are instructive. Gilman’s ideas resonate
with Jefferson’s insofar as she too hoped to refine the genealogi-
cal inheritance of the nation by keeping apart blacks and whites.
And yet Gilman’s argument, written more than a century later,
contravenes Jefferson’s insofar as it manifests all the trappings of
a specifically nineteenth-century reform-minded approach to the
possibilities of ‘‘Americanization’’ and ‘‘racial uplift.’’ As Gilman
observed in typical Progressive fashion, since ‘‘the Negro . . .
does not suit us as he is . . . [we ask] what can we do to im-
prove him.’’ For ‘‘if the Negro population can become entirely self-
supporting and well behaved it ceases to be a ‘problem’ and a
menace . . . [thus] at last the suggestion: Let each sovereign state
carefully organize in every county and township an enlisted body
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

of all Negroes’’ so that they may be educated to become ‘‘true

Americans.’’ 31
Gilman’s plan involved separation, but not deportation, and
was apparently distinguished from slavery by its label: ‘‘enlist-
ment.’’ However, even with a new moniker it is abundantly clear
that the work that the enlisted ‘‘Negro’’ army of labor is expected
to perform is that of former slaves. As Gilman specified, the ‘‘en-
listed Negroes’’ are to be placed on farms producing sustenance for
entire communities; they are to cultivate cotton (because ‘‘Negroes
are particularly suited to this kind of agriculture’’); and they are
to make themselves useful to the (white) nation by building roads,
harbors, and river banks—that is, by ensuring the ‘‘general devel-
opment’’ of ‘‘the whole South’’ (81). Once converted into the pro-
ductive bodies that they were when enslaved and thus more effec-
tively managed, the enlisted will be allowed to rejoin American
society. Accordingly Americanization will not be achieved through
escape from the bonds of slavery or the purchase of freedom but
through indoctrination through the labor process, such that ‘‘every
Negro . . . [may become] better fitted to take his place in the com-
munity’’ (82). Lest white nationals continue to deem a particular
individual burdensome, Gilman reassures that ‘‘degenerates and
criminals’’—the uneducable and un-Americanizable—will be kept
under ‘‘wise [state] supervision,’’ and safely outside of the repro-
ductive pool (83).32
Yet a third essay concerned with new arrivals from Southern
and Eastern Europe combines the ideas Gilman has already set
forth about freedmen and immigrants. In ‘‘Immigration, Impor-
tation, and Our Fathers’’ she proposes ‘‘national training schools
of citizenship [that] all immigrants must pass through’’ in order
to become self-supporting. The population control features of this
unabashed plan for internal colonization and eventual American-
ization are again glaring. Unworthy immigrants are to be physi-
cally separated from ‘‘native stock’’ Americans until such time as
they are transformed into ‘‘true Americans’’ who can safely inter-
mingle with the larger population; for as Gilman points out, un-
controlled ‘‘grafting upon’’ the nation of foreigners can only pro-
duce catastrophe: ‘‘When a nation changes by reason of the natural
growth of its people, that is one thing; when it changes by the
grafting upon it of an artificial growth of other people that is an-
other. . . . No nation has ever laid itself open to as great and rapid
admixture of alien blood as has this nation. . . . A ‘too easy’ na-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
tion may be exploited like a too easy individual. . . . The evil of our
‘watered stock,’ our artificially distended citizenship, lies mostly at
our own door.’’ 33 The existence of ‘‘aliens’’ within the nation’s bor-
ders lures the ‘‘promiscuous’’ citizens of America into the sexual
unions that soil the national fabric. No matter which undesirable
group she pondered, Gilman’s nation-building project was consis-
tently pursued through containment of the population and control
of the reproductive misalliances that threatened to water down the
‘‘pure’’ national genealogy.
Herland and Racial Nationalism

With few exceptions, scholars who treat Gilman’s racism and
nativism have focused on her nonfiction. They have turned to the
essays and articles discussed in the previous section of this chap-
ter and to similar writings and exposed their bigotry and racial
animus.34 By contrast, those who have worked to reclaim Gilman
for feminism have focused on her fiction, particularly her uto-
pian novel Herland and her heavily canonized novella ‘‘The Yel-
low Wallpaper.’’ This second group has tended to view Gilman’s
imaginative work as free of the difficulties that beset her polemical
social commentaries, and thus a bifurcation in the scholarship has
emerged: those who treat fictional texts regard Gilman’s racism
and nationalism as separable from her fiction or as marginal to its
principal preoccupations, while those who focus on her racial and
nationalist politics (generally cultural historians and social scien-
tists) are critical of the same documents that are regarded as un-
important, even aberrational, by the dominant group of literary
scholars. Significantly, these divergent scholarly tendencies cannot
simply be understood as generational—rather, ‘‘Gilman hagiogra-
phy’’ is a historically continuous formation that links early second-
wave recovery projects to those advanced by a new cohort of schol-
ars who are interested in expanding the Gilman canon beyond
those texts that have become, at this point, quite well known.
In her introduction to The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, a
watershed collection of fiction that was first published in 1980,
Ann J. Lane instructively justifies her editorial choices: ‘‘Gilman
voiced opinions that are racist, chauvinistic, and anti-Semitic. The
decision to exclude selections . . . that would illustrate these ideas
flowed not from a decision to hide that side of her thought but
from the belief that her valuable ideas [those exhibited in the an-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

thologized fiction] better deserve remembering and repeating.’’ 35

Following in Lane’s footsteps, an editor of a 1997 edition of the
science-fictional sequel to Herland asks rhetorically, ‘‘Shall we
vilify With Her in Ourland because it contains a few (and it really
is only a few) ethnocentric lapses? I think not. . . . Gilman’s social
critiques . . . are original and powerful. They remain cogent and
surprisingly contemporary.’’ 36 Mary Jo Deegan, like Lane almost
twenty years earlier, sidelines aspects of Gilman’s thought that are
distasteful and difficult to assimilate. Effectively both editors pre-
serve Gilman’s privileged place within the feminism they practice,
while in the process purifying the genealogy of feminism that their
scholarly editions implicitly promote. Of course, the difficulty that
emerges when Gilman’s ‘‘good’’ fictional texts are hived off from
her ‘‘bad’’ polemics, and the racial nationalism that dynamizes her
thinking is regarded as a ‘‘lapse,’’ is that critical assessment of
the connections between Gilman’s fiction and nonfiction—noth-
ing less than a well-rounded account of the conceptual continuities
that cut across Gilman’s philosophical edifice—becomes impos-
sible to generate.
The three remaining sections of this chapter reconvene Gil-
man’s fiction and nonfiction through an analysis of Herland that
reads this often celebrated novel through the lens of the nonfiction
already discussed. Through this juxtaposition I demonstrate that
Gilman’s utopia and her nonfiction are together driven by fears of
racial mixture that neatly coincide with the discourse of ‘‘race sui-
cide.’’ For Gilman the novelist was a nativist who grounded the
maternalist feminism that she depicted in her fiction in a eugenic
politics in which women are cast as the primary agents of racial
‘‘purity,’’ superiority, and nationalism.
Unlike American mothers, Herlandian mothers produce per-
fect citizens modeled on themselves. In stark contrast to ‘‘the
crowding multitudes’’ that pollute the United States as they popu-
late it, Herlanders carefully render the national populace: all Her-
landian citizens are females whose timely births are genetically re-
fined. In Herland all reproduction is parthenogenic and thus free
of the ‘‘misplay’’ that Gilman elsewhere lamented. As Herlanders
explain, they have cultivated reproduction in all its myriad forms;
not only do they ‘‘make the best kind of people’’ but they success-
fully expand motherhood into an ethic that saturates their religion,
agriculture, government, education, and science—not to mention
their collective consciousness of themselves as a people (59).
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
The account of Herlandian mother culture is provided by the

narrator Van Dyke Jennings, a sociologist and a member of a three-
man team that has set out to discover a society thought to be
peopled by female ‘‘savages.’’ Wending their way downriver by
boat, flying over the stony precipice that separates Herland from
the surrounding forest, the explorers eventually arrive at their des-
tination. Almost as soon as they set down, however, hopes are
dashed. Far from finding themselves prized as ‘‘valuable American
Citizens,’’ virile men desired by (hetero)sex-starved women, they
are captured and treated as intruders who must be carefully sur-
veyed and disciplined. In the captivity narrative that unfolds, the
men gradually, if somewhat begrudgingly, acquire the Herlandian
language, accumulate knowledge of Herlandian customs, govern-
ment, and industry, and discover, through detailed if often uncom-
fortable comparison, just how superior to their own land is the
nation of mothers.
Within Gilman’s fictional logic, Herland’s unique gender demo-
graphic emerges over two thousand years, through a process in
which Herlanders transform their formerly polygamous, slave-
holding, and heterosexual society into a modern nation of women
severed from contact with the ‘‘bisexual races’’ of the globe. As
Van Dyke (referred to within the narrative as Van) explains, the
Herlandian nation is the outcome of a succession of ‘‘historic mis-
fortunes.’’ First, the original population, decimated by war, was
driven inland; a volcanic eruption filled in the pass connecting
Herland to the rest of the world; all males were killed defending
themselves from ‘‘savage’’ invaders; and, finally, the survivors of
these onslaughts were seized in a slave revolt in which the remain-
ing women and girls became prey to their racially inferior con-
querors. Evincing the gusto of latter-day Herlanders, these ‘‘in-
furiated virgins’’ came together to resist their fate as sexual booty.
Successfully killing off their ‘‘brutal conquerors,’’ they went on to
build an exclusively female world that was saved from extinction
by a divine intervention that rendered first one woman, and then
all succeeding generations, spontaneously reproductive.
Ultimately, Herland is distinguished from other nations by the
singular fact that all Herlanders are descended from one mother,
a situation that has resulted from Herlanders’ collective bravery,
their refusal to be conquered by men of the slave caste—quite
bluntly, their refusal to engage in interracial reproductive sex.
As Gilman reiterates, these ‘‘willful virgins’’ are ‘‘New Women,’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

‘‘One family, all descended from one mother, who alone founded
a new race . . . of ultra-women, inheriting only from women’’
(57). Should there by any doubt, Gilman confirms that these ‘‘ultra-
women’’ are ‘‘Aryan,’’ truly ‘‘white’’ even if they appear ‘‘some-
what darker than our Northern races because of their constant ex-
posure to sun and air’’ (54). Crafted in the image of her proposed
Americanization colonies, Herland too keeps reproductive ‘‘mis-
play’’ in check by making all reproduction parthenogenic, and
thus effectively getting rid of heterosexuality.
Throughout Herland the ethos of purified reproduction is de-
scribed in nationalist terms and Herlandian maternalism trans-
lated directly into racial nationalism. As Van admiringly attests,
in this utopia there is no ‘‘struggle for existence . . . [resulting in
an] everlasting writhing mass of underbred people trying to get
ahead of one another . . . [a] hopeless substratum of paupers and
degenerates’’; instead, Herlanders convene in council and exercise
‘‘mother-will,’’ carefully selecting those citizens most fit to repro-
duce. Herlanders are ‘‘Conscious Makers of People’’ because with
them ‘‘Mother-love . . . [is] not a brute passion, mere ‘instinct,’
a wholly personal feeling . . .[but is instead]—a religion . . . that
include[s] a limitless feeling of sisterhood, that wide unity of ser-
vice’’ that is, as Van concludes in a flurry of enthusiasm, ‘‘Na-
tional, Racial, [and] Human’’ all at once (69). The ‘‘pure’’ national
genealogy and the unpolluted pedigree of each Herlandian citizen
renders filiation, kinship, and shared genealogy dominant ideolo-
gies in Herland. Herlanders are of ‘‘one family’’ descended from
‘‘one mother,’’ and thus the national genealogy that binds them
is biologically verifiable. Whereas the imagined national commu-
nity, as discussed in the previous chapter, binds members to one
another through the invention of the fiction of a common heri-
tage, in Herland citizens are actual comothers and sisters. Each
has a first name but instructively Herlanders have no need for
family names, as individual and national kin groups are coex-
tensive.
The shared maternal origin of Herlanders has the additional
merit of making nationals into perfectly abstractable citizen-sub-
jects. As one patriot attests, ‘‘Each one of us has our exact line of
descent all the way back to our dear First mother’’ (75). Each Her-
lander’s genealogy is equally ‘‘pure,’’ traceable to the same point
of origin, as well as to the universally shared history that emanates
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
from it. In Herland the Enlightenment ideal of ‘‘universal brother-

hood’’ has been replaced with a realized ‘‘universal sisterhood.’’
And although the male intruders find the idea ‘‘hard to credit,’’
they eventually convert to the Herlandian value system—which is,
after all, a perfected version of their own. Comparing mothers in
the United States and Herland, Van attests,
They loved their country because it was their nursery, play-
ground, and workshop—theirs and their children’s. . . . From
those first breathlessly guarded, half-adored race mothers, all
up the ascending line, they had this dominant thought of build-
ing up a great race through the children. All the surrendering
devotion our women have put into their private families, these
women put into their country and race. . . . The mother instinct,
with us so painfully intense, so thwarted by conditions, so con-
centrated in personal devotion to a few . . . all this feeling with
them flowed out in a strong wide current, unbroken through
the generations, deepening and widening through the years, in-
cluding every child in all the land. (94–95)
Writing Feminist Genealogy

With few exceptions in the decades since Herland’s republication
in 1979 scholars have viewed the utopia depicted as subversive of
entrenched patriarchal views and as a prototype for a society free
of sexism. Through analyses of the novel’s portrait of women as
intelligent, scientific, educable, physically capable, and politically
savvy, readers have agreed that Herland explodes existing gender
relations and models an alternative woman-centered community.37
As one critic explains, Gilman performs ‘‘a radical inversion of the
traditional male stance. . . . [T]he masters become the mastered,
the powerful become the helpless, and the unbending oaks become
the clinging vines.’’ By satirically revealing male culture as less civi-
lized than Herlandian culture, another adds, Gilman proffers a
‘‘blueprint’’ for a society that reverses gendered power structures
and sustains a feminist riposte to patriarchy. Yet a third argues that
Herland projects ‘‘mythic female representations that alert women
readers to other possibilities—that stretch our imaginations and
make us see the world we live in (and ourselves) differently.’’ 38
Indeed, the majority of scholars insist that Herland has stretched
feminist thinking and inspired everything from early feminist film
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

(particularly melodrama) to radical feminist theory (Mary Daly,

Shulamith Firestone), to feminist poetry (Adrienne Rich), to alter-
native feminist prose and philosophy (Monique Wittig, Luce Iri-
garay, Julia Kristeva), to ecofeminism—not to mention the entire
range of feminist science fiction.39
In part, this dominant approach to Herland is a by-product
of second-wave publishing efforts and successes. After ‘‘The Yel-
low Wallpaper’’ was reprinted in 1969, Women and Economics in
1968, and Herland nearly a decade later—that is, after Gilman had
been fully rediscovered and her work amply recovered—her uto-
pian fiction became a standard text in women’s studies and U.S.
literature courses and was seemingly written about as often as it
was taught. There is certainly nothing wrong with canonizing Her-
land, or for that matter any of Gilman’s writings (this is a project
in which I participate through my focus on Gilman); rather, at
issue are the enduring problems that have been generated as an
adjunct to the rediscovery and recovery of Gilman’s novel. For, de-
spite Gilman’s maternalist racial nationalism, most critics writing
in the 1980s and 1990s have elected to nostalgically look back to
Gilman’s utopia as a desirable antecedent of and prelude to their
feminism.
Although the problems that pervade the dominant approach
to Herland may be found in any number of articles and essays,
several treat Gilman’s novel in a paradigmatic manner that re-
veals the criticism’s pressing structural problem—the erasure of
the race/reproduction bind that subtends Gilman’s thought. For
when we read Herland as a ‘‘blueprint’’ for contemporary femi-
nism and install Gilman as a worthy heroine awaiting recovery, we
erase the historicity of Gilman’s novel. My aim in briefly analyz-
ing the work of several prominent feminist treatments of Herland
is thus neither to condemn nor to dismiss the work of particular
scholars but rather to sketch the contours and indicate the cost of
the compounded problem of the retention of the genealogical con-
cerns that obsessed Gilman (maternalist racial nationalism), and
the related inattention to Gilman’s sexual politics.
Val Gough’s argument in ‘‘Lesbians and Virgins: The New
Motherhood in Herland’’ is illustrative of the critical dilemma, if
in no way uniquely so. According to Gough, Gilman created her
utopia to negotiate two parallel impulses: ‘‘her private lesbian fan-
tasies of female nurturance, and her public belief in the potential
transformation of heterosexual social structures. . . . Herland is
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
thus both a fictional fantasy of utopian lesbian motherhood, and a

stunning critique of the hetero-patriarchal social structures used
in the service of her other utopian ideal, the ‘fully human’ hetero-
sexual subject.’’
Although, as I discuss shortly, assessment of Gilman’s ideas
about sexuality is urgent, Gough’s conceptions of ‘‘utopian les-
bian motherhood’’ and ‘‘fully human heterosexual’’ subjectivity
are not germane to Gilman’s historical moment, nor do such con-
ceptions allow for sustained attention on the historically deter-
mined figurations of sexuality in Herland. As Gough explains, the
‘‘ ‘fully human’ heterosexual subject’’ she has in mind is feminist
philosopher Marilyn Frye’s ‘‘willful virgin’’—she who can ‘‘fuck
without losing [her] virginity, because virginity is not organized
in relation to penile penetration, but in relation to women’s larger
sexual freedom.’’ In turn, the ‘‘private lesbian fantasies’’ she men-
tions are equated with Sonya Andermahr’s and Adrienne Rich’s
dated notions of ‘‘Woman Culture’’: Herlanders, Gough notes,
are ‘‘lesbians as conceived by the utopian separatist lesbianism
of the late 1970s, which stressed the collectivity of lesbian iden-
tity and perceived women’s needs as nurturance and interrelat-
edness.’’ 40 In short, Gough grounds her interpretation of Gilman
in a retrospective projection onto Herland of a gender-focused
and sex-phobic feminism that had its heyday in the 1970s, not
1914. In so doing she eclipses Gilman’s genealogical concerns,
and more importantly the sexual politics that undergird Herland’s
racial nationalism.
The difficulties that beset historically decontextualized analy-
sis are exacerbated in readings of Herland in which the colonial
metaphor at work throughout the novel is read as the lens through
which to interpret Gilman’s commentary on patriarchy. Typically,
scholars who advance this interpretation argue that in ‘‘depicting
the aggressive penetration of the separatist space of Herland by
three male ‘explorers,’ Gilman dramatizes the way in which female
space is always under threat from masculinist colonization.’’ As
one makes plain, in Herland ‘‘the colonizers are colonized, the ex-
plorers explored.’’ 41 Such scholarship, focused on gender rever-
sals, enacts a transformation of colonization into a metaphor for
patriarchy. It erases race from the colonial drama, and, insofar as
this drama concerns itself with sexuality, it erases the links be-
tween race and sex that are also constitutive of Gilman’s thinking.
In the numerous interpretations of Gilman’s description of first
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

contact between Herlanders and the male intruders this problem is

starkly revealed. I quote at length from, and then deconstruct, the
passage to which other critics have turned in order to demonstrate
the problem with its reception.
When the American explorers spot three Herlanders in a large
tree and pursue them, they are quickly outmaneuvered. Van nar-
rates the scene as follows: ‘‘We saw short hair, hatless, loose, and
shining; a suit of some light firm stuff, the closest of tunics and
knee breeches, met by trim gaiters. As bright and smooth as par-
rots and as unaware of danger, they swung there before us, wholly
at ease, staring as we stared, till first one, and then all of them
burst into peals of delighted laughter. . . . [T]hen there was a tor-
rent of soft talk tossed back and forth, no savage sing-song, but
clear musical fluent speech’’ (15). Names are exchanged, and Van
shifts his focus to his companion, the womanizer Terry, who urges
his friends to not just ‘‘sit [t]here and learn the language,’’ but to
employ ‘‘the bait’’ with which they have come prepared to catch
their prey. After he produces from his pocket a box of purple vel-
vet out of which he draws ‘‘a necklace of big varicolored stones
that would have been worth a million if real,’’ the ensuing scene
unfolds:
[Terry] reached far out along the bough, but not quite to his full
stretch. . . . [One of the Herlanders] was visibly moved . . . [and]
softly and slowly, she drew nearer. . . . Her eyes were splen-
did, wide, fearless, as free from suspicion as a child’s. . . . Her
interest was more that of an intent boy playing a fascinating
game than of a girl lured by an ornament. . . . Terry’s smile was
irreproachable. . . . [He] was like a creature about to spring.
[It was clear what would happen]—the dropped necklace, the
sudden clutching hand, the girl’s sharp cry as he seized her and
drew her in. But it didn’t happen. She made a timid reach with
her right hand for the gay swinging thing—he held it a little
nearer—then, swift as light, she seized it from him with her left,
and dropped on the instant to the bough below. (16–17)
In the first part of the passage, the women sport short hair, tunics,
knee breeches, and gaiters and are arrayed in bright colors that give
them the appearance of tropical birds. In this defeminized, animal-
ized, and exoticized state Herlanders are implicitly associated with
period stereotypes of so-called savages. Gilman, however, distin-
guishes them from their inferiors by noting that their talk is ‘‘musi-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
cal and fluent,’’ no ‘‘savage sing-song.’’ To make her point resound-

ingly, she puts Herlanders to the litmus test of ‘‘savagery’’ a second
time. When the men attempt to seduce the ‘‘natives’’ with cheap
ornaments, this time with gaudy scarves proffered to Herlandian
elders, their gifts are accepted graciously by the so-called colo-
nels. Ironically, along with the glittering beads, these offerings are
placed in the Herlandian museum. Though the men had planned
on displaying in the United States the shred of Herlandian fabric
that they had found and used to locate Herland, through a clever
reversal the material objects of the men’s world are deemed ‘‘un-
civilized.’’ Their trinkets are placed on display, as it is these arti-
facts of the ‘‘savage,’’ ‘‘bisexual’’ world that deserve study under
the Herlandian microscope.42
In the dominant reading of this scene scholars argue that Gil-
man subverts the expectations of male explorers and unwitting
readers by representing Herlanders as exceedingly ‘‘advanced’’ and
highly ‘‘civilized.’’ As one critic explains, ‘‘the supposedly superior
sex becomes the inferior or disadvantaged.’’ The three men have
deeply ‘‘mistaken notions about the country they are entering and
inappropriate strategies for dealing with the natives,’’ who are ulti-
mately ‘‘too intelligent and disinterested to be bribed by baubles.’’
As another critic agrees, the first-contact scene ripples ‘‘with satire
on the Eden myth. . . . [F]emale agility counterpoints and de-
feats the knowledge, temptations, and ‘advances’ of masculine ex-
ploit. . . . As they avoid possession, the women stay enigmatic, just
out of reach. . . . [The] men ‘advance’ into Herland but make failed
advances at the women; the men’s ‘enterprise’ . . . [is] hardly natu-
ral; their ‘venture’ for profits and spoils is, as the prelude to the
ad-venture, frustrated.’’ 43
Such treatments suggest that Gilman challenged the colonial
enterprise by challenging patriarchy. And yet, in posing the issue
in this way, critics unintentionally elide the racial dynamics of the
colonial drama that they have identified. Instructively, readers of
Gilman’s first contact scene do not connect the conquest depicted
to the history of U.S. imperialism, including the Spanish-American
War, the wresting of borderlands from Mexico, the annexation of
Texas, Oregon, and California, not to mention U.S. interventions
in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i—all events
Gilman surely knew about or witnessed. Consequently, the scene
of first contact exists within the scholarship as if it were unscripted
by the legacy of U.S. imperialism, as if both colonialism and im-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

perialism were merely metaphors for patriarchy, metaphors whose

specific histories are obscured by the failure to distinguish the
project of feminine liberation from that of masculine colonial and
imperial conquest.
Although Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have perhaps be-
come in recent years easy targets for a new generation of femi-
nists seeking to expose feminist racism, in order to extend my
observations about the politics of Gilman’s inversion of colonial
power dynamics, I turn to two companion pieces by the pair who
have together exerted a disproportionate influence on the shape of
feminist literary criticism not only in the 1970s but in subsequent
decades.44 In ‘‘Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness’’ Gilbert ar-
gues that She, Haggard’s popular children’s adventure novel about
a powerful African female demigod who attempts to thwart the
colonial aspirations of a group of male explorers, is best under-
stood as a negotiation (and neutralization) of the ‘‘power of the
female sex’’ that obsessed male writers in the metropoles of Eng-
land and France at the height of colonial expansion.45 Invoking
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Gilbert weaves a comparison
between the protagonist’s movements in She and those of Marlowe
and crew as they travel inward toward a destructive inner sanc-
tum, toward a heart of darkness that is not only ‘‘savage’’ but also
female. Gubar’s argument builds on Gilbert’s, placing it in a U.S.
frame. Working from the suggestion that Gilman crafted Herland
as a utopian rewriting of Haggard’s dystopian vision of ‘‘savage’’
femininity, Gubar explains, ‘‘She’s power and popularity trans-
form the colonized continent into the heart of female darkness that
Charlotte Perkins Gilman would rename and reclaim in a utopian
feminist revision of Haggard’s romance.’’ Gubar continues, ‘‘by
coming to terms with Haggard’s She . . . Gilman confronted the
misogyny implicit in the imperialist romance.’’ 46 As in Gilbert’s
piece, in Gubar’s misogyny appears to intersect with colonialism
and imperialism. And yet, neither analysis examines this intersec-
tion. The upshot: colonialism and imperialism are conflated, trans-
formed into additional names for patriarchy, and analysis of the
imperialist, colonialist, and racialized logics of Gilman’s portrait
of utopia sacrificed to analysis of gender inequity.47
In closing her essay, Gubar provides a concise instance of the
structural problem I wish to delineate. Herland reveals ‘‘the dis-
possession that valorized colonization as a metaphor of female so-
cialization,’’ she writes, ‘‘leading suffragists to proclaim punningly
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
‘No votes for women—no Home Rule.’ ’’ 48 The suffragettes’ pro-

nouncement allegedly reveals their empathy with the colonized: if
women are not granted suffrage there will be no peace for the mas-
ters, for colonized women will revolt. However, an alternative in-
terpretation of the same statement suggests the obverse: if women
are granted suffrage, it is just fine for colonialism to continue un-
checked. Tellingly, this second reading finds support in Gilman’s
reference to suffrage in Herland. When the male intruders’ at-
tempted escape is foiled by the Herlandian ‘‘colonels,’’ Gilman ob-
serves that they found themselves ‘‘much in the position of the suf-
fragettes trying to get to the parliament buildings through a triple
cordon of London police’’ (23). In Herland, positions have been
reversed; men occupy the rebellious role of the suffragettes, and
Herlanders that of the colonial authorities. In feminist utopia, the
mission of keeping insurgents down is women’s. Read in this way,
Gubar’s reasoning is not so much anti-imperialist as resonant with
Gilman’s own. Herlandian ‘‘colonels’’ concerned solely with gen-
der liberation contentedly sideline racial injustice and their own
sexuality. For so long as women wield gender-based power, their
engagement in colonial and imperialist repression is deemed ir-
relevant and the sexual dynamics that organize their sociality un-
worthy of concern.49
In sidestepping the dynamics of colonialism, critics of Herland
become parthenogenic feminists, those with faith in the ‘‘purity’’
of feminism’s origins, and in feminism’s distinction from (as op-
posed to complicity with) colonialism, imperialism, and racial
nationalism. And thus I agree with the majority of critics that Her-
land’s first-contact scene ‘‘foreshadows the by-play of the book
as a whole,’’ but for reasons other than those provided.50 True,
Gilman depicts Herlanders as civilized and superior through a
process of satiric reversal, but this ‘‘by-play’’ depends on an unac-
knowledged third move, counteridentification of ‘‘savage’’ inferi-
ority and desirous female sexuality with masculinity.
In Herland, as in much of the scholarship on it, female superi-
ority has a high cost—the subsumption of race within gender, the
feminization of civilization in the name of white womanhood, and
the neglect of female sexuality and desire. Foreclosing the possi-
bility that gender, race, and sex might intersect and yet not align,
Gilman scholars follow Gilman in engaging in a process of legiti-
mation by reversal in which the repeated victory of feminine cul-
ture over male culture is secured through a prior coup, that of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

asexual white women over subordinated, sexually voracious mas-

culine ‘‘savages.’’ The upshot is that the ‘‘discovery’’ of Gilman’s
‘‘lost feminist utopian novel’’—as Herland is subtitled on the cover
of the most popular edition—mimics the imperialist mission of
‘‘discovery’’ engaged in by the men who penetrate Herland.
Although racism, colonialism, and imperialism have frequently
been used as metaphors for patriarchy within transatlantic femi-
nism, and a strong critique of the problems with this sort of meta-
phorization now exists, the tendencies within Gilman scholarship
that I have outlined show signs of persisting rather than abat-
ing.51 In the new millennium a Gilman publishing boom—un-
precedented since Gilman’s rediscovery in the 1970s—continues
the reproduction of the parthenogenetically ‘‘pure’’ genealogy of
feminism sketched by previous critics. In the last decade Gilman’s
central theoretical text, Women and Economics, was reissued for
the first time in thirty years, numerous scholarly collections and
casebooks have been produced, a rapid succession of critical an-
thologies have emerged, more than a dozen dissertations treating
Gilman have been submitted, and several novels have been repub-
lished.52
Instructively, through their participation in the work of ‘‘re-
covery’’ too many of these contributions omit meaningful discus-
sion of Gilman’s racial nationalism and the sexual dynamics that
subtend it. On the first page of their introduction to the newest
edition of Women and Economics, for example, the editors situate
it as a timeless urtext, ‘‘revival’’ of which introduces ‘‘fresh and
continuing insight to a generation of feminists . . . poised—as they
were when the book was written—on the cusp of a new century.’’ 53
And although they note that Gilman occasionally exhibited ‘‘am-
bivalent racism,’’ a footnote to Gail Bederman’s groundbreaking
work on Gilman’s participation in the discourse of civilized white
womanhood dismisses it as ‘‘excessively politically correct,’’ re-
vealing deep-seated investment in the project of recovery and ‘‘tra-
dition’’ building and resistance to the conceptual transformations
that might ideally result from a reassessment of Gilman’s partici-
pation in a (white) racist and nationalist mainstream.54
Typically such denial of Gilman’s vexed legacy takes two forms:
reiteration of the idea that Gilman’s ‘‘positive contributions’’ far
outweigh her negative ‘‘lapses,’’ and psychologization of structural
and systemic issues. In a 1999 anthology, for instance, the edi-
tors wisely call for ‘‘more critical treatments which allow us to
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
acknowledge elements of [Gilman’s] writings which are now re-

garded as unacceptable,’’ particularly her racism. And yet of the
thirteen essays in the volume, the only one that treats Gilman’s
‘‘evolutionary perspective on race, ethnicity, and class’’ is over-
shadowed by those written by scholars who pay lip service to
new concerns but whose overall assessment of Gilman remains
largely celebratory.55 Ann J. Lane’s essay, for example, seems to
offer something new when it concedes that Gilman was ‘‘racist
and anti-Semitic in her private letters and journal entries.’’ How-
ever, Lane simultaneously insists that such ‘‘bad’’ writings can be
easily segregated from Gilman’s exemplary ones by ‘‘white femi-
nist scholars [who] have listened and learned.’’ 56 Similarly, Gilbert
and Gubar’s contribution acknowledges Gilman’s obsession with
improvement of ‘‘the race’’ but nonetheless rationalizes her racism
by failing to identify ‘‘the race’’ that Gilman sought to improve
as Anglo-Saxon, and by casting Gilman’s obsession with repro-
duction as psychological rather than structural. Gilman, they con-
clude, had a terror of motherhood and reworked maternal themes
in coming to terms with that which she sought to make abject.57
Out of all the recent Gilman editions, With Her in Ourland,
which contains the first reprint of the third novel within the trilogy
of which Herland is a part, is for my purposes the most signifi-
cant. Because Herland was initially the only one of Gilman’s sci-
ence fiction novels to be ‘‘recovered’’ many readers assume that
it stands alone. This is not the case. The version of Herland seri-
alized in The Forerunner in 1915 was preceded by a related uto-
pian fiction, Moving the Mountain (1911), and followed by a sequel,
With Her in Ourland (1916). Herland is directly linked to both
in terms of plot, shared genealogical concerns, and the maternal-
ist racial nationalism it develops. Moving the Mountain expands
on Edward Bellamy’s national socialist classic Looking Backward
(1889) by recasting the United States in a feminist mold. As in
Looking Backward, the narrator, a Rip Van Winkle figure, emerges
after thirty years to find himself in an entirely transformed society,
in which all undesirable individuals and cultural habits have been
‘‘bred out’’ through the implementation of an accelerated evolu-
tionary process that is simultaneously biological and sociologi-
cal. In this newfound America eugenics has rendered immigration
restriction obsolete: as the novel’s heroine explains, Americans
‘‘have [finally] discovered as many ways of utilizing human waste
as [they have found] . . . for the waste products of coal.’’ 58 Those
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

that can be reformed have been reformed, as in the Americaniza-

tion colonies that Gilman had earlier proposed. Alleged idiots, dis-
eased degenerates, criminals, and perverts have been exterminated
or subjected to compulsory sterilization, and syphilitic men have
been prohibited from reproducing. As the novel’s refrain reminds
readers, American women now ‘‘make a new kind of people,’’ just
as Herlanders do.
In the third utopian fiction, a Herlander, Ellador, returns to
the United States with Herland’s narrator, Van, as a researcher,
emissary, and adviser. During her stay she formulates her diag-
nosis of America’s ills and issues a prescription. Much of what
she concludes has already been rehearsed in Herland; what dis-
tinguishes Ourland’s message is that it is not only individual re-
productive processes that require coordinated control, but also a
nation which is anthropomorphized as a bloated and mentally de-
ranged female infant. As Van specifies, when Ellador contemplated
America it was as if ‘‘a mother had learned that her baby was an
idiot.’’ Unsurprisingly, in comparison to the multitude of degener-
ate nations, Herland emerges as the ‘‘healthy child’’ amongst the
lot. Ellador gives her impressions of the world after touring it in
the midst of the Great War: ‘‘Anything more like the behavior of
a lot of poor, little, underbred children it would be hard to find.
Quarrelsome, selfish, each bragging that he can ‘lick’ the others—
oh you poor dears! How you do need your mother! and she’s
coming at last.’’ 59 Casting Herland as a mother superior who can
manage the sickly United States and its squabbling siblings, With
Her in Ourland testifies to the imperialist aspirations of Gilman’s
maternalist feminism. When juxtaposed with Herland, Ourland
also makes strikingly apparent Herlanders’ conception of them-
selves as a superior mother race ready and willing to ‘‘civilize’’ a
world populated by effete, degenerate ‘‘savages.’’ 60
Although With Her in Ourland’s concern with legitimating the
Herlandian conquest, supervision, and control of the globe may
seem obvious from the description I have offered, the substantial
scholarly introduction to the new reprint of the novel makes no
mention of the political agendas that dynamizes it. Rather, Gilman
is positioned as a foremother of sociology, and discussion of the
inspiration she found in E. A. Ross’s work on ‘‘race suicide’’ and
her own nativist writings omitted. As the introduction explains,
Gilman’s second science fiction novel applies ‘‘the positive lessons
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
of Herland to the lived realities of Ourland,’’ marking the ‘‘culmi-

nation of [Gilman’s] life work.’’ Tellingly, Gilman’s ‘‘ethnocentric
lapses’’ and ‘‘occasional bigotry’’ are noted as an aside, and this
only after her contributions are sufficiently celebrated.61 While I
sympathize with the warning that ‘‘ignoring Gilman’s utopia be-
cause of her blemishes invites failure to examine her at all,’’ lack
of attention to the interconnections among race, nation, and re-
production within Gilman’s fiction leaves contemporary readers
in a double bind, unable to successfully negotiate the relation-
ship between the historical and ideological project of ‘‘recovery’’
and feminist antiracism, feminist ‘‘tradition’’ building and critique
of canon formation, and parthenogenic feminism and analysis of
Gilman’s preoccupation with racist and nationalist concerns.62
In contrast to scholarship that leaves intact the genealogical
ideals—and thus the race/reproduction bind that subtends Gil-
man’s work—a critical genealogy of feminism must instead un-
cover the troubled foundations upon which Gilman built her most
cherished formulations. At its best such a project avoids moral-
izing judgment of Gilman as a ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ feminist and in-
stead reads her writings symptomatically. In this spirit, I issue a
call neither to purge Gilman from the annals of feminism nor to
decanonize her texts; both would represent drives for genealogical
‘‘purity’’ similar to those critiqued above. Rather, I propose keep-
ing Gilman in full view—analyzing and incorporating an under-
standing of the most difficult aspects of her feminism within our
own. For when we begin to (re)construct first-wave feminism as
something more than a mirror that casts our reflection back to us,
it becomes possible to look back to Gilman to different effect.
As Foucault instructs readers of Nietzsche’s formulations about
genealogy, ‘‘Knowledge, even under the banner of history, does not
depend on ‘rediscovery,’ and it emphatically excludes the ‘redis-
covery of ourselves.’ ’’ 63 From a critical, antiracist vantage point, it
is possible to learn from Gilman as she inaugurates a feminist poli-
tics in which we need not partake. For at the same time as Gilman’s
maternalist racial nationalism depends upon conventional gene-
alogical ideals, her corpus can be situated as a lever for prying
open the problems of the type of gender-focused feminism that
revels in white women’s superiority and remains inattentive to the
race/reproduction bind that enables its vision of women’s libera-
tion.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Querying and Queering Gilman’s

Racial Nationalism
Up to this point I have focused on exposing the racial and na-
tional logics of Gilman’s writings, and on theorizing the centrality
of reproductive politics to racial nationalism at the turn of the
century. In the final section of this chapter, I use the foregoing
meditation on the relationships among reproduction, race, and na-
tion not only to locate the nationalist and racist grounding of cer-
tain forms of gender-focused feminism but also to make visible
the tortured figuration of female sexuality that is part and parcel
of Gilman’s maternalist feminism. By extending the discussion of
Herland begun in previous sections, this final section demonstrates
that the racial, national, and reproductive politics that organize
Herland are intimately articulated in and through the complex
figuration of sexuality.
Not at all coincidentally within the scholarship on Gilman that
I have already discussed, elision of racism and nationalism is yoked
to elision of sex, sexual object choice, and female desire. In part
this is understandable. Gilman’s sexual politics are fully imbri-
cated with her racial politics; thus it is nearly impossible to treat
the former if the latter are not also addressed.64 Elision of female
sexuality and desire is also comprehensible because these are sub-
textual themes that rarely surface in Herland on the level of mani-
fest content. As Van observes, in Herland ‘‘there was no sex-feeling
. . . or practically none,’’ for Herlanders ‘‘hadn’t the faintest idea of
love—sex-love, that is’’ (92, 88). Referring to the Herlandian story
of the origination of parthenogenic reproduction Van attributes
this lack to ‘‘two thousand years of disuse,’’ which has left Her-
landers with ‘‘little of the instinct’’ (92). Those who do manifest
an interest in sex (it is not specified whether Van refers to sex with
men and/or women, or to autoerotism) are considered atavistic ex-
ceptions whose desire curtails their access to the most sacred right
in Herland, motherhood.
Although current work on the history of sexuality has gone
well beyond the notion that for nineteenth-century women sexual
‘‘normalcy’’ was tantamount to ‘‘passionlessness,’’ as scholars such
as Gayle Rubin, Siobhan Somerville, and Jennifer Terry have ar-
gued, many forms of female sexualization—especially those not
directed toward men—were routinely regarded as perverse and, by
extension, as forms of speciation or ethnocization.65 In the con-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
text of Herland, women who exhibit any sort of sexual impulse

are ethnicized as less than fully human, as ‘‘savages,’’ and by ex-
tension as not quite white. And thus, even though Herlanders are
acutely aware that the arrival of the three American explorers sig-
nals an opportunity to transform their nation into the ‘‘bisexual’’
nation that it once was prior to the advent of parthenogenesis,
they evince no erotic enthusiasm for the heralded transformation
—in fact, they seem to be highly uneasy about it. As Gilman ob-
serves, the ‘‘willful virgins’’ consider men undesirable, a situation
that she assures readers is ‘‘normal’’ since Herlanders are ‘‘Aryan’’
women who by virtue of their race and elevated humanness pos-
sess neither sexual desire for the ‘‘uncivilized’’ nor for autoeroti-
cism. Indeed, the only sexuality that Gilman’s ultrawomen sanc-
tion is that which is directed toward reproduction of their superior
race.
Foreclosure of issues of female sexuality and desire in Herland
is intriguingly coupled with Gilman’s and her critics’ pronounced
focus on male sexuality and desire. In particular, she and they at-
tend closely to the ‘‘sex-feelings’’ of the intruders, especially to
the aggressive, if thwarted, attempt at penetrative heterosexual
contact orchestrated by Terry, the least educable amongst them.
What can be made of this striking asymmetry in focus? How does
Herland make it appear highly reasonable to treat and provide
space for male and not female sexuality and desire? Although there
are no simple answers to these questions, it is possible to begin
responding to them by reading the sexual politics of the novel
through its racial and national politics, and thus engaging the rela-
tionship between the heterosexuality that is heralded by the men’s
arrival and the parthenogenic racial nationalism that precedes it.
For in Gilman’s utopian world Herlandian women and Ameri-
can men belong to such distinct racial groups (one ‘‘civilized,’’ the
other ‘‘savage’’) that heterosexual relations can only be described
as miscegenous, as interracial acts in which it is not only unbe-
coming but unsafe for Herlanders to engage.
Gilman’s understanding of heterosexuality as a form of racial
mixing or miscegenation finds precedent in her celebrated theo-
retical treatise Women and Economics. Although this theoretical
text on gender roles in the United States begins from the inverse
assumption about race and gender that is explored in Herland—
in Women and Economics it is women who are atavistic ‘‘savages’’
and men who have gained ‘‘full humanity,’’ rather than the other
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

way around—the equation of heterosexuality and miscegenation

is nonetheless explicit. Gilman writes:
we may trace from the sexuo-economic relation of our species
not only definite evils in psychic development, bred severally
in men and women, and transmitted indifferently to their off-
spring, but the innate perversion of character resultant from
the moral miscegenation of two so diverse souls,—the unfailing
shadow and distortion which has darkened and twisted the
spirit of man from its beginnings. We have been injured in body
and in mind by the too dissimilar traits inherited from our
widely separated parents. . . . [N]owhere is the injury more ap-
parent than in its ill effects upon . . . the race.66
Apparently men and women are ‘‘so diverse,’’ descended from such
‘‘widely separated parents,’’ that heterosexual relations between
them amount to ‘‘miscegenation.’’ And although Gilman prefaces
the word ‘‘miscegenation’’ with the adjective ‘‘moral,’’ the racial
and reproductive lineaments of her thoughts are stark. The reader
of Women and Economics, her contemporary (an American as op-
posed to a Herlandian woman) is guilty of transmitting to her off-
spring the ‘‘innate perversion of character’’ that results from the
blending of ‘‘two so diverse souls.’’ In turn, the progeny of hetero-
sexual arrangements bear the mark of their miscegenous origins,
and are depicted by Gilman in the familiar language of ‘‘racial
mixing,’’ as ‘‘darkened’’ in ‘‘body and mind,’’ physically and meta-
phorically. They and those who produced them, Gilman argues,
have ‘‘twisted’’ and ‘‘injured’’ nothing less than ‘‘the race.’’
If the equation of heterosexuality and miscegenation in Gil-
man’s work seems to emerge somewhat predictably from the argu-
ment this chapter has set forth thus far, the implications of this co-
nundrum for the understanding of sexuality in Herland are, I think,
far from obvious. Having constructed a world in which gender
differences index racial differences and heterosexuality amounts
to miscegenation, Gilman entangles herself within a conceptual
double bind. Although Herland blueprints a utopian transforma-
tion of wayward reproduction in the interest of racial nationalism,
the premise upon which the novel is based begs a question about
the logical consistency of the political agenda it advances: how
can the purified heterosexual reproductive practices that can save
the nation from becoming ‘‘watered [down and] . . . artificially dis-
tended’’ be advocated in a context in which reproductive hetero-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
sexuality is a crime against the (white) race? 67 In order to solve

the difficulties into which her critique of gender inequality and her
advocacy of white female superiority throw her, Gilman invents
a particular set of textual strategies. In fact, Gilman’s racism and
nativism lead her to intuit a form of ‘‘queer’’ sexuality that those
critics who have elided her racial and national politics and cele-
brated her gender politics have overlooked.
To understand the role of ‘‘queerness’’ in Herland it is necessary
to return to the same description of attempted heterosexual con-
tact to which other critics have flocked, but to read it through the
lens of Gilman’s racial nationalism. The scene in question comes
toward the end of the novel; each of the American men has by this
point in the narrative married a Herlander. In different ways (as
I detail shortly) Van and Jeff have made peace with their situa-
tion. By contrast, Terry, the person whom it seems impossible to
Herlandize, has not. It is thus he who expresses frustration with
the supposed asexuality of Herlanders by attempting to force sex
on his wife, Alima. According to Van, Terry views his actions as
legitimate; he believes he has acted upon ‘‘natural’’ masculine im-
pulses warranted by his sense of deprivation and entitlement. In
the United States, Van notes, Terry’s actions would have been sanc-
tioned, for within an American court a man in Terry’s position
‘‘would have been held quite within his rights’’ (132).
Taking issue with such reasoning in order to expose its mi-
sogyny, Gilman, like the Herlanders who intervene to sabotage
Terry, views his actions as attempted rape. And yet, even as we
acknowledge the violence of Terry’s attack, it is evident that the
deep sense of the impropriety of his actions stems from their im-
plicit racial character (civilized whiteness inappropriately threat-
ened by uncivilized ‘‘savagery’’). From the vantage point of Gilman
and of Herlanders alike, a man such as Terry—one who is reso-
lutely masculine and thus resolutely ‘‘savage’’—cannot engage in
nonviolent heterosexuality, for this is a contradiction in terms.
It is explicitly Terry’s unwillingness to evolve into a fully ‘‘civi-
lized’’ human being that renders his dream of sex with Alima not
only terrifying but also taboo. For any contact between a ‘‘savage’’
and an ‘‘Aryan’’ constitutes a serious transgression of the Her-
landian racial formation, one that threatens to destroy rather than
consolidate the racial nation. In this sense, Terry’s (hetero)sexual
desire for a Herlander is necessarily punishable—it is a miscege-
nous desire to be prevented at all costs. Inverting the prevailing
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

discourse that suggested that the ‘‘New Woman’s’’ indulgent po-

litical activities outside the home and use of birth control were cor-
rupting the nation by depriving it of reproductive resources, here
Gilman casts the ‘‘savage’’ man as the menace to national repro-
duction.68
Gilman subtly ensures that readers recognize the hypocrisy of
prevailing stereotypes about the ‘‘New Woman,’’ as well as the
racial dimensions of Terry’s transgression. First, as he rouses him-
self to commit his act of impassioned violence Gilman describes
him as singing a song, the words of which Gilman plucks from
Rudyard Kipling’s bawdy poem ‘‘The Ladies’’: ‘‘I’ve taken my fun
where I found it,’’ Terry quips, ‘‘I’ve roughed and I’ve ranged in my
time . . . [and] the things that I learned from the yellow and black.
They ’ave helped me a ’eap with the white’’ (131). From the per-
spective of gender-focused scholars wishing to reclaim Gilman’s
feminism for posterity, Terry’s sentiments can be interpreted as
evidence of Gilman’s critique of the colonial nature of patriarchal
oppression. Once again, however, the insidious and unwitting bril-
liance of Terry’s song is that it turns the gendered logic of the
racial formation of the colonial encounter—in this case the sexual
encounter—on its head. ‘‘Yes,’’ Gilman counters, ‘‘white women
have often been degraded by white men whose sexuality has been
tainted by their prior sexual transgressions with brown women
whom they (like Kipling) view as ‘sisters under their skins’; how-
ever, in Herland sexual contamination emanates not from female
‘savages,’ but from the male invaders who are themselves racial
inferiors.’’ Whereas Terry’s prior sexual forays degrade his deal-
ings with white women, his dealings with Herlanders are degraded
and degrading because it is his rather than their sexuality that is
‘‘degenerate.’’
Not surprisingly, Terry’s complete misapprehension of Her-
landers leads to his expulsion from the nation. His skewed race
and gender logic are dysfunctional in the Herlandian psychosexual
economy, and thus he is unable to perceive that his previous colo-
nial exploits cannot be repeated with a ‘‘civilized’’ woman such as
Alima. Drawing a direct connection between Terry and Alima’s re-
lationship and that of transatlantic literature’s most famous inter-
racial couple, Othello and Desdemona, Gilman further secures her
argument about the miscegenous nature of heterosexuality. Terry
might be a brute comparable to his Moorish kin, she surmises,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
but Alima is no Desdemona: ‘‘Othello could not have extinguished

Alima with a pillow, as if she were a mouse,’’ for Alima wields
superior physical and moral powers that allow her to fight back
and win (132). Ultimately the significance of the scene of attempted
rape is twofold: It decisively situates Herlanders as a race apart, as
a ‘‘pure,’’ incorruptible kin group, whose members together com-
prise a homogeneous national ‘‘Aryan’’ populace. And it explains
why it is that heterosexuality cannot be the form of sexuality prac-
ticed in Herland.
In order to mitigate against a reading of rape as the only pos-
sible form of sexuality, Gilman counterpoints her representation
of Terry’s recalcitrant ‘‘savagery’’ with portraits of Van’s and Jeff’s
more evolved masculinity and the options that this opens up for
them. Both men, although sexually desirous, have evidently given
up aggressive assertion of their heterosexuality and come to ac-
cept Herlandian ways. Jeff, already a ladies’ man who ‘‘in the best
Southern style’’ is predisposed to place (white) women on a ped-
estal, now satisfies himself by elevating the entire national popu-
lace (9). Like other Southern gentlemen before him, he idolizes
white womanhood, especially ‘‘pure,’’ allegedly sexless femininity
(which in his mind implicitly stands in contrast to oversexed black
womanhood). Although Herlanders view Jeff’s response as lim-
ited—recognizing it as a reversal of Terry’s insofar as it too de-
pends on a stark gender polarity that fails to recognize Herlanders’
full humanness—Jeff’s idealization is regarded as far safer than
Terry’s denigration of all women as ‘‘sisters under their skins.’’ Jeff
worships his wife and eventually wins her over: as we are informed
toward the end of the novel, the two are expecting ‘‘that Marvel of
Celis’s’’—a baby, at whose origin (parthenogenic or heterosexual)
readers are left guessing (142).
By contrast with both Terry and Jeff, Van travels a third route
through the racial and sexual landscape of Herland. Recogniz-
ing that he is of a different race than his love insofar as he is not
yet fully ‘‘civilized’’ and thus ‘‘fully human,’’ Van contemplates his
situation and gains insights that Terry and Jeff lack. He quickly
realizes that he and the other men are ‘‘strangers of an alien race,
[members of an] unknown opposite sex,’’ who must reconstitute
their mode of relating—and thus their gender and sexuality—in
order to survive (72). Embellishing the differences among Her-
landers, the form of masculinity to which he and his colleagues
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

are accustomed, and the Victorian femininity by which they were

surrounded prior to entry into Herland, Van explains: ‘‘With us
[Americans], women are kept as different as possible and as femi-
nine as possible. We men have our own world, with only men in
it. . . . [I]n keeping our women as feminine as possible, we see to it
that when we turn to them we find the thing we want always in evi-
dence’’ (129). In the United States, and by implication in the larger
‘‘bisexual’’ world with which Van is familiar, male and female exist
as two extreme forms of being. As Van’s Herlandian tutor, Somel,
explains, ‘‘In a bi-sexual race [such as yours] the distinctive fea-
ture of each sex must be intensified’’ (89); and, as Van himself
astutely notes, ‘‘No combination of alien races, of color, cast or
creed, was ever so basically difficult to establish as that between
us, three modern American men, and these . . . women of Her-
land’’ (121).
Herlanders are female, but distinct from American men and
women. The potentially shared bond of gender has been super-
ceded by an evolutionary gulf that amounts to a racial divide.
Closer to American men, but still more advanced, Van recog-
nizes that Herlanders have achieved a ‘‘full humanness’’ that sets
them apart from all other human beings. In Herland, he notes,
women are ‘‘anything but seductive.’’ Instead he describes them as
‘‘human women, always in human relation’’ (129, emphasis added).
By contrast with American women, whose femininity need not be
prefaced by ‘‘human’’ because, by implication, they are not fully
evolved, Herlanders are cast as the realization of civilizational and
thus evolutionary and racial perfection. When in spite of himself
Van feels that his atavistic ‘‘hereditary instincts and race-traditions
[make him] long for a feminine response in Ellador,’’ her Her-
landian humanness keeps him at bay, jolting him into acute aware-
ness of his difference, of her racial superiority, and thus of the
fact that she is sexually off limits until such a time as she deems
him sufficiently evolved (130). As Van explains, Ellador responded
to his increasingly infrequent attempts ‘‘to make love to her’’ by
providing him with ‘‘a little too much of her society—always de-
feminized’’ (130). Her assertion of her humanness rather than of
the ‘‘primitive’’ femininity that Van initially hopes for is tanta-
mount to an assertion of racial superiority. And inevitably this
realization brings Van to his senses—to sharp and painful recog-
nition of the impropriety of sex with an ‘‘Aryan’’ such as Ellador.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
If Herlanders refuse heterosexuality, a question remains as to

what kind of sexuality is available to these overevolved women
and the unevolved men with whom they cohabit. Attempting to
answer this question Van utilizes his sociological skills; he meets
Herlanders on their terms, inhabits their world, and becomes one
of them insofar as this is possible. He commits himself (at least for
the duration of the novel) to a life devoid of heterosexuality and
begins to practice a form of sexual intimacy that he refers to as
‘‘loving ‘up’ ’’: ‘‘After I got over the jar to my pride (which Jeff, I
truly think, never felt—he was a born worshipper, and which Terry
never got over—he was quite clear in his ideas of the ‘position of
women’) I found that loving ‘up’ was a very good sensation after
all’’ (141).
This posture toward Van’s beloved requires recognition of her
superiority, her role, as Amie Parry has brilliantly explained, as
the ‘‘top’’ in a relationship of differential power that looks at first
glance like a sadomasochist one.69 At the same time, it is important
to note that Van does not wish to remain perpetually on the ‘‘bot-
tom’’; his submission to Ellador, his idealized representative of the
master race, is matched by a desire to transform this power rela-
tionship. Unlike Jeff, who is content with the status quo, and Terry,
who hopes to invert it, Van realizes that ‘‘loving ‘up’ ’’—as the quo-
tation marks around ‘up’ imply—is a relative, constitutively un-
stable relationship that he can transform by asserting the wiles of
the ‘‘bottom.’’ In order to substantially alter the dynamic of his re-
lationship with Ellador from one in which he ‘‘loves ‘up’ ’’ into one
that is more fluid—if as of yet unknown—Van understands that he
must become ‘‘civilized,’’ ‘‘fully human’’ in the Herlandian sense.
Although Van’s proposed transformation is a gigantic under-
taking that involves a far-reaching re-racing that is simultaneously
a regendering and resexing of Van’s person, Van alone has the
potential to succeed, for he possesses the glimmer of ‘‘full human-
ness’’ that his companions lack. As Somel explains to him early
on, ‘‘We like you the best . . . because you seem more like us . . .
more like People’’—because you seem more Herlandian and thus
racially familiar (89). Unlike Terry, whose capacity for evolution-
ary progress is foreclosed almost from the start by his sexually
predatory masculinity, and Jeff, whose blind adolation of ‘‘pure’’
white sexless women reifies gender differences, Van exhibits poten-
tial for change, for assimilation into Herlandian sameness and thus
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

into the racially homogeneous nation. It is not completely surpris-

ing, then, when over time, Van undertakes a radical metamorpho-
sis under Herlandian tutelage.
The shifting shape of Van’s desire, or ‘‘sex-feeling,’’ indicates
his transformation. As he attests: ‘‘The thing that Terry had so
complained of when we first came—that [Herlanders] weren’t
feminine, [that] they lacked charm [became for me] . . . a great
comfort.’’ In Van’s eyes Herlanders’ ‘‘vigorous beauty is an aes-
thetic pleasure, not an irritant [and] their dress and ornament’’
are desirable precisely because these accoutrements mark them
as ‘‘fully human’’—in stark contrast to American women, whose
overadorned hyper-feminine bodies radiate ‘‘the ‘come-and-find-
me’ element’’ that so degrades the wearer (128). In fact, as he
evolves Van sheds his longing for the display of femininity to which
he had grown accustomed and begins to see beyond the allure of
the surface of Victorian womanhood. As his ‘‘savage’’ desires and
predilections fall away, he begins to exhibit the aesthetic judg-
ments of the ‘‘civilized’’—those that according to Gilman’s con-
temporaries, including the social theorists Adolf Loos and Thor-
stein Veblen, equate excessive female adornment with ‘‘savagery’’
or ‘‘barbarism.’’ 70
By the novel’s close it becomes evident that Van will be re-
warded for his labors. His evolving humanness will eventually be
on a par with Ellador’s, and he will no longer have to ‘‘love ‘up’ ’’
as he will have become a fully ‘‘civilized’’ human being involved
in a relationship with another with whom he is a ‘‘racial’’ equal.
And yet the racialized logic of equality on which the promise of
sexual intimacy depends begs a question: for, insofar as Van’s long-
awaited sexual union with Ellador requires a race change that is
tantamount to a sex change, strictly speaking sex between them
can no longer be figured as heterosexual. Uncannily anticipating
some of the late-twentieth-century meanings of the term, Van ob-
serves on more than one occasion that his transformation into full
humanness is accompanied by nothing less than queerness. For in-
stance, when he first begins to enumerate the differences between
American women and Herlanders and to specify his feelings about
the latter, he notes that he had in ‘‘some way . . . a queer little
indescribable feeling,’’ one that apparently grows rapidly as does
his acceptance of Herlandian ways (47, emphasis added). After at-
testing to the surprisingly ‘‘good sensation’’ of ‘‘loving ‘up,’ ’’ Van
further modifies his description of this mode of relating, comment-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

ing that it is so uncommon, so beyond available language that it

gives him
a queer feeling, way down deep, as of the stirring of some an-
cient dim prehistoric consciousness, a feeling that they were
right somehow—that this was the way to feel. It was like—
coming home to mother. I don’t mean the underflannels-and-
doughnuts mother, the fussy person that waits on you and
spoils you and doesn’t really know you. I mean the feeling . . .
of getting home . . . of love that was always there, warm like
sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a featherbed—a love
that didn’t irritate and didn’t smother. (142, emphasis added)
As Ding Naifei insightfully admonishes, we should certainly balk
at ‘‘the sublimation of male (hetero)sexual desire into regressive/
incestuous desire for maternal love and warmth’’ that Van’s de-
scription advocates.71 At the same time, I want to suggest that
Gilman’s recourse to the notion of ‘‘queer’’ in this passage can be
read against the grain, as indicative of a deep instability in the con-
ceptualization of sexuality in Herland.
Though Gilman is unable to fully elaborate an alternative to
heterosexual intimacy in a context in which gender is indexed
by race, or to describe the sex acts that might transpire among
Herlanders and between Herlanders and the male intruders—tell-
ingly she veers clear of the former and concludes her narrative
prior to the point at which the plot would demand full exploration
of the latter—with Van, her stand-in within the novel’s mise-en-
scène, she searches for new ways of thinking about intimacy and
‘‘sex feeling’’ that leave her grasping at ‘‘queer’’ by way of an
alternative. To borrow a formulation from Lauren Berlant and
Elizabeth Freeman, Gilman exhibits ‘‘erotophobia’’ in that she em-
phasizes ‘‘lifestyles’’ rather than sex;72 and yet, she imbues her
understanding of ‘‘lifestyles’’ with an erotic charge that unpre-
dictably sparks just beneath the surface of her text. In this sense,
Gilman’s lifestyle emphasis clears space for new nonnormative
forms of sexuality even as Gilman fails to elaborate the contours
of these.
The ‘‘queer feeling’’ of which Van speaks is pleasurable if unset-
tling and definitively pushes the boundaries of his previous affec-
tive and sexual repertoire. It is explicitly structured by the erotics
of physical denial and attenuated desire for a love object, but there
is nothing to suggest that this queerness could not also be more
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

robustly body-oriented. As he evolves into a Herlander, he comes

into a new form of relation with himself and with Ellador in which
he is stripped of his inferior race/gender—his masculinity and his
‘‘savagery.’’ And thus, although my point is not to suggest that
in 1915, with her nauseatingly saccharine ideas of love as ‘‘warm
sunshine in May,’’ Gilman somehow anticipated the meaning of
‘‘queer’’ in the next century, I want to suggest that the ‘‘queer’’
connection is more than semantic: it reveals continuities in the
conceptualization of ‘‘queer’’ over time and provides evidence of
the historical sedimentation of the term. And just as importantly
in view of the racial nationalism that Gilman deployed the notion
of ‘‘queer’’ to shore up, it testifies to the historically determined
limitations of claiming ‘‘queer’’ as a subversive identity or strategic
position in a war over sexual meaning making.
Within the logic of Gilman’s work, as in our current mo-
ment, ‘‘queer’’ serves as a placeholder for that which does not fit
within the dominant organization of the social, that which de-
fies classification as either political or personal, private or pub-
lic, sexual or nonsexual. With ‘‘queer’’ Gilman gestures toward
an unbounded and binary-free world in which individuals occupy
identity positions and constitute intimate affective relations that
mitigate ‘‘against mandatory gender divisions’’ and, as Michael
Warner has put it, articulate themselves through ‘‘a more thorough
resistance to regimes of the normal.’’ 73 The Herlanders who popu-
late the pages of Gilman’s novel cannot be classified as either
‘‘homosexual’’ or ‘‘heterosexual,’’ ‘‘lesbian’’ or ‘‘straight’’—the
various terms used by the few critics who have attempted Her-
landian classification; rather, Herlanders occupy a liminal position
in relationship to all these categories.
In Gilman’s work, as in contemporary queer theory, ‘‘inter-
sectionality’’ usefully describes the coming together or articula-
tion of racial, gender, and sexual formations.74 Herland consti-
tutes the sexual organization of the social through a deployment
of a regime of racialized gender hierarchy. In other words, Gilman
articulates racialization and gendering as intersecting historical
and ideological processes that may be subject to change but are
nonetheless always already mutually involved in the transforma-
tion of the sexual organization of the social order. After all, Her-
land moves from being a heterosexual, racially heterogeneous na-
tion to being a parthenogenic racially homogenous nation looking
forward to a ‘‘bisexual,’’ ‘‘Aryan’’ future in which citizens of all
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

genders can join together in an infinite variety of combinations to

reproduce a new nation of fully human, racially superior citizen
subjects.
Although both the distance and proximity between the ideas
about queerness circulating in Herland and those that have been
developed by scholars seeking new ways of exploring sexual cul-
tures, politics, and publics and the normalization of dominant re-
gimes of heterosexualization are important, I first consider how
Herland’s racial nationalism might be deemed ‘‘queer’’ and Her-
land a ‘‘queer nation.’’ At the risk of stating the obvious, in contrast
to the nation (the United States) from which the male intruders
and readers of Gilman’s text hail, Herland successfully reproduces
itself without the physical or ideological support of heterosexual
reproductive sexuality. If in the heteronormative United States, as
Berlant and Warner have argued, ‘‘practical heterosexuality . . .
guarantees the monocultural nation,’’ in Herland the reproductive
telos of the nation does not express itself through any particular
form of sexuality but rather without recourse to forms of sexu-
ality that have been previously known or delineated.75 In ridding
Herland of reproductive heterosexuality, Gilman also rids it of
the affective and economic relationships that subtend the hetero-
sexual reproduction of the nation. Herland lacks parent-centered
households, private property, and genealogically focused inheri-
tance laws; children are no longer raised within nuclear families
but by the larger collectivity; and, consequently, the distinctions
between the public realm of civil society and the private realm
of the domestic are nonexistent. Community is imagined neither
through intimate coupling nor the institutional and legal apparatus
of what the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Mor-
gan (whom I discuss in the next chapter) dubbed ‘‘pairing mar-
riage.’’ In sum, Herland’s dominant (and only) culture is such a
far cry from that which is familiar to the intruders and readers
alike that it achieves intelligibility without recourse to ideologies
of heterosexual intimacy or couple-centered familialism.
At least on first inspection it would thus appear that Herland at-
tempts to bring into being a world so exorbitant to heterosexuality
and the many restrictive gender codes and forms of sociality that it
entails, that it succeeds in contesting heteronormativity in several
of the ways that queer theorists argue queer culture does. And yet
there are also serious limitations to this comparison. Berlant and
Warner’s work is helpful in identifying these. They write:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

A complex cluster of sexual practices gets confused, in hetero-

sexual culture, with the love plot of intimacy and familialism
that signifies belonging to society in a deep and normal way.
Community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling
and kinship, a historical relation to futurity is restricted to gen-
erational narrative and reproduction. A whole field of social
relations becomes intelligible as heterosexuality, and this pri-
vatized sexual culture bestows on its sexual practices a tacit
sense of rightness and normalcy. This sense of rightness—em-
bedded in things and not just in sex—is what we call hetero-
normativity.76
In Herland there is nothing tacitly normal or right about hetero-
sexuality; and insofar as a ‘‘norm’’ emerges it is anything but ‘‘het-
ero.’’ Belonging within the national community is never secured
through ‘‘the love plot of intimacy and familialism’’ but rather
through the romance of female collectivity and wider civic-minded
sociality—and this is so even after the men arrive. There are no
privatized sexual cultures in this nation, for domestic space is na-
tional space; to the extent that there is sex in Herland it is public
sex. The nation, ‘‘a land in a state of perfect cultivation,’’ is liter-
ally ‘‘an enormous garden’’ gone communal (11). Herland is home
as nation, and nation as home and thus the domain of all social
transactions and the modality in which a blended public/private
culture articulates itself.
And yet, even as Herland manages to constitute itself without
recourse to heterosexuality it is suffused with—even built upon—
ideas about kinship, reproduction, and genealogical ‘‘purity.’’ For
this reason although the ‘‘field of social relations’’ that dominate
within Herland are not principally intelligible through the lens of
heterosexuality but rather through its negation, Herland’s nation-
alism remains deeply inflected by the reproductive culture that
it attempts to transform. As Janet Jakobson has admonished, re-
sistance to ‘‘the regime of the normal can be (misleadingly) ap-
propriated as if resistance to normalization undid the question of
normativity rather than moving us into another normativity.’’ 77 In
Herland, escape from heteronormativity moves Herlanders into
other forms of normativity; Herlanders may not imagine commu-
nity through ‘‘scenes of intimacy’’ and heterosexual ‘‘coupling,’’
but kinship and the ability to reproduce kin relations as the basis
of national familialism remain at the center of Herlanders’ self-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

conception, constituting the normativizing mechanism through

which the nation’s ‘‘Aryan,’’ female citizenry imagines its relation-
ship to ‘‘futurity.’’ Indeed, Herland’s greatest limitation is that it
fails to map the coordinates of a new form of sociality, or more
particularly that it leaves unchallenged nation-centered and racial-
ist thinking about belonging. In so doing, Herland inaugurates a
nationality without heterosexuality that remains just as emphati-
cally genealogical in its foundations and as racialized in its self-
conception as the nation—the United States—that it seeks to im-
prove upon.78
Even as Herland can be read as a nation that stirs ‘‘queer feel-
ings,’’ allows for queer identifications, and plays with queer sub-
ject positions, the potentially subversive queerness that Gilman
intuits emerges as the idiom of national reproduction, as the mo-
dality in which she pursues the racial ‘‘purity’’ of the nation. In
queering affective and sexual relationships Gilman extricates her-
self from a form of heterosexuality that amounts to miscegena-
tion within the racialized gender and sexual logics of her argu-
ment; however, she simultaneously consolidates the racial nation
—in this case the ‘‘Aryan’’ nation of Herland. Even as she struggles
to extricate herself from the race/reproduction bind, by electing
to transcend it in the name of full humanness she becomes re-
ensnared. In the end, Gilman’s efforts at queering heteronorma-
tive culture reveal that the successful contestation of the normal
depends upon how the norm that is being contested is conceptu-
alized and on how the subversion of it is imagined. As we have
seen, mere resistance to the norm familiar to the American men
and to most of Gilman’s readers has unwelcome, even reaction-
ary consequences. In Herland ‘‘queer’’ is a placeholder for non-
normative sexuality but also for white racial superiority—in fact,
Gilman’s ‘‘queer nation’’ paradoxically fails to be subversive pre-
cisely because the norm it questions (that which is well known to
the American men who attempt to invade Herland) is conceived of
as racially heterogeneous. The upshot is the resistive culture that
Gilman attempts to model by ‘‘queering’’ Herland reinscribes the
ideal of (white) racial ‘‘purity.’’ And in the end, this realization
should give feminists pause. It reminds us that a truly liberatory
feminism must always be linked to an antiracism capable of imag-
ining female sexuality and sociality outside of the rubric of racial-
ized kinship and the confines of racial nationalism.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Chapter Three
Engels’s Originary Ruse: Race and
Reproduction in the Story of Capital
The idea of the racial community makes

its appearance when the frontiers of kinship dissolve
at the level of the clan, the neighborhood community and,
theoretically at least, the social class to be imaginarily
transferred to the threshold of nationality.
—Etienne Balibar
As suggested in the last chapter, feminists have typically been

more inclined to search for, rediscover, and celebrate their fore-
mothers than their forefathers. And yet, transatlantic feminism is
not without its male progenitors. Few nineteenth-century theorists
have been deemed as important to feminists interested in the gen-
der politics of class struggle, socialism, and Marxism as Friedrich
Engels. His treatise Origin of the Family Private Property and the
State (1884), written as the ‘‘execution of a bequest,’’ from exten-
sive notes Marx had compiled on several major works of Victorian
ethnology shortly before his death in 1883, narrates the emergence
of patriarchal class society out of so-called primitive society.1 In
the process it focuses attention on the causes of women’s subordi-
nation within the family and on the coincidence of the emergence
of a gendered division of labor and the advent of private property.
Feminist reactions to Origin, though not always uncritical, have
been numerous; Engels’s book inspired strong responses when it
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
was written and nearly a century later, during the heyday of femi-
nism’s second wave in the 1970s and early 1980s.
This chapter revisits the feminist response to Engels, the im-
passe within Marxist feminism generated by the feminist reread-
ing of Origin, the Victorian ethnographical work on Native Ameri-
cans on which Origin is based, and finally Origin itself. Just as I
argued in the previous chapter on Charlotte Perkins Gilman that
a return to and reassessment of the race/reproduction bind in Gil-
man’s writings can put contemporary feminism on an antiracist
trajectory, in this chapter I suggest that examination of the race/
reproduction bind that undergirds Origin has the potential to move
feminism beyond the impass encountered by those who turned to
Engels’s text early on, but found it wanting in its neglect of race as
a category of analysis and racism as a form of gendered and classed
oppression. To be clear from the outset, I am not arguing that
Engels offered an explicit treatment of race or an understanding
of racism comparable to his account of the emergence of capital-
ism; rather, I am suggesting that Engels’s analysis of state forma-
tion, like the theories of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner dis-
cussed in chapter 1, rests on a racialized reproductive politics and
a related cluster of ideas about genealogy and kinship. In locating
the race/reproduction bind that implicitly subtends Origin I hope
to reinvigorate a feminist engagement with Marxism. For it is my
belief that in the process of rereading Marx and Engels textually
rather than programmatically, it becomes possible to clear space
for new forms of race-attentive historical materialism that might
emerge from within the pores of feminism.2
Revisiting the Marxist Feminist Impasse

Origin’s influence on second-wave feminists was partially due to its
importance to first-wave feminists and political radicals, including
Marxist scholars, revolutionary thinkers, and political leaders of
societies attempting to implement Marxist principles. Alexandra
Kollentai, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Eleanor Marx, Emma
Goldman, August Bebel, and Stella Browne, among other Marx-
ists, socialists, and anarchists who were outspoken on ‘‘the woman
question,’’ looked to Origin in formulating and/or revising their
historical materialism and thinking about women’s oppression.
Owenites, utopian socialists, and socialist sex radicals likewise
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Engels’s Originary Ruse 107

took stock of Origin, as did Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.3 Some of these
intellectuals, political groups, and national leaders regarded it as
an enabling point of departure; others interpreted Engels’s formu-
lations as unequivocal historical truths that constituted an infal-
lible blueprint for the emancipation of women under socialism. As
Lenin hyperbolically averred, Origin ‘‘is one of the fundamental
works of modern socialism, every sentence of which can be ac-
cepted with confidence, in the assurance that it has not been said
at random but is based on immense historical and political ma-
terial.’’ 4
In contrast to these laudatory responses, the second-wave femi-
nist reaction to Origin in the United States and United Kingdom
can be characterized as engaged but invariably critical.5 Unlike
Lenin, who willingly forgot what he undoubtedly knew—that
Origin was a highly speculative work based on Marx’s hand-
written and difficult-to-decipher notes on compendious volumes
that Engels himself had not read at the time of writing—second-
wave feminists returned to Engels’s urtext in order to contest its
authority and its adequacy as an account of the history of mod-
ern social organization. Though they recognized that Origin ‘‘laid
the foundations for an analysis of the position of women in class
society,’’ they were wary about its operationalization by existing
communist and socialist states and thus skeptical about whether it
was of use in forging the type of feminism to which they aspired.6
As Rayna Rapp observed in 1977, speaking for her professional
and political cohort, ‘‘Consciously or not, our questions are often
framed within the general territory mapped in Origin,’’ even if, as
Rapp continues, considerable debate about the merits of uncriti-
cally inhabiting this terrain have already been generated.7
Feminists have privileged Origin over other texts principally be-
cause it offers a more sustained treatment of ‘‘the women ques-
tion.’’ Although many of Origin’s ideas about women’s subordi-
nation within class society are prefigured in The German Ideology
and The Communist Manifesto, Origin has garnered attention be-
cause of the centrality of this piece of the analysis to the book’s
overall argument and political agenda.8 In an often cited passage
Engels expands upon an earlier formulation in The German Ideol-
ogy, arguing that the historical emergence of monogamy, private
property, and the sexual division of labor are together rooted in
the original subordination and exploitation of women within the
family:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

When the monogamous family first makes its appearance in his-

tory, it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less
as the highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary
monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation
of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between
the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric
period. The first class opposition that appears in history co-
incides with the development of the antagonism between man
and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class op-
pression . . . with that of the female sex by the male. In an
old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in
1846, I find the words: ‘‘the first division of labour is that be-
tween man and woman for the propagation of children.’’ And
today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in his-
tory coincides with the development of the antagonism between
man and woman in the monogamous marriage, and the first
class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the
male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step for-
ward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it
opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step
forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity
and development for some is won through the misery and frus-
tration of others. (96)
Several pages later Engels brings his ruminations on nineteenth-
century monogamous marriage up to date. In the ‘‘modern indi-
vidual family,’’ he observes, the domestic slavery of the wife can
be translated directly into class terms, such that the husband ‘‘is
the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat’’ (105).
From an instrumentalist perspective, Engels’s well-known po-
litical agenda appears to leap from the page. Since the patriar-
chal family and private property are imbricated formations and
women’s oppression increases with the expansion of the capital-
ist relation, women’s freedom from oppression will be contermi-
nous with the overthrow of private property and the monogamous
family that ensures its transfer—that is, with class revolution. For
when all production is fully collectivized there will be no need for
marriage as a legal contract sanctioned by the state. As Engels con-
fidently explains, ‘‘It will be plain that the first condition for the
liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into
public industry, and this in turn demands that the characteristic of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abol-

ished’’ (105).
In addition to expressing discomfort with Engels’s romanticiza-
tion of the position of women in proletariat marriages (in which,
he reasoned, women are necessarily emancipated by their work
outside the home), second-wave feminists identified the less self-
evident but no less troubling failures of imagination upon which
Engels’s argument rests. In their view, as in mine, the forms of
economic reductionism that plague Origin are manifold: Engels’s
failure to recognize women’s domestic labor in the home as pro-
ductive labor in its own right and his associated inability to com-
prehend women’s biological and social reproduction of laborers as
productive; his failure to see that women are oppressed not only by
male control of private property and male subordination of women
within the capitalist relation, but also by the ideology of domes-
ticity and state-sanctioned circumscription of the employments
available to women; and finally, Engels’s inability to perceive that
even when women (such as the proletarian women whom he ele-
vates) engage in social production outside the home, emancipa-
tion from gender oppression is in no way guaranteed either in the
workplace or in the domestic realm. As the more anthropologi-
cally minded have added, Engels’s data was inaccurate. He was
blissfully unaware of the unreliability of the ethnological sources
upon which he and Marx relied—not least because of the alle-
giance of these sources to ideas about an equitable matriarchal
society (or matriarchate) existing prior to the emergence of private
property, the family, and the state.9
In the late 1970s and early 1980s these deficiencies prompted
Marxist and socialist feminists to depart from Origin and search
elsewhere for more adequate theories. In so doing they hoped to
deepen their analysis of women’s reproductive labor in the home
and in the reproduction of workers. In order to avoid subsump-
tion of reproductive labor within the category of productive labor
and to comprehend the specificity of women’s economic activity,
they devised a corrective ‘‘dual systems’’ approach that analyzed
gender and class oppression side by side.10
Though the ensuing ‘‘domestic labor debate’’ produced an in-
tensification of Marxist and socialist feminist publishing, as well
as activist projects, including a wages-for-housework movement
of international scope, many scholars found the new approach’s
bifurcation insufficiently historical and thus incapable of account-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

ing for the overlap of systems of oppression. Still others specified

its shortcoming as its utter inattentiveness to the racial division of
labor and to racism. As Gloria Josephs argued in ‘‘The Incompat-
ible Ménage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism, and Racism,’’ a piece
included in Lydia Sargent’s prominent anthology Women and Revo-
lution, to envision the union of Marxism and feminism as com-
patible is to ‘‘deny the reality of being Black in America.’’ 11 Spe-
cifically Josephs called out Heidi Hartmann (whose famous essay
‘‘The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Feminism’’ was
also included in Sargent’s anthology) for neglecting the ‘‘incestu-
ous child’’ of ‘‘patriarchy and capitalism,’’ namely, racism. Accord-
ing to Josephs, not only are the categories of Marxism ‘‘sex-blind’’
(as Hartmann claimed) but the categories of Marxist feminism are
‘‘race-blind’’ (93), unable to apprehend that ‘‘in a discussion of
Marxism and the woman question, to speak of women, all women
categorically, is to perpetuate white supremacy—white female su-
premacy’’ (95). Underlying Josephs’s argument was the insight that
black women’s allegiance to black men differs structurally from
white women’s allegiance to white men, because ‘‘capitalism and
patriarchy simply do not offer to share with Black Males the seat
of power in their regal solidarity’’ (101). She concluded: ‘‘The pos-
sibility of an alliance between Black and white women can only be
realized if white women understand the nature of their oppression
within the context of the oppression of Blacks. At that point we
will be able to speak of ‘the Happy Divorce of Patriarchy, Capi-
talism, and Racism,’ and the impending marriage of Black revolu-
tionary socialism and socialist feminism’’ (106).
In the place (the United States) and period in which it ap-
peared (the late 1970s), Josephs’s article had company. Capital-
ist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, another influ-
ential anthology, included (instructively at the end of the book)
‘‘The Combahee River Collective Black Feminist Statement.’’ Like
Josephs, the members of the collective engage Marxist feminism,
but only insofar as it attends to issues of race and racism. They
write, ‘‘Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory
as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he ana-
lyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in
order for us to understand our specific economic situation as
black women’’ (366). In the context of Eisenstein’s anthology, the
Combahee River Statement had the onus of covering the issues
of black feminism, lesbianism, and racism—none of which was
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

the principal subject of any of the other articles in the volume. To

date, the statement, which has been reanthologized frequently, is
regarded as a watershed moment in black feminism.12 What I want
to argue here—despite the fact that the Combahee River Statement
has not often been considered in this context—is that its pres-
ence in Capitalist Patriarchy, like the presence of Josephs’s essay in
Women and Revolution, signaled a decisive moment within Marxist
feminism as well.
From one vantage point, the Marxist feminist project that
began with a reading of Origin came to crisis under the pressure
of an emergent antiracist critique of dual systems theory precisely
in those scholarly volumes and venues that sought to fully criticize
and elaborate it. Though some theorists would proceed to write
exclusively about the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism well
into the 1980s, many Marxist and socialist feminists shared a
growing awareness—as did feminists of all political stripes—that
race and racism had to be addressed and that Marxist and socialist
feminism, at least in the way in which it initially framed its ques-
tions, was incapable of doing so. Indeed, the internal transforma-
tion of Marxist and socialist feminism, including a decisive turn
away from Origin, can be viewed as a response to interventions
made by women of color, to a growing awareness that the start-
ing point of the domestic labor debate erased race, and to emer-
gent consensus that Origin and the debate about it were inadequate
to the task of grounding an analysis of capitalism, patriarchy, and
racism.
The transformative impact of black feminist critique on the tra-
jectory of feminist theory in the 1980s was pervasive. The combi-
nation of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the neoracism central to
each catalyzed antiracist activism inside and outside the academy
on both sides of the Atlantic. The impact of such movements on
the shape of Marxist and socialist feminism that I am attempting
to sketch can be readily located in several registers. The theoriza-
tion of antiracist materialist feminism by women of color, includ-
ing Angela Davis, Chandra Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe
Moraga, and Barbara Smith, that began in the early 1980s consti-
tutes one; the feminist retooling of world systems theory by schol-
ars such as Maria Mies and Swasti Mitter another. Race enters
such analyses through discussion of the uneven racialized and gen-
dered global division of labor. In the same period Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak launched a thoroughgoing feminist revision of sub-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

altern studies with wide-ranging implications for the developing

field of postcolonial studies and for Marxist theory more gener-
ally.13
While this groundbreaking scholarship has deeply shaped my
thinking, it is the transformation in texts by those who expressly
described themselves as recharting the trajectory of Marxist and/
or socialist feminism that concern me here. In her 1985 foreword
to the sixth edition of her monumental work Women’s Oppres-
sion Today, Michèle Barrett reassessed her Marxist feminist vision,
noting that in the preceding five years (her book first appeared in
Britain in 1980) feminism had become dominated by new agendas,
especially ‘‘black feminism.’’ Consequently, Barrett attested to an
awareness of her work as ‘‘strikingly deficient in light of newer
concerns about race and racism’’ and stated that she had come to
regard her early ‘‘theoretical formulations . . . as ethnocentric’’
(vi). If in 1985 Barrett found her previous omissions objectionable,
by 1988 she began to question the validity of her initial project
altogether. In the introduction to the eighth edition of Women’s
Oppression Today she wrote that in ‘‘some ways, the intellectual
project of reconciling a feminist and a Marxist understanding of
the social world could be said to have been shelved—it was aban-
doned rather than resolved.’’ 14
In part Barrett viewed her shelving or abandonment of Marx-
ist feminism as a necessary response to poststructuralism (she lists
the host of usual suspects, including Foucault, Derrida, Lacan,
Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard, and mentions the array of French
feminists involved in psychoanalysis), and the subsequent realiza-
tion that the subjects of feminism, ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘women,’’ were
up for grabs. As she explained, this ‘‘more philosophical criticism
of the integrity of the categor[ies]’’ on which feminism has in the
past relied is connected with political recognition of ‘‘differences
of power and resources’’ among women, particularly those related
to racial difference (vi).15 As she further observed, her subsequent
work with Mary McIntosh on black women’s labor in contempo-
rary Britain revealed ‘‘the many ways in which the old . . . [pre-
occupations and divisions between radical and socialist feminists]
have become eroded by the (for us) ‘newer’ question of race and
racism’’ (xv).16
Barrett’s insight about poststructuralism’s ability to open
Marxist feminism to questions of race and racism was shared by
others. As Barrett made the ‘‘linguistic turn’’—instructively her
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

1991 book, The Politics of Truth, is subtitled From Marx to Foucault

—so too did other Marxist and socialist feminists moving toward
the newly contested ground of ‘‘materialist feminism.’’ 17 Ma-
terialist feminism, which supplanted Marxist and socialist femi-
nism by the mid-1990s, retains the historical and ideological con-
siderations central to feminism, even as traditional Marxist and
feminist categories of analysis (i.e., ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘class’’) open
themselves to deconstruction.18 As Rosemary Hennessy, a leading
materialist feminist theorist, explains, ‘‘Conceptualizing discourse
as ideology allows us [materialist feminists] to consider the discur-
sive construction of the subject, ‘woman,’ across multiple modali-
ties of difference, but without forfeiting feminism’s recognition
that the continued success of patriarchy depends upon its system-
atic operation—the hierarchical social relations it maintains and
the other material forces it marshals and is shaped by’’ (xv). Hen-
nessy elaborates the distinction between materialist feminism and
socialist feminism in terms of a new focus on language and post-
modernism:
Materialist feminism is distinguished from socialist feminism
in part because it embraces postmodern conceptions of lan-
guage and subjectivity. Materialist feminists have seen in post-
modernism a powerful critical force for exposing the re-
lationship between language, the subject, and the unequal
distribution of social resources. . . . While postmodern critiques
of signification in themselves do not guarantee an oppositional
politics, they do open up the subject to language and difference.
In this way they make available ways of thinking that feminists
grappling with the problem of feminism’s own monolithic sub-
ject have found useful. (5)
Like Barrett before her, Hennessy views poststructuralism, par-
ticularly ‘‘discourse analysis,’’ as central to bringing considerations
of racial ‘‘difference’’ into feminism. As important, she implicitly
suggests that the texts written by Marx and Engels to which femi-
nists once turned are no longer directly relevant to feminism. In
fact, in the writings of Hennessy, Teresa Ebert, Donna Haraway,
and Gerald MacLean and Donna Landry, among other self-pro-
claimed materialist feminists, Marx and Engels are replaced in
prominence by Foucault and Derrida, such that the famous pas-
sage from Origin that was once a mandatory departure point for
Marxist and socialist feminists is not read, and frequently uncited.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Ultimately the turn toward materialist feminism is a turn toward

poststructuralism that entails a turn away from Engels’s urtext, if
not from anticapitalism as a political orientation.19
My objective in sketching the preceding genealogy of Marx-
ist and socialist feminism is not to condemn the current embrace
of poststructuralism or materialist feminism, both of which are
contributions that continue to inform my thinking. Rather, I aim
to draw attention to the ways in which recent trends in feminist
scholarship beg a question of feminism’s relationship to Marx and
Engels’s actual writings. For without becoming a Marxist funda-
mentalist who argues that the only ‘‘politics of truth’’ (to borrow a
wry formulation from Barrett) is that which is already embedded
in Marx’s text, it is certainly possible to speculate about how to
foreground questions of race and racism within Marxism without
abandoning the work of reading and digesting Marx’s and Engels’s
writings. My task in the remainder of this chapter is to elabo-
rate one such alternative. In rereading Origin outside of the frame-
work set up for its reception and subsequent rejection by Marxist
and socialist feminists and finally materialist feminists, I hope to
discern the racial themes embedded within it. This experiment in
close reading involves reengaging Engels’s treatise not so much to
locate within its pages universal truths or comprehensive theoreti-
cal paradigms but rather to understand its historical situatedness,
its internal textual logic, and the traces it bears of having been cre-
ated by men who were necessarily written by their times. In re-
approaching Origin in this way, I hope to restore it as a central
text for antiracist feminists committed to Marxism, albeit as one
that may be unfamiliar in the reincarnation that I offer.
Rereading Engels: The Matriarchal Gens

and Iroquois Universalism
From the outset, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
presents itself as a study of the successive social and economic for-
mations that constitute human history. The narrative Engels re-
lates (as detailed shortly) begins with an account of matriarchal
primitive communism, moves through an analysis of the begin-
nings of the system of private property and so-called pairing mar-
riage, and culminates with an exploration of the emergence of the
state and monogamous, patriarchal, class-based society. To a great
extent the book is a retelling (or perhaps more aptly a represen-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

tation) of another work, Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines

of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civiliza-
tion (1877), the last volume by Lewis Henry Morgan, an Ameri-
can lawyer, ethnologist, and sometime politician, who spent the
better part of his life studying, and for a short period living among,
the Iroquois Indians in his native state of New York. With the
help of his Seneca collaborator Ely Parker, and with the financial
support of the federal government, Morgan amassed an enormous
amount of information on Native American kinship systems, and
through correspondence with missionaries, traders, and govern-
ment agents extensive material on family formations the world
over. Today Morgan is recognized as among the first anthropolo-
gists and as the inventor of modern kinship studies. As is generally
acknowledged, Morgan’s theory that ‘‘systems of consanguinity’’
are available for study through analysis of a given society’s lan-
guage of kinship prefigures the structuralist approach within an-
thropology. In dedicating Elementary Structures of Kinship to Mor-
gan, Claude Levi-Strauss appreciates this debt.20
Although Engels did not read Morgan’s opus until after Ori-
gin was first published, he apparently had such great confidence
in Marx’s notes on and assessment of Morgan that in his preface
to the first edition of Origin he boldly states that Morgan ‘‘dis-
covered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history
discovered by Marx forty years ago’’ and adds that in Morgan’s
comparison of ‘‘barbarism and civilization’’ he was ‘‘lead . . . in
the main point, to the same conclusions as Marx’’ (35). Given such
assertions it is unsurprising that Engels viewed Ancient Society as
‘‘one of the few epoch-making works of our time’’ (36)—a senti-
ment that he felt comfortable repeating even more hyperbolically
after he had finally read Morgan. The discovery of the ‘‘primitive
matriarchal gens as the earlier state of the patriarchal gens of civi-
lized peoples,’’ he writes in the preface to the fourth edition of Ori-
gin (1891), ‘‘has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s
theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus
value has for political economy’’ (48).
It is now commonplace for Marxist scholars and anthropolo-
gists to criticize Marx and Engels’s use of ideas about matriarchal
society and the primitive gens and to question the accuracy of Ori-
gin’s claims in light of recent evidence from the field. And yet,
while these critics hope to render Marxism more materialist, they
do not frame Marx and Engels’s reading of Morgan within the his-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

torical context in which it was adopted. In calling for an integra-

tion of a consideration of kinship into the Marxist narrative, for
instance, Linda Nicholson hopes to generate a resolutely material-
ist concept of reproduction; however, she engages neither Origin
nor Morgan’s writings. Instead, Nicholson accounts for the limita-
tions of the category of production within Marxism. The Marxist
narrative neglects kinship systems and modes of production be-
longing to so-called primitive peoples, she argues, and thus it fails
to offer a truly materialist conceptualization of reproductive labor
or an adequately historical understanding of productive activity.
Whereas Nicholson works to make Marxism fully materialist by
integrating updated anthropological material on kinship, I hope
to make feminism more historically minded by understanding the
figure of the ‘‘primitive’’ within the foundational texts of Marx-
ism.21 For, as we shall see, although Marx and Engels’s data may
be outmoded (as Nicholson deftly points out), they derived ideas
about the kinship systems of so-called primitives from Morgan,
and thus one way to historicize Origin is to account for how its
conceptual coherence, formal design, and logical consistency de-
pend on ideas that Morgan elaborated through observation of the
kinship systems of American Indians and other ‘‘barbarian’’ and
‘‘savage’’ peoples.22
The historical approach that I suggest may also be described
as intertextual. It reveals how the story of the emergence of the
family, private property, and the state can be read against the grain
as a story that, in the process of narrating transformations in kin-
ship systems, embeds nineteenth-century ideas about race and re-
production and thus ideas about the forms of racial nationalism
discussed in previous chapters. As has already been argued, in the
period in which Morgan, Marx, and Engels wrote, discourses on
reproduction, race, and genealogy—that is, on racialized and re-
producible kinship structures—were invariably caught up in those
about nations. Indeed, a familiar cluster of closely related concepts
structure the penultimate chapter of Origin, in which Engels nar-
rates the emergence of the German nation out of the racialized
and reproductively generated kinship systems that preceded it. Al-
though explicit discussion of racial nationalism was never Engels’s
stated objective—anathema as it was to his Marxist and thus inter-
nationalist task—from a historical and intertextual perspective it
becomes clear that ideas of reproduction, race, and nation none-
theless circulate throughout Origin.23
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

In search of a theoretical tool that can convey how these ideas

function within Origin, I turn to the figure of the supplement. As
Jacques Derrida has characterized it, ‘‘The supplement . . . harbors
within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as
it is necessary. The supplement adds itself; it is a surplus, a pleni-
tude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence.
It culminates and accumulates presence. . . . But the supplement
[also] supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinu-
ates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.’’ 24
The supplement is an addition that marks out a presence by filling
in for an absence; in turn, it simultaneously reveals an absence by
underscoring the contours of a plentitude. In locating kinship as
the supplement in Origin, I name the recurrent textual figure that
expresses the relationship between what is expressly dealt with by
Engels—the origin of the family, private property, and the state—
and what is inchoate, namely ideas about race, reproduction, and
nation. In naming kinship as the supplement I call attention to
how, in the process of telling the story of transformations in kin-
ship systems, Engels brings reproductive and racial themes into
play, leaving readers with a sense of the presence of a narrative
about the emergence of the German nation. This narrative is simi-
lar to that already discussed in chapters 1 and 2. In this instance,
however, racial nationalism paradoxically requires a notion of kin-
ship to think itself and simultaneously suppresses the centrality of
racial and reproductive scripts through discussion of kinship. But
I jump ahead.
Before treating Engels’s argument about German nationalism,
it is necessary to understand Marx and Engels’s particular attrac-
tion to Morgan. By the latter half of the nineteenth century nu-
merous accounts of society’s evolution were available to them;
in fact, a number of scholars drew upon Darwinian theory and
constructed histories of civilization’s evolution based upon infor-
mation derived from archeological remains, classical accounts of
Greek and Roman social, political, and legal institutions, and re-
ports of travelers, colonists, and missionaries who had report-
edly made contact with ‘‘savages’’ and ‘‘barbarians’’ in the less
‘‘civilized’’ parts of the world. If most of the literature on ‘‘primi-
tive’’ peoples and their ‘‘progress’’ toward ‘‘civilization’’ postu-
lated a series of transformations in the organization of social re-
lations, only Morgan insistently represented ‘‘primitive’’ society
as subject to forces of material change. In a prior moment, he
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

argued, production was collective and society communistic, un-

structured by the gender and class inequalities that characterized
Victorian society—thus proving that the Victorian family and the
market economy were neither permanent nor inevitable but rather
evidence of society’s regression.
Such arguments proved irresistible to Marx and Engels. Mor-
gan offered not only a description of social transformation but
a historical explanation for why one social formation gave way
to another. Working with the Darwinian notion that evolutionary
processes lead to the destruction of stages of human development
that they have themselves produced (a sort of Darwinian dialec-
tic), Morgan recognized that particular means of subsistence were
linked to corresponding social forms and that when the means
of subsistence changed, so too did the social formation—specifi-
cally the kinship system. As one Marxist anthropologist attests,
Morgan did nothing less than sketch ‘‘the early history of the pro-
cesses which led to the creation of capitalism.’’ He allowed Marx
and Engels ‘‘to show that the same processes had governed history
from the earliest time and that a science of history was therefore
possible.’’ 25 Though there is no reason to reject the prevailing ac-
count of why Marx and Engels harnessed Morgan’s research to
the task of rewriting history, it is necessary to explore alongside
it how Morgan’s ideas about matrilineal society and mother right
corroborated a materialist approach and enabled Origin’s rhetori-
cal structure. For, in preferring Morgan over other thinkers of
his day, Marx and Engels rejected patriarchal theories about the
origin of civilization prevalent in the eighteenth century, replac-
ing them with ideas about kinship, specifically ‘‘primitive’’ matri-
archy, and making these central to Origin’s internal textual logic
or rhetoricity.
To a great extent, debates that began in the 1860s about an
originary matriarchal society constituted a riposte to the so-called
patriarchal theory of civilization that had reached its apogee in
Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1861). In his influential work, Maine
deduced that the patriarchal family was once the universal unit of
human society and argued that its study would reveal the patriar-
chal antecedents of contemporary civilization. In Maine’s view, so-
cial groups might be united by ‘‘blood,’’ but consanguinity was an
inadequate precondition for ‘‘civilization,’’ since to cohere ‘‘civi-
lized’’ societies required patriarchal power (patria potestas), not
simply biology. As Maine explained, ‘‘civilized’’ societies charac-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

terized by inheritance by agnation (distribution of wealth among

male offspring) require exclusion of women from the property re-
lation. While Maine’s theory was not without precedent, his com-
parative method of study of legal codes and social organizations
was new.26 And somewhat ironically, it was this innovation that
cleared the way for the overthrow of the patriarchal theory Maine
propounded. According to Rosalind Coward, Maine’s compara-
tive approach revealed that ‘‘relations between the sexes character-
istic of the patriarchal family had, in fact, undergone very drastic
changes during the course of human history’’ (18), and thus his ap-
proach contained the seeds of its own destruction. The patriarchal
family was ‘‘not a biological unit, but a unit which created a fic-
tion of biological unity’’ (23) that opened it to social contestation
and transformation.
Maine’s theory was further challenged by knowledge produced
as an adjunct to European colonial expansion. In southern India
in particular, ethnologists began to compile evidence of matri-
archal rather than patriarchal family organization. By employ-
ing a comparative method modeled on Maine’s, they challenged
his central argument. Works such as J. F. McLennan’s Primi-
tive Marriage (1865), J. Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times (1874), and
E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), as well as Morgan’s An-
cient Society (1877), were produced in rapid succession. The com-
bined impact of these works—the turn to mother right—diffused
Darwinism, integrated history into the discussion of social orga-
nization, and in the process inaugurated a new origin story, one
that for the first time underscored women’s reproductive processes
in the shaping of the social order. As Marx and Engels realized,
matriarchal theory inverted the gendered power relations posited
at the beginning of history by Maine and his predecessors, in effect
debunking ‘‘one of the most absurd notions taken over from the
eighteenth-century enlightenment . . . that in the beginning of
society woman was the slave of man’’ (Origin, 79).
While it is evident why a story with matriarchy at the origin
was desirable, it is less clear why Morgan’s particular version of it
so compelled Marx and Engels. The preface to the fourth edition
of Origin provides some answers. In reviewing existing scholar-
ship, Engels differentiates Morgan’s theory from that held by other
prominent ethnologists by disparaging the competition, and thus
(instructively) rationalizing his and Marx’s preference for Mor-
gan. Engels begins by acknowledging Johann Jakob Bachofen’s
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Das Mutterrecht (Mother right), published in the same year as

Maine’s Ancient Law, as the urtext in the debate about matri-
archy.27 Like Morgan, Bachofen viewed ‘‘primitive’’ people as liv-
ing in a state of sexual promiscuity that could be characterized
as matriarchal (Bachofen used the term ‘‘hetaerism’’), insofar as
‘‘primitive’’ women occupied positions of relative power over their
progeny. In such societies paternity was unknown, descent ‘‘reck-
oned only in the female line,’’ and mothers held in such ‘‘high re-
spect’’ that Bachofen proposed ‘‘a regular rule of women’’ prior
to the transition to monogamy and paternal power (40). Despite
Bachofen’s celebration of matriarchy, however, Engels dismissed
him as insufficiently materialist. His disturbing propensity to rely
upon ‘‘innumerable passages of ancient classical literature,’’ Engels
observed, ‘‘especially Greek and Roman myth,’’ led him to argue
that advances in religious conception led to changes in kinship and
thus to mistakenly cast ancient ‘‘religion as the lever of world his-
tory’’ (40, 41).28 ‘‘According to Bachofen,’’ Engels lamented, ‘‘it is
not the development of men’s actual conditions of life, but the reli-
gious reflection of these conditions inside their heads, which has
brought about the historical changes in the social position of the
sexes’’ (40).
If Bachofen was insufficiently materialist, his successor, J. F.
McLennan, whom Engels described as a ‘‘dry-as-dust jurist,’’ was
still more so. Significantly, it is against the backdrop of a critique
of McLennan that Engels elevated Morgan. Evidently realizing
that diplomacy required him to credit McLennan with originat-
ing the idea of ‘‘primitive inheritance’’ through the mother line,
Engels did so. He argued, however, that McLennan’s concepts
of exogamy and endogamy and the distinction drawn between
them was stubbornly rigid: the ‘‘opposition exists,’’ Engels in-
credulously attested, ‘‘only in [McLennan’s] . . . own imagina-
tion . . . [and yet he] makes it the basis of his whole theory’’ (43).
Although Morgan had demonstrated the existence of exogamous
societies in 1847 in his Letters on the Iroquois and again in 1851
in his League of the Iroquois, Engels pointed out that McLennan
never provided equally convincing evidence: ‘‘He speaks of kin-
ship through females only,’’ Engels remarked, but provides little
proof of such societies and thus fails to see that the significance of
matriarchy at the origin lies not in exogamy but in the gens, the
extended group of kin related through the mother.
Ultimately the critical detour through the work of Morgan’s
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

competitors led Engels to cast Morgan as the rightful inheritor of

Bachofen’s insight about mother right at civilization’s origin and
as the correct riposte to McLennan’s false semantic binaries and
empirically impoverished science. And yet, while scholars com-
monly note that in championing Morgan Engels entered into an
intellectual defense of his theory, what is not remarked upon is
that in so doing he also entered into a subtly coded nationalist fray.
Whereas other nineteenth-century thinkers, including Bachofen
and McLennan, took the Greeks and Romans as paradigm cases—
and thus situated Greece and Rome as civilizations that presented
the ‘‘riddles’’ whose answers would shed light upon the present—
Morgan created ‘‘a new foundation . . . for the whole of primitive
history’’ (48) in North America. Indeed, as Engels attested, Mor-
gan revealed that ‘‘the American is the original [civilized social]
form and the Greek and Roman . . . later and derivative’’ (116).
As Engels knew from experience, Morgan’s book was hard
to procure in England, where Engels felt there was a chauvin-
istic attempt to ‘‘systematically suppress’’ it, and thus ‘‘kill by
silence the revolution which Morgan’s discoveries have effected in
our conception of primitive society’’ (49, 35). Engels bemoaned
that, in place of Morgan’s out-of-print edition, McLennan’s cir-
culated widely—a state of affairs that Engels attributed to Mor-
gan’s nationality. As he observed, it is well known that ‘‘every Eng-
lishman turns patriotic when he comes up against an American’’
(49). In displacing McLennan, ‘‘the officially appointed founder
and leader of the English school of anthropology’’ (49), however,
Engels did much more than attack English intellectual arrogance.
He shifted the terms and altered the stakes of the debate. For it
was not just that Morgan was American but that his groundbreak-
ing ideas about kinship derived from a study of Native Americans.
As Engels reiterated, Morgan’s analysis of Iroquois social orga-
nization was generalizable the world over: ‘‘It is Morgan’s great
merit that he has discovered and reconstructed in its main lines
this prehistoric basis of our written history, and that in the kin-
ship groups of the North American Indians he has found the key
to the most important and hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest
Greek, Roman and German history’’ (36). In displacing old pieties,
Engels specified that Morgan’s discovery of the Iroquois matri-
archal gens made it possible ‘‘to outline for the first time, a history
of the family’’ that has opened up ‘‘a new epoch in the treatment of
primitive history.’’ For it ‘‘must be clear to everyone . . . [that] the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

matriarchal gens has become the pivot on which the whole science
turns’’ (48).
Engels’s complete allegiance to Morgan is nowhere more pro-
nounced than in Origin’s central chapter, ‘‘The Family.’’ Taking
his cues from Marx, here Engels embraces and to a great de-
gree ventriloquizes Ancient Society, distilling the essence of Mor-
gan’s compendious account of the successive family forms found in
‘‘precapitalist’’ societies. In the process he divides human history
into three epochs—savagery, barbarism, and civilization (each
of which he subdivides, as in Morgan’s book and Marx’s note-
books, into subperiods: lower, middle, and upper)—that engen-
der a series of corresponding familial forms.29 Of these Engels
is centrally concerned with ‘‘matriarchal group marriage’’ (the
gens), ‘‘pairing marriage’’—middle and upper barbarian forms re-
spectively—and with monogamous marriage, the first ‘‘civilized’’
form.30 In differentiating each type of so-called marriage from that
which preceded it, Engels follows Morgan, asserting the (hetero-
sexual) presumption that ‘‘primitive’’ society is marked by a per-
vasive situation of ‘‘sexual freedom,’’ in which every man belongs
equally to every woman. This state of affairs in turn gives way
to a series of increasing restrictions on (hetero)sexual pairing or
what Engels euphemistically calls ‘‘marriage.’’ 31 While the first
family to emerge from the ‘‘primitive state of promiscuous inter-
course’’ separated members of the group by generation, succeeding
family forms exercised increasingly extensive prohibitions against
incest.32
The gens was the first family shaped by such prohibitions to
emerge. Engels traces Morgan’s text closely; in the gens, he notes,
‘‘descent can only be proved on the mother’s side,’’ and there-
fore ‘‘only the female line is recognized’’ (71). All members of the
gens are united by a shared claim to a common female ancestor.
They are related as one big maternal family, as it were, in which
all productive activity is communal and the household communis-
tic. Finally, and most importantly, in the gens existence of matri-
archal communism precludes individualized possession. The gens
‘‘constituted itself as a firm circle of blood relations in the female
line,’’ Engels concludes, and thus ‘‘we may reasonably infer that at
one time [prior to the emergence of private property] this form of
family . . . existed among all peoples’’ (72).
In Engels’s narrative, ‘‘pairing marriage’’ eventually supercedes
the matriarchal gens: on the one hand, natural selection kicks
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

in and combines with the female’s reportedly natural inclination

toward monogamy and the prevention of inbreeding. Echoing the
Darwinism that characterizes Morgan’s work, Engels observes
that ‘‘the urge toward the prevention of inbreeding asserts itself
again and again, feeling its way . . . quite instinctively, without
clear consciousness of its aim’’ (75). On the other hand, transfor-
mations in the mode of production, including the domestication
of animals, herding, and improvements in agriculture lead to pri-
vatization of specialized tools and the production of a surplus that
no longer belongs to the gens as a whole, but is concentrated in a
few hands. As a male owner class emerged, Engels explains, the
final ‘‘death blow’’ to the gens, and ‘‘to matriarchal descent,’’ was
delivered. By contrast to the former situation in which property
was communal, in the new mode of production men acquire the
means to ensure their paternity and the transmission of their prop-
erty to their offspring. From here it is but a small step to the in-
stitutionalization of ‘‘pairing marriage,’’ regulated monogamy (at
least for women), and men’s reproductive monopoly over indi-
vidual women and the children that these women bear—the right-
ful heirs to men’s tools, slaves, and herds.
Though it is difficult not to balk as Engels naturalizes male
desire for proof of biological relatedness—as many feminist schol-
ars have—if we momentarily shelve our skepticism and follow
Engels’s reasoning, his conclusion that the origin of private prop-
erty and of monogamy are together rooted in the original sub-
ordination and exploitation of women in ‘‘pairing marriage’’ ap-
pears inevitable. The true meaning of family (familia) is not, Engels
reminds readers, ‘‘that compound of sentimentality and domestic
strife which forms the idea of the present-day philistine’’; rather,
the word derives from famulus (Latin for domestic slave). Familia
designates the human property, including women, belonging to
one man (88). Significantly, at this point Engels inserts the famous
passage into Origin—the one previously cited as central to early
Marxist and socialist feminists. I reproduce key sentences a sec-
ond time in order to reassess them, now from the vantage point of
Morgan’s text.
When the monogamous family first makes its appearance in his-
tory, it . . . comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one
sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes un-
known throughout the whole previous prehistoric period. . . .
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with

the development of the antagonism between man and woman
. . . the first class oppression coincides with that of the female
sex by the male. (96)
Ancient Society firmly corroborates the idea that the advent of
private property presages the end of matriarchal society and the
gens. At the same time, it underscores the racial character of the
kinship systems that preexist and emerge with the advert of pri-
vate property. As Morgan insisted, the latter are pervasive among
members of the ‘‘Aryan’’ race, and the former among so-called bar-
barians and savages. Indeed in Ancient Society—and thus in Ori-
gin—racialization is always already at work in the sexual division
of labor that results from the emergence of private property. For
the division of labor that signals the demise of the gens emerges in
the ‘‘civilized’’ and ‘‘semicivilized’’ periods, whose parameters are
produced not as temporal but as racial or ethnic. In this sense, the
subjugation of the gens of which Engels writes emerges through
the prism of Morgan’s text as a racially marked phenomenon.
Within the logic of Ancient Society—one to which Engels meticu-
lously adhered—the overturning of matriarchal kinship systems
that results in women’s subordination is tantamount to the subor-
dination of Western civilization’s other, principally the Iroquois.
Morgan’s Ethnical Periods:

Gendering Kinship, Racializing Time
‘‘Rich as the American continent is known to be in material
wealth,’’ Morgan observes in his preface to Ancient Society, ‘‘it is
also the richest of all the continents in ethnological . . . materi-
als illustrative of the great period of barbarism’’ (xxxi). As will
be quickly surmised, Morgan was referring to ‘‘the history and
experience of the American Indian tribes’’ (xxxi). From the out-
set Morgan’s reasons for studying Native Americans are presen-
tist: American Indians, he informs fellow nationals, represent ‘‘the
history and experience of our own remote ancestors when in cor-
responding conditions’’ (xxxi). As Morgan knew, the disappear-
ance of the ‘‘Indian race’’ in the era of Indian extermination was
likely; and thus his concern for the disappearance of living peoples
was matched by his concern for the disappearance of scientific evi-
dence. Lamenting the intellectual consequences of genocide, Mor-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

gan continues, ‘‘while fossil remains buried in the earth will keep
for the future student, the remains of Indian arts, language and in-
stitutions will not. They are perishing daily. . . . [U]nder the influ-
ence of American civilization [Indian] arts and languages are dis-
appearing, and their institutions dissolving. After a few more years
facts that may now be gathered with ease will become impossible
of discovery. These circumstances appeal strongly to Americans
to enter their great field and gather its abundant harvest’’ (xxxii).
In admonishing scholars to mine the ‘‘great field’’ of living cul-
ture, ‘‘harvest’’ knowledge, and employ it in writing the history
of Anglo-Saxon civilization, Morgan valorized Indian culture, but
not unto itself. Native American genocide, although tragic, con-
stituted for Morgan the loss of information fundamental to the
‘‘civilized’’ project of self-understanding.
In Ancient Society’s first chapter Morgan develops a concept
metaphor, ‘‘ethnical period,’’ that captures and neatly condenses
interwoven ideas about race and time previously expressed in his
preface. According to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘‘ethnical,’’ an
adjective that came into use in the late 1840s in the wake of Euro-
pean imperialism, pertains to an ethnic nature or character, a race
or races, and their origin and characteristics. Morgan states that
his study will treat the three ethnical periods—‘‘savagery,’’ ‘‘bar-
barism,’’ and ‘‘civilization’’—through which the ‘‘human race’’ has
traveled over the centuries. In utilizing the term ‘‘human race’’
he indicates his belief in monogenesis; at the same time, his sug-
gestion that he will treat the social organizations that character-
ize ‘‘ethnical periods’’ by studying ‘‘existing barbarous and sav-
age tribes’’ evinces the complex array of racial hierarchies that
structure his thinking. As he notes, ‘‘The remote ancestors of the
Aryan nations presumptively passed through an experience simi-
lar to that’’ (8) of these human ‘‘monuments of the past’’ (41). For
each ethnical period ‘‘represents a distinct condition of society’’
(8) and a distinct ethnic group or race.
Ethnical periods emerge as temporal forms through which
Morgan is able to define the content of relations between civilized
Aryans and their ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘barbarian’’ others, while in the
process racializing temporality itself. As Johannes Fabian has elo-
quently explained in Time and the Other, in the anthropological
imagination ‘‘there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also
a temporal . . . act.’’ 33 In the course of his discussion of ethni-
cal periods, Morgan specifies which human groups are indexed
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

by which temporal designations: Australians and Polynesians, for

example, exist in ‘‘the middle stage of savagery.’’ Africans, a di-
verse people at different stages in the ‘‘natural as well as necessary
sequence of progress’’ live in an ‘‘ethnical chaos of savagery and
barbarism’’ depending on the particular group in question (16).
By contrast, Native Americans are ‘‘barbarians’’ pure and simple.
Summarizing his findings Morgan explains:
Commencing . . . with the Australians and Polynesians, follow-
ing with the American Indian tribes, and concluding with the
Roman and Grecian, who afford the highest exemplifications
respectively of the . . . great stages of human progress, the sum
of their united experiences may be supposed fairly to represent
that of the human family from the middle status of savagery to
the end of ancient civilization. Consequently, the Aryan nations
will find the type of the condition of their remote ancestors,
when in savagery, in that of the Australians and Polynesians;
when in the lower status of barbarism in that of the . . . Village
Indians of America; when in the Middle status in that of the
Village Indians, with which their own experience in the Upper
status directly connects. (17)
This portrait of ethnical periods and the peoples representing
each reveals the collapse of time into race upon which Morgan’s
schema depends, and thus the manner in which racial identities or
ethnicities are used by Morgan (as they were by many ethnologists
and early anthropologists) to designate temporal locations. Such a
conceptual system favors synchronic over diachronic analysis, or
perhaps more accurately appears to be diachronic although it is
in fact the product of the collection of synchronic moments and
their representation as historical. This is made plain in method-
ological comments such as the following: ‘‘It does not affect the
main result’’ of the study in question, Morgan explains, ‘‘that dif-
ferent tribes and nations on the same continent, and even of the
same linguistic family, are in different conditions [and thus ethni-
cal periods] at the same time. . . . [F]or our purpose the condi-
tions of each is the material fact, the time being immaterial’’ (13).
‘‘Conditions’’ evidently refers to degree of technological progress
and thus racial classification; apparently, actual historical location
is rendered irrelevant or immaterial.
The development of synchronic rather than diachronic analysis
would appear to have presented a dilemma for Marx and Engels.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

How could they legitimately cast Morgan as a theorist of his-

tory? How could they praise his method as materialist when it was
patently synchronic or ahistorical? The answer to these questions
is disconcertingly straightforward: Marx and Engels viewed Mor-
gan’s work as materialist because the racialization of time—the
concept of ‘‘ethnical periods’’ that is its organizing feature—was
seamlessly integrated into their thinking. They not only accepted
Morgan’s collapse of time into race, but assimilated the idea of
racialization as a motor of temporalization. Indeed, it may be ar-
gued—as Engels did—that Morgan the ethnologist and Marx the
political economist were lead ‘‘in the main point’’ to the same con-
clusions, precisely because Morgan’s racialized understanding of
time and temporal understanding of race were incorporated un-
critically into the rhetoric of the larger argument of Origin. In this
process kinship systems emerge as a supplement within the Marx-
ian account of the origins of the family, private property, and the
state, as a rhetorical figure whose presence reveals the contours
of a racial narrative without ever explicitly marking it as such.
Through its work as supplement, kinship ‘‘intervenes or insinuates
itself in-the-place-of’’ the Marxian text’s absences and omissions,
revealing the presence of an inchoate racialized and reproductive
discourse around which it coheres.
In racializing time, Morgan’s ‘‘ethnical periods’’ also gendered
it. For integration of the logic of ‘‘ethnical periods’’ into Origin
required tacit acceptance not only of Morgan’s thinking about
racialized temporality but also about the reproductive and gen-
dered dimensions of the racialized kinship systems of which Mor-
gan wrote. Each period for which Morgan provided a particu-
lar racial or ethnic designation was simultaneously indexed by a
particular gendered organization of the social. In the case of the
Iroquois this gendered social system was the gens, the same kin-
ship system that Engels argued in Origin’s preface held the key
to understanding the origins of Western civilization. In fact, Mor-
gan’s definition of the gens is already familiar to us from our ini-
tial reading of Engels. ‘‘A gens,’’ Morgan observed, ‘‘is a body
of consanguinei descended from the same common ancestor, dis-
tinguished by a gentile name, and bound together by affinities of
blood. . . . Where descent is in the female line, as it was univer-
sally in the archaic period, the gens is composed of a supposed
female ancestor and her children, together with the children of
her descendants, through females, in perpetuity’’ (63). For Mor-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

gan as for Engels, the gens was a racialized and reproductively

organized social system: one belonged to the gens on account of
shared female ancestry with other members. Indeed, this was a
gendered system organized around maternal rather than paternal
affiliation, and a reproductive system insofar as women’s repro-
duction of the members of the gens constituted the motor of in-
clusion within it. Notably, maternal affiliation is the criterion for
inclusion within the nation that was operative in the female world
depicted by Gilman in Herland, and theorized in the discussion
of racial nationalism in chapters 1 and 2. Just as the maternally
related citizens of Herland reproduce a racially unified nation, in
Morgan’s formulation, the members of the Iroquois gens belong
to a carefully reproduced social order.
In Ancient Society’s central chapter, ‘‘The Iroquois Gens,’’ Mor-
gan culls numerous ethnographic accounts to demonstrate that the
racial and reproductive organization of the gens is the general-
izable foundation of civilization the world over. As he observes,
contra Maine, the gens ‘‘of the Iroquois can be taken as the stan-
dard exemplification of this institution. [For] to understand fully
the gentes [a grouping of gens] of the latter nations a knowledge of
the functions, and of the rights, privileges, and obligations of the
members of the American Indian gens is imperatively necessary’’
(69). In a section entitled ‘‘Growth of the Idea of Government,’’
Morgan devotes four chapters to discussion of Iroquois social
organization (gens, phratry, tribe, and confederacy) and situates
these chapters so that they precede, and through their positioning
supply the model for, those on ‘‘Gentes in Other Tribes of the
Ganowánian Family,’’ and on the Grecian and Roman gens. In
other words, the ordering of chapters renders the argument about
the exemplary status of the Iroquois gens irrefutable: the Iroquois
provide the model, and the gens ultimately emerges as the ‘‘nearly
universal plan of government of ancient society, Asianic, Euro-
pean, African, American and Australian’’ (63). As Ancient Society
progresses such claims become so sweeping that Morgan confi-
dently concludes: ‘‘In no part of the earth, in modern times, could
a more perfect exemplification of the Lower status of barbarism
be found than was afforded by the Iroquois. . . . With their arts in-
digenous and unmixed, and with their institutions pure and homo-
geneous the culture of this period, in its range, elements and pos-
sibilities, is illustrated by them in the fullest manner’’ (464).
At the outset of his discussion of the Iroquois Morgan speci-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

fies that ‘‘mankind’’ developed two ‘‘plans of government’’ that

constituted ‘‘definite and systematic organizations of society’’ (62).
The more ancient was social and was founded upon the gentes,
phratries, and tribes; by contrast, the ‘‘latest in time’’ was political
and was founded upon territory and property (62). Under the first
system, government dealt with people through the gens; under the
second, government dealt with subject citizens indirectly, through
territory, township, country, and state. Despite Morgan’s analyti-
cal separation of the two systems, his argument travels from so-
cial to political organization in a manner that situates what are
initially regarded as kinship systems as the basis of political insti-
tutions. In fact, throughout Ancient Society, rather than fully dif-
ferentiating kinship and political systems, Morgan suggests that
the matriarchal gens contained within it the rudiments of the first
form of civilized political organization. In a particularly bold as-
sertion that is central to my argument, Morgan insists that the
gens is embedded in the political organizations that characterize
modern-day institutions, for it is ‘‘gentile institutions’’ that have
‘‘carried a portion of mankind from savagery to civilization’’ (65).
While initially self-evident, Morgan’s assertion begs a question
about the means of transmission. How exactly did so-called gentile
institutions carry ‘‘a portion of mankind from savagery to civiliza-
tion’’? And, if they did so, does this not contradict the argument
advanced by both Morgan and Engels about the coincidence of
the advent of private property and the disappearance of the gens
and matriarchal social organization? Answers to these questions
are found in the language, particularly in the reproductive concept
metaphors that Morgan employs in joining together the form and
the content of his argument so that the metaphor not only func-
tions as the vehicle for his idea, but an exemplification of it.34 As
Morgan explains: ‘‘Modern institutions plant their roots in the
period of barbarism, into which their germs were transmitted from
the previous period of savagery. They have had a lineal descent
through the ages, with the streams of the blood, as well as a logical
development’’ (4, emphasis added).
The pivotal term in this passage, ‘‘germs,’’ has a complex set of
meanings that connect it to surrounding words. According to the
first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, a germ is a portion
of an organic being capable of development into the likeness of that
from which it sprang. When the passage is read with this definition
in mind, modern institutions are plants with roots in the soil of the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

past, and ‘‘germs’’ fertilized seeds (or ova) that transmit the quali-
ties of one organism to future generations. This usage of ‘‘germ,’’
which emerged in the early 1800s, allows the organic and, more
importantly, the reproductive dimensions of the concept metaphor
to surface. From this vantage point, Morgan builds upon Linnaean
nomenclature in which ‘‘germ’’ expressly refers to either the ovary
or seed of a plant. What is striking about this passage, however,
is that the botanical connotations of ‘‘germ’’ coexist with fleshly,
warm-blooded ones. In fact, in writing of ‘‘germs’’ that have a
‘‘lineal descent through the ages’’ that can be figured in terms of
‘‘streams of blood’’ Morgan shuttles readers between the plant and
the animal kingdom. In this movement a nineteenth-century gene-
alogical discourse about reproduction and race becomes visible,
and germs take on not only a reproductive but also a racial as-
pect.35 The gens is no longer solely the root, ovary, or seed of a
plant transmitting the essential qualities of the organism across
time but rather a blood element, a protogenetic figuration of gene-
alogical, racial inheritance (Morgan was of course writing prior to
Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the rules of genetic inheritance).36 If,
at the passage’s outset, ‘‘savage institutions’’ travel through time
organically, by its end their movement has acquired further defi-
nition: ‘‘gentile institutions’’ are carried in the ‘‘streams of blood’’
that bind a people together. Within Morgan’s text Iroquois so-
cial organization emerges as a racialized element reproduced by
women across generations and through time in the ‘‘blood’’ of the
people.
The above use of the germ concept metaphor is not unique, but
actually pervades Ancient Society. In another representative pas-
sage Morgan writes: ‘‘The germs of the principal institutions and
arts of life were developed while man was still a savage. To a very
great extent the experience of the subsequent period of barbarism
and of civilization have been expended in the further development
of these original conceptions. Wherever a connection can be traced
on different continents between a present institution and a com-
mon germ, the derivation of the people themselves from a common
stock is implied’’ (8, emphasis added). In this instance, ‘‘a common
germ’’ plays a role in constituting a social institution and repro-
ducing ‘‘the people.’’ The ‘‘germ’’ of the so-called savage has, the
passage implies, spawned populations ‘‘on different continents’’
that can be regarded as descended from ‘‘common stock.’’ As dis-
courses of racialization and reproduction converge, the transmis-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

sion of gentile society and of ‘‘germs’’ are linked together with

the perpetuation of ‘‘streams of blood,’’ which in turn indexes
race. Indeed, gentile institutions carry ‘‘a portion of mankind from
savagery to civilization’’ through gendered reproductive processes
that are decidedly represented as racialized.
While Morgan’s concept metaphor fulfills one set of rhetori-
cal requirements, once set loose in his text the idea of the ‘‘germ’’
simultaneously challenges—even threatens to disrupt—several of
the other arguments that are adumbrated. For this metaphor of
transmission invokes the specter of racial mixture even as it works
to create distinct racial groupings. When the reproductive and
racial dimensions of the germ concept metaphor are deconstructed
further still, it becomes evident that those living in the most highly
developed ‘‘ethnical period,’’ namely ‘‘Aryans,’’ have something of
the ‘‘savage’’ and/or ‘‘barbarian’’ that preceded them within their
‘‘streams of blood,’’ at least insofar as their civilized institutions
contain the ‘‘germs’’ of originary gentile ones. Read in this way,
‘‘germ’’ takes on yet another meaning—that of contagion. When
racialized, the germ of ‘‘primitivism’’ can only point toward the
specter of racial contamination of a ‘‘pure’’ stock and thus toward
the reproduction of a mixed people. Even though Morgan argues
that the advent of private property rings out the death toll for
gentile institutions, and specifically for the gens as the prevailing
kinship system, he insists that the ‘‘germs’’ of such matriarchal
systems persist within patriarchal institutions that are, within the
logic of his text, the offspring of matriarchal ones.
This complicated and at times contradictory logic of repro-
ductive and racial transmission persists in Origin. Though Engels
never discusses ‘‘ethnical periods’’ nor uses the same concept meta-
phors that Morgan employs in articulating the mechanism of
transmission and endurance of gentile institutions over time, the
racial and reproductive residue of Morgan’s formulations are dis-
cernable, especially in those chapters of Origin in which Engels
turns to the question of the birth of the German state. Among the
Germanic ‘‘barbarians,’’ Engels informs readers, the gens persists
as a constitutive part of the social organization despite the ad-
vent of private property and the supposed decimation of the matri-
archal gens—the two events that are together thought to coincide
with the transition from ‘‘savagery’’ to ‘‘civilization.’’ For, as we
shall see, when the spillover of Morgan’s text is identified within
Engels it becomes evident that Origin narrates how the germ of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

the gens flows in the blood of the German people. Indeed, formu-
lations about gentile kinship that originate in Morgan’s Ancient
Society enable Engels to tell a story not only about the origin of the
family, private property, and the state but also about the origin of
the German nation as a racial and reproductively organized social
entity.
Engels’s Originary Ruse: Race into Nation

Engels’s discussion of the rise of the state follows that of the family,
and on the surface this textual organization makes quite a bit of
sense. The gens, a social group with a distinct social organization,
elects representatives to wider confederacies (the phratries and
tribes) and makes decisions collectively. And yet, as superior as is
the gens, it cannot regulate the conflicts that arise with the ascen-
dance of ‘‘pairing marriage’’ and individualized property. The state
thus arrives on the scene with the dissolution of this matriarchal
social organization, because the emergence of private wealth and
individual families require a variety of new guarantees of owner-
ship and forms of property transfer. Put differently, insofar as class
hierarchy and private property grow out of the dissolution of the
gens, it is these institutions that call forth the state and to which
the state addresses itself.37 The state is generated in the process of
class struggle, Engels confirms; it arises on the ruins of the gentile
constitution, becoming a generalizable abstraction through which
the interests of private property can be expressed. The state not
only secures ‘‘the newly acquired riches of individuals against the
communistic traditions of the gentile order,’’ but also perpetuates
‘‘cleavage of society into classes’’ and orchestrates ‘‘the right of the
possessing class to exploit the non-possessing’’ and thus ‘‘rule . . .
over the latter’’ (141).
Comparative analysis of the various cases he provides leads En-
gels to acknowledge that each state’s history is unique. At the same
time, he insists that a general narrative (Morgan’s about the Iro-
quois) holds true in its main points in all instances, even as spe-
cifics vary. The details of Engels’s explanation of those cases that
at first appear anomalous, but which on closer inspection snugly fit
within the Iroquois plan, are thus instructive. Although there are
numerous instances in which the matriarchal gens’s disappearance
is the precondition for the emergence of the state (see, for example,
Engels’s chapters on Athenian, Roman, and Celtic peoples), in
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Origin’s penultimate chapter, that on the birth of the German

state, Engels argues that the gens persists in germ form among the
Germans and that it is these gentile characteristics above others
that constitute a condition of possibility not only for the emer-
gence of the state but also for the eventual emergence of the Ger-
man nation.
As Engels explains, the German state rose like the proverbial
phoenix from the ruins of a dissolute and quickly crumbling Ro-
man Empire. At the end of the fifth century ‘‘an exhausted and
bleeding imperial power lay helpless before the invading Ger-
mans’’ (183). Roman subjects throughout the empire lived in con-
ditions of utter abjection. What the German invaders offered the
far-flung and diverse subjects was thus relief from their distant Ro-
man rulers; in return for this favor former Roman subjects were
willing to abide the imposition of new rule. Under ‘‘Roman admin-
istration and Roman law,’’ Engels avers, ‘‘the old kinship groups
and with them the last vestiges of local and national independence’’
were destroyed and the Roman subjects left without the unity or
strength to resist. Under Roman rule, Engels specifies, all ‘‘natural
languages had been forced to yield to a debased Latin,’’ individual
provinces had been ‘‘ruthlessly exploited,’’ and systematic robbery
and extortion of the citizens of the empire had become the norm.
The Roman Empire ‘‘gave as the justification of its existence that
it maintained order within the empire and protected it against the
barbarians without. But its order was worse than the worst dis-
order, and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against barbari-
ans longed for the barbarians to deliver them’’ (184). As if other
causes for the conquered people’s embrace of the Germanic in-
vaders were necessary, Engels adds that the Roman system of slave
labor had finally outlived its moment, leaving in its wake a crisis
in the mode of production and the associated ‘‘poisoned sting—
the stigma attaching to the productive labour of freedmen’’ (186).
On first reading Engels’s chapter on the Germanic invasions,
one might conclude that his main point is that Germanic invaders
succeeded in conquering the Romans and their subjects because
they offered abject people an injection of freedom, a means to un-
burden themselves of their oppressors and their outdated mode
of production. On closer examination, however, the decisive fac-
tor in the Germanic victory is not solely the offering of freedom
and new forms of agriculture and industry but also the Germanic
contribution of a specifically gentile sensibility and social infra-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

structure, one that lay the groundwork for state and nation for-
mation among the conquered. It is thus not only by referring to
the diverse Germanic peoples who took over the mantle of power
from the Romans with the ahistorical moniker ‘‘the Germans’’ (der
Deutschen and der Germanen) that Engels retroactively produces
the Germanic invaders as German nationals, but also through the
retrospective projection of a nationalist rationale for the success
of the Germanic invasions. For ultimately what the so-called Ger-
mans provided to the former Roman subjects was a social orga-
nization—the gens—that we know from our reading of Morgan
is a racial and reproductively organized kinship formation. Engels
writes:
There were no more national differences, no more Gauls, Iberi-
ans, Ligurians, Noricans; all had become Romans. Roman ad-
ministration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old
kinship groups and with them the last vestige of local and na-
tional independence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided
no substitute; it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nation-
ality. . . . [T]he strength was not there to fuse these [diverse]
elements into new nations; there was no longer a sign anywhere
of capacity for development or power of resistance to say noth-
ing of creative energy. The enormous mass of humanity . . . was
held together by one bond only—the Roman state; and the Ro-
man state had become in the course of time their worst enemy
and oppressor. (184, emphasis added)
Engels accuses the Romans of destroying ‘‘old kinship struc-
tures’’ and of failing to offer those whom they have conquered a
‘‘nationality’’ to replace the social organization, the gens, that had
been decimated by the advent of private property. And thus, while
it at first apperars that the ‘‘nationality’’ and the ‘‘kinship struc-
tures’’ of which Engels wrote are antithetical, it becomes evident
that as in Morgan’s text in Engels’s they are supplementary. The
salvation the invading Germans offer their captors is expressed in
national terms because what has been lost under Roman rule is
a kinship system, a form of social cohesion that contains the ele-
ments of the racial and reproductive organization of the social that
undergirds the nation form proper. In Origin Engels refers to ‘‘Ger-
manic barbarians’’ as ‘‘Germans’’ with conviction because the kin-
ship systems that they proffer to those whom they have conquered
are racially and reproductively organized, and thus national.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Though Engels notes that ‘‘the sections [of Origin] . . . on the

Germans are in the main [his own] . . . work’’ (37) rather than
Morgan’s, return to the discussion of the Germanic invasions in
Ancient Society reveals that Morgan, not at all surprisingly, prefig-
ures Engels’s treatment of the Germans. In Morgan’s chapter on
‘‘Gentes in Other Tribes of the Human Family,’’ he employs the
model he had developed in his previous discussion of the Iroquois
gens to explain the role of the gens within ‘‘the Scottish Clan,’’
‘‘the Irish Sept,’’ ‘‘the Hebrew tribes,’’ ‘‘the hundred families of
Chinese,’’ ‘‘the African tribes,’’ and finally, ‘‘the Germanic tribes.’’
In short, he suggests (as Engels did after him) that the gens per-
sists among ‘‘the Germans’’ (359): ‘‘The condition and mode of
life of the German tribes tend to the conclusion that their several
societies were held together through personal relations, and with
but slight reference to territory; and that their government was
through these relations’’ (359). Citing Caesar and Tacitus as his au-
thorities Morgan specifies that the Germanic tribes ‘‘were formed
according to families and kinships’’ and that ‘‘the remains . . . of
a prior gentile organization’’ thus continued to inflect the orga-
nization of ‘‘the Mark or local district’’ (360). Tellingly, Morgan
employs the now familiar germ concept metaphor in arguing for
the organic connection between the gens, the Mark, and the still
larger Gau, all of which constitute ‘‘the germs of the future town-
ship and county’’ (361). As in Engels’s account, in Morgan’s urtext,
German political society is an organic outgrowth spawned by the
‘‘germs’’ of the Iroquois gens. In turn, the Iroquois gens is a racial-
ized kinship system—nothing less than the ‘‘germ’’ of the modern
nation.
There is of course a long history of the use of the figure and/or
idea of the Native American within nationalist discourse. Helen
Carr has examined how the invention of the idea of the ‘‘Ameri-
can Primitive’’ by white settlers moving westward across the great
plains helped to constitute these immigrants as American nationals
by throwing into relief their difference from Indians.38 If during
the colonial period the Indian simultaneously stood as a symbol
of the New World and as the prototypical American, by the 1850s
Indians had come to define everything Americans were not. As
Reginald Horsman has argued, the mid-nineteenth century was
an epoch marked by white settlers’ recourse to racialism as the
principal means of thinking the nation. This involved an assertion
of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy of the sort discussed in previ-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

ous chapters and the development of the various forms of scien-

tific racism that buttressed this belief system. Ethnographic work
on Native Americans was central to the consolidation of the new
racialist discourse about Anglo-Saxonism, even when it roman-
ticized or otherwise celebrated rather than denigrated ‘‘savage’’
others.39 As Carr elaborates, in the 1850s America had already
begun to conceive of itself as a country of the future, ‘‘the Indian
along with the wilderness would give way to a modern culture. . . .
In order to create the future, the nation had to argue that the
present (the living Indian) was already the past. . . . Morgan too—
and this despite his recognition of the existence of Indian govern-
ment, culture, and philosophy—accepted the idea of Anglo-Saxon
superiority and the inevitability of Indian demise in the face of
the Indian’s ‘fatal deficiency,’ ‘the non-existence of the progressive
spirit.’ ’’ 40
Although Engels took his lead from Morgan in choosing to
regard Native Americans as outcasts from evolution, as ‘‘primi-
tives’’ who, in their arrested state of development could provide
him with information about European civilization’s prehistory, his
use of the Iroquois to build a case for the origins of the Ger-
man nation neither involved the production of the self/other dia-
lectic that scholars such as Carr and Horsman document nor did
it relegate Indians to a long lost past.41 Rather, Engels rendered
Native Americans foundational to his story about German nation-
alism in a more complex way. For Engels integrated the persis-
tence of the Iroquois’s matriarchal kinship system rather than its
demise into his thinking about the origins of the German nation.
Instead of positioning racial otherness and national belonging as
antithetical (as by implication both Carr and Horsman do), by
introducing the concept of the gens into Origin, Engels renders
race and nation commensurate, even interchangeable, and situates
the gens as a continuously existing kinship system that contains
the seeds of the modern racial nation. Whereas in prerevolutionary
America the predominant impulse was to regard Native Americans
as racial others and thus as nonnational, in Engels’s work the Iro-
quois emerge as the (m)others of the Germans. Even as he lambasts
a romantic historiographic tradition that retrospectively projects
the greatness of the so-called German race onto the Germanic
barbarians, Engels simultaneously insists on the persistence of the
‘‘germ’’ of the Iroquois gens among the Germans, effectively offer-
ing a restorative nationalism grounded in the persistence of the re-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

productively organized matriarchal kinship system that Morgan

found among the Iroquois.
‘‘The German peoples, now masters of the Roman provinces,
had to organize what they had conquered’’ and thus had to trans-
form ‘‘the organs of the gentile constitution . . . into state organs’’
(188); and yet, Engels assures readers, they managed to do so in
a manner that preserved the former within the latter. ‘‘Progress,’’
Engels explains, employing reproductively laden language, ‘‘was
made during these 400 years,’’ for the social classes of the ninth
century that emerged from the period of barbarism were ‘‘formed,
not in the rottenness of a decaying civilization, but in the birth
pangs of a new civilization. Compared with their Roman predeces-
sors, the new breed, whether masters or servants, was a breed of
men’’ (192). With a flurry of rhetorical queries, Engels concludes:
But what was the mysterious magic by which the Germans
breathed new life into a dying Europe? Was it some miracu-
lous power innate in the Germanic race, such as our chauvinist
historians romance about? Not a bit of it. The Germans, espe-
cially at that time, were a highly gifted Aryan tribe and in the
full vigour of development. It was not, however, their specific
national qualities which rejuvenated Europe, but simply—their
barbarism, their gentile constitution . . . in a word all the quali-
ties which had been lost to the Romans and were alone capable
of forming new states and making new nationalities grow out of
the slime of the Roman world—what else were they than the
characteristics of the barbarian of the upper stage, fruits of his
gentile constitution? (192–93, emphasis added)
This seemingly contradictory passage twists and turns only to
double back upon itself. If emphasis is placed on the first half,
Engels appears to adamantly refuse a nationalistic, ‘‘chauvinist’’
interpretation of the Germanic invaders as well as a notion of race-
based nationalism. The ‘‘Germanic race’’ has not saved civiliza-
tion, he insists, but rather a group of ‘‘Aryan’’ barbarians. And yet,
when emphasis is shifted to the second half of the passage, an en-
tirely different interpretation becomes possible. What are the in-
vading ‘‘barbarians’’ offering their captors but ‘‘the qualities’’ that
they exclusively possess: namely, the capacity ‘‘of forming new
states and making new nationalities grow’’ in the place of old,
extinguished ones. In invoking ‘‘the slime of the Roman world,’’
Engels inflects his language with evolutionary significance, sugges-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

tively implying that this process of formation is organic, part of

a larger inevitable process of natural development that has been
followed by humans and amphibians alike. Even as Engels focuses
on state building, the birth of the German nation is the unstated
telos of his argument. As in Benedict Anderson’s famous formu-
lation about the temporality of nationalism, in Origin the gentile
features of German nationalism seem to extend into the ‘‘limitless
future’’ and stretch back into the ‘‘immemorial past’’ that Engels
discusses, even though this is not his express concern.42 In fact,
like Anderson writing nearly a century after him, Engels embeds
racialized reproductive ideas about kinship within his theory of
nation-state formation, but he never foregrounds or self-reflexively
examines the presence of the race/reproduction bind that subtends
his argument.
If the seemingly oxymoronic assertion of the national status
of the prenational Germanic barbarians appears insurmountable,
Engels is nonplussed. He concludes his argument with the follow-
ing resolution of the historical dilemma that his text opens up:
If [the Germans] recast the ancient form of monogamy, mod-
erated the supremacy of the man in the family, and gave the
woman a higher position than the classical world had ever
known, what made them capable of doing so if not their barba-
rism, their gentile customs, their living heritage from the time of
mother right? . . . [T]o what was [their ability to save the Roman
subjects] due, if not to their barbarism, their purely barbarian
method of settlement in kinship groups?’’ (194, emphasis added)
Having begun by attesting that any notion of the barbarian in-
vaders as members of the ‘‘German race’’ is a philistine’s retro-
spective projection, Engels concludes by using the figure of ‘‘gen-
tile customs’’ and matriarchal ‘‘kinship groups’’ to smooth over
the historical difference between German nationals and Germanic
barbarians, effectively rendering them equivalent. It is the barba-
rism of the Germans, he postulates, ‘‘their living heritage from
the time of mother right,’’ their organization according to mater-
nal lines of descent, that rendered them capable of providing the
former members of the Roman empire with the racializing repro-
ductive power to bind their peoples together afresh and birth their
nations anew; for in Origin it is ‘‘the purely barbarian method
of settlement in kinship groups’’ that is the precondition for the
reproduction of nations. ‘‘Germany,’’ Engels concludes, ‘‘carried
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

over into the feudal state a genuine piece of gentile constitution’’

(193), and it was this infusion of barbarism, this ‘‘vigorous and
creative’’ element that in the last instance ‘‘explain[s] everything’’
(194).43
If Engels is either unaware of or sanguine about the national
subtext that he generates within the confines of the larger and
more explicit arguments he sets forth in Origin, readers interested
in the future of the relationship among Marxism, feminism, and
antiracism should not be. With the reintroduction of the matri-
archal gens into the story about the origins of the family, private
property, and the state, a racially and reproductively laden con-
cept of kinship emerges as a supplement that secures the story of
the origin of state society in a narrative that depends upon racial
and reproductive ideas for its coherence. For in Origin, it is the
‘‘germ’’ of the matriarchal gens that Morgan first found among
the Iroquois that finesses the misfit between Engels’s overt narra-
tive and the inchoate narrative about the origins of the German
nation that simultaneously unfolds between the covers of his text.
Although the overarching story that is related in Origin—the one
that is intentionally proffered by Engels—suggests that the state
emerges after the demise of the gens, and that what is lost with
the rise of the state form is a society organized by consanguineous
descent through the mother line, the details of Engels’s argument
in the penultimate chapter of Origin constitute an instructive tex-
tual exception. For Engels’s story about the Germans is guided by
an alternative racial and reproductive logic that ultimately contra-
venes the overarching narrative. Among the Germans the ‘‘germ’’
of the gens, and thus the persistence of matriarchal kinship struc-
tures, secure first the rise of the state and then that of the German
nation.
Once the story about the birth of the nation is revealed as Ori-
gin’s covert or, perhaps more accurately, its unintentional if logical
telos, it becomes possible to discern an array of textual details that
pave the way for the text’s arrival at this destination. In the chap-
ter on ‘‘the family,’’ for example, Engels argues that wherever the
monogamous family ‘‘remains true to its historical origin . . . [it]
clearly reveals the antagonism between the man and the woman
expressed in the man’s exclusive supremacy.’’ However, not all
monogamous ‘‘marriages turn out thus’’ (98–99), and instructively
if not surprisingly German marriages are instanced as the excep-
tion to the rule. As Engels chattily attests, ‘‘Nobody knows better
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

than the German philistine who can no more assert his rule in the
home than he can in the state . . . [that it is his wife who] with every
right, wears the trousers of which he is unworthy’’ (99). He adds
more seriously, Germans are late bloomers, a people among whom
a clear distinction between monogamy and ‘‘pairing marriage’’ ar-
rived late on the scene and even then incompletely. Such thinking
leads Engels to repeatedly assert that the Germans retained much
longer than other peoples their ‘‘respect . . . for the female sex,’’
such that for a long period in German history the ‘‘woman seems
to have held undisputed sway’’ (174). No matter the angle from
which we approach Engels’s narrative, when read through the lens
of Morgan’s work it becomes evident that it is animated by the
‘‘germ’’ of the gens, for there is undeniably something matriarchal
or trouser-wearing about German women.
At this chapter’s outset I suggested that scholars are in agree-
ment that Marx and Engels selected Morgan’s work on the history
of the family over that of other ethnologists because it offered a
materialist understanding of history. Unlike Bachofen and McLen-
nan, Morgan recognized that there was neither anything perma-
nent nor inevitable about the patriarchal Victorian family. I also
suggested that a return to Morgan’s writings would reveal some-
thing in addition to the coincidence of Morgan’s method with a
Marxist materialist one—namely, the work of kinship as a sup-
plement, and the matriarchal gens as a racializing reproductive
formation or nation-making institution. As we have seen, Origin’s
centering of the matriarchal gens as a kinship system with racial-
izing and nationalizing force transforms Origin into a text quite
different from the one it professes itself to be, and quite different
from the text that Marxist and socialist feminists have in the past
treated. For when kinship’s work as supplement is made trans-
parent, it becomes possible to discern how racialized reproductive
narratives supplement the Marxist origin story and, in turn, how
ideas about the origin of the family, private property, and the state
are built upon the same race/reproduction bind that subtends the
idea of the modern racial nation.
Though he does not directly refer to Origin, in the passage that
serves as this chapter’s epigraph Etienne Balibar expresses simi-
lar ideas: ‘‘The idea of the racial community makes its appear-
ance when the frontiers of kinship dissolve at the level of the clan,
the neighborhood community and, theoretically at least, the so-
cial class to be imaginarily transferred to the threshold of nation-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

ality.’’ 44 Reworking Balibar’s formulation in view of the argument

this chapter delineates, it becomes possible to recognize kinship as
a supplement that installs missing reproductive bonds and in the
process makes visible the presence of racial and national connec-
tions. And it is in this sense that this chapter underscores the racial
and reproductive components of the discourse of belonging upon
which social organizations, including states, nations, and nation-
states, depend. In Origin the presence of the gens among the Ger-
mans renders Engels’s story about the emergence of private prop-
erty and the early moments of capitalist society coterminous with
his story about the origins of the German nation.
Though Balibar helps us to see the supplemental work done by
kinship in Engels’s text, his understanding of the role of the imagi-
nation in inaugurating the nation is completely missing from Ori-
gin. As discussed in chapter 1, Balibar regards ‘‘race’’ as an inven-
tion, a fiction that enables the thinking of community. ‘‘Race’’ is
not in Balibar’s view a real substance or biological ‘‘germ’’ trans-
mitted over time in the ‘‘blood’’ of a people but a symbolic kernel
that makes the thinking of ‘‘racial community,’’ and thus the imagi-
nation of ‘‘blood,’’ ‘‘descent,’’ ‘‘genealogy,’’ and national belong-
ing, possible. By contrast, insofar as Engels regards the language of
kinship as an accurate representation of actually existing kinship
bonds, he casts kinship systems, genealogical ties, and bloodlines
as real, organic, and biological. As he explains, the various kinship
systems he discusses became available to Morgan through study
of the language of kinship, which, although outmoded at the time
it was encountered by the anthropologist, nonetheless reflected
real social and biological ties: ‘‘while the family undergoes living
changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies,’’ Engels avered (60).
For Engels, as for Morgan before him, the language of kinship in-
dexed a real world of organic connections. Engels explains this by
making analogical recourse to a figure, the fossilized bone, that
was central to the natural sciences of his day: ‘‘Just as Cuvier could
deduce from the marsupial bone of an animal skeleton found near
Paris that it belonged to a marsupial animal and that extinct mar-
supial animals once lived there, so with the same certainty we can
deduce from the historical survival of a system of consanguinity
that an extinct form of family once existed which corresponded
to it’’ (60). This passage reveals two interrelated biases: First, that
Engels regarded kinship terminologies as ‘‘fossil records’’ of pre-
vious family forms and thus as proof of the family’s evolution of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

these forms over time.45 And second, it indicates the philosophy

of language and representation to which Engels subscribed. Lan-
guage was for Engels a direct reflection or perfect representation
of social practices and biological bonds. While ‘‘racial commu-
nity’’ may be transferred to the threshold of nationality at the mo-
ment that bonds of kinship dissolve within the story that Engels
relates, it is not ‘‘imaginarily transferred’’ (as Balibar would have
it) but directly transferred (as in Morgan’s text) in the germ of the
gens. According to Engels, the nation is a political organization
that perpetuates a biologically grounded social system based in re-
producible kinship structures. Clearly, what Engels could not see
is that nations invent racialized kinship to support ideologies of
inclusion rather than the other way around.46
If Origin, the book that has been canonized as the foundational
Marxist account of the coemergence of patriarchal and capitalist
society, can be read—as I have read it in the preceding pages—as
an account of race-based kinship systems in which nation-states
are thought to be grounded, this raises a number of issues for femi-
nist readers. It challenges us to examine the relationships among
race, reproduction, and class and to clear space for new under-
standings of how class formation and gender hierarchy, as they are
explored in Marx’s and Engels’s writings, are bound up with in-
choate ideas about race and nation. It helps us become more aware
and critical of the racial grounding of the developmentalist model
in which Marxism is awash. And finally, it compels us to decide if
and when essentialist, often expressly biological, understandings
of social and political formations such as families and nations are
useful to us in crafting feminist and antiracist versions of Marx-
ism. For from the historical and at once intertextual vantage point
that I have offered in this chapter, Origin can be read as a text in
which race implicitly structures the thinking of the sexual division
of labor, and the property relations that require this division. And
thus, although Origin may be grossly inadequate as a game plan for
liberating women from multiple sources of oppression (as previ-
ous feminist scholars have surmised), its content nonetheless pro-
vides us with an understanding of the articulation of the gendered,
raced, and classed modalities of thinking that have been woven
together in the Marxist story of the origins of capitalist patriarchy.
If feminists wish to make Origin relevant to discussions of race
and racism, we must stop evaluating it on the basis of its descrip-
tive accuracy and resist the urge to discard it because it has been
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

too readily instrumentalized. Instead we must take the time to read

it against the grain. For when apprehended textually and situated
historically it becomes possible to bring the racial, reproductive,
and national themes that structure Origin into full view.
Of course such a reading practice does not instantly transcend
the impass in Marxist and socialist feminism that was identified
in the first section of this chapter, but it does help reconceptualize
the perceived limitations of the Marxist project. Such a reading
indicates that our goal as feminist readers need not simply be ‘‘the
marriage’’ or integration of Marxism and feminism but rather the
critical assessment of the rhetoricity of Marxian texts. For once we
better understand how the Marxist project articulates race, nation,
and reproduction, we can envision new, more self-conscious ways
of formulating our analyses of human domination. Such a perspec-
tive would attend to kinship as a racial and reproductive supple-
ment within analyses of the origins of the family, private property,
and the state. It would also enable us to think racism as consti-
tutive to gendered and classed oppression and, in turn, to think
antiracism as constitutive to women’s liberation from capitalism.
In a different context, Michel Foucault cryptically observed
that ‘‘racism is literally revolutionary discourse put in reverse.’’
This observation gestures toward the relationship of historical
reciprocity that exists between racial formation and class forma-
tion, on the one hand, and antiracism and class struggle, on the
other. In closing this chapter, I interpret Foucault as begging a
question of Origin that remains to be answered by feminists inter-
ested in antiracist revolutionary politics: what is Engels’s originary
ruse, his insistence on matriarchal kinship at the origin, other than
a scripting of the story about the origins of private property and
state society such that racial nationalism figures as the unofficial
telos of his argument, inserting itself into the position that has
been officially reserved for class revolution? Ideas of race as well
as racist thinking have clearly had an unlimited range of applica-
tions within Engels’s foundational treatise. Unless feminists make
the project of excavating such thinking our own, we run the risk of
missing kinship’s function as racial and reproductive supplement
and thus of participating in the reversal of revolutionary discourse.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Chapter Four
Sexual Selection and the Birth of
Psychoanalysis: Darwin, Freud, and the
Universalization of Wayward Reproduction
Preceding chapters have explored how the race/reproduction

bind structures theories of nationalism and genealogy; nationalist
strands of first-wave feminism and maternalist strands of second-
wave feminism; Marxist theories of the family, private property,
and the state; and the early anthropological work upon which
Marxism draws. In this chapter I build on those explorations by
demonstrating how the race/reproduction bind also subtends evo-
lutionary theory and psychoanalysis, the latter of which was devel-
oped in implicit dialogue with Darwinism. To date few critics have
examined Freud’s debt to Darwin, and yet we know that Freud
was an avid reader of evolutionary theory and that his engagement
with questions of sexuality reflected and refracted his reading of
Darwin’s writings as well as the wider discourse on Darwinism
that circulated within the contemporary scientific community.1 In
Darwinian theory, race and reproduction forcefully collide in the
theory of ‘‘sexual selection,’’ Darwin’s controversial companion to
the theory of natural selection that accounts for differences among
members of species that appear to confer no evolutionary advan-
tage. In particular Darwin explained the origin of racial differ-
ences among members of the human species using sexual selection.
In so doing he located wayward female desire as pivotal in repro-
ducing such differences.
Attention has focused on race in recent psychoanalytic criti-
cism by scholars interested in situating the development of psycho-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
analysis within the context of nineteenth-century raciology and

in view of more long-standing anti-Semitic discourses. In Austro-
German medicine and science, as in the immediate sociopolitical
milieu of Freud’s Vienna, race invariably called up the constella-
tion Aryan/Jew. The 1890s, when Freud began to publish, wit-
nessed the final death blows to midcentury liberalism and formal-
ized Jewish integration into the state. Social cleavages ran deep
and were marked by Czech movements for Bohemian autonomy,
Catholic loyalty to Rome, the rise of Pan-Slavism, and the ascent
of full-blown German nationalism. In 1894, the year the Dreyfus
affair erupted in France, anti-Semites swept into the majority in
Vienna’s municipal council. In 1897, Emperor Franz Josef con-
firmed as mayor of Vienna the rabid anti-Semite Karl Lueger, who
had been refused entry into government twice before. Through-
out the decade Vienna was wracked by anti-Semitic demonstra-
tions and violence; boycotts of Jewish merchants were routine,
Jewish students were attacked and driven from schools, Jews were
‘‘restricted’’ from public facilities, barred from teaching in pri-
mary grades, and only selectively allowed to attend and teach at
higher schools and universities. Freud himself had difficulty secur-
ing an academic position. Historians characterize the last decades
of the nineteenth century as the period in which discourses of
anti-Semitism shifted from a culture-based articulation of racism
targeted at eastern Jews to a decisively biological or essentialist
articulation of racism targeted at all Jews—new immigrants and
German Jews alike—who had come to be regarded not only as
religious and cultural outsiders, but as a distinct and inferior race.2
This chapter explores Jewishness not as a reified racial iden-
tity but as a facet of the larger racial formation that Freud worked
within and against. It suggests that the most compelling route into
a discussion of race and psychoanalysis is through examination of
the race/reproduction bind out of which psychoanalysis was built.
Its aim is twofold: to explore the complex intertwining of race and
reproduction in Darwinian theory and to demonstrate how a gen-
eralized version of this discursive nexus became foundational, the
condition of possibility for elaboration of the modern science of
the mind. Before I proceed with an analysis of Freud’s work, I take
a short tour through Darwin’s. Although the juxtaposition of these
two thinkers is seldom pursued as an analytical strategy, when
Freud’s and Darwin’s formulations are placed into dialogue, it be-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

comes evident that Darwinian ideas about wayward reproduction

and race spill into Freud’s work, especially in Freud’s early figu-
ration of the hysteric. In Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, re-
productive sexuality is racialized and racial difference sexualized.
Freud, a scientist attempting to universalize his study of the psyche
and legitimate its claims, managed to harness this potent conjunc-
tion for his own scientific purposes. For, as we shall see, several of
Freud’s key texts implicitly rework Darwinian ideas about racial-
ized reproduction in the interest of constructing an antiracism
founded upon the appropriation, transformation, and subsequent
universalization of an array of pervasive anti-Semitic stereotypes
about wayward Jewish reproductivity.
Reproductive Insurrection and the

Origin of ‘‘Race’’ among Species
In the introduction to The Origin of the Species by Means of Natu-
ral Selection; or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle
for Life (1859), Darwin intimates that his book, ostensibly fo-
cused on animal and plant evolution, will also shed ‘‘light on
man and his origins.’’ 3 The outrage provoked by Darwin’s opus
grew in response to the challenge it posed to Judeo-Christian be-
liefs in divine creation and the place of human beings in nature.4
It was, however, Darwin’s second major contribution, The De-
scent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), that provided
the promised evidence that ‘‘there can hardly be a doubt that we
[humans beings] are descended from barbarians,’’ by way of ‘‘some
lowly-organized form.’’ 5 In Descent Darwin explicitly elaborates
his theory of human evolution and hypothesizes the sexual mecha-
nism of racial differentiation among human beings.6 As the title of
his second tome announces, in addition to evolution proper it is
concerned with selection in relation to sex.
Throughout Descent, Darwin draws on vast reserves of evi-
dence from the animal kingdom, concentrating on the plumage,
mating rituals, and coloration of various species of birds. In the
two penultimate chapters, he moves from a discussion of species
differences among animals to that of differences among the so-
called races of man. Here, theories of evolution elaborated in the
first part of the book and the theory of sexual selection focused on
in the second combine to account for physical variations among
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis 147

human beings that are racial in character. By the end of Descent

Darwin has arrived at two conclusions. The first is recognizable as
standard evolutionary argument: ‘‘all races agree in so many unim-
portant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities,’’
he writes, ‘‘that these can be accounted for only through inheri-
tance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus charac-
terized would probably have deserved to rank as man’’ (2:388).
The second conclusion is less well known: the evidence, Darwin
attests, shows us ‘‘that the races of man differ from each other
and from their nearest allies amongst the lower animals, in cer-
tain characters which are of no service to them in their ordinary
habits of life, and which it is extremely probable would have been
modified [not through natural selection but rather] through sexual
selection’’ (2:384).
As Darwin sought to account for the differences among human
beings that seemed most stark to him, he held fast to his belief
in descent from a common progenitor. As he notes, it was only
after human beings ‘‘attained the rank of manhood [that they] . . .
diverged into distinct races, or as they may be more appropri-
ately called sub-species’’ (2:388). And yet, although such state-
ments imply that it is the second-order process of sexual selection,
not the primary one of natural selection, that is responsible for
(re)producing racial distinctions among humans beings, the theory
of natural selection and that of sexual selection are actually col-
lapsed within Descent’s pages. Descent is pervaded by a blending
or intertwining of theories that often transposes Darwin’s mono-
genecist conclusion into a more dubious one about racial differ-
entiation, a transposition aided by Darwin’s loose use, and conse-
quent elision of, the category of ‘‘sub-species’’ and its replacement
by the term ‘‘race’’ as it was understood in common rather than
scientific usage.
Because Darwin scholars ignore the significance of the race/
reproduction bind within Darwin’s work they are silent on the role
of the female’s choice of mate in originating differences among
‘‘the races of man.’’ In the eyes of Darwin’s fellow scientists and
historians of science alike, Descent is stigmatized by its association
with sex, and it is thus tacitly agreed that all ‘‘serious’’ focus should
be on Origin. Those feminists who have treated the sexual dimen-
sions of the argument in Descent rarely acknowledge that Darwin
was as preoccupied with race as with sex and in fact posited the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

inextricable connection between the two.7 In departing from treat-

ments that keep sex and race analytically separate, this chapter
reads Descent through the race/reproduction bind and engages not
only the controversial argument about gender (as previous femi-
nist scholars have) but also Darwin’s detailed narrative about the
female’s role in the reproduction of racial differences.
Darwin breaks the sexual selection mechanism that results
in the production of differences such as coloration of skin, fur,
and feathers, amount and distribution of plumage and body hair,
shape, and size into two parts: ‘‘The sexual struggle is of two
kinds; in the one it is between individuals of the same sex, gen-
erally the male sex, in order to drive away or kill the rivals, the
females remaining passive; whilst in the other, the struggle is like-
wise between individuals of the same sex, in order to excite or
charm those of the opposite sex, generally the females, which
no longer remain passive but select the more agreeable partners’’
(398). Darwin dutifully notes anomalous cases but ultimately sug-
gests that sexual selection involves male rivalry for females and
female choice of males.8 Though the former idea was easily ac-
cepted by popular and scientific audiences—the vision of male ani-
mals battling each other for mates fitting nicely with Victorian
notions of male strength, bravery, and virility (all the qualities
that are displayed in such contests)—Darwin’s ideas about females
as active selectors and thus as sexual agents stirred up multiple
objections.
For his fellow scientists, the idea of female choice was prepos-
terous. As Darwin seemed to anticipate, ‘‘It is astonishing . . . that
the females . . . should be endowed with sufficient taste for what
has apparently been effected through sexual selection’’ (2:400).
Alfred Russell Wallace, the naturalist with whom Darwin collabo-
rated in developing the theory of evolution, broke with him over
sexual selection. Going to great lengths to prove that the plumage
of male birds had a function related to species’ survival, Wallace
dismissed sexual selection as unnecessary since natural selection
alone could explain the modifications in question.9 An additional
objection to the theory of sexual selection was purveyed by Dar-
win’s wider intellectual cohort. Like the scientists, this audience
found the theory irrational and anthropomorphic. As Marx wit-
tily explained, Darwin appears to ‘‘recognize among beasts and
plants, his English society.’’ 10 Echoing this jibe, Havelock Ellis ob-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

served that Darwin ‘‘certainly injured his theory . . . by insist-

ing on ‘choice,’ ‘preference,’ ‘aesthetic sense,’ ’’ among females.
For in Ellis’s view there was ‘‘no need whatever to burden any
statement of the actual facts by such terms borrowed from human
psychology.’’ 11
It was not merely the transfer of ‘‘Victorian romanticism from
boudoir to bush’’ 12 that touched a nerve among Darwin’s readers,
but that Descent inadvertently underscored the commonality be-
tween the aggressive sexual behavior of women and female ani-
mals, birds, and bugs.13 The idea that the female of the human
species, like that of other species, ‘‘no longer remains passive,’’
to quote Darwin, but becomes a reproductive agent endowed
with sexual desire, deeply disturbed Victorian notions of proper
bourgeois femininity and ideologies of separate spheres. Though
Darwin never argued that sexual selection operated among the
‘‘civilized’’—namely, his Victorian readers—his argument elicited
anxiety on all sides.14 If, on the one hand, the mechanism of sexual
selection were not functioning among Victorians, then perhaps the
‘‘civilized’’ had ceased to ‘‘evolve.’’ If, on the other hand, human
females had selected in some primeval past, what was to prevent
them from returning to their unseemly, unfeminine ways? What
was to stop Victorian women from snatching the agency of selec-
tion back from men, making improper sexual choices, and effec-
tively bringing ‘‘civilization’’ down with them? 15
To fully comprehend Descent’s challenge, one need only exam-
ine the evidence Darwin offers about sexual selection among lower
animals as he builds up to his arguments about selection among
human beings. In the four long central chapters of Descent, Dar-
win explains the differences between males and females of a num-
ber of species, demonstrating that males are generally more color-
ful and highly ornamented than females because this is how they
compete for mates. By contrast, females possess what is variously
described as ‘‘a sense of beauty’’ or ‘‘an appreciation for novelty’’
that leads them to select the most excessively and/or pleasingly
adorned males. Brushing off anticipated protest, Darwin insists
that it is impossible that ‘‘male birds of paradise or Peacocks . . .
should take such pains in erecting, spreading, and vibrating their
beautiful plumes before the females for no purpose’’ (400). The
male peacock’s tail feathers—perhaps Darwin’s favorite and most
famous example—are not useless extravagances but indispensable
adornments used for attracting fertile females, who pass these fine
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

plumes on to their male offspring and perpetuate their mate’s sig-

nature trait.
Throughout Descent, as in much of the criticism on it, the pea-
cock serves as a model for Darwin’s arguments about males of all
sexually dimorphic species, insects and mammals alike. In discuss-
ing these cases, Darwin produces evidence from correspondence
with breeders, farmers, and naturalists and presents a number of
memorable accounts: female salmon selecting to spawn with males
whose intermaxillary bones are the most highly developed (2:4);
female orangutans selecting mates with the longest beards; female
monkeys choosing mates with the most resplendent tufts, crests,
or mantles of hair (1:312–13); and female antelopes selecting males
with the most dramatically curved and lyrated horns (1:254).
Although Darwin intersperses his narrative with evidence about
animals observed in the wild, the pairings of mammals and birds
observed by professional breeders compel him the most, as it is
within these firsthand accounts that the sexual dynamic so piv-
otal to his argument about human racial differentiation repeat-
edly emerges. Darwin’s informants not only tend to corroborate
his ideas about female choice; they also suggest that some females
extend their purview, selecting not just the most pleasing members
of their own species but so-called novel mates belonging to other
subspecies as well. In a chapter on pairing preferences among
mammals, for instance, Darwin quotes Mr. Mayhew, a breeder of
smaller dogs:
The females are able to bestow their affections; and tender rec-
ollections are as potent over them as they are known to be in
other cases, where higher animals are concerned. Bitches are
not always prudent in their loves, but are apt to fling them-
selves away on curs of low degree. If reared with a companion
of vulgar appearance, there often springs up between the pair
a devotion which no time can afterwards subdue. The passion,
for such it really is, becomes of a more than romantic endur-
ance. (2:270)
To support Mayhew’s testimony about ‘‘bitches’’ swept away by
inappropriate passions, Darwin offers evidence from ‘‘the well
known veterinary Blaine,’’ who affirms that his ‘‘own female pug
became so attached to a spaniel, and a female setter to a cur, that
in neither case would they pair with dogs of their own breed’’
(2:271). Further buttressing these stories, Darwin adds that he
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

knows of ‘‘two similar and trustworthy accounts’’ of female re-

trievers and spaniels that likewise ‘‘became enamored with terrier
dogs’’ (2:271).
In these and other instances Darwin aims to establish female
choice as the motor of selection. Yet these examples also suggest
that the females in question are not solely interested in adorned
males of their own kind but also in differently decorated members
of other subspecies, breeds, and varieties. In the first example, the
‘‘pure-bred’’ female prefers the ‘‘lower’’ mutt of ‘‘vulgar appear-
ance’’; in the second, she strays further afield and prefers a ‘‘cur’’;
while, in all the other instances, she audaciously makes not only
a ‘‘bad’’ but a markedly inappropriate choice of mate who is cast
as an outsider. In short, Darwin’s evidence for sexual selection
among dogs suggests that the female of the species is ‘‘downwardly
mobile,’’ her reproductive desire decidedly wayward.
Darwin reiterates this argument with dramatic force in his
chapter on birds. In a section entitled ‘‘Preferences for particular
males by females,’’ he again cites the numerous observations of
fellow breeders to provide an account of domesticated birds be-
longing to distinct species, who, despite living among members of
their own kind, select mates of another:
Waterton states that out of a flock of twenty-three Canada
geese, a female paired with a solitary Bernicle gander, although
so different in appearance. . . . Lloyd describes the remarkable
attachment between a shield drake and a common duck. . . .
Many additional instances could be given. . . . [T]he Rev. W. D.
Fox informs me that he possessed at the same time a pair of
Chinese geese . . . and a common gander with three geese. The
two lots kept quite separate, until the Chinese gander seduced
one of the common geese to live with him. Moreover, of the
young birds hatched from the eggs of the common geese, only
four were pure, the other eighteen proving hybrids; so that the
Chinese gander seems to have had proponent charms over the
common gander. (2:114)
In these examples and others, the power of the foreign male’s orna-
ment is so great that ‘‘common’’ females select for the unusual
male’s ‘‘proponent charms.’’ Although Darwin excuses, when nec-
essary, his own anthropomorphic tendencies, it is difficult to miss
the racial overtones and subtle reversals of power that pervade
such descriptions. The last, especially orientalist, example is in-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

structive. In this account of the coupling of a so-called Chinese

gander and common goose, Darwin presents an alien male as the
seducer of a ‘‘native’’ female. Here sexual selection is based on
female choice, but in a manner that foregrounds the orientalized
gander’s seemingly illicit seduction of the goose, thus attributing
agency not only to the female but also to the male. Several pages
later, Darwin offers a second similar case. Again, it is an oriental-
ized male, a ‘‘Shanghai cock,’’ who is said to have subdued a ‘‘quar-
relsome hen’’ (2:118). In both instances, a reversal of power char-
acterizes the selection, indicating that agency has been somehow
inappropriately or uncomfortably attributed. Apparently there is
an aporia in Darwin’s text. The female, in the theory of sexual
selection, is made a subject and the male an object. And yet so
inadmissible is such a reorganization of gendered reproductive
agency that it produces a conceptual crisis indicated by an absence
or silence in the narrative. The oriental male becomes the seducer,
the elicitor of native female choice, because what apparently had
to be kept from view was female desire for another, in a context in
which the expression of such a transgressive whim was inadmis-
sible.
The conclusion Darwin draws from his various bird stories
gives away his narrative’s racial subtext. He explains that accord-
ing to the Rev. E. S. Dixon: ‘‘Those who have kept many differ-
ent species . . . together, well know the unaccountable attachments
they are frequently forming, and that they are quite as likely to pair
. . . with individuals of a race (species) apparently the most alien
to themselves as with their own stock’’ (2:114, emphasis added).
Once again slipping from an account of sexual relations among
members of different ‘‘subspecies’’ to relations among separate
‘‘species,’’ here the popular language of ‘‘race’’ becomes inter-
changeable with that of ‘‘species.’’ Consequently, the ideological
weight of the formulation becomes transparent: members of dif-
ferent ‘‘races’’ will mingle and mix; and when they do, it is best
not to attribute the initiation of such illicit interracial crossings
to females. And yet, one is left asking, what precisely is so desta-
bilizing about female sexual selection across the purported ‘‘race
(species)’’ divide that female sexual agency must be portrayed as
coerced?
Darwin answers this question in the chapters of Descent in
which he draws upon his animal examples to analyze the ori-
gin of ‘‘secondary sexual characteristics in man’’—a discussion
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

that rapidly becomes one about the origin of differences among

‘‘the races of man.’’ 16 Having climbed several rungs farther up
the evolutionary ladder (in a problematic manner that has been
roundly criticized by others), Darwin shuttles effortlessly from
bugs, birds, monkeys, and apes to ‘‘savages,’’ those living represen-
tatives of European prehistory whom he apodictically invokes to
segue between his discussion of ‘‘civilized’’ human beings and their
thumbless forebears.17 Unlike his previous examples, culled from
personal observation and correspondence with farmers, breeders,
and naturalists, the evidence for sexual selection among ‘‘semi-
civilized and savage nations’’ (2:338) is drawn from travel writ-
ings and available ethnographic texts. Darwin sifts through these
to document that ‘‘savage’’ males, like male birds, are elaborately
adorned, ‘‘everywhere deck[ing] themselves with plumes, neck-
laces, amulets, earrings, [tattoos] & c’’ (2:339); and that female
‘‘savages,’’ like female birds, are especially drawn to these highly
ornamented males. As among the lower animals, among ‘‘savages,’’
females persist as agents of sexual selection.
Darwin’s account of the origin of differences among ‘‘the races
of man’’ depends on a shift from his discussion of canine and
bird preference for ornament to ‘‘savage’’ preference for the par-
ticular bodily ornament of ‘‘dark skin.’’ To finesse this move Dar-
win relies on two additional assumptions: that propounded since
the eighteenth century by naturalists such as Blumenbach, that
human beings were originally light in color and that darker skin
was at some primeval moment a novelty; and, that darker skin,
like the exotic plumage of the drake, lured native (read ‘‘white’’
or ‘‘light-skinned’’) females away from more appropriate object
choices.18 Elaborating, Darwin observes that among ‘‘mankind the
differences between the sexes are greater than in most species of
Quadramana’’ (2:316), and it is ‘‘savages’’ who are most acutely
aware of these differences, as evidenced by the great ‘‘attention
[they pay] to their personal appearance’’ and the enjoyment they
take in ornament (2:325).19 In a chapter section entitled ‘‘On the
influence of beauty in determining the marriages of mankind,’’
Darwin casts his discussion in euphemistic terms (‘‘marriage’’ is
substituted for sexual selection, for example) and argues that his
‘‘study of the habits of semi-civilized and savage nations’’ lead him
to conclude that in some earlier (though unspecified) era ‘‘savage’’
women exercised choice much as do nonhuman animals such as
geese and dogs. Darwin specifies, ‘‘Clothes were . . . first made
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

for ornament and not for warmth,’’ 20 as evidenced by ‘‘primitive’’

habits of dress and bodily adornment such as painting and dying of
skin, hair, nails, and teeth as well as tattooing and scarification;21
and it is females that select for these attributes. Invoking the now
familiar gender division that constitutes the sexual selection pro-
cess, Darwin explains:
Men paint their bodies to make themselves appear terrible in
battle; certain mutilations are connected with religious rites;
or they mark the age of puberty, or the rank of the man, or
they serve to distinguish the tribes. . . . [T]he same fashions
prevail for long periods, mutilations, from whatever cause first
made soon come to be valued as distinctive marks. But self-
adornment, vanity, and the admiration of others seem to be the
commonest motives. . . . [Indeed,] in most . . . parts of the world,
the men are more highly ornamented than the women . . . [who
are] hardly ornamented at all. (2:342–43)
As in his previous discussion of animals, in his discussion
of human beings Darwin conscientiously enumerates anomalous
cases. And yet he concludes that, as among other animals, among
human beings, adornment is principally a male propensity, and
aesthetic appreciation of decoration and difference is a female trait
that has shaped the physical character of entire populations.22 Ra-
cial diversity in all probability resulted from sexual selection, he
affirms: ‘‘Characters proper to the males of lower animals, such as
bright colours and various ornaments, have been acquired by the
more attractive males having been preferred by females’’ (2:371).
This is especially true among ‘‘utterly barbarous tribes’’ where as
a rule women have ‘‘power in choosing, rejecting, and tempting
their lovers, or afterwards changing their husbands’’ (2:372).23
Darwin’s discussion of sexual selection among ‘‘the races of
man’’ concludes with a section entitled ‘‘Colour of skin,’’ in which
the stakes of the argument become transparent. Although ‘‘the best
kind of evidence that the colour of the skin has been modified
through sexual selection is wanting in the case of mankind,’’ Dar-
win concedes, we ‘‘know from many facts already given that the
colour of skin is regarded by the men of all races as a highly impor-
tant element of their beauty; so that it is a character which would
be likely to be modified through selection, as has occurred in in-
numerable instances with the lower animals.’’ Anticipating an out-
raged response he boldly concludes:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

It [may] seem at first sight a monstrous supposition that the jet

blackness of the Negro has been gained through sexual selec-
tion . . . [but] this view is supported by various analogies, and
we know that Negroes admire their own blackness. With mam-
mals, when the sexes differ in colour, the male is often black or
much darker than the female; and it depends merely on the form
of inheritance whether this or an other tint shall be transmit-
ted to both sexes or to one alone. The resemblance of Pithecia
satanas [a small tree monkey] with his jet black skin, white roll-
ing eyeballs, and hair parted on the top of the head to a Negro
in miniature, is almost ludicrous. (2:381–82)
Ultimately Darwin distills a highly racist theory of racial forma-
tion in which female reproductive agency produces aesthetic dif-
ferences visible to the observer as racial in character. In fact, he
elaborates the familiar racist foundations of theories of female re-
productive agency, including those put forth by thinkers such as
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. As he affirms, ‘‘For my own part, I con-
clude that of all the causes which have led to the differences in
external appearance between the races of man . . . [female] sexual
selection has been by far the most efficient’’ (2:384).
By the end of Descent Darwin collapses the distinctions among
‘‘species,’’ ‘‘subspecies,’’ and ‘‘races,’’ and effortlessly shifts from a
theory of sexual dimorphism within species to a discussion of pro-
found ‘‘racial’’ differences among them.24 As he explains, ‘‘Prefer-
ences on the part of the women, steadily acting in any one direc-
tion, would ultimately affect the character of the tribe’’ (2:374),
and if we are to ‘‘suppose [that] the members of a tribe . . . spread
over an unoccupied continent,’’ then we can imagine that tribes
would ‘‘soon split up into distinct hordes, which would be sepa-
rated from each other by various barriers’’ that would in turn still
‘‘more effectually’’ produce distinctions among them (2:370). As
among birds, bugs, and monkeys, among human beings female
desire for wayward reproduction constitutes the motor of pro-
cesses of differentiation. The theory of sexual selection renders
human females responsible for human racial diversity.
Intuiting the ramifications of his argument, Darwin ends De-
scent by assuaging anxiety with eugenic prescription: ‘‘[Though]
man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his
horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; . . . when he
comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

care.’’ To amend the potentially damaging consequences of repro-

ductive misalliance, he continues, ‘‘both sexes ought to refrain
from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind’’
(403). As this prescription (which both cites and anticipates the
development of the eugenic discourse popularized by Darwin’s
nephew, Sir Francis Galton, and the preeminent social Darwin-
ist Herbert Spencer) indicates, without proper supervision, human
beings will revert to their old ways, devolving into a ‘‘savage’’ state
in which Victorian women would emerge as reproductive agents
whose inappropriate desires would culminate not only in their
own degeneration but in ‘‘civilization’s’’ decline.25
These controversial ideas were not easily dismissed. Rather,
they circulated so widely in Europe and the United States in the
last decades of the nineteenth century that it is difficult to imag-
ine that the theory of sexual selection was soon to be deemed in-
valid. In Germany, for example, the social theorist and architec-
tural pioneer Adolf Loos explored the linkages among ‘‘savagery’’
and ornamentation. In ‘‘Ornament and Crime,’’ he followed Dar-
win closely, equating excessive ornamentation with ‘‘savagery,’’
and in turn feminizing preference for bodily adornment. Loos ar-
gued that a culture’s level of ‘‘civilization’’ and ‘‘degeneracy’’ could
be gleaned from a study of the populace’s proclivity for ornamen-
tation. Criminality, a state of complete degeneration, is a function
of excessive ornament. The criminal, like the ‘‘savage,’’ is tattooed,
and it is these ‘‘stragglers [stuck in a state of arrested develop-
ment who] slow down the cultural progress of nations. . . . [F]or
ornament is not only produced by criminals; it itself commits a
crime, by damaging men’s health, the national economy and cul-
tural development.’’ 26 In contrast to his condemnation of the ‘‘sav-
age’’ who ornaments his body to attract females, Loos commends
‘‘modern man . . . [whose] individuality is so strong that he does
not need to express it any longer by clothing’’ (231).
In the United States Thorstein Veblen and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman also explored the connection between ornament and bar-
barism, but to a different end. Instead of celebrating American cul-
ture as ‘‘modern,’’ ‘‘civilized,’’ and thus free from excessive orna-
ment, they lamented women’s ornate attire as the principal index
of national ‘‘barbarism.’’ In ‘‘The Economic Theory of Women’s
Dress,’’ as well as in sections of The Theory of the Leisure Class,
Veblen claimed that women’s sartorial display was a sign of ‘‘civili-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

zation’’ in decline. Although, as he notes, bodily adornment suits

the purposes of the leisure class by advertising its wealth and
status, women’s dress visibly manifests the degeneration that char-
acterizes American capitalism and the culture of consumption
more generally.27 Similarly, in ‘‘The Dress of Women’’ Gilman ar-
gued that ‘‘cloth is a social tissue,’’ a ‘‘social skin,’’ a medium
that expresses American women’s arrested development. Whereas
modern men’s functional clothing indicates their evolutionary ad-
vance, women’s overly ornate, functionless garb reveals their re-
course to ‘‘savagery.’’ In contrast to the mannish garments worn
by Herlanders, American women’s clothes, Gilman protested, are
grossly feminine; for, in America (as opposed to Herland) women
are the selected rather than the selectors.28 From this perspective
Gilman’s portrait of Herlanders can be read as a direct redress of a
sexual selection process that in her view had been inverted. In Her-
land women reclaim their role as reproductive agents and either
reproduce without men or select only those able to improve the
national stock.
Curiously, despite the careful documentation of contestation,
transformation, and reappropriation of the theory of sexual selec-
tion in the work of Veblen, Loos, Gilman, and other nineteenth-
century writers and social critics, ranging from William Dean
Howells to George Eliot, the impact of the theory of sexual selec-
tion on Freud, whose life overlapped with Darwin’s for nearly
twenty-six years, has been unexplored.29 In fact, although scholars
routinely acknowledge that Freud owned a copy of Descent and
counted it as one of the ‘‘ten most significant books ever written,’’
Descent has not been regarded as important to Freud’s views on
race and reproduction.30 This situation has resulted in part from
a too-literal understanding of intellectual influence and in part be-
cause the Darwinian legacy has been construed too broadly. All
too often only those few works by Darwin that Freud cites di-
rectly are examined, while commonalities between Freud and Dar-
win are too sweepingly cast to compass the two thinkers’ shared
ideas about the specific issues of race and reproduction. In one of
the two book-length studies on Darwin and Freud, Lucille Ritvo
meticulously documents Freud’s twenty-eight textual references
to Darwin.31 Although she establishes the extent to which Freud
drew upon Darwin’s ideas about the ‘‘primal horde’’ and ontog-
eny’s recapitulation of phylogeny, she does not treat sexual selec-
tion. By contrast, Frank Sulloway creates a general picture of Freud
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

as a ‘‘crypto-biologist’’ invested in biological, empirical truths

about the psyche. Bolstering Ernest Jones’s assessment that Freud
was ‘‘the Darwin of the mind,’’ Sulloway demonstrates Freud’s in-
corporation of Darwin’s stress on instinctual sexual action and on
the nonrational in human sexual behavior.32
In contrast to these approaches, the remainder of this chap-
ter suggests that ideas about race and reproduction that Darwin
grappled with in elaborating the theory of sexual selection were of
central concern to Freud. And although it is impossible to docu-
ment explicit references to sexual selection in Freud’s writings,
it is possible to examine psychoanalysis’s engagement with Dar-
winian ideas about race and sexual agency by focusing on Freud’s
repeated attempts to theorize wayward reproductive desire as a
racializing force. By locating what is overt in Darwin as a chain
of displacements that is also evident in the rhetoricity of Freud’s
texts—that is, by moving away from arguments about conscious
authorial intent—it becomes possible to render discursive conver-
gence. For both Darwin and Freud reproductive agency and sexual
desire were invariably racializing while, in the anti-Semitic context
in which Freud wrote, wayward female passions and reproduc-
tions were specifically stereotyped as Jewish in character.
Hysteria’s Genealogy
Most discussions of psychoanalysis begin with the assertion that
Freud’s contribution to modernity was the discovery of the un-
conscious and the attendant realization that the cure for psychic
disorders lay in remembering and working through repressed psy-
chic content.33 One aspect of this well-worn formula bears high-
lighting: it was through study of and dialogue with female hyster-
ics that Freud first conceptualized his ideas. Because of hysteria’s
centrality to what is instructively referred to as ‘‘the birth’’ of the
psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, of the cathartic method
of uncovering its contents and alleviating its distress, and of the
sexual nature of psychic trauma, the pages that follow focus on
several of Freud’s key writings on hysterics. Conveniently, but not
coincidentally, in one of the earliest of these, ‘‘The Aetiology of
Hysteria’’ (1896), Freud charts this pathology’s causation as gene-
alogical—literally and metaphorically—and thus, as explained in
chapter 1, as necessarily reproductive and racial.34
Taking as his starting point Josef Breuer’s ‘‘momentous dis-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

covery . . . that the symptoms of hysteria are determined by cer-

tain experiences of the patient’s which have operated in a trau-
matic fashion’’ and are then reproduced in psychical life in the
form of symbols, Freud points out that interpretation of symp-
tom (read symbol) formation is nonetheless exceedingly arduous
(192). It would be greatly advantageous to the analyst to possess a
method of arriving at the etiology of hysteria comparable to those
available in other medical fields. Unlike the dermatologist, who
can ‘‘recognize a sore as luetic from the character of its margins, of
the crust on it and of its shape, without being misled by the protes-
tations of his patient’’ (191–92), the psychoanalyst cannot uncover
the cause of a hysteric’s symptoms based on the form of their mani-
festation.35 Emphasizing the sexual charge of his example, Freud
adds that where the dermatologist can confront a patient infected
with syphilis with his own and/or his sexual partner’s illicit sexual
actions, psychoanalysts rarely identify direct causal links between
symptoms and sources, let alone incontrovertibly sexual ones.
In general Freud finds that the explanations that hysterics give
for their symptoms fail to satisfy two crucial conditions: either
they are unsuitable in terms of experiential content, or they lack
sufficient traumatic force. When a hysteric claims that vomiting
arose from a fright, such as a railway accident, Freud explains
that this derivation of the feeling of disgust is plainly inadequate.36
Likewise, if the vomiting is thought by the hysteric to be caused by
eating rotten fruit, the analyst is again thwarted; such an experi-
ence lacks suitable traumatic force. In contrast to the ease and cer-
tainty with which the sexual activities of the syphilitic patient can
be presented as the source of disease, the sexual trauma that lies
at the origin of hysteria is deeply buried. As Freud observes, more
often than not an analyst treating a hysteric is left ‘‘in the lurch,’’
confronted with a barrage of innocuous or unrelated information
that needs not only ordering but also sexualization (194).
Here Freud reveals that he is obliged to abandon the examples
with which he has been working. The explanation for the type of
symptom formation toward which he is gesturing is elusive—the
vomiting patients are, after all, fictions whom he has constructed.
To convey the etiology of hysteria’s complexity without giving an
account of an entire course of treatment—recounting a case study
in detail, a project too time-consuming for his present theoreti-
cal purposes—Freud introduces a metaphor: the figure of geneal-
ogy. As he notes, it becomes possible to locate the sexual origins
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

of hysterical symptoms when the path that leads to a trauma is

pursued further back, to a scene prior to the one offered by the
hysteric, and then to another prior to that, and so on. For each
scene conceals a memory of another, behind which there is yet an-
other scene.37 Giving this idea richer form, Freud continues, ‘‘The
chain of associations always has more than two links; and the trau-
matic scenes do not form a simple row, like a string of pearls,
but ramify and are interconnected like genealogical trees, so that
in any new experience two or more earlier ones come into opera-
tion as memories’’ (196–97, emphasis added).38 As if to ensure the
prominence of the genealogical metaphor, its descriptive capabili-
ties and content, Freud adds, ‘‘If—as I believe—this proposition
holds good without exception, . . . [then it] shows us the basis on
which [the entire] . . . psychological theory of hysteria must be
built’’ (197). At the very moment that the genealogical metaphor
appears in Freud’s text it becomes both the theoretical description
of and the solution to the question of hysteria’s etiology.
Freud does not discard the genealogical metaphor after first use
but twice returns to extend and complicate it. In the second in-
stance Freud invokes genealogy to explain that the vast majority of
hysterical cases present several symptoms, not just one, and that
if each is traced back to its origin, experiences ‘‘which are linked
together,’’ rather than a single traumatic event, emerge as the cause
of somatization. Writing as if he has just discovered the metaphor’s
utility anew, Freud declares: ‘‘Indeed, a comparison with the gene-
alogical tree of a family whose members have also intermarried, is
not at all a bad one’’ (198, my emphasis). Mobilizing the gene-
alogical metaphor a third and last time, Freud avers, ‘‘If analysis
is carried further, new complications arise. The associate chains
belonging to the different symptoms begin to enter into relation
with one another; [and] the genealogical trees become intertwined’’
(198, emphasis added). Having begun with a figure that suggested
the complexity of the branch system of a single tree, Freud shifts
to an image of a tree whose limbs are intricately interconnected,
and then finally to that of two or more trees whose individual
trunks have become indistinguishably ‘‘intertwined’’ from the van-
tage point of Freud, the observer, who presumably stands on the
ground and casts his gaze upward into the canopy of leaves.
In view of the racial and reproductive significance of the idea
of genealogy in nineteenth-century thought, several questions are
begged by Freud’s choice and persistent development of the gene-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

alogical metaphor. How can we account for Freud’s election of

it? How does it transform his text? How does it become indis-
pensable to the elaboration of his ideas? How does this metaphor,
rather than another, effectively introduce and imbricate the racial
and reproductive elements, the Darwinian elements, that saturate
psychoanalytic theory? Initially Freud elects the genealogical met-
aphor because the array of associated recollections with which the
hysteric explains the exhibited symptom are as difficult to trace
as a family’s pedigree, as the complex lines of descent metaphor-
ized as infinitely branching structures. Behind every possible trau-
matic scene lies another in need of investigation. Like the hysteric’s
symptoms, which lack a readily discernible etiology, the pedigree
of the individual hailing from a family with a complex genealogy
is nearly impossible to discover.
When the genealogical metaphor is examined more closely,
however, the arboreal image gives way to that of a written record,
a figure with yet another set of resonances. For it is the inter-
personal ‘‘traumatic experiences’’ of a sexual nature after which
Freud chases, as it is these that he hopes to locate as the univer-
sal etiology of hysteria and to situate (quite literally) as rendering
genealogy complex, disorganized, difficult to apprehend. By the
third time Freud invokes the genealogical metaphor, it is denuded
of its arboreal aspect. The tree metaphor breaks down under the
pressure of the unconvincing image of multiple trunks and emerges
instead as an archive comprised of barely legible, crumbling docu-
ments. These are the familiar parchments upon which a family’s
lineage is transcribed for posterity. They are also the documents
that present readers, as Foucault reminds us, not with a simple
and clear script, but with a jumble of hard-to-read scribblings that
have been scratched over and recopied many times.39
As with the corrupted genealogies that Kate Chopin allego-
rized, and the infinitely expanding concentric circles that com-
prised individual descent in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s writings,
Freud’s genealogical metaphor renders a ‘‘pure’’ origin virtually
untraceable. And yet there is an important distinction among these
cases. For Freud mobilizes a different type of genealogical dis-
turbance than that prioritized by Chopin and Gilman; in Freud’s
text genealogical confusion is catalyzed by sexual alliances among
members of already interconnected families, or, as he expressly
maintains, among the members of genealogical trees representing
families who have already ‘‘intermarried’’ and ‘‘intertwined.’’ In
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

short, Freud is writing not about ‘‘interracial’’ sex, or what in the

U.S. context was often referred to as ‘‘miscegenation,’’ but about
incest.
In German the incestuous coding of genealogical chaos is evi-
dent in Freud’s word choices.40 The term rendered as ‘‘genealogi-
cal tree’’ by Freud’s principal English translator James Strachey is
given by Freud as Stammbaum einer Familie. Although Stamm can
simply mean trunk, it also means tribe (as in der Stamm Davids),
and more specifically, as in the language of Darwinism, phylo-
genetic tree. A Volkstamm is literally a ‘‘folk tree trunk,’’ and more
commonly a nation, people, folk, tribe, or race; while an expres-
sion such as aus einem alten Geschlecht stammen means to be de-
scended from an ancient lineage (the verb, stammen, to descend).
In high German a Liutstam is literally a ‘‘people tree’’ or lineage.
A Stammtafel is a genealogical table, and a Familienstammbuch, a
genealogical album, or family album that records births, deaths,
and marriages.41 Significantly, the word Stamm is also linguistically
self-reflexive: it is commonly used to designate the linguistic stem
or root of a word. When Freud writes of individual ‘‘links’’ in a
chain, as he does in the first and second invocations of the gene-
alogical metaphor, the German word that has been translated as
‘‘link’’ is inscribed, like Stamm, within an overdetermined racial
and sexual discursive field. Glied can mean link, section, or part
but also translates as member (of a family or group), and euphe-
mistically, as in English, as penis. The third time Freud invokes the
genealogical metaphor, these multiple sexual and racial meanings
are pronounced. He writes ‘‘die Stammbäume verflechten sich.’’ In
using the reflexive form of the verb Freud suggests that the mem-
bers of the Stamm—people, tribe, or race—have come into a type
of relation with one another that is explicitly endogamous or in-
cestuous.
Even if Freud’s first use of the genealogical metaphor implies
that the analyst (as archivist) is thrown off the trail by exogamous
reproductive transgressions that occur among members of distinct
families, tribes, or racial groups, the second time Freud invokes
his genealogical metaphor he is clearly concerned with those way-
ward sexual encounters that have transpired among members of
the same family, tribe, or race. Freud is writing about the gene-
alogy of an endogamous community, a group characterized by
‘‘intertwined’’ genealogical trees (note the plural), and it is the
sexual life of this intermingled, tangled, endogamous community
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

alone that he imagines as the best metaphor for the etiology of hys-
teria.
For readers familiar with Studies in Hysteria, a text to which I
turn shortly, it will be evident that the genealogical metaphor used
in ‘‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’’ is uncanny in the precise, psycho-
analytic sense of the word. It is simultaneously familiar (heimlich)
and unfamiliar (unheimlich), unsettling in its ambivalence.42 Inso-
far as genealogy functions as a concept metaphor, it establishes
a necessary connection between the vehicle of the metaphor and
the idea it conveys.43 This connection is obvious—already famil-
iar, known, to the hysteric in an intimate sense—and at the same
time unfamiliar, unknown to the hysteric and analyst alike, as it is
the hidden secret that will be unearthed in the course of analysis.
Put differently, the concept of corrupted genealogy is self-reflexive,
simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar to itself in a primal fashion.
The hysteric’s symptoms are not only interconnected, intertwined,
and thus difficult to trace, but the analyst tracing these symptoms
‘‘infallibly come[s],’’ in the process of his researches ‘‘to the field
of sexual experience’’ (199), especially to that of incest. In ‘‘Aeti-
ology,’’ as in much of Freud’s work, the content and form of the
analysis merge, the content actually coming to constitute the form,
the demarche or forward movement of the text.44 For this reason,
genealogical chaos is the best metaphor for the etiology of hyste-
ria, because incest is the overdetermined cause of the symptoms
treated in the psychoanalysis.
When, at the end of ‘‘Aetiology,’’ Freud arrives at the conclu-
sion that in all of the cases of hysteria on which his paper is based
a traumatic sexual experience involving a sibling, parent, or rela-
tive is the catalyst of the patient’s neurosis, he presents informa-
tion for which the genealogical metaphor has already prepared his
readers. Incestuous genealogy emerges not only as the most apt
metaphor for the etiology of hysteria but as the most readily iden-
tified cause of hysteria. Had Freud used his paper to present an
entire case study—the option he rejects in favor of use of the gene-
alogical metaphor—he would have arrived at the same conclusion
to which he has come by other means: genealogical disturbance
constitutes the etiology of the hysteria; the genealogical metaphor
embodies the content of the analysis.
Although Freud’s genealogical metaphors make his conclusions
about the sexual nature of hysteria appear inevitable, it is impera-
tive to note that assertion of the ‘‘universal validity’’ of his find-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

ings for all the psychoneuroses and all neurotic people would have
been viewed as outrageous by the Austro-German medical and sci-
entific establishment. Not only were Freud’s findings audaciously
sexual, but incest, far from being regarded as a ‘‘universal’’ ex-
perience, was within the scientific and medical literature of the
period invariably cast as a Jewish racial trait characteristic of a
people who were thought to be mired in tribal exclusiveness. In
particular, the ancient custom of levirate marriage (which obli-
gates a man to marry the widow of his brother), and the perva-
sive practice of endogamy among Jews—so-called consanguine-
ous coupling, or cousin marriages—were thought to render incest
a ubiquitous practice that set Jews apart and led to the infinite
reproduction of their racial pathology across the generations. In
nineteenth-century European racial science endogamy, inbreed-
ing, and incest were conflated and viewed as a composite mark of
Jewish neurotic propensity.45 In Germany and Austria this confla-
tion had a legal expression. By the late nineteenth century sexual
contact between in-laws was seen as a violation of the law, and
thus so-called inbreeding was viewed not only as the direct cause
of Jewish mental pathology but as a racialized criminal act. In Ger-
man legal and forensic literature Blutschande was the name given
to the reported ‘‘pollution’’ of the ‘‘blood’’ that occurs when close
relatives engage in sexual contact. Instructively, the term, which
eventually gained popular usage and is now synonymous with in-
cest in general, has a deep historical association with race and
with ‘‘unnatural,’’ ‘‘degenerate,’’ Jewish reproductive practices and
wayward sexual desires.46
Caught within this damaging logic Jews were viewed as degen-
erate because they cultivated marriage among themselves, and in-
bred because they were predisposed to mental illness, especially
hysteria. As one scientist attested, ‘‘Being very neurotic, consan-
guineous marriages among Jews cannot but be detrimental to their
progeny. . . . The Jewish population of [Warsaw] alone is almost
exclusively the inexhaustible source for the supply of specimens
of hysterical humanity, particularly the hysteria in the male, for
all the clinics of Europe.’’ Otto Binswanger, the prominent psy-
chiatrist, echoed this judgment: ‘‘Among the European races the
Jews present the greatest number of cases of Neurasthenia.’’ An-
other member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, meanwhile,
pronounced this to be especially true of Eastern European Jews,
since among Russians and Poles ‘‘almost every man is hysteri-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

cal.’’ In the standard medical textbook of the period, Richard von

Krafft-Ebing announced the consensus: ‘‘under a veil of religious
enthusiasm [Jews conceal an] abnormally intensified sensuality
and sexual excitement that leads to sexual errors that are of etio-
logic significance.’’ 47 In the anti-Semitic idiom of the period Jewish
refusal to marry out of the group was seen as signaling Jews as a
pathological entity parasitically, even vampiristically living off of
gentile society. In short, Jewish inbreeding was a form of sexual
excess that enabled the corrupt economic hegemony of the Jews.48
Though Freud was immersed in this racist cacophony, as were
all Jews, he was acutely aware of the pronouncements of Jean
Martin Charcot, under whom he worked from 1885 to 1856 at the
Salpêtrière in Paris. Charcot’s impact, as Freud admits, was pro-
found: ‘‘No other human being has affected me in such a way,’’
he wrote to Martha Bernays, his fiancée.49 Freud took from Char-
cot his orientation to hysteria and his insistence that the disease be
recognized as an object of scientific study for which laws of devel-
opment, a uniform nosology, and a clear hierarchy of symptoms
could be established. Following Charcot, Freud sought to claim
hysteria as a legitimate condition with a hitherto hidden mecha-
nism, not an imaginary disease vaguely associated with an un-
ruly, wandering womb and malingering women.50 However, even
as Freud celebrated Charcot’s neurobiological insights, his anti-
Semitism caused Freud consternation. Charcot, in his ‘‘Tuesday
Lesson,’’ for instance, argued that ‘‘nervous illness of all types
are innumerably more frequent among Jews than among other
groups,’’ a statistic attributable to Jewish endogamy. In another fa-
mous case, Charcot diagnosed a Hungarian Jew known as Klein
as a male hysteric, whose symptoms, limping and wandering, he
designated as Jewish ailments. Along with his cohort, Charcot re-
garded hysteria as the degenerative neurosis to which inbred Jews,
already predisposed to mental illness, were prone because of their
biological predisposition and its perpetuation through their mar-
riage practices.51
In their attempts to understand Freud’s response to anti-
Semitism, Freud scholars have cast psychoanalysis as a ‘‘reaction
formation.’’ This approach—which tends to put Freud on the
couch and to read his science as a symptom—suggests that Freud
defended against the anti-Semitic idea that Jews are inherently
pathological by demonstrating that neurosis is cultural rather than
biological (read racial). In numerous articles and books Sander
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Gilman, the prolific historian of nineteenth-century medicine, has

argued that Freud established psychoanalysis as a legitimate sci-
ence by producing it as racially neutral and thus universally ap-
plicable. According to Gilman, Freud felt that scientists should be
objective, free of what today is frequently regarded as a ‘‘stand-
point epistemology,’’ and thus that Freud purged traces of his iden-
tity, his Jewishness, from his science to position psychoanalysis as
a legitimate and objective practice with universal relevance to the
treatment of all people, not just neurotic Jews.52
In subsequent work Gilman has incorporated an analysis of
Freud’s reaction to the castigation of the eastern Jewish male
as feminized and thus akin to the hysterical woman.53 Because
anti-Semitism was articulated through sexism within European fin
de siècle medical literature and scientific culture, Gilman argues,
Freud felt it necessary to transmute race into gender such that
‘‘race was excised from Freud’s scientific writing and appeared
only in his construction of gender’’ (37). Consequently, Gilman
reads Freud’s theories of femininity as reactions to the feminiza-
tion of Jewish men. Freud’s famous ‘‘Dark Continent’’ metaphor
for female sexuality, for instance, is interpreted as a response to
Jewish male emasculation and the racialization of Jews as black or
African: ‘‘The language Freud used about the scientific unknow-
ablity of the core of what makes a Jewish male a male Jew was
parallel,’’ Gilman writes, ‘‘to that which he used concerning the
essence of the feminine. . . . Freud translates the complicated, pejo-
rative discourse about the dark Jew with its suggestion of dis-
ease and difference into a discourse about the blackness (the un-
knowability) of the woman’’ (37–38).54 In an oft-quoted passage
Gilman equates the circumcised or ‘‘truncated’’ Jewish penis (his
term) with the clitoris, revealing the salient fact that in Viennese
slang the latter was known as the ‘‘Jew’’ ( Jud), and ‘‘playing with
the Jew’’ was a widely used colloquialism for female masturba-
tion (39).55
In response to Gilman’s work Ann Pellegrini has offered an im-
portant corrective. Gilman’s focus on gender as a stand-in for race,
she argues, makes it impossible to account for Jewish women in
the text of psychoanalysis. In identifying the mechanism whereby
the Jewish woman gets lost in Freud’s work, Pellegrini suggests
that Gilman has repeated the original gesture of erasure of which
he accuses Freud: ‘‘The collapse of Jewish masculinity into an ab-
ject femininity displaces women . . . [for] in the homology Jew-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

as-woman, the Jewish female body goes missing’’ (18). In call-

ing Gilman out—in a manner reminiscent of the black feminist
critiques of those black liberationists and white feminists who
together wrote black women out of the picture—Pellegrini sug-
gests that in Gilman’s work, as in Freud’s, all the Jews are men, and
all the women Aryan. To make Jewish women visible as more than
Jewish men in drag, Pellegrini restores them to Freud’s texts by re-
fusing to go along with Freud when he deracinates his patients by
providing them with pseudonyms and excises all references within
their cases that would identify them as Jewish.56
While such scholarship recognizes ‘‘the Jewish woman’’ in the
text of psychoanalysis (a project to which this chapter also con-
tributes), it is worth noting that there is no substantive differ-
ence between the structure of Pellegrini’s and Gilman’s arguments,
or for that matter between their work and that produced by
other scholars who have made significant contributions to the new
field often dubbed ‘‘cultural studies in Freud.’’ Indeed, in all such
scholarship psychoanalysis is conceived of as a reaction formation,
a flight from feminized Jewishness that shores up a deracinated,
decisively heterosexual masculinity by relegating Jewish pathol-
ogy to the neurotic (often hysterical) female body.57
Freud’s theoretical formulations were clearly shaped by the sci-
entific and medical establishment’s views on Jewishness, gender,
and disease, and yet there are, I believe, alternative interpretations
of psychoanalysis’s engagement with anti-Semitism. As demon-
strated in the readings that follow, rather than purging the new
science of Jewishness, Freud’s texts actually bring the anti-Semitic
milieu in which he worked into view. Through invocation of the
genealogical metaphor in ‘‘Aetiology,’’ for example, rather than
erasing Jewishness, Freud subtly invokes it. In using—even rely-
ing upon—the genealogical metaphor, the rhetorical structure of
Freud’s text winds up implicitly centering anti-Semitic ideas about
inbred Jews and binding them to racially marked ideas about in-
cestuous reproduction. Far from cleansing his theory of a Jewish
taint, as others have argued, Freud rendered racially marked re-
productive metaphors central. Rather than creating psychoanaly-
sis as a universal science by purging it of Jewishness, Freud incor-
porated racialized discourse to new ends and built universal claims
out of Jewish particularisms. And unless we wish to psychoanalyze
Freud, in the end it matters little whether the Jewishness that per-
vades Freud’s texts was intentional or unintentional, conscious or
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

unconscious, for the effect of its presence remains the same. What
is significant about the anti-Semitic ideas about Jewishness that
saturated the context in which Freud worked, and thus his writ-
ings, is precisely the textual energy that was derived from them
and the rhetorical power they allowed Freud to generate and to
marshal.
In mobilizing the genealogical metaphor, a reproductive meta-
phor that is coded as Jewish and that codes Jewishness, the ‘‘uni-
versal validity’’ of Freud’s claims about the sexual nature of the
etiology of neurosis became intelligible from the singular vantage
point of a racial stereotype, or a stereotyped particularism. Rather
than installing an Aryan definition of psychic normativity in an
effort to make his science palatable, Freud engaged anti-Semitism,
rescripting this particular form of racism. In reappropriating a
discourse on Jewishness and wayward reproduction, harnessing
it, gaining control over it, Freud (consciously or not) managed to
render the aspect of anti-Semitism by which he was assaulted pro-
ductive rather than destructive of ‘‘genuine’’ science. In Freud’s
hands Jewish sexual selections were invariably racializing and
simultaneously, if paradoxically, universalizing. Although psycho-
analytic theory has from the outset aspired to universal applica-
bility, as Gilman and others have so eloquently argued, it is pos-
sible to arrive at a reading of psychoanalysis as a universal theory
by turning the dominant line of argumentation on its head.
In his discussion of one of Freud’s earliest essays, Gilman offers
an example that illustrates the inversion of the dominant interpre-
tative trend that reading for a paradoxically universalized Jewish
particularism enables. In ‘‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neu-
roses’’ (1896), Gilman argues that Freud sought to dislodge heredi-
tary explanations of pathology by advancing strictly psychological
ones. For instance, Freud interpreted ‘‘a pair of neurotic patients’’
from the same family, whom Charcot would have regarded as pos-
sessing a shared hereditary predisposition to illness, as instead in-
cestuously involved. Quoting Freud directly Gilman concludes: a
pair of ‘‘little lovers in their earliest childhood—the man suffer-
ing from obsessions and the woman from hysteria,’’ may be mis-
takenly interpreted as ‘‘related by nervous heredity.’’ 58 Although,
as Gilman suggests, this passage can be read as evidence of Freud’s
refusal of hereditary and thus of Jewish neurosis, the inverse is also
possible. For these same siblings appear again a month later in
‘‘Aetiology’’; the second time they are figured through the lens of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

the already familiar genealogical metaphor that structures the later

text.59 They are the progeny of intertwined family trees whose in-
cestuous relationship is marked as Jewish, and whose Jewishness
renders the sexual etiology of hysteria a universalizable, globally
powerful scientific tool.
In reworking the category of universality, Freud—intentionally
or not—cast psychoanalysis as a Jewish (read racially marked) sci-
ence. Indeed, the connection between racial particularity and hys-
teria emerges as part and parcel of Freud’s understanding of neuro-
sis—as the means through which his theory about it paradoxically
asserts a claim to universal scientific truth. From this alternative
perspective, ‘‘Aetiology’’ offers an account of racialized endoga-
mous sexual selection among Jews that builds upon Darwinian
ideas of sexual selection as a racializing force even as it reassesses
the relationship between race and sex. For to be useful to the new
science, race and sex are inextricably joined in such a way that it
becomes difficult to determine whether the trauma that produces
neurotic symptoms is sexual or racial; one can claim only that it
is both in origin and expression.
Once identified, the intersection of Jewishness and sexuality
that pervades ‘‘Aetiology’’ becomes readily evident in other theo-
rizations of hysteria, and the neurotic body of the hysteric a privi-
leged location for studying hysterical sexuality as racializing force.
In fact, when we take the genealogical metaphor and the centrality
bestowed upon it seriously—remembering that it is the metaphor
that Freud relies upon to convey the meaning of hysteria to his
readers—it becomes clear that far from universalizing psycho-
analysis and legitimating it as a science by deracinating it (as if this
were possible), the genealogical metaphor reveals psychoanalysis’s
involvement in complex processes of reproductive racialization.
As in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, in Freud’s theory of hys-
teria, wayward reproductive sexuality produces racial formations,
and in turn these wayward desires and selections emerge as norms,
not exceptions, as universals rather than particulars.
In contrast to the position of those Freud scholars who have
tended to view Jewishness as a static category, as a reified or essen-
tialized object of investigation that can be hived off and examined
and then reattached to ‘‘real’’ Jewish bodies whose identity can
be reclaimed and made known within an identitarian logic of re-
covery,60 this chapter recasts Freud’s work on hysteria to show that
the hysterical body is a source of racial otherness simply because
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

hysterics are defined by a particularly Jewish form of wayward re-

productive desire. As in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, the
female body is, in Freud’s theory of hysteria, a racialized repro-
ductive body whose waywardness threatens to produce and repro-
duce racial difference. For in the Freudian theory of the etiology of
hysteria, as in the Darwinian theory of sexual selection, racializa-
tion is intimately bound up with women’s sexual agency and way-
ward desire, a fact that pathologizes reproduction, but also one
that makes the hysterical body serviceable for Freud, the objective
Enlightenment scientist.
Darwin’s Descent into Studies on Hysteria

Studies on Hysteria, a work by Freud and Josef Breuer, Freud’s
one-time collaborator, confidant, and fellow physician, was pub-
lished a year prior to ‘‘The Aetiology of Hysteria.’’ 61 Studies, which
comprises a reprint of a joint theoretical paper on hysteria (origi-
nally written in 1892), five case histories (one by Breuer, four by
Freud), a theoretical paper by Breuer, and a concluding essay on
psychotherapy by Freud, is significant for two reasons. It is the text
credited by historians of psychoanalysis with giving ‘‘birth’’ to the
form of psychoanalysis known as Freudianism; and it contains the
most controversial ‘‘birth’’ recorded within the annals of Freud’s
science. Let me explain this double reproduction less cryptically.
In Studies Freud first explores ideas of ‘‘free association,’’
‘‘transference,’’ and ‘‘conversion’’ and proposes the ‘‘cathartic
method.’’ This method, which involves recollection and narration
of psychic trauma, was transformed into a therapy by Breuer and
his patient Anna O., the woman who gave the technique its moni-
ker, ‘‘the talking cure.’’ 62 Anna O.’s story, however, which opens
Freud and Breuer’s volume, is also significant because it bears wit-
ness to Anna O.’s hysterical pregnancy. Although Anna O. was
not Freud’s patient (he never met her), her case, placed at the be-
ginning of Studies, has been heralded as the prototype for the rest
of the cases recounted.63 These two births—psychoanalysis’s and
Anna O.’s—are inseparable, for the ‘‘birth’’ of Freud’s theoreti-
cal edifice is bound up with the wayward reproductivity of this
hysteric. Although it had to be carefully crafted and repeatedly
fine-tuned, the narration of Anna O.’s phantom pregnancy consti-
tutes the condition of possibility for the elaboration of the larger
psychoanalytic project.64
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Anna O., née Bertha Pappenheim, was born into a wealthy,

orthodox German-Jewish family.65 Her Hungarian grandfather
had acquired a fortune through marriage and made a huge profit
through investment in a family grain-dealing business which was
then passed on to Bertha’s father, who moved it to Vienna after the
opening of the Pressburg ghetto. Bertha’s mother was a member of
another prominent Jewish family, the Goldschmidts of Frankfurt,
which included the poet Heine. Bertha was frustrated by thwarted
intellectual and social ambitions, as were the other alleged hys-
terics whom Freud treated in his early practice. She has been
characterized as a bored, lonely, and miserable young woman,
confined within a respectable home, where she was expected to
patiently await marriage. Unlike her brother, Wilhelm (the only
other Pappenheim child to live to adulthood), who went off to
university, Bertha was left to entertain herself with what she de-
scribed to Breuer as her private ‘‘mental theater’’ of daydreams
that were spun out as she tatted lace. In 1880, while nursing her
sick father, Bertha herself became ill and began treatment. Though
her initial complaint was a common cough, Breuer diagnosed her
as troubled by severe psychological disturbances, which after ‘‘a
period of incubation’’ (Breuer’s clinical designation) became mani-
fest in a variety of symptoms, including hallucinations, paralyses,
contractures of limbs, anesthesias, two distinct states of conscious-
ness, aphasia, and an unusual polyglot. When, during the course
of her treatment, Anna O.’s father died, her condition deteriorated
further still, and she began to have difficulty seeing and recogniz-
ing people.66
Over the course of two years Breuer noticed that, when in a
hypnoid state, Anna O. imagined scenes and muttered words that,
when queried by him, were elaborated into full-blown stories.
Though these tales often culminated in the expression of terri-
fying hallucinations of black snakes and death’s-heads, Anna O.
found mental relief following the verbalization of her thoughts.
‘‘In the case of this patient,’’ Breuer explained, ‘‘the hysterical phe-
nomena disappeared as soon as the event which had given rise to
them was reproduced in her hypnosis’’ (35). Verbalization was thus
adopted as a therapeutic procedure by Breuer and dubbed ‘‘chim-
ney sweeping,’’ or ‘‘the talking cure’’ by Anna O. At the end of
the case, after detailing the relief of one symptom after another (to
greater or lesser effect), Breuer finally provided a description of
Anna O.’s reenactment and renarrativization of the most terrifying
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

of her hallucinations, that experienced at the bedside of her dying

father. After recreating this scene, designated by Breuer as ‘‘the
root of her illness,’’ Anna O. was pronounced on the way to re-
covery. Breuer concluded the case by suggesting that the continual
relief of symptoms had had a cumulative effect, and that though it
took his patient time to regain ‘‘her mental balance entirely,’’ she
was eventually restored to ‘‘complete health’’ (41).
Breuer told Anna O.’s story to an enraptured Freud in Novem-
ber 1882. Thirteen years after the treatment was terminated, and
several years after Freud began developing the ‘‘talking cure’’ in
his own practice, he convinced Breuer to collaborate in the publi-
cation of Studies. Although the volume that resulted is presented
as a unified whole, it is rife with conflict. While each of the four
case studies that Freud contributed introduced a sexual element
into the hysterical etiology and revealed sexual feelings as cata-
lysts of hysterical symptoms, Breuer’s single contribution to their
book, the case in which ‘‘the talking cure’’ and cathartic method
originate, failed to fit the larger clinical picture. Though Freud
and Breuer’s famous break over the issue of the sexual etiology
of hysteria would not transpire until after their volume’s publica-
tion in 1895, Studies can be read as a transcript of the dispute that
lead to it. Freud reveals the distance separating him from Breuer
with two remarks in his concluding discussion: on the one hand,
he insists, apparently wishing to appease skeptics (Breuer among
them), he came ‘‘fresh from the school of Charcot’’ and thus ‘‘re-
garded the linking of hysteria with the topic of sexuality as a sort
of insult—just as the women patients themselves do’’ (260); on the
other hand, as he reiterates, practical experience obliges him ‘‘to
recognize that, in so far as one can speak of determining causes
which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their aetiology is to be
looked for in sexual factors’’ not in hereditary ones (257, original
emphasis).67
Not quite as committed to ‘‘free association’’ (letting his pa-
tients draw their own conclusions and connections) as eulogizers
attest, Freud suggests in the discussion with which Studies con-
cludes that he has been compelled to assume an aggressive attitude
in his quest for information when the cause of an illness offered
him by a patient was nonsexual. ‘‘I naturally rejected this [non-
sexual] derivation,’’ he notes, ‘‘and tried to find another instead
of it which would harmonize better with my views of the aeti-
ology of the neuroses’’ (275). Freud’s interventionist and theory-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

laden method bore the desired results. In the case of Frau Emmy
von N, a wealthy middle-aged widow living in the Baltic prov-
inces of Russia, hysterical symptoms resulting from self-imposed
sexual abstinence were found to have been accompanied by un-
realized sexual desire. Emmy von N, Freud relates, did not re-
marry because she wished to fulfill her duty to her daughters, to
whom she hoped to leave her dead husband’s fortune. In another
case, that of an English governess, Miss Lucy R’s ‘‘pure hyste-
ria’’ is again given an ‘‘unmistakable sexual aetiology’’ (260). This
patient, ‘‘an overmature girl with a need to be loved,’’ had been
‘‘hastily aroused’’(260) by her widowed employer, the father of her
charges. Likewise, in the volume’s closing case, that of Elisabeth
von R, ‘‘repressed’’ sexual feeling for a brother-in-law, the hus-
band of a dead sister, are said to have produced hysteria.
Although each of Freud’s contributions to Studies documents
the sexual origins of hysteria, Katharina’s case, which reads as
a bucolic fairy tale at the volume’s center, epitomizes the trend.
Freud narrates his (feigned?) surprise discovery of this Alpenkind:
‘‘I reached the top [of the mountain] after a strenuous climb, feel-
ing refreshed and rested, and was sitting in deep contemplation of
the charm of the distant prospect. I was so lost in thought that at
first I did not connect it with myself when these words reached my
ears: ‘are you a doctor sir?’ ’’ (125). Katharina, the daughter of an
innkeeper, catches Freud, the mountain climber (rather than doc-
tor), off guard in the Hohe Tauern. She has discovered Freud in the
inn’s register and has sought him on account of her ‘‘bad nerves.’’
In the exchange that transpires (no doubt the most productive ses-
sion ever recorded) Freud recognizes Katharina as a hysteric, a
‘‘model . . . of virginal anxiety’’ (260), whose symptoms have re-
sulted from her prior discovery of her uncle engaged in sex with
a cousin, a scene that in turn brought to consciousness this same
uncle’s sexual advance upon herself. Once the memory was ver-
balized, Freud assures the reader, Katharina was swiftly cured. In-
deed, in a footnote appended in 1924, he testifies that her recovery
was even more remarkable than first indicated, as it was actually
Katharina’s father who was her seducer.
Atop a six-thousand-foot precipice and thus far from the city
and his more ‘‘prudish’’ analysands, Freud finds resounding con-
firmation of his theory for the sexual etiology of hysteria. ‘‘You
see,’’ he seems to announce, ‘‘hysteria is not an exclusively Jewish
disease but a pathology of the Volk; psychoanalysis is not Jewish
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

quackery but genuine science.’’ Freud renders hysteria a pathology

found in the city and high on the mountain, among working-class
and wealthy women alike, and furthermore, a neurosis under-
girded by a sexual experience, which although attributed to Jews
by anti-Semites, is universalizable among women of all stations,
situations, and races. In this sense, Freud’s account of Katharina
might have served as a rejoinder to Breuer’s account of Anna O.,
competing with it for pride of place. If Anna O.’s illness was an
anomaly, a hysteria lacking a sexual etiology, Katharina’s was a
definitive counterexample.
Alas, things were not so simple. Substitution of Katharina for
Anna O. as prototypical hysteric did not constitute a sufficient
solution to the conflict brewing in Studies. And although Freud
scholars would probably argue that this archetypal Aryan helped
Freud to universalize his claims, Katharina’s case instructively
failed to secure Freud’s. Indeed, even though Freud left Breuer’s
account of Anna O. intact for many years, he eventually returned
to it to reinterpret it, make it fit his mold and work for his sci-
ence. For Breuer’s case presented Freud with a dilemma: how
was he to attribute the ‘‘birth’’ of psychoanalysis to an account
of hysteria that did not have any sex or race in it? Unless the
Anna O. case could be expressly sexualized, and by extension im-
plicitly racialized, Studies could not adequately ground Freud’s
science. And thus, despite Katharina’s exemplementarity, Freud
slowly but surely orchestrated a multistage alternation process,
one that located a sexual origin for Anna O.’s hysteria, and as we
shall see, racialized this origin as well.
Freud began by circulating rumors about the patient and her
relationship to her doctor, despite the fact that Breuer had been
adamant that for this woman ‘‘the element of sexuality was aston-
ishingly underdeveloped’’ (21). In fact, as a consequence of Freud’s
efforts, the Anna O. case became known for containing a very par-
ticular sexual element, a phantom pregnancy, or as Ernest Jones
would immortalize it in the language of science, a ‘‘pseudocyesis’’
that was implicitly Jewish in character.68 The first trace of active
textual reconstruction that readers stumble across is a footnote
added to Studies by Freud’s editor and translator, James Strachey,
more than half a century after the text’s original publication.69
The new material is conspicuous because of its awkward inser-
tion directly prior to Breuer’s closing sentence (the one that con-
firms that Anna O. was eventually cured) and because of the in-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

sider knowledge that it purports to convey from the living and

breathing source:
At this point (so Freud once told the present editor, with his
finger on an open copy of the book) there is a hiatus in the text.
What he had in mind and went on to describe was the occur-
rence which marked the end of Anna O.’s treatment. . . . [H]e
spoke of it as, from Breuer’s point of view, an ‘untoward event’.
The whole story is told by Ernest Jones in his Life of Freud, and
it is enough to say here that, when the treatment had apparently
reached a successful end, the patient suddenly made manifest to
Breuer the presence of a strong unanalyzed transference of an
unmistakably sexual nature. It was this occurrence, Freud be-
lieved, that caused Breuer to hold back the publication of the
case history for so many years and that led ultimately to his
abandonment of all further collaboration in Freud’s researches.
(40–41)
In this sexualized game of finger pointing, Freud implies (via
Strachey) that since Breuer did not corroborate his theory of
the sexual etiology of neurosis, he (Freud) found it necessary to
renarrate Breuer’s story for him. In so doing, he transformed
Breuer’s case into a more ‘‘honest’’ and useful founding moment
for his own science. Freud’s reported hand gesture speaks vol-
umes: with his phallic finger filling in the gapping chasm in the
textual body in an act of penetration, he reveals the ‘‘hiatus’’ in
Breuer’s account, and then qualifies it by marking out the pres-
ence of an ‘‘untoward event’’ of a ‘‘sexual nature’’ that arose during
Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. Although at the time Studies was
written Freud had just begun to theorize ‘‘transference’’ (alluding
to the idea fleetingly in the last section of the theoretical conclu-
sion to Studies), he casts the ‘‘hiatus’’ he finds in Breuer’s narra-
tive as not only transferential but countertransferential. For, Freud
insinuates, the entire episode was repressed by Breuer, in whom
Anna O.’s desire provoked feelings that were terrifying. Although
Strachey refrains from proffering torrid details, he guides readers
to Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud, where he promises that the
‘‘fullest account’’ is given and additionally references those pas-
sages in Freud’s oeuvre where the master himself describes his ver-
sion of events.70
As intriguing as the pages to which Strachey directs us are, they
pale in comparison to a document he does not mention: a posthu-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

mously published letter to Freud’s friend Stefan Zweig, the author

and historian of the psychoanalytic movement. In this letter, Freud
emphasizes two additional aspects of Breuer’s case: ‘‘What really
happened with Breuer’s patient I was able to guess later on, long
after the break in our relations, when I suddenly remembered some-
thing Breuer had once told me in another context before we had
begun to collaborate and which he never repeated. On the evening
of the day when all her symptoms had been disposed of, he was
summoned to the patient again, found her confused and writh-
ing in abdominal cramps. Asked what was wrong with her, she re-
plied: ‘Now Dr. B’s child is coming!’’’ 71 Freud’s understanding of
the case is here no longer cast as speculation, but confirmed by his
own memory of a previous telling. He (re)narrates events with full
authority, revealing that he knew all along about the ‘‘sexual na-
ture’’ of Anna O.’s hysteria. In an act of revision, in other words,
Freud constitutes the sexual etiology of Anna O.’s hysteria as an
originary ‘‘fact’’ that has been deliberately covered over, and for
the first time specifies from what it was that Breuer fled: not only
Anna O.’s perturbing desire for Breuer but specifically her way-
ward reproductivity.
Reprimanding Breuer for his shortcomings, Freud attests that
at the moment that Breuer terminated Anna O.’s treatment he
‘‘held in his hand the key that would have opened ‘the door to the
Mothers,’ but he let it drop.’’ 72 The door to the Mothers! Finally
Freud acknowledges that it was not simply a sexual etiology that
he sought to integrate into the Anna O. case so that it might better
satisfy his theoretical aims, but rather, by way of innuendo, foot-
note, and phallic finger pointing, the familiar specter of wayward
reproductive sexuality—the cause of hysteria previously discussed
in ‘‘Aetiology’’ by way of the twisted genealogical trees and illicit
incestuous couplings. And thus, even though Anna O.’s hysterical
reproductivity has most often been read as a rejoinder to Char-
cot’s resolute rejection of the association of hysteria with illnesses
of the womb,73 another interpretation for Freud’s odd if marked
obsession can also be offered. For Freud’s simultaneous marginal-
ization and foregrounding of Anna O.’s pregnancy was precisely
the double move that allowed full integration of Studies into his
larger corpus. In interjecting himself into Breuer’s text by way of
a footnote, Freud allowed psychoanalysis to give birth to itself, to
begin as a narration of its own birth, such that Freud could in turn
claim to have given birth to the psychoanalytic science.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

This reading, brilliantly developed by Rachel Bowlby and

Wayne Koestenbaum, suggests that Freud wrested the power of re-
production from this hysterical woman, to claim her (pro)creation
of the ‘‘talking cure’’ as his own. As they argue (albeit to different
ends), in renarrating the Anna O. case, Freud engaged in a discur-
sive struggle for control over reproductivity and emerged victori-
ous.74 Such readings add meaning to Etienne Trillat’s dictum that
‘‘all psychoanalytic theory [is] born from hysteria, but the mother
died during the birth.’’ 75 And yet, although such arguments about
the power struggle played out over Anna O.’s reproductivity en-
able my own, the phenomenon that they recognize—that the addi-
tion of information about the phantom pregnancy renders Studies
‘‘whole’’—can be read somewhat differently. For Freud’s inser-
tion, with finger on text, of Anna O.’s reproductive body is an ex-
pressly sexualizing act that is simultaneously racializing. Certainly,
Freud provided Bertha Pappenheim with a race-neutral name and
thus barred Jewishness entry into his text on the level of mani-
fest content; however, along with her reproductive body, an inex-
tricable, if inchoate, figuration of race enters in tow. In restoring
Anna O.’s fantasmatic pregnancy to the record, Freud, like Dar-
win before him, mobilized wayward reproductivity as a racializ-
ing force—in this case a force that enabled a universally applicable
science to be generated out of a castigated racial particularism.
When the metaphors that structure Anna O.’s case are histori-
cized, especially those that describe her linguistic symptoms, the
Jewishness of hysteria emerges full force. According to Breuer’s
schema, Anna O.’s illness had four distinct phases. During the
most severe, the period of ‘‘manifest illness,’’ she experienced ex-
treme disturbances of speech and found herself at times aphasic, at
others able to speak only a confusing polyglot speech comprised of
several foreign languages, or, at still other times, a fluent German
followed by an inability to speak in any language other than Eng-
lish. In short, at the height of her illness, Anna O. was deprived of
words, bombarded by an excess of words, or able to speak exclu-
sively in someone else’s words, but rarely at home in what Breuer
(quite inaccurately) refers to as her (German) ‘‘mother tongue.’’
This linguistic shattering and scattering was paralleled by a split-
ting of Anna O.’s mental theater into a form of ‘‘double conscious-
ness’’ (Breuer’s term) in which she was divided into a ‘‘naughty’’
and normal self, a hysterical woman who acted out and a sane
version of the same person. In Anna O., hysterical ‘‘naughtiness’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

(read illness) and multilinguality converged.76 Breuer neatly docu-

ments this in detailing Anna O.’s difficulties:
She lost her command of grammar and syntax; she no longer
conjugated verbs, and eventually she used only infinitives, for
the most part incorrectly formed from weak past participles;
and she omitted both the definite and indefinite article. In the
process of time she became almost completely deprived of words.
She put them together laboriously out of four or five languages and
became almost unintelligible. When she tried to write . . . she em-
ployed the same jargon. (25, emphasis added)
Anna O.’s polyglot speech was, Breuer avers, ‘‘unintelligible.’’ And
yet, a paradox is embedded within his assessment. Being ‘‘unin-
telligible’’ because one uses incorrect syntax and grammar, or be-
cause one is ‘‘completely deprived of words,’’ is distinct from being
‘‘unintelligible’’ because one speaks in a language that those who
are listening do not understand. Similarly, putting words together
‘‘out of four or five languages’’—employing ‘‘jargon’’—is hardly
synonymous with having no words at all. And thus, it is perhaps
more accurate to restate the situation thus: Anna O.’s expression
was not devoid of meaning; it was filled with a surfeit of meaning
that Breuer chose not to acknowledge, or perhaps could not.
Strikingly, the anti-Semitic view of Jewish language was rou-
tinely expressed in terms that echo Breuer’s and indicate what
was implicitly at stake in his assessment of Anna O.’s symptoms.
As Sander Gilman explains in another context, ‘‘The Christian
world . . . represents the Jew as possessing all languages or no lan-
guage of his or her own; of having a hidden language which mir-
rors the perverse or peculiar nature of the Jew; of being unable to
truly command the national language of the world in which he/she
lives.’’ 77 Anna O.’s polyglot and her tenuous relation to German
are figures for her Jewish use of language, or more simply for her
neurotic racial otherness, her Jewishness. Mauscheln, which liter-
ally means to speak German like Moses, or to speak like a Jew,
was, like endogamy, considered a stigmatizing racial trait. Addi-
tionally, the term was a descriptor that Western (Germanicized
Jews) used to designate the German speech of their East European
brethren. Mauscheln, which originally meant to counterfeit, or to
engage in shady dealings, was further linked within anti-Semitic
discourse to stereotypes about Jews and money and to those about
Jews as deceitful cheats, fakes, and frauds. In the context of anti-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Semitic rhetoric about national belonging, this linguistic fraudu-

lence was tantamount to national fraudulence. As first Hannah
Arendt and later Carl Schorske have observed, Jews in turn-of-
the-century Austria were regarded as a ‘‘state people’’ par excel-
lence. Jews did not constitute a nationality of their own, nor did
they belong to one of the existing nationalities (such as Slovaks or
Ukrainians, for example); rather, Jews were without a nation and
of all nations, without a language and usurpers of all languages.
As Schorske explains, such views about language and nation were
especially pronounced in the rhetoric of the Pan-Germanist and
anti-Semite Georg von Schönerer. In Schönerer’s eyes Jews were
‘‘the supra-national people of a multi-national state’’ who could
be ‘‘attacked in the name of every nation’’ and for being without
a nation, that is for being ‘‘sub-national.’’ Schönerer’s observa-
tion reiterated nearly verbatim that expressed by Richard Wagner,
who earlier in the century had denied that Jews could have any
authentic relation to national cultures or languages because they
were merely guests in the nations in which they resided: ‘‘The
Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived
from generation to generation, but he speaks it as a foreigner.’’ 78
In instances in which Jews attempted assimilation, they were re-
garded within anti-Semitic discourse as ‘‘converts’’ to their as-
sumed nationality, as false nationals and linguistic counterfeits.79
There is also a second route along which to trace the anti-
Semitic racialization of Anna O.’s language. When Breuer denotes
it as ‘‘jargon’’ ( Jargon), he employs a common euphemism for Jew-
ish talk in general, one that German speakers often used for Yid-
dish.80 As for many Jews who immigrated from the outer reaches
of the Hapsburg Empire to Vienna, Yiddish was the language
of the real Anna O.’s (Bertha Pappenheim’s) dead father, a lan-
guage she knew intimately. Later in life Pappenheim, in addition to
emerging as an important feminist activist, would become known
as a translator of ‘‘Judeo-German’’ or Yiddish, what she called
‘‘the Woman’s German.’’ From such a biographical perspective,
Anna O.’s ‘‘jargon’’ clearly emerges as a figure for her Jewishness,
as a sign ‘‘at once of this woman’s alienation from a truly Ger-
man heritage and [of] her incomplete assimilation’’ into a multi-
lingual culture.81 Like Mauscheln, Jargon has a racist etymology;
it was often defined as speech solely intelligible to members of a
particular group, tribe, or race—that is, as a shibboleth. As in the
logic of the label ‘‘anti-Semitism’’ (coined by the Hamburg jour-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

nalist Wilhelm Marr)—in which ‘‘Semitic,’’ an adjective originally

used to designate the language of the Jews, is transformed into
a racial mark, trait, or designation—‘‘jargon’’ conjures an amal-
gam of language and race.82 In sum, Anna O.’s pathologized lan-
guage symbolizes ‘‘supra-’’ and ‘‘subnationality,’’ and by extension
a form of linguistic exclusivity that is decisively racial in character,
inappropriate because it is distinctively Jewish.
If Anna O.’s language, the preeminent symptom of her hysteria,
figures her Jewishness, then by extension her hysteria itself figures
Jewishness. When Anna O. was hysterical, acting as her ‘‘naughty’’
self, she was not just a neurotic bourgeois cosmopolitan, but also
a Jewess whose neurosis found expression in a particularly racial-
ized linguistic symptom. In turn, this revelation gives new mean-
ing to Breuer’s insistence that when he heard Anna O. speak Ger-
man he knew that her treatment was effective. In describing one of
her sessions of so-called chimney sweeping he writes, ‘‘The longer
she went on the more fluent she became, till at last she was speak-
ing quite correct German’’ (29). According to Breuer, Anna O.’s
ability to speak the German ‘‘mother tongue’’ was a sign of nor-
malcy; by contrast, her polyglotism and other linguistic difficulties
were a sign of her hysteria. To be cured of hysteria was to become
capable of speaking/being German; to be sane, the hysteric had
to master and display correct German grammar and syntax—that
is, she had to assimilate by transforming her racially denigrated
language into a properly national one. Significantly, in closing his
narrative, Breuer describes Anna O.’s rendition of the most tor-
menting of her memories and interprets her subsequent return to
proper German usage as a sign of her ‘‘cure’’ (40).
If in the logic of Breuer’s text Anna O.’s wellness was equated
with her ability to express herself in (as) German rather than in
any other way, there remains a link in the metonymic chain that
is still unanalyzed. For it must be remembered that at the precise
moment that Breuer declared Anna O. cured, Freud (via Strachey)
inserted the footnote into the case that introduced Anna O.’s preg-
nancy and thus unequivocally declared that she was still quite hys-
terical. In short, the Jewishness of hysteria that found expression
in Anna O.’s pathologized speech emerges, in view of Freud’s foot-
note, as a function of wayward reproductivity. As in ‘‘Aetiology,’’
in the Anna O. case, a discursive web comprised of mutually re-
inforcing discourses on race and reproduction emerges slowly;
this web embodies the connections among wayward reproduction,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Jewishness, and pathology that have been discussed throughout

this chapter and simultaneously constitutes the foundation upon
which the psychoanalytic project’s claim to universal relevance is
based. For it was upon a particularism—wayward Jewish repro-
ductive sexuality—that Freud founded a decidedly sexualized and
racialized science with paradoxically universal purview.
In one of the only instances in which Breuer uses figurative lan-
guage, he discusses the hysteric as ‘‘the flower of mankind.’’ He
specifies that she is not just any flower, but a ‘‘double flower’’ char-
acterized by beauty and sterility. Perhaps Breuer’s approach to
Anna O.’s sexuality—flight from her reproductivity (or dropping
of the key to ‘‘the door to the Mothers,’’ as Freud would have it)—
was the safest option, disengaged as it was from the racializing
and pathologizing logic of anti-Semitism. However, if Breuer took
the safe route, Freud located the more productive one. For it was
not until he successfully introduced the wayward reproductive ele-
ment into the case that it became possible for Anna O. to give birth
not only to a phantom child but to the form of racialized repro-
duction that constituted the appropriate foundation for Freud’s
universal science. In Freud’s work, as in Darwin’s, reproduction
and racial difference are invariably tightly bound. In Studies, a Jew-
ish women’s wayward reproductivity is appropriated and trans-
formed into a resource that is drawn upon in creating theoretical
coherence and, better still, universal validity. Rather than align-
ing Jewishness with pathology and normalcy with Aryanness or
Germanness (as Breuer did), through insertion of textual addenda
about Anna O.’s wayward reproduction Freud enabled Jewish pa-
thology to emerge as the model for all pathology—that is as a Jew-
ish particularity that, situated as it was at the origin of the ‘‘talking
cure,’’ was paradoxically universal in form.
After years of covert reconstructive activity Freud ultimately
succeeded. Anna O., like the hysterical siblings who were revealed
to be incestuously involved, became a prototypical case, a hysteric
whose neurosis could be viewed as exemplary in that it was both
racially particular and universalizable. Indeed, Anna O.’s wayward
reproductivity, like the endogamous relation between the Jewish
siblings, was finally rendered as a racial particularism available
for transformation into a psychoanalytic universal. In hauling his
insinuations about the ‘‘untoward event’’ into Breuer’s narrative,
Freud succeeded in making an anti-Semitic discourse about Jew-
ishness appropriable and thus generative of a ‘‘genuinely’’ uni-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

versal science. If the widely accepted anti-Semitic discourse by

which Freud was surrounded was a form of racism masquerad-
ing as universalism, Freud produced out of it a counteruniversal-
ism, one that addressed the problem inherent in universalism by
building a new universalism out of a castigated particularism. In
the most robust formulation, anti-Semitism was a discourse that
Freud could not escape. Rather than submitting to it, he (ab)used
it by resignifying and employing it to generate scientific authority
and to universalize his findings. Indeed, as this chapter has dem-
onstrated, psychoanalysis is built out of stereotypes about Jew-
ish wayward reproduction, in that it effectively renders insights
about Jewish pathology germane to Jews and Austro-Germans
alike.
Although in many ways the textual logic of the Anna O. case
appears quite similar to that of ‘‘Aetiology,’’ there is a difference
worth remarking upon. In the Anna O. case, Jewish particularity
is never essentialized; rather, it is unmoored from the racial body
as biological entity. Whereas in ‘‘Aetiology’’ the universal cause
of hysteria emerges as incestuous or endogamous (read Jewish)
sexuality, in the Anna O. case hysteria emerges as Jewish but is
not indexed by a singular expression of wayward reproductive
desire. Instead, Anna O.’s wayward reproductivity can be read as
endogamous or exogamous, ‘‘miscegenous’’ or incestuous, or all of
these at once. If Anna O. is understood as a Jewess, her desire for
Breuer, the Jewish physician, emerges as endogamous; conversely,
if the case is read according to the protocols dictated by its mani-
fest content, then only Breuer is Jewish in the eyes of the reader,
and Anna O.’s reproductive desire for Breuer is exogamous. The
point is not, however, to submit Anna O.’s case to such a calcu-
lus. Rather, it is to show how within psychoanalytic theory, as in
the theory of sexual selection, race and reproduction were so inti-
mately bound together that they were articulated in and through
each other. For in both theories the exercise of wayward reproduc-
tive desire—women’s sexual selection—itself emerges as a racial-
izing force.
As Hortense Spillers has explained in a different context, ‘‘the
universal sound of psychoanalysis’’ often misleads us into ‘‘giving
short shrift to its cultural uniqueness.’’ Though she is not writ-
ing of psychoanalysis’s Jewishness but rather of its Eurocentrism,
her assertion underscores a scholarly tendency to naturalize rather
than interrogate supposed psychoanalytic universals.83 As this
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

chapter has demonstrated, it is precisely the alleged universality of

psychoanalysis that should put us on guard and make us alert to
the ‘‘cultural uniqueness’’ out of which its universal purview has
been generated. Though Freud may not have consciously or ex-
pressly thematized his connection to the particular location from
which he wrote, anti-Semitic ideas about Jewish wayward repro-
ductivity implicitly and persistently contoured his work and, in
the process, enabled the paradoxical universality of the science of
psychoanalysis to which he gave birth.
Insofar as the Anna O. case provides a window onto Freud’s em-
brace of Jewish particularism to produce emancipation from anti-
Semitic marginalization, it also is suggestive of the ways in which
we might begin to raise questions about our reading not only of
Freud’s early work on hysteria but of other centerpieces within the
Freudian corpus. For when it becomes evident that racialized ideas
about reproductive sexuality—indeed, stereotyped ideas about
Jewish wayward reproduction—were not so much purged from
psychoanalysis as constitutive to psychoanalytic theory’s expres-
sion, it becomes possible to locate the work of a now familiar con-
ceptual unit, the race/reproduction bind, in other texts as well. In
the range of social treatises that Freud produced later in life, in-
cluding Totem and Taboo (1913), Group Psychology and the Analy-
sis of the Ego (1921), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929),
for instance, the wayward sexuality of the so-called primal horde
that inaugurates the taboo on incest might itself be interpreted
as Jewish. In formulating his argument about the ‘‘primal horde’’
Freud followed Darwin closely, arguing that taboos against in-
cest are not innate (as Edward Westermarck famously averred),
but rather social inventions put into place by ‘‘primitive’’ people
significantly prior to the advent of ‘‘civilization.’’ As first Darwin
and then Freud attested, such societies were comprised of ‘‘small
hordes, each of which was under the despotic rule of an older
male who appropriated all the females and castigated or disposed
of the younger males, including his sons.’’ 84 In such a situation a
band of brothers who desired to have sex with their sisters and
mother formed. In a rage against the father’s curtailment of their
desire they murdered the father, raped the mother, and were sub-
sequently struck by internalized guilt and remorse. Ultimately this
structuring guilt found expression in the imposition of a taboo on
incest.
These stories, like the Anna O. case, are origin stories in which
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

the wayward sexuality figured at the origin might be productively

understood as racializing, or more precisely as Jewish. From such
a vantage point it becomes possible to discern that Freud crafted
not only a narrative in which a ‘‘primal horde’’ inaugurated the in-
cest taboo but one that flirted (albeit quite ahistorically and anach-
ronistically) with the notion that the ‘‘primal horde’’ was itself a
racialized social order—nothing less than a Jewish social order
—that enabled ‘‘civilization’’ by erecting a taboo upon its own
highly particular, incestuous impulses. In texts that elaborate the
origins of the most significant and pervasive social injunctions,
those against patricide and incest, it becomes possible to consider
that Jewishness lies at the origin of ‘‘civilization’’ as a catalyz-
ing particularity that Freud rescues from pathologization through
its expansion into a universal. Indeed, it seems relevant to con-
sider whether Freud was in fact suggesting that the first ‘‘civilized’’
people were Jews, as such ‘‘primitives’’ were the first to desire in-
cest and to contain, through prohibition, this universal desire.
Once the social texts are recast in this light, other central Freud-
ian contributions, including the Oedipus complex, also begin to
be implicated in a reoriented reading. Freud’s theorization of the
Oedipus complex was, after all, an attempt to explain how a uni-
versal taboo regulates sexuality, promotes heterosexual marriage,
and configures interpsychic relations among family members, not
only among incestuous Jews but among all people. In the Oedipus
complex Freud universalized the son’s desire for the mother and
explored the conflict with the father that this incestuous urge pro-
duced. Though it is well beyond the scope of this chapter to read
closely any of Freud’s numerous iterations of the Oedipal drama,
suffice it to suggest here that just as the incestuous desire of the sib-
lings in ‘‘Aetiology,’’ the wayward reproductive desire of Anna O.,
and the impulse of the ‘‘primal horde’’ may be productively read as
Jewish when placed within the context of virulent Austro-German
anti-Semitism, so too may the incestuous desire of the Oedipal
son. Fearing castration, the Jewish boy identifies with the father,
and in so doing imposes upon himself the prohibition of the father,
that against incest. Once again a Jewish particularism is mobilized
to launch an antiracist argument in which a denigrated stereotype
is recast as a universal in the interest of securing the theory of
psychoanalysis and its applicability to all people.
As this chapter has argued, Jewishness was not purged from
Freud’s science to universalize it, but rather a certain version of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

stereotyped, castigated Jewishness—nothing less than the racial-

ized desire of the incestuous siblings, the wayward hysteric, the
‘‘primal horde,’’ and the Oedipal son—was the particularized ele-
ment out of which a new counteruniversalism was generated. In-
deed, from such a perspective Jewishness can be aligned with neu-
rosis and with social pathos more generally, but only insofar as
it simultaneously inaugurates the universal culture, including the
Austro-German culture, in which Freud wrote and for much of
his life lived. In contrast to those who have argued that Freud
founded his science by excising any hint of Jewishness, this chap-
ter asks whether it might not be time to consider how psychoana-
lytic theory reappropriated, reworked, and ultimately resignified
anti-Semitic discourse about wayward reproductivity, not by run-
ning from it but by casting Jewishness as a constitutive function of
wayward reproduction, and in turn rendering racialized reproduc-
tion—nothing less than the race/reproduction bind—productive
of a new science with universal purview.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Chapter Five
The Sexual Politics of Black
Internationalism: W. E. B. Du Bois and
the Reproduction of Racial Globality
The symbolic kernel of the idea of race . . . is

the schema of genealogy, that is, quite simply the idea
that the filiation of individuals transmits from generation
to generation a substance both biological and spiritual and
thereby inscribes them in a temporal community
known as ‘‘kinship.’’—Etienne Balibar
It may be African-Americans, supposedly those

Americans with the most sketchy genealogical records,
who have most consistently constructed racial identities
for themselves that do not rely on myths of
racial purity.—Harryette Mullen
In my life the chief fact has been race—

not so much scientific race, as that deep conviction
of myriads of men that congenital differences among the
main masses of human beings absolutely condition the
individual destiny of every member of a group. Into
the spiritual provincialism of this belief I have been
born and this fact has guided, embittered,
illuminated and enshrouded my
life.—W. E. B. Du Bois
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
In the United States, black maternity has been persistently con-

structed as antithetical to national belonging. In a nation whose
ideology of inclusion has been grounded in notions of biological,
reproductive, and thus genealogical connection, being an ‘‘Ameri-
can’’ entitled to the exercise of full civil rights has often required
having a white mother, herself descended from a family whose
Anglo-Saxon pedigree is uncontaminated by so-called interracial
sex or miscegenation. Insofar as the concept of Americanness
has been regarded as coextensive with whiteness, the exclusion
of blackness, and the marginalization from the nation of those
women thought to reproduce it, have been mainstays of U.S. social
and political culture.1 By the turn of the nineteenth century, when
the activist and public intellectual William Edward Burghardt Du
Bois began writing, this ideological construction had taken root
in a variety of discourses—scientific and legal as well as popular.
In this chapter I read Du Bois’s work as an evolving response to
the ideology of racial nationalism elaborated in chapter 1, and as
the articulation of a genealogical counternarrative that argues, at
times, for African American inclusion in the nation, and at others,
for black belonging in the world.
The most explicit rendition of the racialized reproductive
themes against which Du Bois wrote was the discourse of ‘‘race
suicide,’’ discussed in detail in chapter 2. According to E. A. Ross,
Francis Amasa Walker, Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and
others, the birthrate among those who had come to call them-
selves ‘‘native Americans’’ was plummeting; unless Anglo-Saxon
mothers were recruited into the reproductive service of the na-
tion, the United States would quickly become a land comprised
of the darker-hued progeny of prolific foreign-born immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe and the descendants of African
slaves.2 As Ross, a prominent sociologist, averred, ‘‘The superi-
ority of a race can not be preserved without pride of blood and
an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races.’’ 3 Expressing
such an ‘‘uncompromising attitude’’ in horror-struck, stuttering
syntax, one doctor wrote in the pages of the Pennsylvania Medical
Journal, ‘‘American families’ having no children and the increase
of foreigners with large families means . . . that the [national]
majority will be the foreign and their children.’’ 4 For this self-
declared champion inveighing against ‘‘race suicide,’’ as for others,
white women were to solve the dilemma. They were to be recruited
as nation builders—national reproducers to be exact—and given
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

incentives to steer clear of childless marriages, labor outside the

home that might impact their fertility and, of course, sexual liai-
sons across racial lines. As for black mothers, about whom the
silence of ‘‘race suicide’’ tracts speaks volumes, the message was
clear: cease to reproduce. For unless a mother could bestow white
skin privilege upon her offspring, her child would not be embraced
as a national, as a subject with a claim to truly equal protection
within the nation’s borders and under its laws.
From the start of his career Du Bois wrote within and re-
sponded to what he calls, in the above epigraph, ‘‘the spiritual pro-
vincialism of this belief’’ system—a system in which sexual and
reproductive politics played as great a role as racial politics, pre-
cisely because the two were inextricable.5 As Etienne Balibar helps
explain, ‘‘the symbolic kernel of the idea of race’’ within the con-
text of the modern nation is ‘‘the schema of genealogy’’—a schema
in which issues of reproduction, maternity, and kinship play star-
ring roles.6 After the formal end of Reconstruction United States
nationalism came to depend upon what might be understood as
reproductive racism. The production of the idea of the dominant
national population as racially homogeneous was underpinned by
the idea that this population was reproducible as a racially ‘‘pure’’
kinship group. Such a construction of the nation was not only
about the reproduction of minoritarian elements as genealogical
outcasts, but as important, it was about the reproduction of racial
kinship as central to the self-conception of the national majority.
As Du Bois understood, the nation in which he resided was a
majoritarian racial entity and the majoritarian memory of the na-
tion was racist insofar as racialized reproduction was viewed as
the motor of national belonging. And thus Du Bois’s deceptively
simple insight: reproductive politics are internal to both national-
ism and racism.7 This chapter argues that in order to fully under-
stand Du Bois’s lifework on ‘‘the race concept’’ that he claims
‘‘guided, embittered, illuminated and enshrouded [his] life,’’ it is
necessary to explore his negotiation of the reproductive undergird-
ing of the concept of race in his time, particularly the reproductive
dimensions of the racial nationalism by which he was surrounded
and against which he wrote. Like Freud (as discussed in the pre-
vious chapter), Du Bois realized that most forms of racism de-
pended upon the consolidation of the race/reproduction bind—
and thus like Freud he sought to rescript the relationship between
these terms in producing antiracist thinking.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
The Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism 189

In response to the genealogical imperatives that secured belong-

ing in the United States, Du Bois produced various literary figu-
rations of black maternity, reproduction, and genealogical conti-
nuity that have not yet been examined. Three strategies, though
there are others, are my focus in the following pages. In his early
work, in protest of the failures of Reconstruction, Du Bois refused
to represent the black maternal body as a source of belonging for
African Americans. He refused, in other words, to participate in
the dominant reproductive logic of racial nationalism. The Souls of
Black Folk (1903) elaborates this approach, especially in Du Bois’s
eulogy for his son, ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-Born.’’ By contrast,
in the 1920s, as Du Bois wearied of the struggle for black inclusion
within the United States, he began to look outward toward a larger
global theater, and his treatment of black reproductivity changed
again. In a text marking this shift in thinking, the romantic novel
Dark Princess (1928), Du Bois reinserts the black mother into a dis-
course on belonging, but this time appropriates this vexed figure
to argue for black inclusion in the world. This expanded horizon
of belonging, this alternative approach to the issue of racial repro-
duction, is also evident in Du Bois’s 1940 autobiography, Dusk of
Dawn, the text which I examine at the end of this chapter. In this
pivotal work Du Bois leaves the figure of the black mother behind
and focuses all his energy on reworking the concept of genealogy
to bring his thoughts on reproduction and race to a new form of
politically strategic fruition. For in Dusk Du Bois goes a long way
toward deconstructing the notion of genealogical belonging and in
so doing articulates the robustly revolutionary and internationalist
goal of black belonging in the world, or what I refer to throughout
this chapter as racial globality.
National Genealogies
In reading Du Bois’s work as gender-conscious, even feminist in its
persistent attention to issues of maternity, reproduction, and gene-
alogy, I build on the work of those scholars discussed throughout
this book who have sought to theorize the gendered and sexual dy-
namics of nationalism and antinationalist movements.8 In pushing
the discussion of Du Bois in this direction I also hope to augment
several of the dominant interpretations of Du Bois’s writings on
gender. Du Bois’s readers have been divided over how to assess
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

his representation of black women, especially mothers. Some extol

his portraits of womanhood, particularly those of the figure he re-
peatedly refers to as ‘‘the black All-Mother.’’ Others reserve praise,
and like Joy James, are willing only to claim Du Bois as a ‘‘pro-
feminist’’ voice.9 As Hazel Carby points out, Du Bois imagined
the black intellectual as necessarily male and as preponderantly
patriarchal; indeed, his very definition of black intellectual life and
political activism is masculinist.10 Still other critics are concerned
with neither Du Bois’s unrealistic or overly romanticized repre-
sentation of black women, nor his masculinism. Rather, they are
interested in how Du Bois’s political claims about racism and the
meaning of being black in the twentieth century are subtended by
his eugenic thought. As Daylanne English suggests in an essay on
Du Bois’s editorship of the Crisis, from about 1900 to 1930 the
journal was shot through with eugenic strands, especially in its
promotion of a form of ‘‘racial uplift’’ that had as much to do
with biological as cultural pedigree, and thus with what might be
thought of as ‘‘intraracial ‘family planning.’ ’’ 11 Although I am not
expressly concerned with Du Bois’s eugenic thought, I argue, as
does English, that the most interesting—and often most troubling
—gendered and sexualized elements of his thinking are expressed
through implicit and explicit discourses on black reproduction.
For although, as other scholars have shown, Du Bois’s representa-
tions of women are often mythopoetically idealized and/or stereo-
typically reductive, assessment of their (de)merits can be usefully
separated from exploration of their rhetorical function in articu-
lating a series of inextricable relationships between race and re-
production.
First published as a chapter of Souls, Du Bois’s account of the
untimely death of his first child, Burghardt, in ‘‘Of the Passing of
the First-Born’’ may seem an unlikely place to begin discussion
of the racialized reproductive politics that structure his concep-
tual edifice.12 After all, the figure of the mother hardly appears in
this eulogy at all. And yet, it is precisely her spectral presence, her
lack of embodiment, that allows Du Bois to work out questions
of paternity and paternal filiation while simultaneously exposing
the political valence of a refusal of maternal genealogical narra-
tion as racial connection. Miming and in the process exposing
the prototypical white male national who secures his whiteness,
his belonging within the nation, through the assertion of pater-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

nal epistemological authority over reproduction and subsequent

misrecognition of his black progeny, Du Bois willfully refuses to
recognize himself in his son.
Souls, published while Du Bois was working as a teacher of
history and economics at Atlanta University, is divided into three
sections containing both previously published essays and unpub-
lished works. The first two sections are comprised of academic and
polemic writings that explore the social and economic situation of
blacks during and after Reconstruction (including Du Bois’s fa-
mous argument with Booker T. Washington), the Black Belt, cot-
ton, and the black southern metropolis, Atlanta. The third section,
which contains Du Bois’s eulogy (one of three chapters written ex-
pressly for the collection) is more recognizably literary, and also
includes a short story and Du Bois’s monumental essay on the po-
litical significance of black music to American culture. Together
these stylistically distinct and seemingly incompatible elements
combine in an uneasy whole, creating a genre-busting modernist
aesthetic that is ‘‘self-consciously polyphonic.’’ 13
In transforming his account of personal tragedy into an occa-
sion for considering a different vision of racial and national be-
longing, one that reappropriates rather than consolidates the logic
of national reproduction, ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’’ be-
comes a collective narrative and thus as inseparable from the
overtly political chapters included in Souls as from issues of group
survival. Of particular significance for understanding Du Bois’s
elegy is ‘‘Of the Dawn of Freedom.’’ In this early chapter, he fore-
grounds rather than forgets the history of miscegenation in the
United States and the black maternal body’s central place in it.
Using two archetypal figures to emblematize an emergent, though
still divided, nation, Du Bois retells the story of the unfulfilled
promise of Reconstruction:
One, a gray haired gentleman whose fathers had quit them-
selves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed
to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill
to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined
form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering
dark and mother-like; her awful face black with the mists of
centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s com-
mand, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daugh-
ters . . . [and] aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

lust, and borne a tawny man child to the world, only to see her
dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders
riding after ‘‘cursed Niggers.’’ (383)
In replacing a racist memory of the white nation with its history
of miscegenation, Du Bois claims the progeny of white masters
and enslaved women as the legitimate inheritors of America and
implicitly situates black maternity as the ‘‘medium through which
two great races [have been] united’’ in the United States.14 As for
the ‘‘tawny man child,’’ the babe born to the formerly enslaved
woman and her master, he remains the trace, the vestigial symbol
of violent beginnings, he who must straddle the color line as it ob-
scures the real, and yet inadmissible, heterogeneity of the nation
he inherits.
In creating a portrait of his son Du Bois imbricates his geneal-
ogy with the story of miscegenation on a national scale. Describing
his son in terms that echo his portrait of ‘‘the tawny man child,’’
he writes of his son’s body: ‘‘How beautiful he was, with his olive-
tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and
brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which
the blood of Africa had molded into his features!’’ (507). Du Bois’s
son is visibly mixed, and Du Bois does not hesitate to conceal his
reaction. Upon holding him and feeling ‘‘a vague unrest,’’ he asks,
‘‘Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair
in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and
killed the blue?—for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s
father’s’’ (507). Not only does Du Bois acknowledge the violent
history embedded in his son’s genealogy, but he casts genealogy as
a visual confusion precipitated by the body of his child. Even as
his father love awakens, Du Bois struggles with the reproductive
dimensions of racialization, with the complexity of black gene-
alogical belonging in the United States, and with the relationship
of both to a dominant scopic economy of race in which physio-
logical marks constitute a visual index of life chances as well as
the attendant affective repercussions of Du Bois’s paternity.15
As Du Bois’s eulogy proceeds he does not mitigate his obsession
with the optics of race but returns to and reworks it as a sign of
his own evolving thoughts on fatherhood, reproductive racializa-
tion, and the ideology of racial nationalism. In addition to the first
moment he sees his child, Du Bois’s thoughts pivot on a series of
further optical moments. In the opening sentences of the chapter,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

as he receives news of his son’s birth, his first thought is to wonder

how his baby looks. In passages that follow he marks the descent
of the ‘‘Veil’’ that separates the white world from the black as a
transformation in the visual field, as a process of shadowing. As
he recounts the circumstances of his son’s death and describes the
funeral procession, his use of darkness and light intensifies: Death
is cast as a ‘‘shadow,’’ and the sun as a ‘‘brooding’’ presence ‘‘veil-
ing its face’’ (508). The funerary song in the ears of the mourners is
likewise transformed into an image, a ‘‘shadow’’ that stands out in
bold relief next to the ‘‘pale faced’’ hurrying men and women, who
fail to turn in sympathy toward the black mourners but instead
judge them in a ‘‘glance’’ and pronounce them ‘‘Niggers!’’ Finally,
in his depiction of Burghardt’s departing soul Du Bois writes that
it leaves ‘‘darkness in its train’’ (508), as well as the ominous veil
itself.16
Du Bois’s preoccupation with the visible coding of his son’s
body, and with the play of darkness and light across it, is directly
linked to the treatment of racial optics in the best known pas-
sage in Souls, where he declares that the ‘‘true self-consciousness’’
that he seeks to find and to instill in others is that which be-
longs to the man who ‘‘simply wishes it to be possible . . . [to] be
both a Negro and an American’’ (364). In formulating the struggle
for self-consciousness as the articulation of racial and national
belonging, Du Bois mobilizes the highly visual figure of the veil
to explain the twinned forces that inspire that particular feeling
of ‘‘twoness,’’ of possessing a body that holds ‘‘two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’’ in a form of tension mani-
fest as ‘‘double-consciousness’’ (364–65). Double consciousness,
the ‘‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks
on in amused contempt and pity’’ (365) is structured by racial
optics, by a presumption that blackness is opaque to the white
gaze. In turn, double consciousness relies on a series of visual con-
cept metaphors and refers to a number of scopic states simulta-
neously: the power of white racism to render blacks invisible and
subordinate; the experience of being perceived as American and
not quite American that results from such invisibility; the recourse
of racism to the hypervisibility of ‘‘one drop of black blood’’ that is
the inverse of a racism of invisibility; the internal conflict attendant
on living in a white nation while perceiving oneself as black; and
the visually overdetermined metaphor of the Veil.17 Consciousness
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

is perhaps more accurately double-edged than double: the Veil ren-

ders blacks subordinate to the white world and gaze, while those
who must look at the world through the Veil gain a painfully clear
view of racial apartheid’s mechanism.
In coming to terms with the heavy use of visual metaphors and
color-coded figurations in Du Bois’s work I do not mean to argue
that he wished to reduce blackness to a set of visual signifiers, nor
to imply that in meditating on the raced body and on physiologi-
cal degrees of lightness and darkness Du Bois embraced an essen-
tialist conception of race.18 Rather, I am suggesting a reading of
Du Bois’s central philosophical formulations—the Veil and double
consciousness—as ones in which consciousness and vision are, as
in most Enlightenment projects, inextricable. Du Bois chose to
inhabit the dominant discourse on race and the notions of racial
visibility that are part and parcel of it, because he regarded this
as a strategic necessity in a context in which racism transpar-
ently grounded itself in such thinking.19 In short, Du Bois’s en-
gagement with the optics of race expresses his awareness of racial
(in)visibility as one of the primary power regimes through which
racism institutes itself. His reflections on his son’s golden hair and
blue-tinted eyes constitute an acknowledgment of the historical
and political necessity of working through the effects of the domi-
nant scopic economy of race—the ‘‘the quasi-hallucinatory’’ 20 visi-
bility of race that has been used to cement relationships between
racial and national belonging in a nation Du Bois famously de-
scribes as divided by ‘‘the color line.’’
Insofar as Du Bois’s engagement with the optics of race exists
in a strategically deconstructive relationship to the dependence of
racism on the putative visibility of race, it also bears such a re-
lationship to the nationalist discourse that joins race and repro-
duction. As Du Bois understood, black fathers could not secure
belonging for their sons in a nation in which they themselves re-
ceived unequal treatment and protection. And thus, when Du Bois
imagines that his son’s body can escape the cut of the Veil it is
by way of a genealogical counternarrative in which he is dissoci-
ated from the paternal line (note that Burghardt does not have
the eyes and features of his father nor his father’s father) and is
affiliated instead with his mother. Significantly, at the same time
as he refuses paternal filiation, Du Bois casts the maternal-child
bond as decisively antiessentializing—not grounded in biology—
but instead integrated into an alternative calculus of connection in
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

which spiritual merging plays a far greater role than genealogical

descent.
Like her child, Burghardt’s mother is presented as racially in-
determinate. And while it may be argued that readers were meant
to assume that Nina Gomer Du Bois was black and self-identified
as such, the textual mother in Du Bois’s eulogy is unnamed, never
subjected to physical description, or otherwise racialized.21 In-
stead, she is characterized as an empty vessel, a protean being of
mythological proportions who is so emotionally bound up with
Burghardt that Du Bois depicts his baby as torn from ‘‘underneath
her heart’’ (506) rather than from her womb. Indeed, the primacy
of the textual mother’s connection to the child is so strong that
Du Bois’s paternity is expressed as maternally mediated. Unable
to love the ‘‘tiny formless thing . . . all head and voice,’’ he in-
sists that his tie to his baby is secured through his ‘‘love for its
mother’’ (506). This romanticized and at once nonbiological link
between mother and child is further solidified when the connec-
tion between the two is rendered in terms of language rather than
flesh or blood. As Du Bois points out, renovating a nineteenth-
century discourse of sentimentality to his own ends, mother and
child communicate through a private, ‘‘soft and unknown tongue
and in it [hold] communion’’ (507).
Though Du Bois insists throughout that his son is born within
the Veil, he also reiterates that even as it shadowed him it was
incapable of ‘‘darken[ing] half his sun’’ (509). Because Burghardt
lacks racial self-consciousness, Du Bois describes him as living in
a better world, in which ‘‘souls walk alone, uncolored and un-
clothed’’ (509). In this sense Burghardt is suspended above the
color line, a precarious position associated with youthful igno-
rance, with his multiply signifying body, with his body’s ability to
escape the cut of the Veil, with the cutting gaze of white America,
and perhaps most importantly, with his racially unmarked mother.
Just as Du Bois will not ‘‘Africanize America . . . [or] bleach his
black Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism’’ (215), he will
not bind his son to his mother using the ideological constructs
of racial nationalism; for to do so would be to capitulate to the
(il)logic of national reproduction—a losing proposition for a black
father and for a child born to a black woman. Instead, in Du
Bois’s eulogy an ambiguous maternal body holds his child close, all
the while allowing this incalculable body to remain in suspension
above the color line, contesting its logic.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

The few critics who have treated ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-
Born’’ interpret it allegorically.22 The reading offered here follows
suit, while paying special attention to the narrative’s reproductive
politics. For, by focusing on and developing a portrait of his child’s
tiny changing form, Du Bois constructs mother and child together
as a symbolic repository for the relationship between race and
nation that is allegorized in Souls and, simultaneously, indicates
the contours of a genealogical counternarrative. In contrast to the
dominant ideology of national belonging, in which the reproduc-
tion of race is coupled with an account of the maternal body as a
resource for instantiating the racial nation and the racist memory
of nationals (and thus of a particular form of sexualized racism
as the history of nationalism), ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’’
allegorizes the violence of the ideology of national reproduction
by refusing to construct the maternal body as the source of racial
identity. As the last words of Du Bois’s chapter indicate, so long
as national belonging and blackness remain irreconcilable in the
United States, there will be no justice for America’s black sons.
Together with the other ‘‘tawny’’ children who comprise the newly
unified nation, Du Bois’s child will reside ‘‘above the Veil,’’ bal-
ancing on the tightrope of the color line that suspends it.
With this in mind, Du Bois’s title, ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-
Born,’’ begins to resonate multiply. Du Bois’s first son passes away,
potentially passes in and out of the white world, and passes in the
biblical sense of being passed over. He is not sacrificed to the Veil
but is among the chosen, his death, as Priscilla Wald has argued, a
‘‘survival, [or an] almost active (although . . . unwitting) protest.’’ 23
And yet, the act of ‘‘passing’’ invoked in the title can be interpreted
as referring not only to Du Bois’s son but also to Du Bois. For it is
he who ‘‘passes’’ in the sense that he declines to ground either his
own paternity or his portrait of maternity in the nationalist logic
of racialized reproduction. In creating an alternative representa-
tion of mother and son, Du Bois refused to make the black mother
into the source of racial identity in a context in which this same
logic excluded blacks from the nation. In refusing to situate his
son in the world according to the geography of American racism—
a map that at the time charted the terrain of visible blackness—
Du Bois deconstructed the nationalist logic that situated reproduc-
tion as a racializing force that determined who belonged and at the
same time denied belonging to those who would be both Negro
and American.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

In his ‘‘After-Thought’’ to Souls, Du Bois prays that his book

will not fall ‘‘stillborn into the world’’ (547). In closing he thus in-
dicates that ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’’ is an allegory of
thwarted reproductive potential that is central to the book over-
all. ‘‘In the Dawn of Freedom,’’ the essay in which Du Bois locates
white masters and slave women as the progenitors of the nation,
he reflects on the failures of the Freedmen’s Bureau, stating that
‘‘the passing of a great human institution before its work is done,
like the untimely passing of a single soul . . . leaves a legacy of
striving for other men’’ (390). In echoing nearly verbatim his senti-
ments about his son’s death in recounting his feelings about the
plight of black freepersons, Du Bois reveals his child’s story as
again coincident with that of the miscegenated nation. In fail-
ing to nurture its black children, Du Bois warns, America ren-
ders its future precarious. For in a context in which the pervasive
form of historical memory disavows the history of miscegenation
in the United States—in a context in which it is impossible to ac-
knowledge black mothers as ‘‘co-worker[s] in the kingdom of cul-
ture’’(365)—the bold vision elaborated in Souls risks demise.
As Souls continues on from Du Bois’s personal tragedy, ‘‘the
kingdom of culture’’ emerges as the ultimate figuration of the mis-
cegenated nation. And instructively, the book’s final chapter, ‘‘The
Sorrow Songs,’’ forcefully expresses this. As Du Bois avers (prefig-
uring the arguments of cultural studies scholars nearly a century
later), the black contribution to the United States is foundational,
as can be discerned in black music: ‘‘by fateful chance the Negro
folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not sim-
ply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expres-
sion of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been ne-
glected, it has been, and is, half despised . . . but not withstanding,
it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and
the greatest gift of the Negro people’’ (536–37). As readers have
observed, the United States, like its music, is African American;
and yet this fact, like the starkly political one, awaits acknowl-
edgment.24 What is seldom mentioned about Du Bois’s argument
about the black foundations of the nation is that the sorrow songs
are not only a raced but also a gendered and expressly reproductive
cultural formation. These songs, ‘‘the siftings of centuries,’’ were
sung by Du Bois’s grandfather’s grandmother, who was ‘‘seized
by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago’’ (538). Slave mothers
once passed them down to their ‘‘children and they to their chil-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

dren’s children,’’ such that generations upon generations know not

the meaning of the songs’ words but ‘‘know . . . well the meaning
of [the] . . . music’’ (539) and the significance of its reproduction
across time.
The sorrow songs chapter not only concludes Souls but also
provides a key to the paired musical and poetic epigraphs that
begin each of the book’s chapters. As becomes evident from the
vantage point of the arguments set forth about the sorrow songs,
in coupling stanzas of song with bars of music or stanzas of poetry
from around the world, Du Bois universalizes the sorrow songs’
message, enlarging, even globalizing, the scope of ‘‘the greatest
gift’’ while keeping sight of its specific import in the United States.
Voices heard singing songs of grief and liberation, oppression and
freedom are universally comprehensible because the message of
black music—that ‘‘sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by
their souls and not by their skins’’ (544)—travels no matter the lan-
guage in which the sorrow songs are sung.25 Indeed, music that
originated in Africa and found new expression in America is not
only aesthetically on a par with European music but is the proto-
typical sound of freedom. And, significantly, these cadences of lib-
eration have been reproduced by black women who have succeeded
not so much in creating a biological destiny for the race, as in re-
producing a universalizable cultural inheritance.26
Racial Globality
Though Du Bois clearly hoped that acknowledgment of black
music, and black culture more generally, would be foreseeable in
the near future, over a quarter of a century after writing Souls his
optimism was to a great extent dampened. Three decades of lynch-
ing, Jim Crow, and other forms of state-sanctioned racial violence
had taken their toll. Rather than persisting exclusively in a battle
for national recognition of black men and women, by the 1920s
Du Bois began to turn toward the larger world, toward Marx-
ism, and toward an understanding of the interconnection between
struggles for racial justice fought at home in the United States and
those fought against imperialism and colonialism elsewhere. In his
1920 anthology, Darkwater, this geographical reorientation is al-
ready pronounced. Whiteness, Du Bois argues, is a concept that
signifies class as much as race, and thus in discussing world eco-
nomic power he develops a critique of colonialism as a form of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

international capital expansion that is linked directly to racial op-

pression in the United States. Like European imperial powers the
United States has produced itself as a white nation, and thus of
Darkwater’s readers Du Bois asks, ‘‘Are we not coming more and
more, day by day, to making the statement ‘I am white’ the one
fundamental tenet of our morality?’’ Are not Americans ‘‘shoulder
to shoulder’’ with Europeans in their quest for the accumulation of
wealth through imperial escapades and racialized exploitation? 27
In a 1925 essay entitled ‘‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out,’’
Du Bois instructively elaborates these ideas through careful self-
citation and revision of his famous opening gambit in Souls.28
‘‘Once upon a time,’’ he writes,
in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote:
‘‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color line.’’ It was a pert and singing phrase which I then liked
and which since I have often rehearsed to my soul and asked:—
how far is this prophecy or speculation? To-day in the last years
of the century’s first quarter . . . fruit of bitter rivalries of eco-
nomic imperialism . . . deeply entwined at bottom with the
problems of the color line . . . [such that] world dissension
and catastrophe still lurk in the unsolved problems of race re-
lations. (385)
Whereas in Souls the problem of the color line is principally
(though not exclusively) treated as national, in 1925 ‘‘the prob-
lem of the twentieth century’’ is overtly global and refers to Portu-
guese involvement in Sao Thomé, British Nigeria, insurgent Mo-
rocco, Liberia, the Belgian Congo, the French West Indies, Sierra
Leone, and a score of other sites of imperial domination and anti-
colonial struggle that Du Bois discusses at length. These dispa-
rate geographic sites and the people who inhabit them are linked
by a shared experience of exploitation, by the unity that might
emerge from common analysis of ‘‘international finance’’ and ‘‘im-
perialistic world industry’’ (406)—that is, by a powerful, if par-
tially inchoate, global consciousness of ‘‘the Color Problem and
the Labor Problem’’ as to ‘‘a great extent two sides of the same
human tangle’’ (407–8).29
Building on these interwar period writings, Du Bois’s novel
Dark Princess joins together a critique of a nation that had frus-
trated Du Bois’s quest for justice, with an exploration of the poten-
tial for black anti-imperial internationalism.30 The novel, which
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Du Bois called his ‘‘favorite book,’’ resolutely gazes outward to-

ward emerging struggles for decolonization while simultaneously
legitimating inclusion of African Americans in such world histori-
cal events.31 As if to continue the unfinished argument of Souls by
picking up on the internationalist potential of the sorrow songs,
in the opening chapter of Dark Princess the protagonist, the self-
identified ‘‘American Negroe’’ Matthew Towns, makes the global
move by singing ‘‘Go Down Moses’’ to an audience referred to as
the ‘‘Council of the Darker Peoples of the World.’’ He is prompted
to share the ‘‘great song of emancipation’’ by a desire for recog-
nition by this group as a man whose cultural contribution rivals
that of members of other great civilizations and whose conscious-
ness of exploitation and dream of liberation are consonant with
those of the world’s oppressed peoples.32 If, as Du Bois argued in
Souls, he could not make America recognize black people as ‘‘co-
workers in the Kingdom of culture,’’ if he could not by force of
will and reason convince America that it could not be ‘‘America
without her Negro people’’ (545), then the fictional Matthew will
show the rest of the world that American Negroes have a place on
the larger global stage.
In Dark Princess, as in Souls, the political argument finds ex-
pression through a series of reproductive metaphors, figurations,
and themes. In contrast to Du Bois’s previous use of the black
mother to contest the racist logic of nationalism, Dark Princess
elaborates a utopian dream of solidarity among the darker peoples
of the world by reappropriating this figure. As if recrafting his
earlier grief-stricken representation of mother and child, he prof-
fers a new (albeit troubling) vision of a ‘‘black All-Mother.’’ In this
sense, Du Bois’s internationalist fiction does not simply supersede
his earlier, overtly political project, but rather intertwines with it
by reiterating as it responds to the failures of the first.
That Dark Princess, a work formally and generically distinct,
should be coupled with Souls is partly explained by the novel’s ful-
fillment of Du Bois’s mandate for propagandistic literature which
he elaborated in ‘‘The Criteria of Negro Art,’’ a controversial
paper first delivered in 1926 at an naacp conference in Chicago,
just two years before Du Bois’s novel’s publication.33 In this trea-
tise on engaged artistic production, Du Bois expresses himself de-
cisively: ‘‘all art is propaganda and ever must be. . . . I stand in
utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing
has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not
used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined
to one side while the other is stripped and silent.’’ 34
As Dark Princess’s subtitle signals, it is generically ‘‘A Ro-
mance’’—first and foremost a story about the love of Matthew for
Kautilya, the Maharanee of Bwodpur, the princess of the novel’s
title. In invoking ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ I do not mean to sug-
gest that Du Bois’s writings must be read as propaganda; rather, I
wish to draw attention to the particular place given to the roman-
tic genre in the ‘‘Criteria for Negro Art.’’ For of all the generic
forms that Du Bois might have chosen as vehicles for propaganda
he singles out romance, thus implicitly suggesting that it is be-
cause Dark Princess is a romance that it can advance the unfinished
political arguments put forth in Souls. After describing the anti-
colonial struggle in German East Africa, in which thousands of
‘‘black men from East, West and South Africa, and Nigeria and
the Valley of the Nile . . . struggled, fought and died,’’ to drive the
Germans, English, and Flemish from their lands, Du Bois writes
that ‘‘such is the true and stirring stuff of which romance is born.’’
Here, he directly connects romance to struggle against imperial-
ism and colonialism and thus situates it as an artistic form that
lends itself to expression of triumph over oppression. Through this
lens, Dark Princess practices what Du Bois elsewhere preaches: in
its pages romance emerges as a useful political tool, as a propa-
gandistic narrative that inextricably binds the fight to end white
world domination through international anticolonial alliance with
a globe straddling love affair.35
The relationship between the novel’s lovers is related in four
parts, each of which doubles as an account of Matthew’s political
awakening, and thus his struggle to develop internationalist con-
sciousness is bound up with his love for the princess and the move-
ment in which she is involved. In part 1, ‘‘Exile,’’ Matthew leaves
the United States for Germany after being discharged from medi-
cal school. In Berlin he first meets the princess when he rescues
her from the advances of a white American in a café. After telling
her his life story he is invited into the inner circle of ‘‘the Coun-
cil of the Darker Peoples of the World,’’ who have begun plotting
an anti-imperialist realignment of global power. Though the mem-
bers of this group are uncertain about whether Matthew should
be included amongst them, the princess is convinced of the need
to include African Americans in their internationalist enterprise.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Against the protestations of her comrades, Matthew is discharged

by the princess to research and report on the activities of Manuel
Perigua (a Caribbean nationalist reminiscent of Marcus Garvey),
the leader of an organization committed to the overthrow of white
supremacy through terrorism. Having fallen in love with the prin-
cess and her cause, Matthew departs with the intention of execut-
ing her orders.
On his return home Matthew finds that his life is filled with new
forms of racialized brutality. In part 2, ‘‘The Pullman Porter,’’ he
meets Perigua, by whom he is baffled, unsure whether he is a mis-
guided visionary or true prophet. To find out and to support him-
self Matthew becomes a railway porter. He meets Perigua’s alleged
supporters and quickly discovers that his organization is largely a
sham. Though disheartened, Matthew retains his sense of purpose
until his fellow porter is lynched aboard a train transporting Klan
members to a huge international conference. Matthew’s rage and
sorrow are compounded when he discovers that his friend’s assas-
sins had assumed that they were in fact murdering Matthew. Over-
whelmed by bitterness Matthew joins Perigua in a suicide mission
to dynamite a bridge over which the next ‘‘Klan Special’’ will pass.
At the last minute, when he discovers the princess on board the
train slated for destruction, Matthew aborts the mission, realizing
that his love for Kautilya and his commitment to her cause per-
sist. When Matthew refuses to turn Perigua over to the law, he is
sentenced to ten years in prison.
In part 3, ‘‘The Chicago Politician,’’ Matthew begins a new life
as a cog in the corrupt political machine that is making a bid for
control over black Chicago. This section of the novel, an exposé of
the corruption of organized politics and the manipulation of black
constituencies by power-hungry hucksters, also depicts the politi-
cal alternatives to the princess’s cause. Though Matthew momen-
tarily loses himself in this narrow world, he eventually reawakens
to the distinction between justice and injustice, honesty and graft.
When the princess reenters his life, having gone off to learn the dig-
nity of toil (as a maid, waitress, tobacco worker, and official of the
Box Maker’s Union) Matthew is jolted back into consciousness
and love. In part 4, the romance is consummated, and the princess
and Matthew each achieve spiritual and political enlightenment.
When the princess finally calls upon Matthew to rejoin ‘‘the Coun-
cil of the Darker Peoples of the World,’’ whose planning for global
transformation is now in its final stages, she also summons him to
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

join her in constituting a new family at the center of which resides

a golden child, Matthew’s son, a baby cast as the messiah of a new
world in which Pan-Asia and Pan-Africa are united in common
cause against white world domination.
As is evident, the events that catalyze the novel’s drama and
those that resolve it are decisively reproductive. Matthew is not
dismissed from medical school because he cannot make the grade
but because he has been prohibited from his training in obstet-
rics, a course that would place him, a black man, into contact with
the reproductive bodies of white women. As the dean of the medi-
cal school admonishes, ‘‘What did you expect? Juniors must have
obstetrical work. Do you think white women patients are going
to have a Nigger doctor delivering their babies?’’ (4). As in the
discourse of ‘‘Race Suicide,’’ the white maternal bodies that re-
generate the nation are rescued from contaminating black hands,
and Matthew’s ‘‘exile’’ in ‘‘his own native land’’(7) is explicitly
marked as an exclusion from the reproductive order of things.
When Matthew arrives in Berlin, the rage in his heart channels
itself into an action that avenges the specific wrong done him. His
exclusion from medical training fuels his outrage that a white man
would sexually defile a woman of color, the princess, who sits at a
far table in the Viktoria Cafe. As Matthew first envisions her she
is cast as a burst of color, ‘‘a glow of golden brown . . . darker than
sunlight and gold . . . a living, glowing crimson,’’ which suddenly
brightens ‘‘the absence or negation of color’’ in which he exists in
Europe (8).
The scene that ensues is overdetermined and highly charged.
Matthew’s honorable intention toward white women as a would-
be doctor contrasts with the sexually threatening intention of
the white American. In this brief episode, the white man, rather
than the fantasmatic black rapist, is revealed as the true threat to
racial harmony. Though the scene is set in Berlin, its male actors
operate within a specifically U.S. racial and sexual economy. The
white American points to the princess and claims he knows what
‘‘Niggers’’ want, while Matthew defends her honor with a con-
viction of which only he understands the deeper meaning: ‘‘All
that cold rage which still lay like lead beneath his heart began
again to glow and burn’’ (9). Though grateful, the princess is non-
plussed. Although ‘‘she [is] ‘colored’ . . . [she is] not at all colored
in [Matthew’s] intimate sense’’ (14), and thus she interprets the
incident through a global lens rather than a specifically North
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

American one. As she explains to Matthew over coffee, ‘‘It had

never happened before that a stranger of my own color should
offer me protection in Europe. I had a curious sense of some great
inner meaning to your act—some world movement’’ (17, emphasis
added).
As the narrative unfolds the princess’s understanding of the alli-
ance of ‘‘Negro America’’ and India, Pan-Africa, and Pan-Asia,
rather than Matthew’s U.S. exceptionalism, is literally born out in
the international and interracial reproductive union that serves as
the narrative’s symbolic and rhetorical culmination. Before turn-
ing to the birth of the child who may aptly be identified as Du
Bois’s second son, however, I turn to the depiction of two arche-
typal female bodies: the first, the light-skinned Sara Andrews, the
nonreproductive foil to Kautilya; and Sara’s antithesis, a dark and
fecund background figure who provides the novel with a mater-
nalist mechanism of filiation that makes arrival at its reproductive
telos possible. Within the narrative’s logic, the embrace and cele-
bration of the latter figure depends upon the sacrifice of the former.
The disturbing castigation of Sara’s pale form is overt: Matthew
is first married to Sara, and it is his sterile union with her that he
repudiates when he joins the princess. An array of textual details
forecast this turn of events: the ‘‘new and shining’’ (142) house
that Sara furnishes and arranges for herself and Matthew on the
eve of their marriage boasts an electric log in the fireplace that
Matthew had longed to fill with real ones. Moreover, the home
without a hearth is purged of Matthew’s personal effects, most
notably his ‘‘long coveted . . . copy of a master painter’s female
nude’’ (142–43), an image that spoke to him of ‘‘endless strife, of
finer beauty and never dying flesh’’ (143). Like Sara on her wed-
ding day, the perfectly ordered house that the couple cohabit is
‘‘immaculate.’’ Further depictions of Sara as a frigid, sterile check
to Matthew’s advances are unrelenting; all passionate impulses
that Matthew experiences are immediately squelched by his light-
skinned wife. On the couple’s wedding day, as Matthew gazes on
Sara’s ‘‘roll of silken hair,’’ and the ‘‘single pearl shining at the part-
ing of her’’ noticeably ‘‘little breasts,’’ he is reprimanded by her
‘‘metallic voice’’ to straighten his tie. When afterward, the pair roll
off in their new Studebaker and Matthew is moved to tenderness
by ‘‘his slim white bride’’ (144), she issues a portentous reminder
to ‘‘be careful of the veil’’ (144), a warning that cannot but echo
doubly for Du Bois’s readers.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

The veil that divides the white and black worlds ultimately
separates the light-skinned Sara from Matthew. Though her am-
bition is to secure a political office for Matthew and to use him
to gain the power that she as a woman cannot dare seek for
herself, she does so by selling out the black constituency that
he represents, an activity that often necessitates that she pass as
white. Events come to a head on the day of the election at a pre-
victory dinner in honor of Matthew’s imminent acquisition of a
place in Congress. At this event meticulously orchestrated by Sara,
the princess surreptitiously reenters Matthew’s life, luring him
back with her full lips and dark, sinuous form, which has been
visibly molded by the toil she has now experienced. Sara, who
is by contrast adorned in a ‘‘flesh colored even frock’’ that ap-
pears white and soulless by comparison, is left gasping in disbelief.
Kautilya’s ‘‘colored hands,’’ ‘‘which are bare and almost clawlike,’’
tell of a deeper transformation, her entrance into the proletariat.
As Matthew notes, ‘‘The Princess that [he] worshipped is become
the working woman whom [he] loves’’ (209), a laborer whose
‘‘body is beauty’’ and whose soul is ‘‘freedom to [his] tortured
groping life’’ (210). Needless to say, Matthew abandons Sara, who
is now ‘‘white to the lips’’ in Du Bois’s estimation.
Though Kautilya’s work-wizened body foreshadows other
forms of bodily productivity, the black mother figure that is the
antithesis of Sara is first incarnated as Matthew’s ex-slave mother,
a woman who lives alone in rural Virginia on the farm that she
received after the Civil War. This silent yet powerful woman is
repeatedly etched in the reader’s mind with simple descriptives:
‘‘big,’’ ‘‘straight,’’ ‘‘tall,’’ ‘‘immense,’’ ‘‘white haired,’’ and ‘‘darkly
brown’’ and is often encountered ‘‘singing something low and
strong’’ (130), the same sorrow songs passed down from African
ancestors that Du Bois wrote about in Souls, that Matthew sings to
the princess’s council, and that Du Bois claims to have first heard
from the descendants of his great-grandmother Violet, who had
‘‘crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees’’ (538).
Though Matthew’s interactions with his mother are scant, she
comes into focus through the bond that the princess forms with her
during Matthew’s imprisonment. On the occasion of Kautilya’s re-
union with Matthew, she extols his mother: ‘‘Oh Matthew, you
have a wonderful mother. Have you seen her hands? Have you seen
the gnarled and knotted glory of her hands? . . . [Y]our mother is
Kali, the Black One; wife of Siva, Mother of the World!’’ (220).
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Describing her encounter as ‘‘what I shall always know to have

been the greatest thing in my life,’’ Kautilya continues:
I saw that old mother of yours standing in the blue shadows of
twilight with flowers, cotton, and corn about her, I knew I was
looking upon one of the ancient prophets of India and that she
was to lead me out of the depths in which I found myself and
up to the atonement for which I yearned. . . . So I started with
her upon that path . . . [and] we talked it all out together. We
prayed to God, hers and mine, and out of her ancient lore she
did the sacrifice of flame and blood which was the ceremony of
my own great fathers and which came down to her from Shango
of Western Africa. (221)
For Kautilya, Matthew’s mother symbolizes the dignity of the
manual labor that Kautilya herself will soon know, a Hindu god-
dess of life (Kali) who is specifically racialized as black, a sym-
bol of the fertility of the earth, and an ‘‘ancient prophet’’ whom
Kautilya views as a direct descendent of Gotama, the Buddha of
the world, an incarnation of ‘‘his perfect and ineffable self,’’ who
is meant to lead her to atonement.36
This pantheistic and at times unapologetically orientalist por-
trait of the black mother as the life-giving goddess of the entire
world originates in Du Bois’s early nonfiction. In ‘‘The Damna-
tion of Woman’’ (1920), which first appeared in Darkwater, Du
Bois rescues black women from historical occlusion, from scorn
and racist stereotype, by celebrating them as descendants of those
other ‘‘daughters of sorrow,’’ among whom he includes ‘‘the pri-
mal black All-Mother of men,’’ and ‘‘black Neith, the primal
mother of all,’’ through to the ‘‘dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces,
and darker and fiercer Zinghas’’ (300–301). According to Du Bois,
the land of ‘‘the mother is and was Africa’’ and the black mother
is herself akin to ‘‘Isis . . . still titular goddess . . . of the dark
continent’’ (301). Taking a detour through the writings of famous
authors who have recognized ‘‘the mother-idea’’ as itself a black
concept, Du Bois concludes that although it is commonly believed
that slavery destroyed black maternity, black women have drawn
on their prodigious lineage such that ‘‘the half-million women of
Negro descent who lived at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury [have] become mothers of two and one-fourth million daugh-
ters at the time of the Civil War and five million granddaughters
in 1910’’ (303).37
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Black maternity is simultaneously American, global, and an-

cient. And while Du Bois’s ‘‘black All-Mother’’ image may have
glossed over the complexity of black women’s lives and lent itself
to black matriarchy myths (formulated by Franklin Frazier and
later egregiously distorted by the Moynihan Report), within the
context of Du Bois’s own corpus this figuration plays a crucial role
in freeing black people the world over from the logic of the color
line. Whereas Du Bois refused to racialize the mother of his son in
‘‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’’ in order to fend off the racist
logic of national reproduction, in Dark Princess he repudiated the
sterile light-skinned woman by counterpointing her with the fe-
cund ‘‘black All-Mother,’’ a dark racialized vessel of consciousness
and belonging whom he cast as the source of racial globality—
a form of international kinship that encompasses all the darker
peoples of the world, and constitutes a refutation of U.S. racial
nationalism.
In continuing her dialogue with Matthew, Kautilya transposes
the black mother figure yet again. When Matthew asks her to
tell him about India, she depicts India as a mother source met-
onymically connected to Matthew’s mother: ‘‘India! India! Out
of black India the world is born. Into the black womb of India
the world shall creep to die. All that the world has done, India
did, and that more marvelously, more magnificently. The loftiest
mountains, the mightiest of rivers, the widest of plains, the broad-
est of oceans—these are India’’ (227). This passage is part of an
ongoing argument in which Du Bois contests Europe and Greece
as the origin of civilization—in this instance positing India as the
origin of world culture. When on completion of her monologue
the princess turns to Matthew and asks whether he understands
what she has said, however, more is at stake than a reworking
of civilization’s origin story. Matthew’s deceptively simple reply
encapsulates the affective logic of racial globality: ‘‘No I can not
understand,’’ he says to Kautilya, ‘‘but I feel your meaning’’ (227,
emphasis added). In refusing a strict analogy between India and
America, Pan-Africa and Pan-Asia, Du Bois refuses to homoge-
nize the members of the darker world; rather, through Matthew,
he proffers a shared ‘‘structure of feeling’’ (to borrow a formula-
tion from Raymond Williams), a form of racial consciousness that
connects all the world’s darker peoples into a single world-shaping
force.38 Echoing the princess’s earlier sentiment about feeling a
world movement in Matthew’s rescue of her from white sexual
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

predation, here Matthew similarly feels global connection. ‘‘Black

America’’ and ‘‘Black India’’ have much in common in terms of the
feelings of their black populations, and even though these are not
the same, the story that can be told through the mother line makes
revolutionary kinship possible. Whereas Richard Wright cast the
Negro as America’s metaphor, Du Bois cast the black mother as
the world’s metaphor.39
If ‘‘the Council of the Darker Peoples of the World’’ is initially
reluctant to grant full membership to African Americans, the tra-
jectory of the novel is toward their enlightenment, toward a shift
in their political analysis made possible by their embrace of a more
nuanced understanding of realized labor and white world domi-
nation. While in the beginning of the novel the council members
(Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Arab elites) believe that
a color line divides the world, but that there is a necessary ‘‘color
line within a color line’’ (22) dividing the worthy from the rabble,
by the end of the book this internal divide dissolves.40 The council
realizes that it matters not whether the masses ‘‘be bound by op-
pression or by color’’ but only that all the oppressed belong among
their ranks. In promulgating a more robust Marxism, the council
approaches Stuart Hall’s famous formulation that race is the mo-
dality in which class is lived.41 As Matthew and the princess con-
cur: ‘‘the mission of the darker peoples . . . of black, brown, and
yellow is to raise out of their pain, slavery, and humiliation, a bea-
con to guide manhood to health and happiness and life and away
from the morass of hate, poverty, crime and sickness, monopoly,
and the mass-murder called war’’ (257).
Though the novel’s pervasive elitism precludes the possibility
that the masses emerge as significant historical actors within its
pages, Du Bois grounds the princess’s political philosophy and
emergent Marxist proclivities in his historical reality and politi-
cal concerns. Like Du Bois, Kautilya is thoroughly engaged in
the Communist Party’s debate over ‘‘the Negro question,’’ which
started in the early twenties when Lenin introduced it at the Sec-
ond Congress of the Communist International in his famous
‘‘Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question.’’ In this
document Lenin advanced the idea that African Americans con-
stitute an oppressed nation, whose struggle for freedom should
be supported and recognized as akin to other struggles against
capitalism and imperialism.42 Significantly, the final formulation
of the ‘‘Theses’’ adopted by the Comintern was linked from the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

outset with debates about the dawn of communism in India, and

especially with the writings of the Bengali intellectual and activist,
M. N. Roy, founder of the Indian Communist Party. Roy’s contri-
bution to Lenin’s ‘‘Theses’’ came in the form of comments and cri-
tiques, and eventually an alternative draft created in response to a
preliminary version of the document that Lenin had precirculated
among Congress delegates. The central additions that Roy offered,
and which were officially adopted by the party, drew distinctions
among diverse bourgeois-democratic liberation movements and
their revolutionary potential. Roy was concerned that in many
contexts ‘‘reformist’’ nationalist movements prevailed, and that
the Comintern should eschew such movements and their leaders
lest they desert to the imperialist camp. In contrast to his con-
demnation of such dangerous bourgeois tendencies, Roy advo-
cated undivided support of the real revolutionary masses, those
nationalists who were stridently anticolonialist. The difficulty with
Roy’s proposals, as Du Bois also seemed to comprehend in cre-
ating his portrait of the princess and her council, was the question
it begged about how to distinguish among nationalist movements,
how to divine the difference between revolution from above and
from below.43
In 1921, after the Second Congress met, Lenin wrote the Com-
munist Party United States expressing surprise that their reports
to Moscow did not discuss party work among black Americans,
urging them to reconsider their strategy, and appealing to them to
recognize blacks as a crucial element in communist activity. After
all, he argued, ‘‘American Negros’’ occupy the most oppressed sec-
tor of American society. Though Lenin had his detractors, particu-
larly John Reed (the outspoken leader of the Communist Labor
Party), by the Fourth Congress in 1922, a more realistic basis for
discussion of the connection between the ‘‘National Question’’
and the ‘‘Negro Question’’ was finally established.44 And thus it
was this congress, the first to be attended by American blacks—the
unofficial and noncommunist Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay
and an official communist delegate, Otto E. Huiswood—that re-
sulted in the first formal declaration of Comintern policy toward
blacks.45 As the Comintern announced in the pages of The Worker,
it was now ready to recognize the right of ‘‘Negro Americans’’
to national self-determination for the ‘‘history of the Negro in
America fits him for an important role in the liberation of the en-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

tire African race.’’ As the Comintern concluded, ‘‘the international

struggle of the Negro race is a struggle against Capitalism and Im-
perialism,’’ and thus there is a clear ‘‘necessity of supporting every
form of Negro Movement which tends to undermine Capitalism
and Imperialism and to impede its further penetration.’’ 46
These ‘‘real life’’ correlates for Kautilya’s politics explain her
interest in Matthew Towns. When comparing the language of the
Comintern’s declaration with that which Du Bois attributes to
Kautilya, the echoes are audible. As Comrade Rose Pastor Stokes
expressed it, following the language approved by the congress ver-
batim,
The world Negro Movement must be organized: in America,
as the center of Negro culture and the crystallization of Negro
protest; in Africa, the reservoir of human labor for the fur-
ther development of Capitalism; in Central America . . . where
American Imperialism dominates; in Puerto Rico, Haiti, Santo
Domingo and other islands washed by the waters of the Carib-
bean, where the brutal treatment of our Black fellow-men by
the American occupation has aroused the protests of the con-
scious Negro . . . in South Africa and the Congo . . . in East
Africa . . . in all of these centers the Negro movement must be
organized.47
Work among black Americans is here described as part of a world-
wide struggle against colonialism and imperialism, and the Com-
munist Party International situated as the means for organizing
this movement. Just as the Comintern recognized the relationship
between ‘‘the Negro Question’’ and ‘‘Colonial Question,’’ so too
Kautilya and, at her urging, the members of ‘‘the Council of the
Darker Peoples of the World.’’
In particular these historical debates find expression in Kaut-
ilya’s discussion of the ‘‘black belt,’’ a concept she deploys to re-
script black America not only as a ‘‘nation within a nation’’ (the
formulation announced at the Sixth Party Congress in 1928, the
year Dark Princess was published) but as a black nation that is part
of a ‘‘black belt’’ that girds the world.48 As she observes in a let-
ter to Matthew, rural blacks constitute a significant sector of the
darker world. From Virginia, where she is living with Matthew’s
mother, gestating their child and at the same time planning world
revolution, she writes:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

This world [the black world of Virginia] is really much nearer

to our world [the black world of the council] than I had thought.
This brook dances on to a river fifty miles away. . . . And the
river winds in stately curve down to Jamestown of the slaves. . . .
Think Matthew, take your geography and trace it: from Hamp-
ton Roads to Guiana is a world of colored folk, and a world,
men tell me, physically beautiful beyond conception; socially
enslaved, industrially ruined, spiritually dead; but ready for the
breath of Life and Resurrection. South is Latin America, East
is Africa, and east of east lies my own Asia. Oh Matthew, think
this thing through. Your Mother prophesies. We sense a new
age. (278)
When Matthew responds to her letter, asserting an exceptional-
ist position, Kautilya stridently contests his U.S.-centrism. Asia
and Africa are the center of the world, she corrects. And yet, be-
cause ‘‘America is power,’’ it must be factored into her new geog-
raphy. Recognizing rural Virginia as a part of a world-swaddling
swatch of color and consciousness, Kautilya proceeds to articulate
her position more deftly still:
Here in Virginia you are at the edge of a black world. The black
belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges reaches by way of
Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow up into the heart of
white America. Thus I see a mighty synthesis: You can work in
Africa and Asia right here in America if you work in the Black
Belt. . . . [N]ow I see through the cloud. You may stand here,
Matthew—here halfway between Maine and Florida, between
the Atlantic and the Pacific, with Europe in your face and China
at your back; with industry in your right hand and commerce
in your left and the Farm beneath your steady feet; and yet be
in the Land of the Blacks. (286)
According to Kautilya, black America, the nation within a nation,
merges with all the oppressed nations that together comprise the
‘‘the Land of the Blacks.’’
Not surprisingly this internationalist vision comes to Kautilya
while she is pregnant with Matthew’s child. As the Black Belt
wraps itself around the world, the black world develops enveloped
in Kautilya’s womb. In Du Bois’s representation of this epic repro-
ductive process the three movements—Kautilya’s transformation
into a mother, the gestation of her child, and the dawning of her
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

political consciousness of racial globality—are inextricable. Just as

Matthew’s mother is the ‘‘Darker World’’ and, through a process
of metonymic substitution India itself, so, through her reproduc-
tive journey, Kautilya is transformed from an Indian princess into
a ‘‘black All-Mother,’’ whose womb emerges as the repository for
a form of black internationalism encompassing people of color the
world over.
In the novel’s last few pages, the birth of Kautilya’s baby and
of a new black world order converge fully. Where the politics of
national reproduction would expel the racially mixed baby from
the nation as examined in Souls, in Dark Princess this child inher-
its the world. The coupling of this second fictional birth with that
of Du Bois’s son, Burghardt, is pronounced in the language de-
scribing these children. On returning to Kautilya for the last time,
Matthew is beckoned to her side for what he does not realize until
the last moment is his own wedding and the crowning of his son
as Maharajah of Bwodpur. On this occasion mother and child are
depicted in terms that resonate with the sentimental language of
Souls but also transform it:
She was dressed in Eastern style, royal in coloring, with no con-
cession to Europe. As he neared, he sensed the flash of great
jewels nestling on her neck and arms; a king’s ransom lay be-
tween the naked beauty of her breasts; blood rubies weighed
down her ears, and about the slim brown gold of her waist ran
a girdle such as emperors fight for. Slowly all the wealth of silk,
gold, and jewels revealed itself as he came near and hesitated
for words; then suddenly he sensed a little bundle on her out-
stretched arms. He dragged his startled eyes down from her
face and saw a child—a naked baby that lay upon her hands like
a palpitating bubble of gold. (307)
Just as Du Bois wrote of his son as ‘‘golden,’’ so too is the babe
in Kautilya’s arms. And yet the affect that attends the revelation
of the child’s body and the figuration of the mother distinguishes
the two. Whereas in ‘‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’’ Du Bois
experiences conflict on first viewing his son and baldly declines to
racialize his child’s mother, his description of the princess’s body
is rendered with an array of racializing details that bind her to
her baby. This ‘‘Princess of the wide, wide world’’ (307) can give
her son to the brown world and the world to him, even though
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

for the black mother in the United States such a proposition is

unrealizable. In contrast to Du Bois’s son, who is ‘‘torn from be-
neath the heart’’ of his mother, an act that signals an intimate bond
and an intimate violence, the golden child born to Matthew and
Kautilya is described as having ‘‘leapt [from] beneath [her] heart,’’
an act that signals joy and possibility. Whereas Burghardt, when
separated from the protective maternal body, is consumed by the
racism of white America, in Dark Princess the golden child thrives
in the world’s warm embrace.
No sooner are Kautilya and Matthew pronounced man and wife
than a mysterious pageant emerges from the gloom of the Virginia
woods and the coronation of their son begins. In this second ritual,
Matthew’s mother hands the child over to the Brahmin leader of
ceremonies. Symbolically he is the gift of black America to black
India. In completion of the ceremony Kautilya, joined by cele-
brants and the ‘‘silver applause of trumpets,’’ declares: ‘‘Brahma,
Vishnu, and Siva! Lords of Sky and Light and Love! Receive from
me, daughter of my fathers back to the hundredth name, his Maj-
esty, Madhu Chandragupta Singh . . . Maharajah of Bwodpur . . .
Protector of Ganga the Holy! Incarnate Son of the Buddha! Grand
Mughal of Utter India! Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker
Worlds’’ (311). Although Du Bois has aggressively glossed over his-
toric Brahmin caste prejudice against blacks and evinces little if
any interest in criticizing the elitism of his imagery, in the utopian
dream of his novel a black child can inherit ‘‘the Darker Worlds.’’
For with the golden child’s arrival the narrative of racial maternity
that Du Bois found to inhere in the United States is reappropriated
to internationalist ends.
‘‘What Is Africa to Me?’’

Although Du Bois’s romance of black world revolution constitutes
a successful utopian fiction insofar as it rescripts racial nationalism
as racial globality, it presents a deeply troubling vision that even
Du Bois’s earliest critics regarded as that of a ‘‘romantic racist.’’ 49
With its hallucination of Brahmin royalty, royal blood, and of the
golden child as the incarnation of a new interracial alliance, Dark
Princess reinscribes the orientalism we might expect it to challenge
while making what may be called a ‘‘racial origin mistake,’’ an es-
sentializing argument about racial belonging that is on a structural
level a mere revamping of that made by advocates of racial nation-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

alism within the U.S. context, those who view whiteness as a re-
quirement for national belonging. In the end, even as Dark Princess
succeeds in severing maternity from the logic of racial national-
ism, it reinserts the black mother into a logic of internationalism,
casting reproduction as the motor of black belonging in the world.
The upshot is that Du Bois’s novel emerges as racially globalist
in the way in which it mobilizes racial reproductivity to ground
intercolonial alliance.
Perhaps the sentimentalism of Du Bois’s romance allowed it
to evade the tough scrutiny Du Bois might have subjected it to
had it been expressed in another idiom. We can only speculate
about why the novel lacks critical perspective on its strategy of
narrative resolution. What is clear is that Du Bois did not con-
clude his meditation on the relationship of race to reproduction
with Dark Princess, but continued it for the rest of his life. In
closing this chapter, I turn to a third strategy that he developed for
grappling with the race/reproduction bind, jumping forward just
over a decade from Dark Princess to his 1940 autobiography Dusk
of Dawn. Although Dusk lacks some of the poetry and symme-
try of Souls, its multigeneric form (comprised of essays, memoir,
and political polemics) echoes the earlier work. And yet, if it re-
sembles Souls formally, the arguments it advances are closer to
those in Dark Princess. Like Du Bois’s novel, Dusk focuses on
questions of racial globality, on the interconnection of African
American struggles for justice and struggles for decolonization
elsewhere in the world, and explores how black internationalist
thought is necessarily bound up with thinking about reproduction.
Indeed, within Dusk’s pages antiracist, anti-imperialist, anticolo-
nialist, and reproductive arguments are imbricated, although this
complex of ideas has not been addressed in the criticism.
Whereas in Souls and Dark Princess Du Bois examines the con-
nection between race and reproduction through the figuration of
maternity, in Dusk the black mother all but disappears from the
text and is replaced in centrality by the figure of genealogy. From
one perspective, this is nothing new. Du Bois, who narrated his
life more often than almost any other twentieth-century intellec-
tual, wrote four books that can be considered autobiographical—
those already mentioned, Souls, Darkwater, and Dusk, as well as
his last work, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on
Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1960).
Each of these texts devotes space to Du Bois’s account of his pedi-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

gree, his descent from his forebears. What distinguishes Dusk from
the others is how it articulates its central political agenda through
genealogical metaphors, and how accounts of genealogy are thus
situated as inextricable from political expression.
In the ‘‘Apology’’ with which Du Bois opens Dusk, he explains
his preoccupation with kinship and familial networks.50 His per-
sonal musings are never simply accounts of his life, he underscores;
they are always also historically located meditations on ‘‘the Prob-
lem’’ of being black in the United States and in the world in the
twentieth century. ‘‘My life had its significance and its only deep
significance,’’ he avers in Dusk’s famous opening passage,
because it was part of a problem; the central problem of the
greatest of the world’s democracies and so the Problem of the
future world. . . . I seem to see a way of elucidating the inner
meaning and significance of the race problem by explaining it
in terms of the one human life that I know best. I have writ-
ten then what is meant to be not so much my autobiography as
the autobiography of a concept of race, elucidated, magnified
and doubtless distorted in the thoughts and deeds which were
mine. (551)
Lest the emphasis be lost, Du Bois subtitles Dusk ‘‘An Essay to-
ward an Autobiography of a Race Concept’’ and then reiterates
his thoughts on the political dimensions of personal narrative
throughout the book’s chapters.51 ‘‘My discussion of the concept
of race, and of the white and colored worlds,’’ he repeats later, are
not ‘‘digressions from the history of my life; rather my autobiogra-
phy is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has
meant in the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . .
My living gains importance from the problems and not the prob-
lems from me’’ (716). The volume’s organization quietly confirms
this message, moving from initial chapters on Du Bois’s New Eng-
land boyhood to those on worldwide revolt against colonialism
and imperialism. Together, Du Bois’s strategic formulations, sub-
title, and organizational choices reveal ‘‘the Problem of the color
line’’ (as he called it nearly forty years earlier in Souls) to be consti-
tutively linked to autobiography and, by extension, to the project
of genealogical narration that Du Bois brings to the fore with spe-
cial force in Dusk.52
Du Bois uses genealogical narration to counter racialized forms
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

of oppression and uneven distributions of power in two ways. On

the one hand, he exposes nineteenth-century racial science as a
pernicious form of racism deployed to legitimate imperialism and
colonialism; on the other, he engages and ultimately rejects the
positivism of genealogical narration in arguing for African Ameri-
can inclusion within a larger black diaspora of oppressed people
the world over. In doing so he redresses the essentialism of his
earlier vision of racial globality as set forth in Dark Princess, while
harnessing the power of genealogical discourse for new ends. Du
Bois conceives of these two strategic objectives as inseparable; the
fight against nineteenth-century racial science is part and parcel of
the fight against imperialism, and the overturning of racial science
and its understanding of racial kinship is central to the formation
of an alternative model of black international solidarity.
If in Souls Du Bois deconstructs racial nationalism by reappro-
priating the figure of the mother, in Dusk he deconstructs the
forms of racism that have been buttressed by racial science by re-
appropriating genealogical narration—by doing what Nietzsche
would label ‘‘genealogy’’ and Foucault ‘‘effective history.’’ Indeed,
Du Bois’s rhetorical move is akin to that made by Freud in his en-
gagement with the anti-Semitic ideas about race and reproduction
that pervaded Austro-German medical and scientific discourse (as
detailed in the previous chapter). Racial science had been abused
to justify imperialism: as Du Bois notes, the ‘‘income bearing value
of race prejudice [is] the cause and not the result of theories of
racial inferiority’’ (649). To contest such imperial domination and
forge alliances in the face of it, Du Bois thought it necessary to
reveal racial science’s mechanism and then to displace it. For he
believed it possible to generate new forms of connection and kin-
ship—new orderings of the social in which race and reproduction
would no longer be bound.
Within the racial science that Du Bois wished to challenge and
expose as an adjunct to global capitalist expansion and uneven
development, genealogical thinking was central. As suggested in
preceding chapters, genealogical notions of descent and pedigree
were used to argue for the existence of ‘‘pure’’ races and essen-
tial racial differences thought to be manifest in either ‘‘blood’’ or
‘‘genes.’’ Such genealogical narratives of racial ‘‘purity’’ existed in
vertical and horizontal forms simultaneously.53 They were vertical
when employed to express ‘‘pure’’ or ‘‘uncorrupted’’ connection
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

between parents and their children (for example, in a vertical nar-

rative an individual’s whiteness is bestowed by that individual’s
parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on). Such was
the reasoning behind the ‘‘one-drop theory’’ in which the exis-
tence of one great-grandparent thought to possess black blood
rendered an individual black. By contrast, genealogical narratives
were horizontal when they documented links between siblings or
other related members of a community. In a horizontal narrative,
belonging to a group was based on kinship or filiation within a
single generational cohort, while proof of such belonging resided
in the idea that all members of a group could trace their line of
descent back to a set of common forebears. Such would be the
notion of connection that secured the ideology of racial nation-
alism in which the United States was viewed as a nation com-
prised of ‘‘white’’ citizens who shared a common racial heritage.
Such would also be the genealogical thinking that undergirded the
antimiscegenation legislation that was produced in the aftermath
of the Civil War, as well as the nativism and restrictionism (dis-
cussed in chapter 2) that characterized anti-immigration legisla-
tion. For my purposes, what is important is that within horizon-
tal and vertical genealogical narratives matrilineal and patrilineal
descent confer differing forms of authority on claims of belong-
ing and racial ‘‘purity.’’ When absolute certitude about pedigree is
necessary, only a maternal genealogy will do, as maternity alone is
definite. By contrast, claims of paternal affiliation (at least prior to
the advent of dna testing) are viewed as tenuous, as readily desta-
bilized by the gender asymmetry that has until recently structured
the reproductive relation.
Acutely aware of how genealogical thinking enabled racist and
nationalist claims to belonging in the name of science, Du Bois
writes within the genealogical idiom in Dusk, but turns it toward
different ends. Rather than accepting it as scientific fact, he in-
habits the arguments that buttress it and, from the inside, exposes
their inadequacy. Because genealogical thinking is constitutively
gendered and sexualized, its deconstruction likewise required Du
Bois’s attention to genealogy’s sexual anatomy. Once exploded
from within, the hegemony of genealogical thinking could be con-
tested and potentially displaced. To fully understand Du Bois’s
choice and use of genealogical narration it is thus necessary to
examine how race and gender function in his writings, not only
on the level of manifest content (i.e., what he says about black
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

women, and what kinds of images of women he creates) but also

on structural and rhetorical levels.
Du Bois provides the bulk of genealogical information in Dusk
in a chapter that begins with the claim that within its pages the
author plans to turn ‘‘aside from the personal annals’’ of biog-
raphy, and turn instead to serious consideration of ‘‘the concept
of race’’ (625).54 However, given Du Bois’s repeated assertion of
the inextricable relationship between the personal and political, a
seeming paradox resolves rapidly. Far from turning ‘‘aside’’ from
‘‘personal annals,’’ Du Bois gravitates toward them, particularly
toward a tandem discussion of his encounters with racial science
as a student in the United States and Europe, and of his family’s
genealogy. As he explains, on both sides of the Atlantic he was
confronted with ‘‘scientific race dogma: first of all, evolution and
‘Survival of the Fittest’ ’’ (625).55 He recalls that in the university
community as in his classes it was ‘‘continually stressed . . . that
there was a vast difference in the development of the whites and
the ‘lower’ races . . . [and] that this could be seen in the physi-
cal development of the Negro’’ (625). In graduate school at Har-
vard and later in Germany, although some emphasis was placed
on racial differences ‘‘as a matter of culture and cultural history,’’
even within this wider discussion ‘‘Africa was left without cul-
ture and without history.’’ When ‘‘the matter of mixed races was
touched upon [blacks’] evident and conscious inferiority’’ was in-
variably noted (626). As Du Bois poignantly recounts (in a passage
that recalls Freud’s recollection of Charcot’s racism), Heinrich
von Treitschke, one of his German professors, thundered during
a lecture that ‘‘Mulattoes . . . are inferior. . . . Their actions show
it’’ (626).
It is Du Bois’s shift from discussing the racism at Harvard and
in Germany to discussing his own genealogy that interests me;
for within the logic of his text the latter is offered as a response
to the former. His account of his pedigree constitutes a strategic
move into the realm of racial science and the genealogical thinking
that underpins it—a move that contests the concepts upon which
racial science and genealogy depend. Marking and in the process
defiantly making the connection between his account of the per-
suasiveness of scientific racism and his turn toward narration of
his pedigree, he writes, ‘‘The whole question of the heredity and
human gift depends upon’’ knowledge of ‘‘the various types of
mankind and their intermixture.’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

[E]ver since the African slave trade . . . we have been afraid

in America that scientific study in this direction might lead to
conclusions with which we are loath to agree; and this fear
was in reality because the economic foundation of the mod-
ern world was based on the recognition and preservation of so-
called racial distinctions. . . . We have not only not studied race
and race mixture in America, but we have tried almost by legal
process to stop such study. It is for this reason that it has occurred
to me just here to illustrate the way in which Africa and Europe
have been united in my family. (629, emphasis added)
Having argued that the account of race produced by modern
racial science was an unreasonable ‘‘science fiction,’’ Du Bois now
proffers a discussion of the mixture of African and European
within his family. In so doing he reengages and ultimately decon-
structs the genealogical terrain claimed by racial science, rededi-
cating this form of reproductive thinking to new ends. By focusing
on mixture rather than race ‘‘purity,’’ Du Bois vacates the gene-
alogical narrative that he sketches of its racist utility and instead
proposes that an alternative set of conclusions be drawn from the
available genealogical information. Instructively placing the term
‘‘race’’ within quotation marks for the first time in Dusk, he com-
ments that he has been speaking of ‘‘ ‘race’ and race problems quite
as a matter of course,’’ but that in turning to his genealogical nar-
rative he will take on the more complicated task of ‘‘explanation’’
and ‘‘definition’’ of ‘‘the race concept’’ (627).
At the outset of Du Bois’s promised enumeration of his an-
cestors he states that his family pedigree will not be ascertained
from legal documents (which he notes are ‘‘naturally unobtain-
able’’ [630]) but rather from ‘‘oral tradition in . . . [his] mother’s
family and direct word and written statement from . . . [his] pater-
nal grandfather’’ (630).56 Despite his reliance on an archive that
would be deemed illegitimate by scientists, Du Bois attests to the
‘‘substantial accuracy of [his] story,’’ boldly placing the forms of
evidence to which he and other African Americans have recourse
on a par with those to which experts more conventionally appeal.
In short, he draws attention to the constructed nature of scien-
tific authority—to the fact that scientific narratives are stories—
and just as significantly to how an individual’s genealogical nar-
rative can serve as a counterweight to the universalizing claims of
science.57
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Unsurprisingly, as Du Bois unfolds his particular tale of de-

scent, ‘‘mixture’’ emerges as the main plot. He describes his pater-
nal great-grandfather, Dr. James Du Bois, as a ‘‘white’’ man de-
scended from ‘‘a French Huguenot farmer,’’ and his grandfather,
Alexander, as born of this man’s son and his common-law wife, a
slave on his plantation in the Bahamas (631). These grandparents in
turn gave birth to Du Bois’s father, Alfred, whom he characterizes
as ‘‘a throw back to his white grandfather’’ in feature and man-
ner, insofar as he was ‘‘small, olive skinned’’ and ‘‘naturally a play-
boy’’ (633). Not only does Du Bois state that his family comprised
a white forefather at its inception and is thus peopled by numerous
black folk of mixed race, but he insists that his family tree includes
unknown branches, including a number of black people who, un-
beknownst to themselves, have spent their lives passing as white.
In Du Bois’s view, those who think that they are racially ‘‘pure’’
ought to think again, for ‘‘proof of paternity . . . [is always] ex-
ceedingly difficult’’ to ascertain, while the more likely scenario is
that an ‘‘interracial history’’ such as his own has ‘‘been duplicated
thousands of times’’ in the United States (630 and 629).
Du Bois begins his narration of his maternal genealogy by nam-
ing his great-great-grandfather, Tom Burghardt, a slave who was
brought to ‘‘this country when he was a boy’’ (634) and became a
freedman after the Revolutionary War. Jacob, the son of Tom, mar-
ried Violet, a woman newly arrived from Africa, who brought with
her the African melody that became a tradition within Du Bois’s
family. Jacob had nine children, one of whom, Othello, was Du
Bois’s grandfather. Othello married Sarah Lampman, with whom
he had ten children, including Du Bois’s mother Mary Sylvina.
This matrilineal account of Du Bois’s genealogy is followed by a
genealogical chart that lays out Du Bois’s pedigree with all the pre-
tense of scientific acumen. And yet, as with Du Bois’s narration
of his paternal genealogy, his excursion into the scientific idiom
works not so much to shore up racial science as to reveal its inade-
quacy as a knowledge tool, and thus the instability of racist and
imperialist ideologies that seek to legitimate themselves by pro-
ducing scientific accounts of race.
In concluding his discussion of his pedigree, Du Bois points out
that even his seemingly secure maternal genealogy ‘‘was curiously
complicated’’ and that genealogical narration in this instance is no
more ‘‘pure’’ than in any other. For this reason, rather than end-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

ing his discussion of ‘‘the Burghardt clan’’ by asserting his defini-

tive descent from maternal African forebears, Du Bois wryly notes
that the biological connection that he might have posited has been
supplanted by a cultural one: ‘‘with Africa . . . I had only one di-
rect . . . connection and that was the African melody which my
great-grandmother Violet used to sing’’ (638). With this statement,
Du Bois refers back to Souls and indicates the alternative bonds of
kinship that find expression through music. And thus again, the
sorrow songs emerge as a genealogical counternarrative that situ-
ates ‘‘melody’’ in the place of biology. If the chapter on the sor-
row songs in Souls gestures toward the foundational status of black
music in the U.S. context, in Dusk music gives expression to the
forms of connection that exceed the national calculus and instead
demarcate an international diaspora among black Americans and
Africans. Like other black communists of the period, Du Bois used
the sorrow songs as a vehicle for internationalist sentiment that
subverted the party’s own racialized cultural categories as well as
the black musical form.58
Despite the array of genealogical details he produces, Du Bois
nonetheless insists that questions of belonging are not usefully cast
as essential or biological and that he prefers to use genealogy to
denote his connection to Africa as affective. As in Dark Princess,
where Matthew understands his connection to the princess, and
thus that between Pan-Asia and Pan-Africa, as what is most aptly
described as a ‘‘feeling,’’ so too in Dusk Du Bois asserts felt kin-
ship with Africa. In both instances, music is the idiom in which
affective connection takes form. A verse of Violet’s song is inserted
directly into Dusk:
Do bana coba, gene me, gene me!
Do bana coba, gene me, gene me!
Ben d’nuli, nuli, nuli, nuli, ben d’le. (638)
As Du Bois notes, although he knows not the meaning of these
words, it is precisely their inability to signify in the languages that
are familiar that allow the melody to become a repository or con-
veyance for an alternative kinship structure. Significantly, after in-
serting the verse of Violet’s song into his text, Du Bois places the
term ‘‘race’’ within quotation marks for the second time in Dusk
and concludes, ‘‘My African racial feeling was [thus] . . . purely a
matter of my own later learning and reaction, my recoil from the
assumption of the whites; my experience in the South at Fisk. . . . I
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

felt myself African by ‘race’ and by that token was African and an
integral member of the group of dark Americans who were called
Negroes’’ (638, emphasis added).59 One becomes black by familial
association within a racist society, Du Bois argues, but such a
situation may be turned on its head. For if ‘‘race is a cultural, some-
times historical fact’’ (665), black cultural productions—in this in-
stance music—may be used to create continuity of connection and
racial solidarity.
If blackness is a particularly U.S. construct—a structure of feel-
ing produced in reaction to the particular forms of racism that
structure the racial formation within the United States—it is none-
theless repeatedly and self-consciously conflated by Du Bois with
the notion of Africanness in those contexts in which he also con-
siders racism’s international purview, its colonial and imperial
reach. Throughout Dusk of Dawn, a work that resolutely tackles
the racial exploitation of labor around the globe, Du Bois casts
Africanness as a diasporic figure of belonging that defies national
borders. And it is for this reason that the Africanness that surfaces
within the genealogical counternarrative that Du Bois produces
about himself should be read not only as a way of contesting racial
science’s ideas of black inferiority in the United States, but also
as a way of conducting anti-imperialist struggle within a larger
international theater. Revealing the desire for international racial
solidarity that underpins his invocations of Africanness, Du Bois
notes that the ‘‘heritage of slavery . . . binds together not simply
the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into
the South Seas’’ (640).
Du Bois’s imbrication of the national and international con-
tours of racial oppression, belonging, and struggle is especially
forceful in the often cited passage in which he expands his obser-
vations about his personal genealogy onto a world stage by craft-
ing an answer to the question, ‘‘What is Africa to me?’’ so famously
posed by his one-time son-in-law, the Harlem Renaissance poet
Countée Cullen.60 Like Cullen, who is circumspect about claiming
Africa as a figure for the woman ‘‘from whose loins’’ he sprang, or
as a mythical land of ‘‘copper sun’’ and ‘‘scarlet sea’’ peopled by
‘‘strong bronzed men and regal black,’’ Du Bois weaves a response
to Cullen’s question that negotiates the vicissitudes of black be-
longing in the world by working through and against the race/
reproduction bind that undergirds uncritical genealogical thinking
about identity and inclusion.61 He writes:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Once I should have answered the question simply: I should have

said ‘‘fatherland’’ or perhaps better ‘‘motherland,’’ because I
was born in the century when the walls of race were clear and
straight; when the world consisted of mutually exclusive races.
. . . [S]ince then the concept of race has so changed and pre-
sented so much of contradiction that as I face Africa I ask my-
self: what is it between us that constitutes a tie which I can feel
better than I can explain? Africa is, of course, my fatherland.
Yet neither my father nor my father’s father ever saw Africa
or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for it. My mother’s
folk were closer and yet their direct connection, in culture and
race, became tenuous; still my tie to Africa is strong. On this
vast continent were born and lived a large portion of my direct
ancestors going back a thousand years or more. The mark of
their heritage is upon me in color and hair. These are obvious
things, but of little meaning in themselves; only important as
they stand for real and more subtle differences from other men.
Whether they do or not, I do not know nor does science know
today. . . . But one thing is sure and that is the fact that since
the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other de-
scendants have had a common history. . . . [T]he real essence of
this kinship is its social heritage in slavery.
At the outset of this passage Du Bois appears to confidently
assert that Africa is the place he would have once considered his
‘‘motherland.’’ In an age in which the ‘‘walls of race were clear
and straight’’ science suggested that there ‘‘was no question of
exact definition and understanding of the meaning of the word’’
race (639). At such a time, Du Bois concedes, he readily imag-
ined his filiation with Africa within the confines of the gender-
coded genealogical thinking germane to nineteenth-century racial
science. He saw himself as African because such was his racial in-
heritance reproduced through the motherline. And yet, as Du Bois
continues to reflect on his relationship to Africa, he begins a care-
ful process of inhabiting, complicating, and displacing old, and
in his mind defunct, ideas of genealogically secure racial filiation.
If maternity is knowable, a mark of ‘‘real’’ biological connection,
then ‘‘motherland’’ is not the metaphor for belonging for which
Du Bois searches. The tie to Africa cast as a motherland is best
explained as a feeling rather than a biological inheritance. And
although paternity is perpetually open to dispute, the notion of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Africa as ‘‘fatherland’’ is still too ensconced in conventional gene-

alogical thinking about origins as ‘‘pure’’ biological posits. Neither
his father nor his father’s father, Du Bois tells his reader, had much
of a connection to Africa; and certainly no more of one than his
mother’s family, who were ‘‘closer’’ to this land and people, but
not a part of it.
Finally, in discarding the rhetoric of ‘‘motherland’’ and ‘‘father-
land’’—and thus of racial belonging as a function of genealogi-
cal inheritance, descent, or pedigree—Du Bois begins to free him-
self from the shackles of the race/reproduction bind, conventional
genealogical thinking, and the legacy of racial science. In so doing
he clears space for the articulation of a different understanding of
his origins and their meaning. He writes, ‘‘The real essence of [my]
kinship [with Africa] is its social heritage of slavery.’’ In refusing
a genealogical connection to Africa, Du Bois opens up the possi-
bility of expressing his sense of identity and belonging as affective.
In the process, he offers an alternative to the troublingly essen-
tialist conclusion of Dark Princess. Anti-imperialist alliances and
racial kinship need no longer gestate in a black woman’s womb.
For in Dusk Du Bois postulates racial globality through the cre-
ation of a genealogical counternarrative—through elaboration of
the interconnections among ‘‘the darker peoples of the world’’ over
that no longer bear the burden of the race/reproduction bind that
lurks in Du Bois’s earlier texts.
In reading Du Bois’s response to Countée Cullen’s question in
this way, I argue against those readings of Du Bois that situate
him as a biological essentialist whose work demonstrates com-
plete, if unwitting, allegiance to biological notions of race and thus
indebtedness to nineteenth-century racial science.62 In conclud-
ing with a reading of Du Bois’s response to Cullen I also suggest
an understanding of Du Bois’s writings as movements beyond the
race/reproduction bind—even (ab)uses of the conventional gene-
alogical narration that had previously been used to support po-
litically and rhetorically essentialist ideas.63 For Du Bois’s inter-
nationalist anti-imperialism necessitated non-biological strategies
for articulating the internationalist connections—strategies to
which readers only gain access when we focus our attention on the
reproductive logic of racial globality.
In producing a genealogical counternarrative that worked
through and against the gender logic and sexual politics that are
part and parcel of conventional genealogical thinking, Du Bois ex-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

plored and to some extent imploded the race/reproduction bind.

Until we fully comprehend Du Bois’s internationalist move out of
the nation and into the world as one that he persistently articu-
lated by reworking reproductive concept metaphors, we will have
failed to read Du Bois closely enough. And while neglect of sexual
and gender politics has certainly been a problem for Du Bois criti-
cism, it is also unfortunate in a wider way. For through his life-
long negotiation of the race/reproduction bind—his failures and
his successes—Du Bois offered us tools, as of yet unclaimed, that
are relevant in the current conjuncture. In the coda that follows
I consider how Du Bois’s struggle to understand racial belonging
without recourse to reproduction provides insight into how we can
move beyond the race/reproduction bind in our time.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Coda
Gene/alogies for a New Millennium
Ties through blood—including blood recast

in the coin of genes and information—have been bloody
enough already. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual
peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity
through something more and less than kinship.
—Donna Haraway
In recent years scholarship on race in the humanities has made

recourse to scientific advances in genetic (in the newest coinage,
‘‘genomic’’) research to argue that race is no longer a meaning-
ful category or concept. As numerous scholars have asserted, in
view of contemporary scientific evidence about genes and the in-
heritance of genetic traits, the collection of purported essences that
have been thought about and referred to as ‘‘race’’ cease to exist.
In his famous article on W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, Anthony
Appiah suggests that essentialist arguments about race as a bio-
logically knowable essence lose their force in the face of new ge-
netic research.1 Scientists have proven that there is no gene for
race, as evidenced by the fact that any two randomly selected mem-
bers of supposedly distinct racial groups share as much genetically
as any two members of the same racial group. As Appiah argues,
because we now have proof that genes are in fact us, we need no
longer believe that race, which has been proven to have absolutely
no genetic basis, is.
Appiah buttresses his argument with an array of statistics. Al-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
though other calls to move beyond race do not always make ex-
press recourse to scientific authority as Appiah’s does, his gam-
bit (which builds on prior scholarly consensus in the post–World
War II period) has been repeated by other nonscientists with in-
creasing frequency. In fact, the announcement of the successful
mapping of the human genome by an international team of re-
searchers involved in the Human Genome Project has been accom-
panied by a proliferation of humanistic arguments about the ‘‘end
of race.’’ 2 For instance, scholars as disparate in their pursuits as
Susan Gubar and Walter Benn Michaels have argued that race is
an obsolete idea, no longer sustainable at a time when the con-
cept of human racial distinction is now more than ever before one
of which we must let go if we are to dismantle barriers to further
understanding of our shared human condition.3 Such arguments,
albeit of differing political stripe, find nearly unanimous endorse-
ment in popular books on genomics—and there are many currently
available—that pronounce that human races are nonexistent, be-
cause there is no gene for race, because there are no alleles that nec-
essarily result in expression of what we have mistakenly thought
about until now as ‘‘racial’’ differences.4
In chapter 5 of this book I argued that Du Bois should not
be regarded as a biological essentialist but rather as a committed
public intellectual who engaged biological discourse as a strategic
move crafted in response to forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century racism grounded in biological, scientific reasoning. Du
Bois treated biological notions of race and ideas about the repro-
ductive body as a source of racial identity and hierarchy precisely
because the historical forces he sought to check deployed such
hegemonic notions in coding difference with biological signifiers
such as ‘‘blood’’ and phenotype. To refuse to think race biologi-
cally, to refuse to grapple with how race was constructed as a re-
producible trait within the shifting raciological discourses of his
day, would have been to step out of historical time, to completely
miss the moment in which he lived and about which he wrote.
When Appiah insists that Du Bois made recourse to essentialist
notions of race and therefore failed to dislodge one of the center-
pieces of modern racism—the idea of race as a biological essence—
he dismisses the significance of the historical imperatives by which
Du Bois felt himself compelled. As a political actor with a materi-
alist analysis of historical processes, Du Bois could not choose not
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
228 Coda
to contend with biological notions of race and reproduction, and

with their mutual ensnarement in the race/reproduction bind.
In closing this book I wish to consider the import of the ar-
guments advanced by reopening the question that confronted Du
Bois from a different vantage point—that is, I wish to consider
how, in our pursuit of antiracism, we might productively treat the
concept of race in the new millennium. For the pressing issue that
Du Bois’s strategic approach to race underscores for us now when
the meaning of both race and reproduction have been inflected and
decisively transformed by new genomic knowledges and reproduc-
tive technologies, is whether it makes sense to—indeed, whether
we have the luxury to approach race (as Appiah and others ad-
vise) so differently than did Du Bois. Are we truly in the midst of a
historically unprecedented moment in which we can attack racism
and build antiracist movements by arguing that science proves that
‘‘race’’ does not exist? Are we living in a moment in which race and
reproduction are becoming unbound, in which race is no longer
calculated as a reproducible identity, trait, or essence?
Those who argue for the nonexistence of race and for the use
of genetic reason as a form of antiracism would have it so. Such
scholars and pundits believe that even in a moment character-
ized by ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, and renewed forms of
race-based immigration restriction there is a way to talk about
differences among groups and individuals without reconstructing
race as a boundary category or relying upon reproductive racial
reasoning in conceptualizing differences among individuals and
groups. And yet arguments that purportedly go beyond race by
bludgeoning us with the supposedly incontestable, hard scientific
fact that race does not exist give me pause. For not only does our
social and political reality continue to be organized by racist ideas
about race, but even in the absence of a gene for race, the idea of
race remains bound up with that of reproduction. Rather than the
race/reproduction bind having been transcended within and by the
contemporary biogenetic practices and discourses that together
characterize the new millennium, this particular ideological knot
has been tightened rather than loosened, given new mass and den-
sity, all the while being continuously woven within large, histori-
cally overdetermined systems of knowledge production. Race re-
mains a cultural category that continues to be produced in and
through practices and discourses that advance the idea of the re-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Gene/alogies for a New Millennium 229

producibility of essences, identities, and other indices of differ-

ence among human beings. In this sense, even as the idea of race
is eclipsed by that of genetic variation, race as a practice and be-
lief system has not been rendered any less potent than has racism.
Indeed, the new language of genes continues to impose notions of
race on human groupings, even though the meaning of human di-
versity is now more than ever before open to contestation, trans-
formation, and resignification.5
As evidenced in the dominant practices that structure the im-
plementation of an array of reproductive technologies, from artifi-
cial insemination and in vitro fertilization to gestational and donor
surrogacy, people are using new genomic knowledges and biotech-
nologies not so much to transcend race as to reproduce already
existent racial identities and hierarchies, as well as the essential-
ist ideas of race and reproduction by which they are subtended.
As feminist anthropologists and science studies scholars have care-
fully documented, egg donors and traditional surrogate mothers
(those who contribute genetic material to the embryos they ges-
tate) are selected by consumers who purchase their services and/or
bodily products on the basis of their genotype, on their ability to
offer a close match, generally construed as a racial match, to the
couple to whom they are contributing a gamete and for whom they
are gestating a child.6 In fact, when donor genes (ova or sperm)
are used in infertility treatments, these materials are selected in the
hope of determining hair type, eye color, and complexion, as well
as mitigating against an array of inheritable diseases—and all this
to reproduce perfected progeny who have the best possible chance
of looking like, and thus being identifiable as belonging to the same
‘‘race,’’ as the social ‘‘parents.’’
When the use of artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization
has resulted in the reproduction of offspring of a different, unan-
ticipated race from the person purchasing the reproductive tech-
nology and/or genetic materials in question, lawsuits have ensued.
In one instructive instance a white mother who utilized in vitro
fertilization involving donated sperm gave birth to twins, one of
whom was black. She sued the fertility clinic that had performed
the procedure for damages that she explained had resulted from
the duress of her wayward birth and the racist taunting that her
child had had to confront as a result. Her grievance stemmed
from the idea that she had been inseminated with racially mis-
matched sperm, a claim buttressed by her overriding sense that the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
230 Coda
race/reproduction bind should remain intact at all costs, that her

white reproductive body should rightfully have been the source of
the whiteness of all the children it reproduced.7 In a second case,
a black surrogate who attempted to breach her contract to keep
the child she had gestated for a white man and his Filipina wife
lost her legal battle for custody. In this decision, the fact that she
was genetically unrelated to the child she had reproduced, and thus
of a different race, figured prominently.8 In such cases and others,
attempts at genetic selection amount to attempts at racial selec-
tion. Even in the absence of a gene for race, genetic knowledge, the
new reproductive technologies, and the laws that govern their im-
plementation continue to be manipulated to secure racial likeness
between parents and progeny and more generally to shore up the
race/reproduction bind that characterizes the modern episteme.
Of course it has also been argued that the same technologies
that are currently employed in consolidating the race/reproduction
bind might also be (and occassionally are) used to transcend it.
Critics who advance arguments against antitechnological reason-
ing and the various government policies that seek to control ge-
nomic research and delimit the use of reproductive technologies
insist that neither the research nor the technologies are themselves
inherently problematic. Rather, these liberal (and generally pro-
market) forces argue that both technology and knowledge are in-
herently neutral, and that the question of use and implementation
should be left to individual discretion. As this line of argumen-
tation concludes, people should be trusted to make reproductive
choices; after all, it is now possible for any and every child born to
be entirely genetically unrelated to both its birth mother and its so-
cial parents, and thus there need no longer be any reason to use the
technologies and knowledges currently available to link race and
reproduction, biological parents and biologically related progeny.9
And yet the difficulty with such arguments is that while they
usefully identify the potential for liberation from existing social
structures and hierarchies that increased use of reproductive tech-
nologies and genomic research might ideally offer (i.e., nonhetero-
normative family configurations and forms of kinship organized
without regard to biological relatedness—both of which are of
course achievable without biotechnological intervention), they do
not account for the reciprocity between dominant social practices
and the implementation of the new technologies and knowledges.
They do not recognize that there are no ‘‘neutral’’ technologies;
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

all are practices shaped by as well as shaping of their context

and their deployment. Although the sexual economy of reproduc-
tion has begun to budge (for example, the increasing number of
lesbian and queer families, single heterosexual and older women
using reproductive technologies to produce unconventional house-
holds), the racial economy of the new reproduction within which
the sexual economy is imbricated remains quite static. On the one
hand, heterosexual women and lesbians almost invariably elect to
be inseminated with sperm or to use donor ova that will produce
racial continuity across the generations, and thus that will pro-
mote the fiction of racially ‘‘pure’’ genealogy. On the other hand,
such choices are made in a context that leaves the racial division
of labor intact: it is black mothers who gestate children to whom
they are themselves genetically unrelated for wealthy, most often
white, parents.
Not at all surprisingly, I have been unable to locate a case in
which a white woman agreed to contract her womb out for ges-
tational use by a black couple requesting that she gestate their ge-
netic materials and form for and turn over to them a black baby;
nor have I found evidence of purposeful and routine race-blind
artificial insemination practices at the fertility clinics or sperm
banks that have been studied by feminist ethnographers.10 Tell-
ingly, although unprecedented modalities of interracial reciprocity
are now possible, they are seldom pursued when racial continuity
—what might be thought of as gene/alogy—is in question. And al-
though we might hope that the racial hierarchies that structure
our society need not necessarily inflect the scientific knowledge
and technologies that we develop and use as we practice reproduc-
tion, knowledges and technologies have proven to be only as lib-
eratory as the context in which they are created and deployed, and
which they in turn contour. From this perspective it is clear that
recent scientific ‘‘advances’’ have not thus far worked effectively
to unbind race and reproduction. In fact, the pervasive disinclina-
tion to conceive of and to practice reproduction differently—and
this despite the availability of knowledges and technologies that
would make this possible—seems to be as much a product of lim-
ited imagination as of more predictable material or legal barriers.
In this situation the centrality of works of creative imagination
to the project of unbinding race and reproduction comes home
with special force. Such imaginative works have the power to serve
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
232 Coda
as springboards to meditation on genomics and on the possibili-

ties and pitfalls of moving beyond race in our current biogenetic
moment. They possess the ability to help us imagine the practice
of reproduction differently. That is, they can expose the problems
that inhere in continued delimitation of the practice of reproduc-
tion according to racial and reproductive scripts that are histori-
cally overdetermined within transatlantic modern thought. And
thus with this coda I make a move that parallels the one with
which I began this book: in chapter 1 I read Kate Chopin’s ‘‘Dési-
rée’s Baby’’ as an allegory of racial reproduction in the context of
racial nationalism; here I turn to three conceptual artworks, all of
which allegorize genomics in the new millennium. My hope is that
through engagement with these visual texts, which were together
included in an exhibition entitled ‘‘Gene(sis)’’ at The Henry Gal-
lery (a major Seattle center for display of contemporary art), it is
possible to sketch some of the most pressing and compelling ques-
tions about the fate of the race/reproduction bind in our time.
As the promotional materials for ‘‘Gene(sis)’’ proclaimed, the
high-profile traveling show sought to meditate upon the social
and political implications of genomics and the new reproductive
technologies by bringing together and commissioning a variety of
works by twenty-six artists for whom the ‘‘accelerated pace of ge-
netic research and the potential socio-cultural impact of recent
scientific developments on our daily lives’’ have been the princi-
pal imaginative spark.11 Many of the artists whose work was fea-
tured in the show had already been part of other nationally cele-
brated exhibitions with similar themes.12 Their work ranged in
form and focus. Larry Miller’s pop-art paper coffee cups, provoca-
tively emblazoned with the question ‘‘Who owns your genes?’’ and
the offer to aid in copyrighting them, were on view beside Susan
Robb’s cibachrome prints of imaginary organisms that looked like
bioengineered specimens enlarged through the lens of a micro-
scope but, as her piece’s title—Macrofauxology—conceded, were
in fact ‘‘faux’’ assemblages of miscellaneous substances including
play dough, dirt, and spit. Other works of sculpture, photogra-
phy, painting, video, and Internet-based interactive performance
treated issues ranging from the patenting of genetic materials, to
the determination of individual identity through dna sequencing,
to the sale and purchase of reproductive technologies such as in
vitro fertilization and embryo transfer.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

While it would be unfair to the curators of ‘‘Gene(sis)’’ and to

the individual artists to suggest that the works on display pre-
sented a unified vision or single ideological position vis à vis ge-
nomics, it was immediately evident that far from having inspired
art that moved the imagination ‘‘beyond race’’ by envisioning the
demise of race and severing race from reproduction, many of the
works on display were highly ambivalent about, if not intention-
ally critical of, their deep ensnarement within imbricated racial
and reproductive scripts—within the race/reproduction bind. For
this reason the genealogical method elaborated in chapter 1 of this
book and mobilized throughout emerges once again as a useful
analytical and theoretical tool—one that can locate its object (aptly
labeled ‘‘gene/alogy’’) as well as the critical edge of the artwork
under discussion. For the genealogical method enables this work
self-reflexively to open up questions about the racial and reproduc-
tive concepts by which it is either implicitly subtended, or upon
which it expressly draws.
The centrality of the race/reproduction bind to the artistic
imagination was most visible in Daniel Lee’s digital c-print series
entitled Judgment. Lee’s piece, a series of eleven poster-size black-
and-white digitally manipulated photographic prints of animal/
human hybrids who gazed resolutely out at the viewer, occupied an
entire wall of the gallery. As the curatorial note beside these images
explained, these creatures represented the judge, jury, and guards
who together comprise ‘‘the mythological court under the earth’’
where 108 different types of existent beings, including human be-
ings, are judged after their death. In most cases the fantastical hy-
brids (represented one to a photograph) were phenotypic com-
posites of familiar nonhuman animals or mythical creatures and
people of color, subjects whose ‘‘otherness’’ was clearly indexed
by sartorial style, skin tone, facial features, and hair (see figure 1).
Juror number 1, ‘‘Pig King,’’ had decidedly Asian eyes and an en-
larged porcine nose; juror number 3, ‘‘Dragon King,’’ sported a
gold chain and goatee, dark skin, and a menacing countenance;
juror number 4, ‘‘Fox Spirit’’ (one of three female members of
the court), was nude from the waist up and, in soft porn fashion,
provocatively crossed her arms over her breasts as her wild hair
blew back from her face, accentuating her black foxlike eyes and
small canine nose. The ‘‘judge of the dead’’ himself had long claw-
like fingernails, sleek black hair pulled back in a ponytail, swarthy
skin, and again, Asian eyes. He was flanked by two guards, one of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
234 Coda
1. Juror number 6, ‘‘Leopard Spirit,’’ from the digital c-print series Judg-
ment by Daniel Lee. From the exhibition ‘‘Gene(sis),’’ The Henry Gallery,
Seattle, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and O. K. Harris Gallery, New York.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
whom, ‘‘Bull Head,’’ was a bare-chested, muscular black man with

a flat bovine nose, flared nostrils, rolling eyeballs, mustache, and
a seemingly obligatory hand on his crotch. Needless to say these
images were deeply fraught: they were simultaneously racialized
and animalized and taken together resolutely suggested that hy-
bridity—nothing less than wayward reproduction across the spe-
cies divide—is generally confined to crossings between people of
color and animals, who by implication do not actually belong to
distinct species but are rather somehow kin enough to have suc-
cessfully reproduced with one another.
Though the images themselves were arresting, so too was the
rationale supplied for their inclusion in the show. As the curatorial
note explained, Lee’s work treats ‘‘concepts of hybridity . . . that
have long inspired the imaginings of both East and West.’’ And
thus viewers were left to ponder what such ‘‘imaginings’’ have to
do with the express theme of the ‘‘Gene(sis)’’ exhibition, whose
subtitle unequivocally proclaimed, ‘‘Contemporary Art Explores
Human Genomics.’’ Hybrids are centuries-old creations, as their
inclusion in a mythical Chinese court attests. They are the prod-
uct not of high-tech genomic science but either of our imagina-
tions (centaurs or cyborgs) or of the low-tech and quite ancient
science of animal husbandry. And thus the questions begged multi-
ply: How do the racial and reproductive scripts that Lee’s hy-
brids engage allow for reflection on genomics? And on what as-
pect of genomics do they allow us to reflect? What does inclusion
of the court in the exhibit suggest about how race is being imag-
ined today?
Answers to these questions begin to emerge from examination
of the curatorial juxtaposition in the gallery area in which Lee’s
creatures were displayed, for directly across from the court of
‘‘half animal, half human chimeras,’’ separated from it only by a
wooden bench, was a series of photographs by Catherine Chal-
mers entitled Transgenic Mice (2000). Each of Chalmers’s six ciba-
chrome prints depicted a real mouse that had been reproduced
by artificially integrating foreign dna that had been inserted into
one mouse via a multistage procedure that resulted in a genetically
blended specimen of the experimental type used extensively in
human genome research (see figure 2).13 Notably, some of the dna
used in this process was human. These unusual portraits, which
were enlarged hundreds of times so that each mouse appeared to
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
236 Coda
2. ‘‘Rhino Mouse,’’ from the series of cibachrome prints Transgenic Mice

by Catherine Chalmers. From the exhibition ‘‘Gene(sis),’’ The Henry Gal-
lery, Seattle, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and RARE, New York.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
be the size of a small child, ranged from the ‘‘Rhino Mouse,’’ who
was pink, hairless, and excessively wrinkled, to the ‘‘Downs Syn-
drome Mouse,’’ who was gray-brown and had a decidedly droopy
aspect, to ‘‘Obese Mouse,’’ a spherical brown fur ball with shiny
eyes and a ludicrously tiny tail. The curatorial comment that ac-
companied the six specimens stated that fifty million such experi-
mental transgenic mice are reproduced each year for research, and
through a loophole in the usda’s 1966 Animal Welfare Act (that
has recently been addressed), they are unprotected and their stan-
dard of care unmonitored.
The juxtaposition of Chalmers’s transgenic mice and Lee’s hy-
brids reveals an overlapping conception of mixture as monstrosity
and indicates that such a conception draws upon a sedimented re-
pository of racial and reproductive meanings that have persisted,
even as they have metamorphosed over time. For this reason the
juxtaposition of these variously distorted images also represents
(though it does not necessarily produce) a serious imaginative fail-
ure. If genetic research reveals that race no longer exists—that it
now behooves us to think beyond race—the juxtaposition of Chal-
mers’s and Lee’s images demonstrates that race persists as a lens
through which the new reproductions and reproductive technolo-
gies and practices are perceived. Transgenics and hybridization are
not the same—one process involves genomics and reproductive
technology, while the other involves the oldest technology of all,
that of conventional reproductive sex. However, when the prod-
ucts of each are juxtaposed, as they were in the gallery space, they
begin to become conflated. The upshot is that the racialized hy-
brids that populate Lee’s court appear to have much in common
with the mice at whom they stare across the gallery space. Indeed,
not only the proximity but also the symmetry of these two sets of
mixed, albeit differently created creatures, reminds viewers that
discussion of mixture in the preceding two centuries has routinely
focused on crossings that were deemed monstrous because they
were conceived of as racial in character, and simultaneously recalls
for us that transgenics is part and parcel of such racialized notions
of monstrosity.
As discussed in chapter 1, ‘‘miscegenation’’ is a term that was
invented in the mid-nineteenth century to describe racial mixing,
while the debates that swirled around the relative evolutionary ad-
vance of ‘‘miscegenous’’ individuals rested upon questions about
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
238 Coda
the relationship of human racial differences to those among spe-

cies. According to many nineteenth-century scientists and ethnolo-
gists, the progeny of wayward reproductions across supposed
racial lines were inferior blends comprised of incompatible parts—
white and black, human and subhuman, human and animal. These
were sterile products of reproductive practices that violated the
integrity of ‘‘pure’’ beings belonging to distinct species descended
from ‘‘pure’’ lineages. As the moniker ‘‘mulatto’’ indicates (derived
as it is from the word mule), racial mixture has all too often real-
ized its most robust expression through analogy to cross-species
nonhuman animal mixture. As the analogy encapsulated in the
word’s etymology conveys, racialized and animalized reproduc-
tive monstrosity are disturbingly proximate within the modern
episteme. In fact, in the word ‘‘mulatto,’’ as in the gallery space
in which Lee’s hybrids and Chalmers’s transgenic mice were dis-
played, interracial and interspecies reproduction merge, becoming
mutually informed racialized scripts about the monstrosity of all
wayward reproductions.
Although it is of course up to the individual viewer to decide
whether Lee’s and Chalmers’s creative works are critical of the
racist notions about interspecies mixing upon which discourses
of wayward reproduction have historically been predicated, or
whether they are complicit in shoring them up, the curatorial
juxtaposition of transgenic and hybrid figures itself can be inter-
preted as an implicit, if unintentional, argument—one about the
endurance in the new millennium of the race/reproduction bind
and the continued relevance of the concept of race within cre-
ative imaginative works that explore the transformations in re-
production made possible by the new genomic knowledges and
technologies, even as these same knowledges and technologies
paradoxically render race a nonessence, a category that only exists
in our minds.14
One consequence of the enduring synergy among ideas of race,
species, and genomics is that the racial narrative about reproduc-
tion that Lee’s piece introduces into ‘‘Gene(sis)’’ inflects not only
the interpretation of Chalmers’s transgenic mice but also, by ex-
tension, other pieces in the exhibit that meditate upon transgenics,
including the monumental installation from which the title of the
show was evidently derived (see figure 3). In closing this with a
reading of Eduardo Kac’s Genesis, I thus make a move that I have
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

3. Genesis, installation by Eduardo Kac. From the exhibition ‘‘Gene(sis),’’

The Henry Gallery, Seattle, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and Julia Fried-
man Gallery, Chicago.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09 7032 Weinbaum / WAYWARD REPRODUCTIONS / sheet 253 of 362
repeatedly made in preceding pages: I consider the work of the

race/reproduction bind in a text in which it can be read as foun-
dational but inchoate—in which it is constitutive but nonetheless
invisible on the level of manifest content. My point in so doing is
to open up a final series of questions about how, within contem-
porary genomic discourse as in the array of discourses that consti-
tuted transatlantic modern thought at the turn of the last century,
race and reproduction remain tightly bound, even as race loses its
status as biological essence, and reproduction assumes previously
unimagined forms.
Kac’s Genesis, which was specially retooled for display at the
Henry, was placed in the huge, vaulted foyer through which view-
ers necessarily passed as they entered the exhibit space. The walls
of this passageway were painted black. On one, two stories high,
there appeared three pieces of bold off-white text: the uppermost,
a passage from the Old Testament, directly below it a dotted and
dashed phrase of Morse code, and below that a familiar letter
string comprised of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs—the alphabet that repre-
sents the four chemicals that comprise the base pairs that make up
dna. At the center of the room, elevated on a black pedestal and
protected by clear fiberglass was a microscope that magnified the
content of a petri dish and projected it onto a second two-story
black wall in the form of a huge illuminated globe of shifting pale
blue and lime green particles whose collisions created eerily am-
plified sounds. As the curatorial note explaining the connections
among the various parts of the installation stated, Genesis ‘‘trans-
lates’’ a passage from the Old Testament into Morse code, then
into the four-letter alphabet of dna, and finally into actual trans-
genic organisms (engineered by transferring this artificially pro-
duced dna into common, fast replicating, E. coli bacteria) that are
on view in a petri dish and on a wall onto which the contents of
the dish are projected.
The piece was in no way static. As viewers manipulated the level
of light that shone on the organisms in the petri dish by sending
signals from a nearby computer terminal, a transformation in the
chemical base pairs that made up the dna, and thus a mutation in
the genetic composition of the transgenic organisms, took place.
As is explained on Kac’s Web site, after shows in which Genesis is
displayed close, the dna of the transformed organisms is again se-
quenced, translated back into Morse code, and then again into the
English language alphabet, such that viewers’ play at a computer
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
242 Coda
terminal and the resultant mutation of the transgenic organisms

become legible as a change in the component parts of the origi-
nal passage from the Old Testament with which Kac began. This
new, partially nonsensical but nonetheless easily recognizable text
is posted on Kac’s Web site: ‘‘let aan have dominion over the fish
of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing
that loves ua eon the earth.’’ 15
As is evident from my necessarily difficult description, Gene-
sis is a complex and intellectually challenging piece that has the
potential to spark a wide variety of interpretations. My intention is
not to limit these or to suggest that a single correct analysis exists
but rather to offer a focused reading that allows us to think about
the issues that such a work of creative imagination raises for us
as we consider what has become of race and the concept of repro-
duction to which it has historically been wed. Put differently, how
might Genesis be used to help us update and then address the ques-
tion of how to think about the race concept—the question that Du
Bois felt himself to have confronted in the previous century—in
our present one? And how might Genesis reveal the importance of
persistent excavation of the race/reproduction bind not only in the
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts treated in preceding
chapters but also in those that constitute our cultural horizon in
the twenty-first century?
Although the relationship between ‘‘translation’’ and race may
not be immediately apparent, the concept of ‘‘translation’’ that
Kac’s piece mobilizes and explores can be read as racialized. To
move from the biblical Book of Life to actual living organism, Kac
translates and in the process transposes the idea of reproduction
into that of translation. In fact, the intelligibility of Genesis hinges
upon the idea that reproduction is a process of translation that is
smooth, perfectible, pure, glitch-free, and fully within human con-
trol. To get from text to living organism Kac depends upon the idea
that it is possible to translate words into Morse code, code into
dna sequences, and such sequences into living organisms with-
out anything getting lost. Within this model meaning can be trans-
ferred across various semiotic systems and remain perfectly, trans-
parently intact. Indeed, according to the logic of Genesis, Kac’s
transgenic organism is not so much something that has been re-
produced as it is a living thing that has been created by producing
a direct translation of the book of Genesis—such a good transla-
tion that unless human beings intentionally corrupt the translation
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

process meaning will effortlessly travel in one direction (from text

to living organism) as well as back the other way.
The disturbing idea that underpins this notion of perfected re-
production as a form of translation that moves from text, to code,
to life itself is of course a familiar one: biological determinism.
Behind the metaphor of translation that is constructed and set to
work in Genesis is that rather simple and all too familiar idea that
one thing (in this case text), can find direct and accurate expres-
sion in another thing (in this case a living organism)—that is, that
genotype can find accurate, direct, and predictable expression in
phenotype, and that there is thus something in genes themselves
that can be said to determine the essence of those life forms that
genes code. In a world in which genomics reigns supreme, divine
creation and human reproduction alike have become obsolete, as
Genesis can now be translated into being like those other organ-
isms, the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, for whose miracu-
lous existence the Book of Life was once itself thought to provide
an explanation.
From one perspective, as at least one critic has pointed out,
Genesis prompts the thought that some omnipotent translator has
led human beings (coded them?) to uncode the system of marks by
which we are coded so that we might begin to rework the code of
codes written into our very core and to thus remake, as we rewrite,
nothing less than ourselves.16 From another perspective, which
places Genesis in the transatlantic modern historical context that
this book addresses, the piece can be read as implicitly engaging
an idea of reproduction as translation that has been consistently
racialized—the idea of reproduction upon which eugenic move-
ments have been based, that upon which surrogate mothers and
donor genetic materials are selected by consumers of reproduc-
tive technologies, and the very same idea of reproduction as per-
fected translation that has bound race to reproduction by calculat-
ing racial belonging as reproducible, and genealogical ‘‘purity’’ as
achievable.
The difficulty with any notion of perfected translation will be
immediately apparent to anyone who has attempted to translate
from one language into another, or who knows even a little about
the numerous factors that impinge upon genes and alter their ex-
pression in a complex system of interlocking contingencies in-
volving biochemical pathways, cellular structures, physiological
relationships, and environmental fluctuations. Such perfection is
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
244 Coda
quite simply impossible. All translation involves transfiguration;

each repetition is with a difference, however slight. For all texts,
organic and inorganic, are in flux, open to multiple iterations that
vary depending upon who is doing the translating, the circum-
stances in which it is being done, and the limitations and flexibili-
ties of the language into which one text is transformed into an-
other. Poststructuralists have repeatedly made this point, not only
about translations but also about reading generally. As Gayatri
Spivak has observed, ‘‘Each reading of the book produces a simu-
lacrum of an ‘original’ that is itself the mark of the shifting and
unstable subject . . . using and being used by a language that is also
shifting and unstable.’’ 17 And perhaps just as significant, scientists
have underscored this point in their attempts to accurately capture
the dynamic, dialogical process of gene expression: ‘‘The cell uses
dna as data, and the resultant effect is a new pattern of gene ex-
pression that creates an altered cellular network. Viewed as an ex-
tended process, dna acts in the dual capacity of program and data,
and the cellular machinery likewise acts as both passive interpreter
and program. The genotype and phenotype are intertwined, each
acting responsively to the other, both contributing to the process
and the result.’’ 18
Initially it would seem that what Kac’s Genesis leaves out in
its apparent preoccupation with construing reproduction as puri-
fied translation is the messiness of translation, nothing less than
the waywardness of reproduction, albeit in a petri dish. What be-
comes evident on further contemplation of Genesis, however, is
not that waywardness has been left out of the story of creation, but
that it has been deliberately and quite literally represented as some-
thing added by human beings. For in translating living organisms
that have mutated in response to random exposure to a light source
that is controlled by viewers back into text whose meaning (or,
as the case may be, meaninglessness) they cannot control, Genesis
begins to undermine the very notion of perfect translation that it
initially appears to represent and depend upon. In so doing Gene-
sis suggests that translation processes can always be—indeed, are
always already—corrupted.19 It would seem that gene/alogies are
not any easier to maintain in a ‘‘pure’’ state across generations than
are the purified national genealogies of which Charlotte Perkins
Gilman and other nativists and restrictionists dreamed more than
a century ago.
If Genesis can be interpreted as suggesting that, in an age of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

genomics, reproduction—even in its guise as translation—is nec-

essarily wayward, it can also be read as indicating that it is human
beings whose interactions, not only with science but also with
texts, possess the ability to alter both the ‘‘facts of life’’ and the
Book of Life. By putting the viewer in a position of control in rela-
tion to Genesis, if only to make of it a text that is recognizable if no
longer clearly intelligible, Kac demonstrates that human actions,
including acts of reading and translation, impinge not only on the
production of texts but also on the (re)production of organisms.
Indeed, the globe populated by shifting and colliding pale blue and
lime green life forms, like the texts we read and translate, repro-
duce and transform acts of reading and translation as they are in
turn transformed by them.
Is the race/reproduction bind undone by Genesis? Perhaps not
fully, but the reading of Kac’s installation that I have offered here
foregrounds for us the manner in which our active reading and
writing of texts will constitute the unbinding process in a genomic
age in which race is said no longer to exist and reproduction has
assumed strange new forms. For Genesis can be read as an alle-
gory that alerts us to the fact that it is by reading and interfer-
ing with purportedly perfectible translation processes that we will
effectively rewrite and thus reshape the scripts by which we have
until now been written, including those biologically determinist
scripts that have consistently bound race to reproduction within
the modern episteme. In some sense this work of reading the race/
reproduction bind so that it might be unbound or translated differ-
ently in the future has been the project and greatest aspiration of
this book. As the Genesis installation suggests, reading and trans-
lating race, reproduction, and the facts of life are tasks that have
been assumed by science, but just as important they are tasks in
which those of us who produce, consume, read, and translate texts
cannot afford not to participate.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
246 Coda
Notes
Introduction
1 See Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘‘Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the
Eighteenth Century,’’ in Conceiving the New World Order: the Global Politics
of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 369–86.
2 See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Keyword was originally intended as an
appendix to Culture and Society (1958; New York: Columbia University Press,
1983). However, it was eventually excised and has only appeared as a separate
volume. As is evident, I follow Williams in taking the oed as a starting point
for inquiry into the social and historical processes that occur within language.
3 Jordanova argues that reproduction was unregulated prior to the nineteenth
century. See ‘‘Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction,’’ 376.
4 Gilroy develops the term ‘‘raciology’’ as shorthand for the wide-ranging Euro-
American discourse that invented modern notions of ‘‘race’’ and truths about
human nature based upon ideas of biological and cultural difference. Racial
sciences, early anthropology, and contemporary genetic discourse are all ex-
amples of raciology. Each attempts, albeit differently, to render the idea of
‘‘race’’ epistemologically correct. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Po-
litical Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2000), 58.
5 See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institu-
tion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other
Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); This Sex
Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985); Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans.
Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993); Sexes and Genealogies, trans.
Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); the discussion
of ‘‘Chora’’ in Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret
Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), and in Toril Moi, ed.,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), especially
‘‘Woman’s Time,’’ 187–213. Marxist and socialist feminist approaches to re-
productive labor are discussed in chapter 3. Also see Mary O’Brien, The Poli-
tics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Sara Ruddick,
Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1989); and the
literary scholarship listed in note 8.
6 I have been immersed in these debates since beginning work on the cultures
and politics of reproduction more than a decade ago. Books and antholo-
gies that analyze the exploitation of women as reproducers are too numer-
ous to list. Key works (in order of publication) that have shaped my under-
standing of the present reproductive order include Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli
Klein, and Shelley Minden, eds., Test-Tube Women: What Future for Mother-
hood? (London: Pandora Press, 1984); Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive
Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine (London: Polity Press, 1987);
Rosalind Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and
Reproductive Freedom (London: Verso, 1986); Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive
Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and Contracep-
tive Choice (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Zillah Eisenstein, The Female
Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Cynthia
Daniels, At Women’s Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal Rights (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Sonia Corea in collaboration
with Rebecca Reichmann, Population and Reproductive Rights: Feminist Per-
spective from the South (London: Zed Books, 1994); Ginsberg and Rapp, eds.,
Conceiving the New World Order; Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser, Biopoli-
tics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology (London: Zed Books,
1995); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the
Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997); Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech
Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York: Penguin
Putnam, 1998); Rosalind Petchesky and Karen Judd, eds., Negotiating Repro-
ductive Rights: Women’s Perspectives across Countries and Cultures (London
and New York: Zed Press, 1998); and Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder
of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997), chapter 5.
7 Among others the following studies, listed in order of publication, have
shaped my thinking: Anna Davin, ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’’ History
Workshop 5 (1978): 9–65; George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respect-
ability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Fertig, 1985);
Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992); Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race and Gender in the Co-
lonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti,
and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial
Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Ida
Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nation-
alisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg,
2000). On the relationship of racism to sexism see Colette Guillaumin,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
248 Notes
Racism, Sexism and Power (New York: Routledge, 1995); Patricia Williams,
The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Con-
struction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
On the relationships among gender, sexuality, and race in U.S. history, see
Hortense Spillers, ed., Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Na-
tionality in the Modern Text (New York: Routledge, 1991); Robyn Weigman,
American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries
in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and
Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995); Siobhan Sommerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention
of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2000); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Poli-
tics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1996); Mason Stokes, The Color of Sex: Whiteness,
Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2001); and Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).
8 Works by Zillah Eisenstein, Jacqueline Stevens, Mary O’Brien, Seth Koven
and Sonya Michel characterize the first trend; those by Alice Adams, Alison
Berg, Eva Chernievsky, Laura Doyle, and Stephanie Smith characterize the
second. See Zillah Eisenstein, Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in
the 21 st Century (New York: Routledge: 1996); Jacqueline Stevens, Reproduc-
ing the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); O’Brien, The Poli-
tics of Reproduction; Seth Koven and Sonya Mitchel, eds., Mothers of a New
World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993); Alice Adams, Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Sci-
ence, Feminist Theory and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);
Allison Berg, Mothering the Race: Women’s Narratives of Reproduction, 1890–
1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002); Laura Doyle, Bordering on the
Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford,
1994); Eva Cherniavsky, That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and
the Imitation of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995); Stephanie Smith, Conceived by Liberty: Ma-
ternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994).
9 I use ‘‘episteme’’ in a Foucauldian rather than classical sense. See Michel Fou-
cault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:
Tavistock/ Routledge, 1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York:
Pantheon, 1972). Of his project Foucault writes, ‘‘I am not concerned . . . to
describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s
science can finally be recognized; what I am attempting to bring to light is
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 249
the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart

from all criteria having reference to its rational value or its objective forms,
grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its
growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility’’ (xxii).
10 See Philip Appleman, ed., Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principles of
Population: Text, Sources and Background Criticism (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1976), especially commentary by Marx, Engels, Darwin, and Sanger,
among others; and Catherine Gallagher, ‘‘The Body versus the Social Body
in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,’’ in The Making of the
Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine
Gallagher and Thomas Lacqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987), 83–106.
11 It is worth noting that recent scholarship on the question of modernity has
roundly criticized the Euro-centrism of the concept and argued for recog-
nition of the existence of multiple modernities. See, among others, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Dif-
ference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Timothy Mitchell ed.,
Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
and Dilip Parameshwar Goankar, ‘‘On Alternative Modernities,’’ Public Cul-
ture 11.1 (1999): 1–18. To be clear, my intent is not to shore up the idea of a
singular experience of modernity through focus on ‘‘transatlantic modernity,’’
but rather to reveal the contours of a dominant and dominating discursive
horizon.
12 See Daniel Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 1.
13 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Joseph Roach, Cities
of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996); and Daniel Rogers, Atlantic Crossings. For analysis and exten-
sion of the ‘‘Black Atlantic’’ paradigm see Neil Lazarus, ‘‘Is a Countercul-
ture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?’’ Diaspora 4.3 (1995): 323–39;
Laura Chrisman, ‘‘Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,’’ Race and
Class 39.2 (1997): 51–64; Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Litera-
ture, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003); and David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick:
National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2003), especially chapter 1. On American excep-
tionalism within American studies scholarship, see Michael Denning, ‘‘ ‘The
Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies,’’ American
Quarterly 38.3 (1986): 356–80; Gary Gerstle, ‘‘The Limits of American Uni-
versalism,’’ American Quarterly 45.2 (1993): 230–36; Michael Kammen, ‘‘The
Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,’’ American Quar-
terly 45.1 (1993):1–43; Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United
States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), especially
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
250 Notes
Kaplan’s introduction, ‘‘ ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Em-

pire in the Study of American Culture,’’ 3–21; Jenny Sharpe, ‘‘Is the United
States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race,’’ Diaspora 4. 2
(1995): 181–99; Eva Cherniavsky, ‘‘Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame,’’ bound-
ary 2 23.2 (1996): 85–110; Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez,
‘‘Resituating American Studies within a Critical Internationalism,’’ American
Quarterly 48. 3 (1996): 475–90; and Alys Eve Weinbaum and Brent Hayes
Edwards, ‘‘On Critical Globality,’’ Ariel: A Review of International English
Literature 31.1 (2000): 255–74.
14 See Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thacherism and the Crisis of the
Left (London: Verso, 1988), 98. Also see Raymond Williams, ‘‘Reproduc-
tion,’’ in The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 181–
205.
1. Genealogy Unbound
1 Kate Chopin, ‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ [written 1892, published 1893], in The

Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin, ed. and intro. Barbara Solo-
mon (New York: Signet Classic, 1976), 177. Hereafter all references will be
given parenthetically.
2 Initially there was a resistance to reading race in this text. See Cynthia Grif-
fin Wolff, ‘‘Kate Chopin and the Fiction of Limits: ‘Désirée’s Baby,’ ’’ South-
ern Literary Journal 10.2 (1978): 123–33; Robert Arner, ‘‘Pride and Prejudice:
Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby,’ ’’ Mississippi Quarterly 25.2 (1972): 131–40;
and Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990). Recent
critics focus on race but not nation. See Margaret D. Bauer, ‘‘Armand Au-
bigny, Still Passing after All These Years: The Narrative Voice and Historical
Context of ‘Désirée’s Baby,’ ’’ in Critical Essays on Kate Chopin, ed. Alice Hall
Petry (New York: G. K. Hall,1996),161–83; Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Women
on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington
Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1989), 126–31; Ellen Peel, ‘‘Semiotic Subversion in ‘Désirée’s Baby,’ ’’ Ameri-
can Literature 62.2 (1990): 223–37; Katherine Lundie, ‘‘Doubly Dispossessed:
Kate Chopin’s Women of Color,’’ Louisiana Literature 11.1 (1994): 126–44;
and Brewster E. Fitz, ‘‘Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’ ’’: Emancipating the
Readers,’’ Short Story 8.1 (2000): 78–91.
3 See Peel, ‘‘Semiotic Subversion,’’ 225.
4 In 1941 American Jurisprudence defined miscegenation as a crime involving
the ‘‘intermarrying, cohabiting, or interbreeding of persons of different races.’’
On miscegenation law and custom see Eva Saks, ‘‘Representing Miscegena-
tion Law,’’ Raritan Quarterly 8.2 (1988): 39–69; Derrick Bell, Race, Racism,
and American Law, 3d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 64–108; Joel Wil-
liamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New
York: Free Press, 1980); F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defini-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 251
tion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Peggy Pas-
coe, ‘‘Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of Race in Twentieth-
Century America,’’ Journal of American History 83.1 (1996): 44–69; and
‘‘Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Mar-
riage,’’ Frontiers 12.1 (1991): 5–18; Teresa Zackodnik, ‘‘Fixing the Color Line:
The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity,’’ American Quarterly 53.3
(2001): 420–51; and Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black-White Inter-
marriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000). In Louisiana interracial sex was more heavily legislated
and punished after Reconstruction than before. Although civil codes of 1808
and 1825 prohibited interracial marriage, white men’s polygamy was institu-
tionalized in an elaborate system of quadroon balls and ritualized common
law marriages. Gens du couleur libre could own property and slaves. As I dis-
cuss, Chopin’s story projects a severe, specifically postwar view of miscegena-
tion onto an imagined antebellum moment. According to Blassingame, white
men seeking legalization of marriages to black women often moved to Cuba
or France; such would provide precedent for Chopin’s portrait of Armand’s
parents. See John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973), 20; and Virginia R. Dominquez, White
by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers
5 See Plessy v. Ferguson, Brief for the Plaintiff in Error in the Supreme Court of
the United States, No. 210 (October Term, 1895): 27–63; and Brook Thomas,
ed. and intro., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston:
Bedford Books, 1997).
6 See C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 142–74, quotes from 154–55 and 168.
The distinction that Woodward draws can be usefully explored through Ray-
mond Williams’s conception of ‘‘residual’’ and ‘‘emergent’’ cultural forms.
‘‘Residual’’ forms are those that have been created in the past but are still
active in the cultural processes of the present. They are distinct from the domi-
nant culture but at the same time partially incorporated within it. By contrast,
‘‘emergent’’ cultural forms are either part of a new phase of the dominant
culture or substantially alternative or oppositional. Woodward reads litera-
ture statically and thus does not apprehend Chopin’s antebellum drama as a
commentary on her present; that is, he reads literature in terms of its domi-
nant expression rather than as a complex system that reflects and refracts
prevailing social tensions. See Raymond Williams, ‘‘Dominant, Residual, and
Emergent,’’ in Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), 121–27; and The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books,
1981), 203–5.
7 Helen Taylor advances this argument in Gender, Race, and Region in the Writ-
ings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 1–28 and 165–66, in relation to ‘‘Dé-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
252 Notes
sirée’s Baby.’’ The idea of the nation as an entity that ‘‘loom[s] out of an im-
memorial past, and glide[s] into a limitless future’’ is Benedict Anderson’s.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 19. Hereafter all references will
be made parenthetically.
8 Cheryl I. Harris, ‘‘Whiteness as Property,’’ Harvard Law Review 106 (1994):
1744.
9 Saks, ‘‘Miscegenation Law,’’ 4.
10 Harris, ‘‘Whiteness as Property,’’ 1714. In Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), David Roediger
also discusses white ‘‘status property’’ in the antebellum period. While Har-
ris’s legal work usefully identifies the economic motivations underpinning
transformations in the definition of property, the work of historians of the
colonial period and of slavery draw our attention to the broader range of so-
cial and political issues that were involved in the creation of an at times iron-
clad, and at other times more malleable, racial order. See Kathleen M. Brown,
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power
in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
and Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-
Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
11 See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immi-
grants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1998); and Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.
12 According to Balibar such misrecognition is always in part a hallucination of
racial identity: ‘‘[Racism] operate[s] in an inverted fashion. . . . [T]he racial-
cultural identity of ‘true nationals’ remains invisible, but can be inferred (and
is ensured) a contrario by the alleged, quasi-hallucinatory visibility of the ‘false
nationals.’ ’’ See Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation,
Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 60. Hereafter all refer-
ences will be made parenthetically in the text.
13 None of the following discuss gender, let alone reproduction: John Breuilly,
Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982);
Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Elie Kadourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (1960; Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994); Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (1929; New York: Col-
lier, 1967), and The Age of Nationalism (1944; New York: Harper & Row,
1968). See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms (London: Basil Blackwell,
1983). Hereafter all references will be made parenthetically in the text.
14 See, for example, Donald E. Pease, ed., National Identities and Post-
Americanist Narratives (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); and
John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: Univer-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 253
sity of California Press, 2000). On the limits of the postnationalist formu-

lation see Alys Eve Weinbaum and Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘‘On Critical Glo-
bality,’’ Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 31.1–2 (2000):
255–74.
15 See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race and Gender in the Colonial
Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexu-
ality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York:
Fertig, 1985); Nira Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Women-Nation-State
(London: Macmillan, 1989); Andrew Parker, Mary Russ, Doris Sommer, and
Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge,
1992); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmoder-
nity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1994); Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson, eds., Subjects and
Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella
Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Caren Kaplan, Norma
Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: National-
isms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1999); and Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gen-
dered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Berg, 2000). Other works that have informed my argument include
Faye G. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order:
The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Mater-
nalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Kumari Jaywardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London:
Zed Books, 1986); Chandra Talpede Mohanty et al., eds., Third World Women
and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991);
and Anna Davin, ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’’ History Workshop 5 (1978):
9–65.
16 See McClintock, Imperial Leather, 355; and Yuval-Davis and Anthias, Woman-
Nation-State, 7.
17 McClintock offers similar observations about Santayana’s formulation. See
Imperial Leather, 353.
18 Emphases and capitalization follow Anderson. Also see Daniel Defoe, The
True-Born English-Man: A Satyr (Dublin: Printed for Sam Fuller at the Globe
and Scales, 1728); and Jennifer DeVere Brody Impossible Purities: Blackness,
Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1998),1–4. Brody treats the racial politics of Defoe’s poem but not Anderson’s
use of it.
19 Parker et al., Nationalism and Sexualities, 5–6; McClintock, Imperial Leather,
353, 358; and Ruth Roach Pierson, ‘‘Nations: Gendered, Racialized, Crossed
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
254 Notes
with Empire,’’ in Gendered Nations, ed. Blom et al., 41–43, critique Anderson
and/or Gellner along these lines.
20 Bhabha and Kristeva discuss alternatives to this temporalization of the na-
tion. See Homi Bhabha, ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins
of the Modern Nation,’’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 291–322; and
Julia Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time,’’ in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (1978;
New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 187–213. Kristeva distinguishes
between cyclical and monumental time, designating the latter rather than the
former as the temporality of nationalism; Bhabha reclaims cyclical time for
nonnationalist articulation.
21 Anderson suggests that his observations are true for Christendom, Ummah
Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism, but only discusses Islam and Chris-
tianity.
22 The Fermin de Vargas quotation is not excerpted from the original text but
from a book on the Spanish American revolutions (1808–26). Given that the
term ‘‘miscegenation’’ was not coined until 1864, it is unlikely that Fermin de
Vargas used this exact term. The questionable translation upon which Ander-
son relies further indicates the unquestioning manner in which he imports
reproductive thinking.
23 A ‘‘concept metaphor’’ establishes a direct connection between a metaphor
and the idea it conveys, in that such metaphors produce that which they de-
scribe in the act of metaphorizing. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘White Mythology:
Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–72, especially 262–
64. Lewis Henry Morgan’s and Freud’s uses of concept metaphor are dis-
cussed in chapters 3 and 4 respectively.
24 On the sexual violence—the rape and so-called population control—that lies
at the core of modern nationalism and recent forms of balkanization, see Zil-
lah Eisenstein, Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Routledge, 1996).
25 In the nation the clerisy is universalized, and these distinctions cease to exist.
This is the point at which ‘‘high culture’’ pervades the entire society, ‘‘defines
it, and needs to be sustained by the polity’’—a situation that Gellner views as
‘‘the secret of nationalism.’’ See Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms, 18.
26 The Eurocentrism of Anderson’s model—the idea that nationalism was dis-
seminated from the West to the rest, and that universal literacy was a neces-
sary precondition for nationalism—has been amply criticized. See McClin-
tock, Imperial Leather, 373; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union
Jack: The Culture and Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1987), 45; and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colo-
nial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), passim.
27 Anderson expressly engages Tom Nairn on this point. According to Nairn
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 255
racism emerges from nationalism; for Anderson, as we shall see, the two are
separate belief systems. See Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London:
New Left Books, 1977).
28 See Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘‘The Ideological Tensions of Capitalism: Uni-
versalism versus Racism and Sexism,’’ and ‘‘Class Conflict in the Capital-
ist World-Economy’’ in Race, Nation, Class, by Balibar and Wallerstein; Im-
manuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vols. 1–3 (La Jolla: Academic
Press, 1972–88); Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974); and André Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumu-
lation and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978).
29 Gellner blames the victims of nationalist sentiment, ‘‘the blue people,’’ for
being tough to bring into the nation. Insofar as ‘‘pigmental blueness’’ is an
unalterable trait, Gellner’s understanding of racism is especially insidious in
its implied permanence.
30 Balibar is often misread on this point. For instance, Eisenstein writes, ‘‘I dis-
agree with Etienne Balibar when he states that ‘racism has nothing to do with
the existence of objective biological ‘races,’ if he means to completely contex-
tualize racialized bodies. . . . Racism is constructed through fictions, which
is not to say that race is a fiction.’’ Such misreadings are instructive: Balibar
does not regard race as a fiction but rather as an ideology that bears no direct
relation to the reality of ‘‘races.’’ Balibar thus uses the term ‘‘fictive’’ rather
than ‘‘fiction.’’ See Eisenstein, Hatreds, 35. Balibar’s understanding of ‘‘fictive
ethnicity’’ is indebted to the social scientist Colette Guillaumin, whose work
traces the unmooring of race from the biological body. See Colette Guillau-
min, Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1995) [first
English translation; the essays in this collection were published in French in
the 1970s and 1980s].
31 Balibar follows his mentor and collaborator Louis Althusser in refusing to
equate ideology with ‘‘false consciousness.’’ See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Freud and
Lacan,’’ New Left Review 55 (1969): 51–65.
32 Stuart Hall’s formulation that race is the modality in which class is lived
allies him (and other members of the Birmingham school) with Balibar. See
Hall, ‘‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,’’ in Socio-
logical Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: unesco Press, 1980), 305–45;
‘‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,’’ Journal of Com-
munication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 5–27; and Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in
the Union Jack. For discussion of racism and classism as fused historical nar-
ratives see Balibar, ‘‘Class Racism,’’ in Race, Nation, Class, by Balibar and
Wallerstein, especially 206–11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also theorizes
this fusion with her two-pronged axiom: ‘‘Capital is anti-essentializing be-
cause it is the abstract as such . . . [essences such as race and sex] are de-
ployed by capitalisms for the political management of capital.’’ See Spivak,
‘‘In a Word: Interview,’’ in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993), 13.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
256 Notes
33 See Etienne Balibar, ‘‘Racism as Universalism,’’ in Masses, Classes, and Ideas:

Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, trans. James Swenson
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 191–204.
34 During a 1996 plenary address Balibar noted that the concept of genealogy is
haunted by a repressed memory of class violence that is also a form of gender
violence. From this perspective, ‘‘race’’ is not an originary category but is de-
rived from ideas about gender and ‘‘fantasmatic sexuality.’’ In subsequent dis-
cussion I asked Balibar why he did not wish to characterize the ‘‘fantasmatic
sexuality’’ that he had discussed as explicitly reproductive. He responded that
he was inclined to steer clear of the term because of its overdetermination
within the Marxist tradition. I thank him for this clarification. Personal com-
munication, and Etienne Balibar and Cornel West, ‘‘Race and Class: A Dia-
logue,’’ plenary address presented at ‘‘Rethinking Marxism,’’ University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 6 December 1996.
35 ‘‘Every social community reproduced by the functioning of institutions is
imaginary . . . [which] comes down to accepting that, under certain condi-
tions, only imaginary communities are real. In the case of national forma-
tions, the imaginary which inscribes itself in the real in this way is that of the
‘people.’ ’’ See Balibar, in Race, Nation, Class, by Balibar and Wallerstein, 93.
36 Once again Anderson and Balibar are opposed. For Anderson racism is
strictly internal to nationalism, and has nothing to do with imperialism. Bali-
bar, by contrast, apprehends the nationalist and imperialist forms of racism
as coextensiveness. See Balibar, in Race, Nation, Class, by Balibar and Waller-
stein, 38–40. In creating a taxonomy of racisms Balibar approaches Michel
Foucault’s argument in ‘‘About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in
Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry,’’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault,
1954–1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 176–
200.
37 Feminists have suggested that the new reproductive technologies shatter the
family as it has been traditionally constituted, redefine the reproductive func-
tion, and split maternity into three parts: social motherhood (rearing of the
child), biological motherhood (donation of genetic material), and gestational
motherhood (donation or sale of the womb and labor). See Michelle Stan-
worth, ‘‘Reproductive Technologies and the Deconstruction of Motherhood,’’
in Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicine, ed. Stan-
worth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 10–35; Sarah Franklin, ‘‘Postmodern
Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction,’’ in Conceiving the
New World Order, ed. Ginsburg and Rapp, 323–45; Marilyn Strathern, Re-
producing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Tech-
nologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); and Barbara Katz
Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal
Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). Elsewhere I discuss the socializa-
tion of women’s reproductive labor power that has accompanied the pro-
liferation of the new technologies and the hyperexploitation of the repro-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 257
ductive labor force. See ‘‘Marx, Irigaray, and the Politics of Reproduction,’’
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.1 (1994): 98–128. On the
market in babies and wombs see Elizabeth Landes and Richard Posner, ‘‘The
Economics of the Baby Shortage,’’ Journal of Legal Studies 7.2 (1978): 323–48;
and Carmel Shalev, Birth Power: The Case for Surrogacy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989). On the global market in reproductive by-products see
Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of
Life (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994).
38 The term is Balibar’s.
39 Barbara Fields, ‘‘Ideology and Race in American History,’’ in Region, Race,
and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan
Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press,
1982), 143–78. Other works that inform my thinking on maternity in slavery
include Angela Y. Davis, ‘‘The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New
Womanhood,’’ in Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981),
3–29; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 20–
39; Deborah Gray White, ‘‘Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Ante-
bellum Plantation South,’’ in Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the
American Past, ed. Catherine Clinton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1994), 56–75; Jacqueline Jones, ‘‘Race, Sex, and Self-Evident Truths: The
Status of Slave Women During the Era of the American Revolution,’’ in Half
Sisters of History, ed. Clinton, 18–35; and Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches.
40 On the reorganization of the black family during Reconstruction and the
efforts of black people to gain recognition of and protection for their chosen
family formations, see Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The
Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
41 This theme pervades literature about baby swapping such as Mark Twain’s
Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which a slave mother passes her child out of the
bonds of slavery by switching it with her master’s. See Carolyn Porter,
‘‘Roxana’s Plot,’’ in Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson, eds., Mark
Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990),
121–36; and Mark Patterson, ‘‘Surrogacy and Slavery: The Problematics of
Consent in Baby M, Romance of the Republic, and Pudd’nhead Wilson,’’ Ameri-
can Literary History 8 (1996): 449–70.
42 Tourgée wrote, ‘‘the preponderance of the blood of one race or another is im-
possible of ascertainment, except by careful scrutiny of pedigree.’’ Plessy v.
Ferguson, 37.
43 Harryette Mullen, ‘‘Optic White: Blackness and the Production of White-
ness,’’ Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994): 80; and Amy Robinson, ‘‘Forms of Appear-
ance of Value: Homer Plessy and the Politics of Privacy,’’ in Performance and
Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996), 237–61.
44 Although the Supreme Court took the power of racial determination away
from non–state actors by turning the question of racial classification back
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
258 Notes
to state courts, the consistency with which it used concepts of descent, heri-
tage, and pedigree to determine the existence of ‘‘black blood’’ in individuals
suggests the extralegal pervasiveness of such genealogical belief systems. In-
deed, de facto and de jure Jim Crow depended upon classification of black-
ness, on identification of ‘‘one drop of black blood,’’ and thus on genealogical
ideas about the reproducibility of race. See Barbara Y. Welke, ‘‘When All the
Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and
the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914,’’ Law and History Review 13.2 (1995): 261–316;
Christine B. Hickman, ‘‘The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories,
African Americans and the U.S. Census,’’ Michigan Law Review 95.5 (1997):
1161–265; and Davis, Who Is Black?
45 What is known is that Chopin’s husband, Oscar, was an active member of the
powerful white supremacist organization the White League and that there is
no record of her objection to his racist activism. See Heather Kirk Thomas,
‘‘The White League and Racial Status: Historicizing Kate Chopin’s Recon-
struction Stories,’’ Louisiana Literature 14.2 (1997): 97–115; and Sandra Gun-
ning, ‘‘Kate Chopin’s Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Suprem-
acy,’’ Arizona Quarterly 51.3 (1995): 61–86. I am grateful to Laura Wexler
for discussions of Chopin and white supremacy and for convening the panel
in which I participated at the American Studies Association meeting, Octo-
ber 2001.
46 Ann Laura Stoler is among the few scholars who treats race in Foucault; al-
though Hortense Spillers’s work also informs my discussion here. See Ann
Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality
and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995);
and Hortense Spillers, ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,’’ Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65–81.
47 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York:
Vintage Books, 1978).
48 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100. Hereafter all cita-
tions will be made parenthetically in the text.
49 Foucault is not the only poststructuralist to have read Nietzsche along these
lines. See Alan D. Schrift, ‘‘Nietzsche’s Contest: Nietzsche and the Cul-
ture Wars,’’ in Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Poli-
tics, ed. Allan D. Schrift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
184–201; Douglas Smith, Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philoso-
phy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (1962; New York: Columbia University Press,
1983). Deleuze writes: ‘‘Genealogy means both the value of the origin and the
origin of value. Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative
or utilitarian ones. Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from
which their value itself derives. Genealogy thus means origin or birth, but
also difference or distance in the origin. Genealogy means nobility and base-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 259
ness, nobility and vulgarity, nobility and decadence in the origin. The noble
and the vulgar, the high and the low—this is the truly genealogical and critical
element. But understood in this way, critique is also at its most positive. The
differential element is both a critique of the value of values and the positive
element of a creation. This is why critique is never conceived by Nietzsche as
a reaction but as an action’’ (2).
50 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kauf-
mann (N.Y.: Vintage, 1967), 57. Hereafter all citations will be made paren-
thetically in the text.
51 I paraphrase Smith’s formulation. See Smith, Transvaluations, 19.
52 Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), quotes 36 and 38. When
Foucault argues that, in the modern transition from a ‘‘system of alliance’’ to
a ‘‘system of sex,’’ blood is transformed into race, he is identifying the same
racialist residue within the eighteenth-century discourse of social hierarchy,
stratification, and aristocratic genealogy that Doyle calls attention to in her
work on romanticism. In short, Foucault reveals that nineteenth-century dis-
courses on heredity and eugenics drew upon older discourses on genealogy,
reproduction, and race. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:124–25. On
the rise of German nationalism and its roots in eighteenth-century intellectual
culture and literary and philosophical romanticism see James J. Sheehan, Ger-
man History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 324–88, especially
371–88.
53 See Sander L. Gilman, ‘‘The Image of the Black in German Thought from
Hegel to Nietzsche,’’ in On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image
of the Black in Germany (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 93–118; Robert Berna-
sconi, ‘‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlighten-
ment Construction of Race,’’ in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Black-
well, 2001), 11–36; Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family
and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 68–70; David Theo Goldberg, ‘‘Modernity, Race, and
Morality,’’ in Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 14–40; Cornel West,
‘‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism,’’ in Race Critical Theories, ed. Philomena
Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 90–112; and
David Lloyd, ‘‘Race under Representation,’’ Oxford Literary Review 13.1–2
(1991): 62–94.
54 In 1884–85 Germany claimed three African colonies, German Southwest Af-
rica, German East Africa, Togo, and Cameroon, as well as German New
Guinea in the Pacific. On German ideas about Africanness, see Sander Gil-
man, ‘‘Preface,’’ On Blackness without Blacks, xi. Also see Zantop, Colonial
Fantasies, passim.
55 See Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds., The Im-
perialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1998), especially Robert C. Holub, ‘‘Nietzsche’s
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
260 Notes
Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germanie, Good Europeans, and the Great

Politics,’’ 33–50. On German women’s participation in colonialism, see Lora
Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke
56 See Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (London: Routledge,
1997); Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1992); Siegfried Mandel, Nietzsche and the
Jews: Exaltation and Denigration (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998);
and Douglas Smith, Transvaluations, especially chapter 3.
57 The debates about whether Nietzsche was an anti-Semite, an advocate of colo-
nialism, or an Aryan supremacist have been persuasively settled by scholars
such as Steven Aschheim and Robert Holub, among others. Aschheim writes,
‘‘There were, to be sure, many building blocks that went into conceiving and
implementing genocide and mass murder but I would argue that this Nietz-
schean framework of thinking provided a crucial conceptual precondition and
his radical sensibility a partial trigger for its implementation.’’ Steven Asch-
heim, ‘‘Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,’’ in Nietzsche and Jewish
Culture, ed. Golomb, 3–20, quote 15. Weaver Santaniello offers counter evi-
dence and arrives at essentially the same conclusion as did Walter Kaufmann
before her. See Weaver Santaniello, ‘‘A Post-Holocaust Re-Examination of
Nietzsche and the Jews,’’ in Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, ed. Golomb, 21–
54; Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968),
especially part 3; and Holub, ‘‘Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination,’’ 33–50.
58 Gilroy develops the term ‘‘raciology’’ as a shorthand for the wide-ranging
Euro-American discourse that invented modern notions of ‘‘race’’ and truths
about human nature based upon these ideas. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race:
Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Bel-
knap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 58. On raciology in the trans-
atlantic context see John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes
of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971);
Michael D. Biddis, ‘‘European Racist Ideology, 1850–1945: Myths of Blood,’’
Patterns of Prejudice 9.5 (1975): 11–18; Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest
Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1981); Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The
Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1981); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Sci-
ence: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982); Stephen J. Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); George Stock-
ing, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987); Paul Weindling,
Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism,
1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Alexander Sax-
ton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990); Robert Proctor, ‘‘Eu-
genics among the Social Sciences: Hereditarian Thought in Germany and the
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 261
United States,’’ in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and
David Van Keuren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 175–
208; Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use
and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Robert Young,
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995); and Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
59 See McClintock, Imperial Leather, 52–53.
60 The Irish were themselves purveyors of racism in their role as minstrels who
donned blackface and as the rowdy spectators of such performances. In con-
trast to Irish abolitionists such as Daniel O’Connell, who saw a direct connec-
tion between Irish freedom (through an end to union with Britain) and black
emancipation in America, many Irish immigrants were proslavery democrats
who rejected the call to see blacks as brethren and embraced the idea that
their whiteness entitled them to political rights and jobs that they had been
denied through their association with blacks. This rhetoric was pronounced
in the 1863 New York City Draft Riot, in which the Irish asserted themselves
as aggrieved ‘‘whites’’ unwilling to fight against slavery. See Eric Lott, Love
and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), especially 94–96, 148–49; David Roediger,
Wages of Whiteness, especially 116–22, 134–37; and Jacobson, Whiteness of a
Different Color, 52–56.
61 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 48; and Lott, Love and Theft, 95.
62 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 133–37. Also see Theodore W. Allen, The In-
vention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (Lon-
don: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York:
Routledge, 1995); and Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and
Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1986).
63 Quoted in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 56.
64 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925,
2d ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 90. In literature that Chopin and Nietz-
sche may have read such ideas are rife. For example, Mark Twain’s Those Ex-
traordinary Twins is about Italian Siamese twins, one of whom is blackened
and accused of cold-blooded murder. Henry James’s Daisy Miller mingles
fears and racial and sexual violence in its story of a dangerous liaison be-
tween an ‘‘American girl’’ and her devious Italian suitor. On Twain’s response
to the intense anti-Italian violence he witnessed see Jacobson’s Whiteness of a
Different Color, 61–62, and 56–62 the 1891 New Orleans lynchings. On the
anti-Italian animus in James see Lynn Wardly, ‘‘Reassembling Daisy Miller,’’
American Literary History 3.2 (1991): 232–54.
65 Interestingly one strand of Irish nationalist discourse coincided with Nietz-
sche’s view. It emphasized Celts as a race separate from Anglo-Saxons, as a
superior and decidedly ‘‘unmixed’’ race. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different
Color, 49, 50–51.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
262 Notes
66 Other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German writers, including Hegel,

Marx, and Freud, also invoked the figure of the hieroglyph. Through oriental-
ization, Egypt risked being erased as a historical source of Greek (read West-
ern) civilization. As Martin Bernal has demonstrated, as the defensive whiten-
ing of Egypt proceeded, an autochthonous origins discourse about antiquity
was consolidated. In light of these trends, it is possible to argue that Nietz-
sche used the hieroglyph not only as a fulcrum for orientalist fantasy but also
as a critique of such a figuration. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York:
Pantheon, 1978), 84–87; and Martin Bernal, ‘‘Black Athena: Hostilities to
Egypt in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward
a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1993), 47–63.
67 Young, Colonial Desire, 124–30.
68 Nott and Gliddon quoted in Young, Colonial Desire, 128, 129.
69 The Latin, genus, has a variety of meanings, including stock, descent, origin,
offspring, nationality, race, nation, and generation. It indicates high or noble
birth, age, or type. In biology it refers to an order of living creatures (e.g.,
humankind), or to a group of inanimate ones of similar variety. The fact that
genus means both race and nation is of interest as this is precisely the confla-
tion that grounds racial nationalism: the Irish (like the Italians) are a genus,
a race characterized by a shared national origin.
70 See David Croly, George Wakeman, and E. C. Howells, Miscegenation: The
Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and
Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864), quote 16. All further citations
will be made parenthetically in the text. On the history of the pamphlet see
Sidney Kaplan, ‘‘The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864’’ [1949], re-
printed in Interracialism, ed. Sollors, 219–65. Croly and his colleagues crafted
not only their signal term but a lexicon of related nonce words including
‘‘miscegen,’’ ‘‘miscegenate,’’ ‘‘miscegenetic,’’ ‘‘melaleukation,’’ ‘‘melaleukon,’’
and ‘‘melaleuketic’’—the last three of which are derived from the same Greek
root (melas) that Nietzsche invokes in the course of examining the racial
coding of morality.
71 On the pamphlet’s reception on both sides of the Atlantic, see Kaplan, ‘‘The
Miscegenation Pamphlet and the Election of 1864,’’ 253. Although there is no
way to know whether Nietzsche read this pamphlet, his library contained a
number of the volumes on biology, cultural, and race on which the authors of
the pamphlet drew. These include titles by Walter Bagehot, Francis Galton,
John Lubbock, and Edward Tylor. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche
mentions Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Henry Huxley, 21,
27, and 79. On the contents of Nietzsche’s library and his views on the im-
pure origins of ancient civilization, see Hubert Cancik, ‘‘ ‘Mongols, Semites
and the Pure-Bred Greeks’: Nietzsche’s Handling of the Racial Doctrines of
his Time,’’ in Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, ed. Golomb, 55–75.
72 One rabid proslavery journalist, John H. Van Evrie, made this same point by
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 263
taking issue with the pamphlet’s supposedly monogenecist argument and in-
sisting upon the existence of superior and inferior races. Van Evrie coined the
term ‘‘subgenation’’ to describe the naturalness of this hierarchical state of af-
fairs: ‘‘Subgenation,’’ from sub, lower, and genus, race is defined as ‘‘the natu-
ral or normal relation of an inferior to a superior race.’’ A ‘‘Subgen’’ is a mem-
ber of the inferior race ‘‘placed in their natural position.’’ Accordingly, great
American men—including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, Adams,
and Hamilton—are progeny ‘‘of a society based on Negro subgenation.’’
John H. Van Evrie, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the
Race; An Answer to ‘Miscegenation’ (New York: J. Bradburn, 1864), quotes
34. Contra Croly et al., but in support of their true agenda, Van Evrie argues
that the success of American democracy depends upon continued subgena-
tion, rather than miscegenation.
73 Jacobson makes this useful distinction in Whiteness of a Different Color, 10.
2. Writing Feminist Genealogy

1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Auto-
biography, intro. Ann J. Lane (1935; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1963), 8.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans.
Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (1887; New York: Vintage, 1967), 15.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 2.
4 See Susan S. Lanser, ‘‘Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the
Politics of Color in America,’’ Feminist Studies 15.3 (1989): 415–41; Mariana
Valverde, ‘‘When the Mother of the Race Is Free’: Race, Reproduction,
and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism,’’ in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in
Women’s History, ed. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1992), 3–26; Gail Bederman, ‘‘ ‘Not to Sex—But to
Race!’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Civilized Anglo-Saxon Womanhood, and
the Return of the Primitive Rapist,’’ in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural
History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1995), 121–69; Bernice L. Hausman, ‘‘Sex before
Gender: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Evolutionary Paradigm of Utopia,’’
Feminist Studies 24.3 (1998): 489–510; Louise Newman, ‘‘Eliminating Sex
Distinction from Civilization: The Feminist Theories of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge,’’ in White Women’s Rights: The
Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 132–57; Kristin Carter-Sanborn, ‘‘Restraining Order: The
Imperialist Anti-violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,’’ Arizona Quarterly
56.2 (2000): 1–36. I am especially indebted to Ding Naifei and Amie Parry,
who examine the celebration of Gilman’s novel Herland by the Taiwanese
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
264 Notes
women’s movement. Their groundbreaking work cautions against the adop-

tion of Gilman as a ‘‘foremother,’’ arguing that Herland’s modernity may
be read as an essentially ‘‘fascistic undertaking’’ that in the Taiwanese con-
text has been put to nationalist ends. See Amie Parry, ‘‘Penetrating Herland’’
(paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Associa-
tion, Seattle, 1998); an earlier version of this paper appeared as ‘‘From Her-
land to Queerland: The Homoerotic Longings of a Feminist Utopia,’’ trans.
Chen Ting, Working Papers in Gender and Sexuality Studies 3–4 (Special Issue:
Queer Politics and Queer Theory). Ding Naifei, ‘‘A Land Where Cats Do
Not Sing’’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies
Association, Seattle, 1998); trans. Liu Jen-Peng, Working Papers in Gender
and Sexuality Studies 3–4. I thank them for generously sharing their work
with me.
5 On the imbrication of sex and gender systems and the pitfalls of conflation
or analogy, see Gail Rubin, ‘‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political
Economy’ of Sex,’’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter
(New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 157–210; ‘‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a
Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,’’ in The Gay and Lesbian Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aiana Barale, and David Halperin (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 3–44; Judith Butler, ‘‘Against Proper Objects’’ Dif-
ferences 6.2–3 (1994): 1–24; and Miranda Joseph, ‘‘Analogy and Complicity:
Women’s Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism,’’ in Women’s Studies
on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2002), 267–92, and Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2002), chapter 5, especially 157–58.
6 Gilman’s book-length nonfiction manuscripts first appeared in The Forerun-
ner. For further bibliographic information see Gary Scharnhorst, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, a Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985). Ex-
plaining her commitment to this project, Gilman wrote: ‘‘as time passed there
was less and less market for what I had to say, more and more of my stuff
was declined. Think I must and write I must, the manuscripts accumulated
far faster than I could sell them, some of the best, almost all—and finally I
announced: ‘If the editors and publishers will not bring out my work, I will!’
And I did’’ (Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 304).
7 On the reception of Gilman’s work, see Joanne Karpinski, ed., Critical Essays
on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 1, 39, and 70;
quote 56.
8 Gale expressed these thoughts in the posthumous preface to The Living of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (xxvii); she is the person whom Gilman originally
asked to write her biography.
9 Gilman’s autobiography sold 808 copies and though reviewed was not criti-
cally assessed. It did not reappear until thirty years later.
10 Gilman, quoted in Ann J. Lane’s introduction to Herland: A Lost Feminist
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 265
Utopia (New York: Pantheon, 1979), ix. The novel was first serialized in The
Forerunner (1915); all further references are to the Pantheon edition.
11 See Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon, 1990), quotes 353. Also see Mary A.
Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 6–8; and Larry Ceplair, ed.,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Non-Fiction Reader (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 5.
12 Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1, 2.
13 Critics disagree over whether Gilman was, strictly speaking, Darwinian.
Bederman and Newman suggest the influence of American popularizers of
Darwin, especially Lester Frank Ward; Hausman argues that Gilman blended
Darwin with Spencer; Valverde suggests that most Anglo-American femi-
nists explicitly reworked Darwin; and Mark Pittenger argues that Gilman
combined social and biological evolution in a unique blend of ‘‘Lamarck-
ian feminism.’’ See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 126–28; Newman,
White Women’s Rights, 142–44; Hausman, ‘‘Sex before Gender,’’ 493, 498–
500; Valverde, ‘‘When the Mother of the Race Is Free,’’ 7–15; and Pittenger,
American Evolutionists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 72.
14 Gilman’s distinction between new and old immigrants coincides with the ide-
ology of restrictionism. Restrictionists advocated limited immigration of par-
ticular national groups to the United States. As John Higham explains, ‘‘The
major theoretical effort of restrictionists in the twentieth century consisted
precisely in . . . transformation of relative cultural differences into an absolute
line of cleavage, which would redeem the Northwestern Europeans from the
charges once leveled at them and explain the present danger of immigration in
terms of the change in its sources.’’ See Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants
in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 44.
15 As one seventeenth-century source explains, ‘‘Robert, brother to Richard III
was never married; but being charmed with the graceful mien of a young
woman named Arlotta (whence ’tis said cam the word harlot) a skinner’s
daughter . . . took her for his mistress and by her had this William.’’ See Paul
Sieveking, ed., The British Biographical Archive, 1601–1929 (London: K. G.
Saur, 1984), microfiche 1170; and The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 21
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 293–301.
16 Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 (emphasis added).
17 Shortly after the entrance of the United States into World War I, African
Americans, poor whites from the rural South, Mexicans, and French Cana-
dians began to fill urban industrial jobs that had been previously occupied by
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and East Asia, whose arrival
had been severely curtailed by restrictive immigration legislation (only 23,068
people entered the country in 1933 and 28,470 in 1934, the year Gilman com-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
266 Notes
pleted her autobiography). A decade later, the contraction of the economy

that accompanied the onset of the depression led to an astronomical rise in
unemployment and a parallel (if not causally related) rise in discrimination
against the recently transfigured labor force. Although few people emigrated
to the United States in the late twenties and early thirties (in 1930 President
Hoover instructed consulates to deny visas to people who might become un-
employed candidates for public relief) intense fear about internal migration
was pervasive. See Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers, Ethnic Ameri-
cans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation (New York: Dodd, Mead,
1975), 73; Ronald Takaki, ed., A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural
America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); Higham, Send These to Me, 57–60; and
Stephen Brier et al., eds., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s
Economy (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 2:317–34.
18 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘‘My Ancestors,’’ The Forerunner 4 (1913), quotes
73, 74.
19 The first restrictive immigration legislation enacted by Congress (1875)
banned prostitutes and convicts from entering the country. The Chinese Ex-
clusion Act (1882), the first legislation proscribing the entrance of a nationally
defined group, was followed by additional restrictions based on national ori-
gin. In 1924, for example, the Johnson-Reed Act set rigid quotas based on
statistics gathered from the 1890 census. A commission created by the act
concluded that there were 94.8 million whites in the population; and that
of these, 41.3 million were of ‘‘colonial stock’’ and 53.5 million of ‘‘post-
colonial’’ stock. The ‘‘Western Hemisphere’’ was excluded from all immigra-
tion acts enacted prior to 1965, when the United States began to actively cur-
tail immigration from Mexico, Central and South America, and Canada. The
entrance of the United States into war in 1917 coincided with a surge in nativ-
ist and restrictionist fervor. The Ku Klux Klan, which claimed over 4 million
members at its height, was the largest nativist organization of the period. See
Dinnerstein and Reimers, Ethnic Americans; Ronald Takaki, ed., From a Dif-
ferent Shore: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987); Stephen Steinburg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity,
and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981); Oscar Handlin, ed., Immi-
gration as a Factor in American History (Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1959); and John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860–1925, 2d. ed. (New York: Athenaeum, 1967).
20 ‘‘Foreign immigration into this country,’’ Walker wrote, amounts ‘‘not to a
re-enforcement of our population, but to a replacement of native by foreign
stock. . . . [N]o one surely can be enough of an optimist to contemplate with-
out dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores.’’
See Francis Amasa Walker, ‘‘Immigration and Degradation,’’ The Forum 11
(1891): 642–43. Walker based his analysis on that of E. A. Ross; both argued
that natives were unwilling to bring children into the world to compete with
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 267
immigrants; consequently native laborers were emasculated in the factory and

the bedroom. See also Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in
America (New York: Oxford, 1963), 168–72.
21 Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Con-
trol in America (New York: Grossman, 1976), 136–58.
22 E. A. Ross was the nephew of Lester Frank Ward, the prominent sociolo-
gist. Gilman met Ross through Ward and maintained contact with both men
throughout her life. Ross included Gilman in a chapter of his autobiography
entitled ‘‘Celebrities I Have Known’’; and Gilman wrote that Ward was ‘‘quite
the greatest man I have ever known. He was an outstanding leader in Soci-
ology . . . and his Gynaecocentric Theory is the greatest single contribution to
the world’s thought since Evolution.’’ Gilman, The Living, 187. Here Gilman
refers to Ward, ‘‘Our Better Halves,’’ Forum 6 (1888): 266–75.
23 E. A. Ross, ‘‘The Causes of Race Superiority,’’ Annals of the American Acad-
emy of Political and Social Science 18–23 (1901): 67–89, quotes 72, 84, 85, 86,
87, 88. The discourse of racial degeneration, of which ‘‘race suicide’’ forms a
part, reserves a special place for East Asians in that Chinese and Japanese are
specifically identified as belonging to overly evolved or decadent civilizations
long past their prime. Gilman follows Ross in viewing Chinese as especially
degenerate. As Lanser argues, the color yellow in ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’
symbolizes Gilman’s anxiety about ‘‘Yellow Peril.’’ See Valverde, ‘‘When the
Mother of the Race Is Free,’’ 14; and Lanser, ‘‘Feminist Criticism,’’ 425–27.
24 Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur answers his own query as follows: America is
a place where ‘‘individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men’’;
an American is a ‘‘new man’’ containing that ‘‘strange mixture of blood that
you will find in no other country.’’ See Letters from an American Farmer (1782;
London: Penguin, 1986), 69–70.
25 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘‘Is America Too Hospitable?’’ The Forum 70
(1923): 1983–89, reprinted in Ceplair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 288–94,
quotes 289, 290.
26 Gilman specifies that European ‘‘mongrelization’’ is pronounced among
peoples from the Levant, and singles out Poles as one of the least assimilable
of all groups. Elsewhere she focuses on the ‘‘mongrel’’ Irish and invokes Jews
as a ‘‘race’’ eager to mix adversely with other races.
27 Werner Sollors discusses Kallen’s and Zangwill’s development of the trope
of the ‘‘melting pot’’ in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 66–101.
28 Gilman, ‘‘Is America Too Hospitable?’’ 291. Gilman often relies upon ex-
amples drawn from the animal kingdom. Invoking ‘‘Genus canis,’’ she pro-
ceeds by analogy: ‘‘If dogs are left to themselves, in some canine asylum or
‘melting pot,’ they are cheerfully promiscuous, but do not produce a super-
dog. On the contrary they tend to revert to the ‘yaller dog,’ the jackal type so
far behind them’’ (291).
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
268 Notes
29 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘‘A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,’’ American

Journal of Sociology 14 (1908): 78.
30 Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (1785; New York: Library
of America, 1984), quotes 264, 270. For discussion of the contradictions that
pervade Jefferson’s colonization scheme, see David Kazanjian, The Colonizing
Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 89–138.
31 Gilman, ‘‘A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,’’ 83.
32 Gilman proposes that blacks become a reserve army of labor capable of per-
forming the work done by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe
and Asia—especially Chinese and Japanese. The mobilization of an ‘‘enlisted’’
black labor force therefore renders importation of foreign labor unnecessary.
33 Gilman, ‘‘Immigration, Importation and Our Fathers,’’ The Forerunner 5
(1914): 117–19, all quotes 118 (emphasis added).
34 Susan Lanser’s work on ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ and Kristin Carter San-
born’s treatment of Herland stand out as exceptions to this general point.
35 Ann J. Lane, ‘‘The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’’ in The Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1980), ix–xlii. Lane ex-
presses similar views in the introduction to her 1990 biography: Gilman’s
‘‘racist, anti-Semitic, and ethnocentric ideas . . . must reside primarily in the
psychological realm, because the racist and nativist views that she held did
not fit with the vision she espoused of radical social and political transforma-
tion.’’ Lane, To Herland and Beyond, 255.
36 Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill, eds., With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Her-
land by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 6. Ourland
was first serialized in The Forerunner in 1916.
37 Herland adheres to established criteria for feminist utopian literature by con-
trasting the present with an idealized society, regarding patriarchy as the
cause of social ills, and casting women as the principal arbiters of their re-
productive function. See Libby Falk Jones, ‘‘Gilman, Bradley, Piercy, and the
Evolving Rhetoric of Feminist Utopia,’’ in Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative,
ed. Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1990), 116.
38 The first quote is from Laura E. Donaldson, ‘‘The Eve of De-struction: Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Re-creation of Paradise,’’ Women’s
Studies 16 (1989): 379. Elizabeth Keyser argues that Herland offers a ‘‘blue-
print’’ for contemporary feminism in ‘‘Looking Backward: From Herland to
Gulliver’s Travels,’’ Studies in American Fiction 11.1 (1983): 44. The last quote
is from E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular
Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 131.
39 See among others, Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1989); Dorothy Berkson, ‘‘ ‘So We All Became Mothers’:
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the New World of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 269
Feminist Culture,’’ in Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, 100–115; Val Gough,

‘‘Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland,’’ in Anticipations:
Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1995), 195–215; Amanda Graham, ‘‘Herland: De-
finitive Ecofeminist Fiction?’’ in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fic-
tion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1998), 115–28; Bridget Bennett, ‘‘Pockets of Resis-
tance: Some Notes towards an Exploration of Gender and Genre Boundaries
in Herland,’’ in A Very Different Story, ed. Gough and Rudd, 38–53; Lou-Ann
Matossian, ‘‘A Woman-Made Language: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her-
land,’’ Women and Language 10:2 (1987): 16–20; and Laura E. Donaldson,
‘‘The Eve of De-struction.’’ In writing Herland Gilman anticipates feminist
sci-fi greats such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Suzy McKee Charnas, Ursula K.
Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Sally Gearhart, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, and
Octavia Butler. See Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Femi-
nism and Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1988), 53.
40 Gough, ‘‘Lesbians and Virgins,’’ quotes 196, 208, and 197. Gough notes that
‘‘white, middle-class lesbian feminism of the late 1970s’’ was racist and clas-
sist, but does not extend this in relation to Gilman.
41 The first quote is from Gough, ‘‘Lesbians and Virgins,’’ 206; the second from
Bennett, ‘‘Pockets of Resistance,’’ 38–53.
42 The act of anthropologization resonated for turn-of-the-century feminists. As
Bederman has demonstrated, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition was a
battleground for opposing sides in the debate over the relative degree of civili-
zation achieved by women. Rather than being situated inside the ‘‘civilized’’
section of the fair (entitled the ‘‘White City’’), the Woman’s Building was
placed across from the exit to the ‘‘uncivilized’’ section of the fair (the ‘‘Mid-
way’’), where native peoples and exotic artifacts were displayed. See Beder-
man, Manliness and Civilization, 33–40. Apparently aware of the struggle over
the placement of the women’s exhibit, Gilman crafts Herland as equal to the
‘‘White City’’ of technology, science, and civilization; she has one of the male
intruders remark upon entry that Herland is ‘‘like an Exposition . . . too pretty
to be true’’ (19).
43 The first two quotes are from Elizabeth Keyser, ‘‘Looking Backward,’’ 32–
34; the third is from Christopher Wilson, ‘‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Steady
Burghers: The Terrain of Herland,’’ Women’s Studies 12 (1986): 271, 283.
44 Sandra Gilbert, ‘‘Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness’’; and Susan Gubar,
‘‘She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy,’’ in Coordinates: Placing Science Fic-
tion and Fantasy, ed. George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 124–38, 138–58.
45 These are the monstrous and/or angelic visions of femininity that Gilbert
and Gubar examine in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979).
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
270 Notes
46 Gubar, ‘‘She in Herland,’’ 140.

47 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak analyzes this configuration in Gilbert and
Gubar’s analysis of Jane Eyre in ‘‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Im-
perialism,’’ in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 262–80. My reading is indebted
to hers.
48 Gubar, ‘‘She in Herland,’’ 149.
49 Gilman discusses the suffragists’ struggle to make Nevada into a ‘‘white’’
state on ‘‘the impressive map issued by the women suffragists.’’ In the suffrag-
ists’ color-coded imaginary, black states were those that atavistically resisted
the cause. This cartography evinces the feminist imperialism discussed above.
See ‘‘Working to Make Black into White,’’ The Forerunner 5 (February 1914):
33–34.
50 Wilson, ‘‘Steady Burghers,’’ 271.
51 On racism, imperialism, colonialism, and feminist complicity, see Anna
Davin, ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’’ History Workshop 5 (1978): 9–65;
Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981);
Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Vron Ware, Be-
yond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992);
Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Amy Kaplan,
‘‘Manifest Domesticity,’’ American Literature 70.3 (1998): 581–606.
52 Fifteen dissertations on Gilman have been written in the last decade. There
are two new scholarly editions of Women and Economics: Amy Aronson and
Michael Kimmel, eds., Women and Economics (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1998); and a reprint with intro. by Sheryl Meyering, Women
and Economics (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998). Anthologies, critical studies,
and casebooks include Jill Rudd and Val Gough, eds., A Very Different Story,
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press,1999); Sheryl Meyering, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman
and Her Work (Ann Arbor: umi Research Press, 1989); Carol Farley Kessler,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia with Selected Writings
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Catherine Golden, ed., The Cap-
tive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ (New York: Feminist
Press, 1992); and Karpinski, ed., Critical Essays. Gilman’s novels The Crux,
Mag-Marjorie, Won Over, Benigna Machiavelli, Unpunished, With Her in Our-
land, and Moving the Mountain have all been recently republished. Gilman’s
diaries, love letters, poetry, and nonfiction have been anthologized for the
first time; see Denise D. Knight, ed., The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), The Diaries of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, vols. 1 and 2 (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1994), and The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark:
University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Press, 1996);
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 271
Mary Hill, ed., Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, 1897–1900 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995); and
Ceplair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The list of journal articles is equally sub-
stantial.
53 Kimmel and Aronson, introduction to Women and Economics, viii. Kimmel
and Aronson situate themselves as Carl Degler’s inheritors; his 1968 edi-
tion of Women and Economics also presented budding feminists with a fore-
mother. See Degler’s introduction to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and
Economics, ed. Carl Degler (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
54 Kimmel and Aronson, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Women and Economics, lxix.
55 See Rudd and Gough, Optimist Reformer, quotes xii; and Lisa Ganobcsik-
Williams, ‘‘The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolutionary
Perspective on Race, Ethnicity, and Class,’’ in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Opti-
mist Reformer, ed. Rudd and Gough, 16–44. Ganobcsik-Williams’s contribu-
tion stands out in the context of the volume but is nonetheless familiar. In it
she regards racism and nationalism as unfortunate adjuncts of Gilman’s ‘‘total
commitment to the idea of human progress,’’ side effects of a noble social up-
lift project (16–17). Moreover, she views Gilman’s nationalism and nativism
as post-hoc rationalizations of another set of compensatory, psychological
concerns (22).
56 Lane, ‘‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Rights of Women: Her Legacy for
the 1990s,’’ in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, ed. Rudd and
Gough, 4, 5, 6.
57 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘‘Fecundate! Discriminate!: Charlotte Per-
kins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity,’’ in Optimist Reformer, ed.
Rudd and Gough, 215.
58 Minna Doskow, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels (Cranbury,
N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 79.
59 Gilman, With Her in Ourland, 109, 143.
60 Gilman prefigures this novel’s argument in an earlier essay in which she advo-
cates a union of mothers as a check to the advance of ‘‘the man-made world.’’
Here she explicitly crafts a strategy for white women’s reproduction of the
globe’s citizenry. As she explains on behalf of the New Mothers: ‘‘We are tired
of men’s wars. We are tired of men’s quarrels. We are tired of men’s competi-
tion. We are tired of men’s crimes and vices and the disease they bring upon
us. . . . The pressure of population shall cease. We will marry only clean men,
fit to be fathers. . . . We will breed a better stock on earth by proper selection—
that is a mother’s duty! . . . We will work together, the women of the race, for
a higher human type. . . . We will be the New Mothers of a New World.’’ Not
all women are included in Gilman’s ‘‘We,’’ as it is only white women who can
reproduce ‘‘purified’’ stock, imperialistically imposing a ‘‘pure’’ genealogy on
the globe. See ‘‘The New Mothers of a New World,’’ The Forerunner 4 (June
1913), quote 149.
61 Gough’s article on Moving the Mountain parenthetically notes the novel’s ‘‘po-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
272 Notes
litically incorrect messages’’ in a similar fashion. See Val Gough, ‘‘ ‘In the
Twinkling of an Eye’: Gilman’s Utopian Imagination,’’ in A Very Different
Story, ed. Rudd and Gough, 129–43.
62 See Deegan and Hill, introduction to With Her in Ourland, quotes 5, 9, 6, 30,
14, 46.
63 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 88.
64 When scholars mention Herlandian sexuality, as does Val Gough, it is invari-
ably treated as a prototype of seventies-style ‘‘woman culture’’—as Gough
concedes, it is lesbianism without sex, a form of woman-centered hetero-
sexual culture. Similarly, Bridget Bennett observes: Herland is ‘‘a lesbian
pocket of women identified women who live and work together harmoni-
ously’’ and who are part of a ‘‘lesbian continuum.’’ See Gough, ‘‘Lesbians and
Virgins,’’ 197; and Bennett, ‘‘Pockets of Resistance,’’ 50. Notably, Bennett re-
gards her article as an intervention into the 1995 conference on Gilman at
Liverpool University, U.K., where she found herself confronted by ‘‘consider-
able uneasiness about discussing Gilman’s sexuality’’ (50).
65 On sexualization as speciation and/or ethnocization see Siobhan Somerville,
‘‘Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,’’ in Queering
the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 15–38; Jennifer Terry, ‘‘The
United States of Perversion,’’ in An American Obsession: Science, Medicine,
and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 74–119; and Rubin, ‘‘Thinking Sex,’’ 16. Among others, Karen Lystra,
Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), contests the ‘‘passion-
lessness’’ paradigm.
66 Gilman, Women and Economics, ed. Degler, 339 (emphasis added).
67 Gilman, ‘‘Immigration, Importation and Our Fathers,’’ 118.
68 On the sexuality of ‘‘New Women’’ see Terry, ‘‘United States of Perversion,’’
97–100.
69 Parry, ‘‘Penetrating Herland,’’ 9.
70 See Adolf Loos, ‘‘Ornament and Crime’’ [1908], in Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Mod-
ern Architecture, ed. Lüdwig Münz and Gustav Künstler (New York: Praeger,
1966), 226–31; Thorstein Veblen, ‘‘The Economic Theory of Women’s Dress,’’
Popular Science Monthly 46 (1894): 198–205, and ‘‘The Barbarian Status of
Women,’’ American Journal of Sociology 4 (1899): 503–14; and chapter 4,
157–58.
71 Ding Naifei, ‘‘A Land Where Cats Do Not Sing,’’ 12.
72 Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘‘Queer Nationality,’’ in The Queen
of America goes to Washington City, ed. Lauren Berlant (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1997), 202. Originally printed in Michael Warner, ed., Fear
of a Queer Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 193–
229.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 273
73 Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvi.

74 My use of the term draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s important formulations
in ‘‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color,’’ in Race Critical Theory, ed. Crenshaw et al. (New
York: New Press, 1995), 357–83.
75 Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, ‘‘Sex in Public,’’ Critical Inquiry 24.2
(1998): 550.
76 Berlant and Warner, ‘‘Sex in Public,’’ 554.
77 Janet R. Jakobsen, ‘‘Queer Is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of
Resistance,’’ GLQ 4.4 (1998): 520.
78 From one perspective Herland is the antithesis of the activist organization
Queer Nation. As Berlant and Freeman argue, ‘‘Queer Nation has taken up
the project of coordinating a new nationality’’ that involves inventing ‘‘collec-
tive rituals of resistance, mass cultural spectacles, an organization, and even
a lexicon to achieve these ends’’ (148). In analyzing Queer Nation’s political
strategies, they hope to extend ‘‘queer nation’s contestation of existing cul-
tural spaces’’ and to ‘‘reopen the question of nationalism’s value as an infidel
model of transgression and resistance’’ (149). As they explain, ‘‘Queer cul-
ture’s consent to national normativity must itself be made more provisional’’
(165). And yet, as Gayatri Gopinath correctly observes, Berlant and Freeman
neglect the troubled relationship of queers of color ‘‘to the disciplinary and
regulatory mechanisms of the . . . nation’’ and thus the ‘‘limitations of any
nationalist project, however transgressive’’ (121). See Berlant and Freeman,
‘‘Queer Nationality,’’ in The Queen of America goes to Washington City, 145–
73; and Gayatri Gopinath, ‘‘Funny Boys and Girls: Notes on a Queer South
Asian Planet,’’ in Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Les-
bian Experience, ed. Russell Leong (New York: Routledge, 1996), 119–27.
3. Engels’s Originary Ruse

1 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
intro. Michèle Barrett (1884; London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 35. I thank
Scott Baker for assistance in checking the translations used throughout this
chapter. Also see Friedrich Engels, ‘‘Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateig-
entums und des Staats. 4. Auflage,’’ in Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 29
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1990), 125–271. All further references to the English
edition will be made parenthetically in the text. Origin, which was based on
Marx’s account of Morgan’s work as recorded in notebooks compiled be-
tween 1880 and 1881, was written in a remarkably short period of time (be-
tween March and May). See The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, tran-
scribed, ed., and intro. L. Krader (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972).
On the differences between Marx’s Notebooks and Origin, see Maurice Bloch,
Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983), 43–62.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
274 Notes
2 This formulation is indebted to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who frequently

talks about doing transformative political work ‘‘from within the pores of
feminism.’’
3 See Rosalind Coward, ‘‘The Woman Question and the Early Marxist Left,’’
in Patriarchal Precedents (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 163–87;
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Poli-
tics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman,
1981); August Bebel, Woman under Socialism, trans. Daniel de Leon (1904;
New York: Source Book Press, 1970); Alexandra Kollentai, Selected Writings,
trans. Alix Holt (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1977); Emma Goldman,
Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969); Clara Zetkin, Selected
Writings, ed. Philip Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1984).
4 Lenin, Collected Works, 30:473, also quoted in Michèle Barrett’s introduction
to Origin, 13.
5 I use ‘‘Marxist’’ and ‘‘socialist’’ feminism interchangeably. By contrast, Donna
Landry and Gerald MacLean argue that socialist feminism is an Americanized
version of Marxist feminism, which is in turn a British intellectual and po-
litical formation. See Landry and MacLean, Materialist Feminisms (London:
Blackwell, 1993), 19–41.
6 See Veronica Beechey, Unequal Work (London: Verso, 1987), quote 53. On
the operationalization of Engels in China, see Delia Davin, ‘‘Engels and the
Making of Chinese Family Policy,’’ in Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays,
ed. Janet Sayers et al. (London: Tavistock, 1987), 145–63; on the codification
of Engels in the Soviet Union and former Soviet bloc, see Maxine Molyneux,
‘‘Socialist Societies Old and New: Progress towards Woman’s Emancipation,’’
Feminist Review, no. 8 (summer 1981): 3–28.
7 Rayna Rapp, ‘‘Gender and Class: An Archaeology of Knowledge Concern-
ing the Origin of the State,’’ Dialectical Anthropology 2.4 (1977): 309–16,
quote 309.
8 On Origin’s relation to earlier texts, see Zillah Eisenstein, ‘‘Developing a
Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism,’’ in Capitalist Patri-
archy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Eisenstein (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1979), 5–40.
9 See Eleanor Burke Leacock, introduction to The Origin of the Family, Pri-
vate Property, and the State in Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan
(New York: International Publishers, 1972); the essays collected in Toward
an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Re-
view Press, 1975), especially Gayle Rubin, ‘‘The Traffic in Women: Notes
on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,’’ 157–210, Karen Sacks, ‘‘Engels Revis-
ited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property,’’ 211–
34, and Judith K. Brown, ‘‘Iroquois Women: An Ethnohistoric Note,’’ 235–
51; Olivia Harris and Kate Young, ‘‘Engendered Structures: Some Problems
in the Analysis of Reproduction,’’ in The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist Soci-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 275
eties, ed. Joel Kahn and Joseph R. Llobera (London: Macmillan Press, 1981),
109–45; and Sylvia J. Yanagisako and Jane F. Collier, ‘‘The Mode of Repro-
duction in Anthropology,’’ in Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference, ed.
Deborah L. Rhode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 131–41.
10 Among a group of influential works that either develop or move beyond the
‘‘dual systems approach,’’ see Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case
for Socialist Feminism; Maxine Molyneux, ‘‘Beyond the Domestic Labour De-
bate,’’ New Left Review, no. 116 (July–August 1979): 3–28; Michèle Bar-
rett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (Lon-
don: Verso, 1980 [fifth impression 1985]); Lydia Sargent, ed., The Unhappy
Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy (Lon-
don: Pluto Press, 1981) [originally published as Women and Revolution], espe-
cially Heidi Hartmann, ‘‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Toward a More Progressive Union,’’ 1–41, and Iris Young’s, ‘‘Beyond the Un-
happy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory,’’ 43–69; Sayers et al.,
Engels Revisited; Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist
Historical Materialism (New York: Longman, 1983); Lise Vogel, Marxism and
the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1983); Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materi-
alist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, trans. D. Leonard (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Veronica Beechey, Unequal Work (London:
Verso, 1987); and the array of articles that appeared in Socialist Review, Femi-
nist Review, Feminist Studies, and Signs throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
11 Gloria Josephs, ‘‘The Incompatible Ménage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism, and
Racism,’’ in The Unhappy Marriage, ed. Sargent, 91–107, quote 92. All further
references will be made parenthetically.
12 The Collective began meeting in 1974 and penned their statement in 1977; it
was included for publication in Capitalist Patriarchy in 1979. It has been re-
printed in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New
York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983), in Cherríe Moraga and
Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, Mass.: Perse-
phone Press, 1981), and in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara
Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us
Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982),
among others.
13 See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981);
Smith, Home Girls; Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back;
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World
Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991); Swasti Mitter, Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Econ-
omy (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation
on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (London: Zed
Press, 1986); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1987), especially part 3, and ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
276 Notes
and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 171–216.
14 Michèle Barrett, ‘‘Introduction to the 1988 Edition,’’ Women’s Oppression
Today: The Marxist Feminist Encounter (London: Verso, 1988), vii–xxxvi,
quote xxiv.
15 Landry and MacLean suggest that Barrett’s transformation be interpreted as a
response to a fundamental shift in Western philosophy. While Barrett’s project
was rerouted by continental theory, viewing this as the principal catalyst of
change downplays the impact of work by women of color on the trajectory
of Marxist and socialist feminism and tends to foreclose analysis of the em-
brace of poststructuralism as itself an engagement with race. See Landry and
MacLean, Materialist Feminism, 6–7.
16 See Barrett and McIntosh, ‘‘Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminist Theory,’’
Feminist Review, no. 20 (June 1985): 23–47. Barrett cites this work in the fore-
word (1985) added to the 1980 edition of Women’s Oppression, there identify-
ing it as an attempt to rectify past wrongs.
17 Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1991).
18 For examples of materialist feminism see, among others, Rosemary Hen-
nessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993); Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire,
and Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1996); Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff, Bringing It All
Back Home: Class, Gender, and Power in the Modern Household (London: Pluto
Press, 1994); Barrett, The Politics of Truth; and Landry and MacLean, Materi-
alist Feminisms. Donna Haraway’s ‘‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’’ constitutes the
apogee of the linguistic turn within Marxist feminism. Haraway celebrates
the cyborg, the ‘‘illegitimate offspring’’ of ‘‘patriarchal capitalism,’’ as ‘‘a so-
cialist feminist invention,’’ who often appears as ‘‘a woman of color.’’ Though
this last formulation has been criticized, it instructively reveals the pervasive
awareness within socialist feminism of the need to clear space for consider-
ations of race. See Donna Haraway, ‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Tech-
nology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’’ Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–
107; and Paula M. L. Moya, ‘‘Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of
Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism,’’ in Feminist Genealogies,
Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra
Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 125–50, especially 128–35.
19 Though Ebert claims the title ‘‘materialist feminist’’ (and is thus listed in the
previous note), it is useful to differentiate the present approach from hers
since she too calls for a return to Marx and Engels. Ebert derides ‘‘ludic femi-
nism’’ for becoming preoccupied with language to the neglect of material
exploitation. She instead favors ‘‘new red feminism,’’ which refuses discur-
sive reductionism and idealism, and focuses on objective historical realities
that precede linguistic determination. While I too advocate a return to Marx
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 277
and Engels, I make frequent recourse to the poststructuralist and feminist

theorists whom Ebert condemns. Following Landry and MacLean I am sug-
gesting that ‘‘a more adequately materialist feminist reading of the texts of
Marx than has usually been attempted will require reading them as texts.’’
See Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After; and Landry and MacLean, Materialist
Feminisms, 65.
20 Morgan’s first work on kinship was a comparative study of the systematic
ordering of various Indian societies. First published as Systems of Consan-
guinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870), this work was later incorpo-
rated into Ancient Society (1877). All further references are to Ancient Society:
Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism
to Civilization, foreword by Elisabeth Tooker (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1985). On Morgan’s contribution to the intellectual work of the Bu-
reau of American Ethnology, see Curtis M. Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the
American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), chapter 5; on Morgan’s
development of kinship studies, see Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Mor-
gan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987); on the intersection of Morgan’s scholarly and political activities, see
Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880 (Norman: Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 1986), chapter 6; on Morgan’s collaboration with
Parker, see Scott Michaelsen, ‘‘Ely S. Parker and Amerindian Voices in Eth-
nography’’ American Literary History 8.4 (1996): 615–38.
21 See Linda Nicholson, ‘‘Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the
Economic,’’ in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cor-
nell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 16–30; and Gender
and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986).
22 Throughout I follow Morgan’s use of ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘savage,’’ and ‘‘barbarian.’’
As Helen Carr notes, in popular nineteenth-century usage the preferred term
was ‘‘savage,’’ as it best connoted racial otherness. By contrast, ‘‘primitive’’
and ‘‘barbarian’’ were more often used as geographical and temporal markers.
See Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the
Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789–1936 (New York:
New York University Press, 1996), 2.
23 On Marx’s and Engels’s views on the national question, see Ian Cummins,
Marx, Engels, and National Movements (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980);
and Cedric Robinson, ‘‘Socialist Theory and Nationalism,’’ in Black Marx-
ism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983),
60–91. Robinson argues that Marx and Engels were committed to the de-
mocratization of Germany through reunification and that such a project en-
tailed a quasi-supportive stance toward German nationalism in the period
between 1849 and Bismarck’s assumption of power in Prussia in 1862. In par-
ticular, Robinson cites Engels’s reaction to the outbreak of war in 1859. In
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
278 Notes
an anonymously published pamphlet, Po und Rhein, Engels argued that Ger-

many needed to stake its claim against Austria, territorial and symbolic, at the
Po River. In so doing, Engels expressed his belief that Germany’s nationalist
movement was a genuine movement of the people against Louis Bonaparte
and the traditions of the First French Empire. Robinson infers that Engels
viewed nationalism as an inevitable result of the logic of capitalist develop-
ment, and the nation as the product of bourgeois rule. By contrast with Marx,
who maintained contradictory views on the question, Engels was persuaded
by the need for nationalist movements and remained so after writing Origin.
24 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. and intro. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141–64, quote
144–45, and Spivak’s preface, lxxi.
25 See Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology, 10.
26 Although Engels never mentions Maine in Origin, Marx treats Maine exten-
sively in the Ethnological Notebooks. On Maine see Rosalind Coward, Patriar-
chal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul,1983),17–26, 43–45; and Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society:
Transformations of an Illusion (New York: Routledge, 1988), 17–41; and Carol
Pateman’s critique of Coward’s reading in The Sexual Contract (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988), 26–28.
27 See Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writ-
ings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1967). Adrienne Rich offers an enduring critique of Bachofen’s sen-
timentalism. See Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 86–89.
28 Engels observes that Bachofen’s use of the term ‘‘hetaerism’’ reveals his dearth
of insight into Greek sources. The Greeks invented the term to describe extra-
marital sexual intercourse, often prostitution (61). Later in Origin, Engels also
corrects Morgan’s use of the term, rendering it consonant with his own: ‘‘By
‘hetaerism’ Morgan understands the practice, coexistent with monogamous
marriage, of sexual intercourse between men and unmarried women outside
of marriage, which, as we know, flourishes in the most varied forms through-
out the whole period of civilization and develops more and more into open
prostitution. . . . Thus the heritage which group marriage has bequeathed to
civilization is double-edged. . . . [H]etaerism is as much a social institution
as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom—to the advantage of the
men’’ (97).
29 Summarizing Morgan’s divisions, Engels specifies, ‘‘Savagery—the period
in which man’s appropriation of products in their natural state predomi-
nates. . . . Barbarism—the period during which man learns to breed domes-
tic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing
the supply of natural products by human activity. Civilization—the period in
which man learns a more advanced application of work to the products of
nature, the period of industry proper and of art’’ (57).
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 279
30 As mentioned previously, kinship forms became evident to Morgan through

study of the terms used to designate degrees of relatedness. Though kin terms
are shaped by what Morgan euphemistically labels ‘‘systems of marriage,’’
they do not change as easily as these systems. The time lag is reflected in lan-
guage, such that the language of kinship indexes the history of kinship. Inso-
far as Engels works within Morgan’s framework, he adopts Morgan’s reflec-
tionist understanding of the relationship between language and reality. See
Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, 58–59. I return to this point at the
end of this chapter.
31 Engels uses the term ‘‘marriage’’ to describe various social organizations that
have nothing to do with legal contract or religion. Rather, ‘‘marriage’’ is a
euphemism for sex that allows him to omit discussion of homosexuality and
nonprocreative heterosexuality. Despite Engels’s awareness of the construct-
edness of sexual morality, his choice of the term ‘‘marriage’’ underscores the
heteronormative pull in his work.
32 Gradually, prohibitions that first emerge between colateral siblings are ex-
tended to all brothers and sisters, and eventually to group members of in-
creasingly remote degrees of kinship. As discussed in the next chapter, Freud
offers another version of this origin story in his account of the so-called pri-
mal horde and the origin of the incest taboo. On nineteenth-century theories
of the taboo on incest, see Carl Degler, ‘‘The Case of the Origin of the Incest
Taboo,’’ in In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism
in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 245–
69; and Rosalind Coward, ‘‘The Patriarchal Family in Freudian Theory,’’ in
Patriarchal Precedents, 188–220.
33 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Others (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 1. I paraphrase one of Fabian’s formulations above: ‘‘Time,’’ he
writes, ‘‘is a form through which we define the content of relations between
the Self and the Other’’ (ix).
34 On ‘‘concept metaphors’’ see Jacques Derrida, ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor
in the Text of Philosophy,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–72, especially 262–64; and my
discussion of Benedict Anderson’s and Freud’s concept metaphors in chapters
1 and 4 respectively.
35 On the competing terms that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scien-
tists used to denote ‘‘the hereditary substance inside cells,’’ see Ruth Hub-
bard, ‘‘Genes as Causes,’’ in Biopolitics, ed. Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser
(London: Zed Press, 1995), 38–39. Hubbard notes the designation ‘‘germ
plasm’’ alongside such favorites as ‘‘stirp,’’ ‘‘idioplasm,’’ ‘‘ids,’’ and Darwin’s
preferred moniker, ‘‘gemmules.’’ Evidently Wilhelm Johanssen’s 1909 term
‘‘gene’’ stuck. Also see Nathaniel C. Comfort, ‘‘Are Genes Real?’’ Natural
History (June 2001): 28–37.
36 On Morgan’s use of ideas of genealogy and the connections between ‘‘the
channels of blood’’ that connect people and the channels that link the riverine
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
280 Notes
communities of beavers that he studied in and around Marquette, Michi-

gan, see Gillian Feely-Harnik, ‘‘The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry
Morgan and the American Beaver,’’ in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship
Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2001), 54–84.
37 Such would be Althusser’s point of entry with his theory of ‘‘Ideological State
Apparatuses,’’ or isas, the most important of which is the family/school dyad.
See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideological State Apparatus,’’ in Lenin and Philosophy,
trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–88.
38 Carr, Inventing the American Primitive, 40–41.
39 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981),
passim.
40 See Carr, Inventing the American Primitive, 9, 159; Morgan, quoted in Carr,
159.
41 On the place of American Indians (southern and northern) in the German
racial imaginary, see Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family,
and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 43–45, 85–87, 90–97.
42 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); and
my discussion of Anderson in chapter 1.
43 Engels claims that a carryover of gentile constitution also characterized feudal
England and France (Origin, 193).
44 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 100.
45 This is Barrett’s term; see her introduction to Origin, 18.
46 This argument coincides with Stevens’s suggestion that the state is the form
of political society that invents the family in order to naturalize itself. See
Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 106–10. When Stevens insists that germanische Staat (state) and
germanische Stamm (tribe) both refer to the German nation, she follows Engels
in conflating kinship systems and political societies.
4. Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

1 See Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1992); and Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
2 Circumstance compelled Freud to realize the demise of Austrian liberalism
and the ideals of the Enlightenment. In 1895, on his thirty-ninth birthday, he
made a clear statement about his Jewish identity by joining the B’nai B’rith
Lodge in Vienna, where he spent every other Tuesday evening until emigrating
to England. On the context in which Freud wrote, see Peter Pulzer, The Rise of
Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 281
University Press, 1988); Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York:

Vintage Books, 1961), especially chapters 3 and 4; William O. McCagg Jr. A
History of Hapsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989); Earl A. Grollman, Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World (New York: Bloch
Publishers, 1965); Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978); H. G. Adler, The Jews in Germany: From
the Enlightenment to National Socialism (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1969); and Dennis B. Klein, Jewish Origins of the Psychoana-
lytic Movement (New York: Praeger, 1981), chapters 1 and 3. On the rela-
tionship between German nationalism and scientific thought, see Paul Wein-
dling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and
Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the
response of German Jewish scientists to anti-Semitism and racial science, see
John Maurice Efron, ‘‘Defining the Jewish Race: The Self-Perceptions and Re-
sponse of Jewish Scientists to Scientific Racism in Europe, 1882–1933’’ (Ann
Arbor: umi; Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991).
3 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or
The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, intro. Ernst Mayr
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).
4 On the social and political dissent generated by Origin, see Robert Young,
Darwin’s Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); on re-
sponses to Origin by members of Darwin’s scientific community, see David L.
Hull, Darwin and His Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
5 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro.
John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981), 404. Hereafter all references to this work will be given parenthetically
in the text.
6 As Darwin explains, extension of his argument from animals and plants to
human beings was inevitable: ‘‘As soon as I had become . . . convinced that
species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must
come under the same law.’’ Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles
Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 130.
7 Michael Ruse’s review of Darwin scholarship, which does not treat a single
work on Descent, offers a case in point. See Michael Ruse, ‘‘The Darwin
Industry: A Guide,’’ Victorian Studies 39.2 (1996): 217–34. Both Cynthia
Eagle Russett, The Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Adrienne L. Zihl-
man, ‘‘Misreading Darwin on Reproduction: Reductionism in Evolutionary
Theory,’’ in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Repro-
duction, ed. Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1995), 425–39, focus on gender alone. Nancy Stepan’s The Idea of
Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982) consti-
tutes an exception to the feminist trend. On pre-Darwinian theories of racial
mixing, see Harriet Ritvo, ‘‘Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
282 Notes
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain,’’ in Human All Too Human, ed.

Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996), 37–58.
8 This two-part process accounts for sexually specific variations in secondary
sexual characteristics, and for differential inheritance among the male and
female members of the same species: ‘‘variations of the same general na-
ture have often been taken advantage of and accumulated through sexual
selection . . . [and] the modifications acquired through sexual selection are
[thus] often so strongly pronounced that the two sexes have frequently been
ranked as distinct species’’ (Descent, 2:398–99). Lacking an understanding of
Mendelean genetics—that inheritance of traits is based upon the equal distri-
bution of genetic material among male and female offspring—Darwin, along
with the majority of nineteenth-century naturalists, believed that the ‘‘law of
inheritance’’ was based upon same-sex transmission, and that traits acquired
by one sex were passed on to ‘‘one and the same sex’’ (2:398). As Lucille
Ritvo argues, Freud, like Darwin, remained committed throughout his life to
Lamarkian ideas of inheritance, and thus argued that psychic changes were
passed on from generation to generation. In particular, Freud believed that
the experiences of the so-called primal horde had been passed down to con-
temporaries in the form of the incest taboo. See Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on
Freud, 31–59, 64–73, 99–109.
9 Wallace’s rejection of sexual selection was so widely accepted that it held sway
for nearly a century; only recently has the theory been resurrected. See Helena
Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Dar-
win to Today (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113–64; Michael
Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), 208–9; Alfred R. Wallace, ‘‘The Origin of
Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natu-
ral Selection,’ ’’ Anthropological Review 2 (1864):158–87; and Bettyann Kevles,
Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in the Animal Kingdom (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
10 Marx, quoted in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991), 485.
11 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse
(Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Publishing, 1903), 21. Ellis’s next sentence reveals
that his theory of sexual attraction is no less invested in naturalization of so-
cial convention than Darwin’s: ‘‘The female responds to the stimulation of
the male at the right moment just as the tree responds to the stimulation of
the warmest days in spring.’’ One volume of Ellis’s work on the psychology
of sex, Sexual Selection in Man (1905) is broadly devoted to an investigation
of sexual selection.
12 See Russett, The Sexual Science, 80.
13 A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), offers an
imaginative interpretation of the pervasiveness of sexual selection motifs in
Victorian mores and sartorial culture.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 283
14 According to Darwin, sexual selection among human beings was operative at

the earliest period of human history, when females exercised decisive choices
that influenced the characteristics of entire populations (read ‘‘races’’): ‘‘It de-
serves particular attention that with mankind all the conditions for sexual
selection were much more favorable, during a very early period, when man
had only just attained the rank of manhood, than during later times’’ (2:383).
15 This last worry was provoked by New Women and first-wave feminists. As
Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman reiterated, among the most
important aspects of woman’s emancipation was the freedom to reclaim
the role of sexual selector. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Eco-
nomics, intro. Carl Degler (1898; New York: Harper & Row, 1966); and Olive
Schreiner, Women and Labor (1911; London: Virago, 1978).
16 The eighteenth-century Scottish physician John Hunter described primary
traits, apparent at birth, and secondary traits, which appear at maturity. In
Descent, Darwin redefines Hunter’s categories: ‘‘primary traits’’ involve re-
production; ‘‘secondary traits’’ are for attracting mates. Darwin’s distinction
persists today. See Bettyann Kevles, Females of the Species, 4.
17 On the figure of the ‘‘savage’’ in evolutionary thought, see George Stocking,
Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987); and Nancy Stepan, The
Idea of Race in Science, especially chapters 1–3. On the dilemma Darwin con-
fronted when he jumped between ‘‘primeval man’’ and living ‘‘savages,’’ see
Rosemary Jann, ‘‘Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its
Discontents,’’ Victorian Studies 37.2 (1994): 287–306.
18 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender and the Making of Modern Science
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 129.
19 Darwin argued that men’s height, weight, strength, musculature, and beard
were all gained through sexual selection, which also accounts for the fact that
men are ‘‘bolder and fiercer,’’ have ‘‘greater courage and pugnacity,’’ and are
‘‘superior in mental endowment’’ (2:325–29).
20 Here Darwin cites Mantegazza, the travel writer and sexologist whom Freud
claimed supplied Dora (one of his famous hysterical patients) with the sexual
knowledge that catalyzed her symptoms. Freud and Darwin’s shared interest
in Mantegazza constitutes an as of yet unexplored connection.
21 Darwin argues that the ancient Jews tattooed their bodies and were thus akin
to ‘‘savages’’ (2:339).
22 Chapter 20 contains several apparently contradictory passages that suggest
that among human beings sexual selection is occasionally effected by males:
‘‘There are, exceptional cases in which the males, instead of having been
the selected, have been the selectors. We recognize such cases by the females
having been rendered more highly ornamented than the males,—their orna-
mental character having been transmitted exclusively or chiefly to their female
offspring. One such case has been described in the order to which man be-
longs, namely, with the Rhesus monkey’’ (2:371). In other instances it seems
that males and females might be sexual selectors: ‘‘results would follow in a
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
284 Notes
still more marked manner if there was selection on both sides; that is if the
more attractive and at the same time the more powerful men were to prefer
and were preferred by, the more attractive women’’ (2:375). Although such
passages suggest the reversal or sharing of the role of selector, Darwin was
nonetheless wed to the notion of predominant female choice. He concludes
that it is only within ‘‘civilized’’ or highly ‘‘advanced’’ cultures that women
ornament themselves, for in such societies evolutionary processes cease.
23 Darwin rejects both the idea of dark skin as an evolutionary defense against
miasma and the belief that dark skin emerges over the life span of an indi-
vidual (2:242 and 318). On pre-Darwinian theories of racial difference, see
Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 115–42.
24 On the conflation of ideas of race and nation within Victorian science, see
Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, chapter 3. On nationalism’s dependence
on Darwinism and the notion of the family of man, see Anne McClintock,
Imperial Leather: Race and Gender in the Colonial Contest (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995), 36–47, 357–60.
25 A parodic rewriting of the theory of sexual selection published shortly after
Descent tells the story of female gorillas and their love of hairless apes (read
white men). In so doing it takes issue with the idea of female choice as an
evolutionary force by suggesting that the only choices of which females are
capable are those that lead to degeneration. See Richard Grant White, The
Fall of Man, or The Loves of the Gorillas: A Popular Scientific Lecture upon the
Darwinian Theory of Development by Sexual Selection (London: G. W. Carle-
ton, 1871).
26 Adolf Loos, ‘‘Ornament and Crime’’ [1908], in Adolf Loos, Pioneer of Mod-
ern Architecture, ed. Lüdwig Münz and Gustav Künstler (New York: Praeger,
1966), 228.
27 See Thorstein Veblen, ‘‘The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress,’’ Popular
Science Monthly 46 (1894): 198–205, ‘‘Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary
Culture,’’ in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: Penguin Books,
1967), 167–87; and ‘‘The Barbarian Status of Women,’’ American Journal of
Sociology 4 (1899): 503–14.
28 See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘‘Women’s Hair and Men’s Whiskers,’’ The
Forerunner 7 (1916): 64–65; and ‘‘The Dress of Women,’’ The Forerunner 6
(serialized 1915). Gilman also touches upon these issues in Women and Eco-
nomics, in a section entitled ‘‘The Peacock’s Tail,’’ in which she conflates
sexual and natural selection: ‘‘If the peacock’s tail were to increase in size
and splendor till it shone like the sun and covered an acre,—if it tended so
to increase, we will say,—such excessive sex-distinction would be so inimi-
cal to the personal prosperity of that peacock that he should die, and his tail
tendency would perish with him’’ (3). Such is the state of the excessively and
hence fatally feminine human female.
29 Bert Bender treats the impact of sexual selection on nineteenth-century cul-
tural production, arguing that ‘‘contrary to accepted literary history . . .
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 285
writers began a vigorous response to Darwinian thought in the early 1870s.’’

Bender analyzes novels by William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Charles Chestnutt. Other scholars
examine sexual selection in works by Edith Wharton, George Meredith,
George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Blackwell, Frances Willard, Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman, and Frank Lester Ward. See Bert Bender, The De-
scent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fic-
tion, 1871–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Gail
Bederman, ‘‘ ‘Not to Sex—But to Race!’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Civi-
lized Anglo-Saxon Womanhood, and the Return of the Primitive Rapist,’’
in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 121–
69; Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: ark, 1983); Joseph Carroll,
Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995);
Mariana Valverde, ‘‘ ‘When the Mother of the Race Is Free’: Race, Reproduc-
tion, and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism,’’ in Gender Conflicts, ed. Franca
Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992),
3–26; Marysue Schriber, ‘‘Darwin, Wharton, and ‘The Descent of Man’:
Blueprints of American Society,’’ Studies in Short Fiction 17.1 (1980): 31–38;
Jonathan Smith, ‘‘ ‘The Cock of Lordly Plume’: Sexual Selection in the Ego-
ist,’’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.1 (1995): 51–77; and Sandra Siegel,
‘‘Literature and Degeneration: The Representation of ‘Decadence’,’’ in De-
generation, ed. Sander Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985),
199–219.
30 Freud wrote this in response to a letter of inquiry from the antiquary Hinter-
berger. See Ernst Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic
Books, 1960), 269.
31 Ritvo concludes that ‘‘the ideas considered most basic to Darwin’s theory
have turned out to be basic to Freud’s theory’’ (189). In her treatment of
Freud’s sociohistorical texts, Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, Civili-
zation and its Discontents, and Group Psychology, Ritvo suggests that Freud
drew upon Darwin to support the idea that feelings of the ‘‘primal horde’’—
guilt over the murder of the father and the consequent taboo on incest—were
passed down to subsequent generations. Ritvo also explores Freud’s inter-
actions with the natural historian Carl Claus, who was brought to Vienna
to establish a modern zoology department based on Darwinian principles.
Claus was Freud’s teacher and the German translator of Darwin’s Voyage of
the H.M.S. Beagle. He visited Darwin at Down in 1871, the year that Descent
was published. The German popularizer of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and di-
rector of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Vienna, Theodor Meynert,
also influenced Freud. See Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud, 118–45, 13–30,
170–87.
32 Sulloway writes, ‘‘It is my contention that many, if not most, of Freud’s fun-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
286 Notes
damental conceptions were biological by inspiration as well as by implica-

tion. . . . Freud stands squarely within an intellectual lineage where he is, at
once, a principal scientific heir of Charles Darwin . . . and a major forerunner
of the ethnologists and sociobiologists of the twentieth century.’’ See Sullo-
way, Biologist of the Mind, quotes 5 and 252, on sexual selection 252–57, on
Darwinism 239–76. On Sulloway’s neglect of race, see Sander Gilman, Freud,
Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.
33 Living in a literary culture attuned to reading symbols, Freud’s contribution
was to make this form of reading into a science. In this sense, psychoanalysis
suggests we are all authors who can learn to read unconscious writing.
34 This paper was originally delivered before the Verein für Psychiatrie und Neo-
rologie in 1896 and published later that year. See Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The Aeti-
ology of Hysteria,’’ in Complete Works, 3:191–221.
35 The German word Freud repeatedly uses for ‘‘uncover,’’ enthüllen, has sexual
overtones, as it often connotes the unveiling or exposure of scandalous sexual
secrets. See Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie,’’ in Gesammelte
Werke, Erster Band aus den Jahren 1892–1899 (London: Imago Publishing,
1952), 427–59. I am indebted to Robert Weston for help with translation
throughout this section.
36 In the second half of the nineteenth century, spectacular train accidents caus-
ing commotion, concussion, paralysis, aphasia, and amnesia were thought to
catalyze mental illness, especially hysteria. Additionally, the high velocity at
which trains traveled caused trauma that was passed on in a Lamarkian fash-
ion to future generations. Charcot helped develop these theories in the mid-
1880s, immediately prior to Freud’s study with him. Freud’s example effec-
tively challenges Charcot. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O.:
A Century of Mystification (New York: Routledge, 1996), 57–59; Sander Gil-
man, ‘‘The Image of the Hysteric,’’ in Hysteria beyond Freud, ed. Sander
Gilman et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 417–18; and
Sulloway, Biologist of the Mind, 37–39.
37 In the early works this chapter treats, Freud had not yet moved away from the
‘‘seduction theory’’—his belief that actual trauma lay at the root of psychical
symptoms. As Freud states in ‘‘The Aetiology of Hysteria,’’ patients ‘‘mention
details, without laying any stress on them, which only someone of experience
in life can understand and appreciate as subtle traits of reality. Events of this
sort strengthen our impression that the patients must really have experienced
what they reproduce under the compulsion of analysis as scenes from their
childhood’’ (emphasis added, 205). Eventually the ‘‘seduction theory’’ gave
way under pressure of implausibility to that of fantastical trauma. See Sullo-
way, Biologist of the Mind, 206–14; and Charles Bernheimer’s introduction to
Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Femi-
nism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially 11–15. Freud’s
theoretical reorientation is documented in his correspondence with Wilhelm
Fliess. In letters exchanged February through May 1897, he is wedded to
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 287
the idea of actual abuse; in a letter written on 21 September 1897 he sug-

gests the fantasmatic nature of such events; by 15 October 1897 he formu-
lates the theory of parental seduction and begins to theorize infantile desire
and fantasy—ideas that would eventually lead to formulation of the Oedipus
theory. See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, trans. and ed., The Complete Letters
of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), especially 238–49, 264–66, 270–
73. I am grateful to David Kazanjian for guiding me through the Freud/Fliess
exchange.
38 Freud uses verzweigte (branch), here translated as ‘‘ramify,’’ thus enforcing
the arboreal image.
39 I echo Michel Foucault in ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100; see my ex-
tended discussion of genealogy in chapter 1.
40 For the three other uses of the genealogical metaphor, see Freud, ‘‘Zur Ätio-
logie der Hysterie,’’ 432–33. As Jay Geller suggests, syphilis was coded as a
form of Jewish ‘‘blood sin’’ in this period. Thus it is possible to suggest that
it is not only through invocation of incestuous genealogy but through com-
parison of the siblings of whom Freud writes to syphilitics that marks those
twins as Jewish. See Jay Geller, ‘‘Blood Sin: Syphilis and the Construction of
Jewish Identity,’’ Faultline 1 (1992): 21–48.
41 On the German reliance on arboreal metaphors in discussions of ancestry,
origins, and blood, see Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: European Aesthetics of
Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 58–62.
42 Freud explains that ‘‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in
the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, un-
heimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.’’ The
mother’s womb is the overdetermined figure for the uncanny, the place we
have all been, and to which we are always returning. See Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The
‘Uncanny,’ ’’ in The Complete Works 17:219–56, especially 226, 245.
43 On ‘‘concept metaphors,’’ see Jacques Derrida, ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor
in the Text of Philosophy,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–72, especially 262–64; and my
discussion of Benedict Anderson’s and Lewis Henry Morgan’s use of concept
metaphors in chapters 1 and 3 .
44 Derrida and Cixous have both observed this of Freud’s work. Cixous ar-
gues that ‘‘the Uncanny’’ proceeds as its own metaphor, ‘‘as if one of Freud’s
repressions acted as the motor re-presenting at each moment of the analy-
sis the repression which Freud was analyzing’’ (526). Similarly, Derrida ob-
serves that mastery of the maternal body (the spool tossed from the cot and
returned) in the fort/da episode is as visible in the content of the analysis as
in Freud’s writing, in the demarche of his text. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Freud’s
Legacy,’’ The Postcard, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 292–337; and Hélène Cixous, ‘‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
288 Notes
Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘‘Uncanny’’), New Literary History

7 (1978): 525–48.
45 On nineteenth-century middle-class Jewish marriage patterns, see Marion
Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 85–116; on the incidence of endogamy among Jews in Europe and
the Middle East, see Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing, The Myth of the
Jewish Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 204–8; on the Chris-
tian preoccupation with levirate marriage, see Sander L. Gilman, The Case of
Sigmund Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 183–84.
46 See Christina von Braun, ‘‘Blutschande: From the Incest Taboo to the Nurem-
burg Racial Laws,’’ in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, His-
tory, and Culture, ed. Gisela Brinkler-Gabler (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1995), 127–48; and Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud, 182–83.
47 See Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud, 173; ‘‘The Image of the Hysteric,’’
405–6; Freud, Race, and Gender, 100; and Kraft-Ebing, cited in Efron, ‘‘De-
fining the Jewish Race,’’ 34. On the production of false evidence for the high
rate of Jewish hysteria, see Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 94–95.
48 In ‘‘Sibling Incest, Madness and the ‘Jews,’ ’’ Jewish Social Studies 4.2 (1998):
157–79, Gilman elaborates these ideas with reference to sibling incest and the
corresponding idea that inbreeding allowed Jews to maintain economic hege-
mony.
49 Letter quoted in Ernst Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 185. While in Paris
Freud translated Charcot into German, for which labor he was rewarded with
a leather-bound edition of his mentor’s work, and a more intimate relation-
ship. To Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux (1887) Freud added sixty-
two unauthorized footnotes, some of which contradicted Charcot’s find-
ings and allowed Freud to venture his own theory of hysteria. See Wayne
Koestenbaum, ‘‘Privileging the Anus: Anna O. and the Collaborative Origin
of Psychoanalysis,’’ Genders 3 (1988): 60; and Sulloway, Biologist of the Mind,
31–32.
50 As Freud explains in one of his earliest essays on heredity and neurosis, ac-
cording to Charcot, ‘‘nervous heredity . . . is the sole true indispensable cause
of neurotic affections, and the other aetiological influences can aspire only to
the name of agents provocateurs.’’ See Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Heredity and the Aeti-
ology of the Neuroses,’’ in Complete Works 3:143–56 [1896, original essay in
French].
51 Until the 1980s, little information on Charcot was available; Charcot’s views
only surfaced in scholarly discussion in accounts of his tutelage of Freud. On
Charcot, see Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Inter-
pretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 88–97; on Charcot’s
views on Jews, see Gilman, ‘‘The Image of the Hysteric,’’ 345–452; on Freud’s
work at the Salpêtrière, see Sulloway, Biologist of the Mind, 28–49.
52 Grammar of Science by British eugenicist Karl Pearson contains several pas-
sages about scientific objectivity that Freud underlined prominently. One
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 289
reads, ‘‘Scientific law is a description, not a prescription’’; another adds, ‘‘The

Universal validity of science depends upon the similarity to the perspective
and reasoning faculties in normal, civilized men’’ (Pearson, quoted in Gilman,
The Case of Sigmund Freud, 52). On ‘‘standpoint epistemology,’’ see Sandra
Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986), 136–62, and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1991); and Donna Haraway’s critique of Harding, ‘‘Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective,’’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991),
183–202.
53 Most discussions of the feminization of Jews treat Otto Weiniger’s infamous
work Sex and Character (1903; London: William Heinemann, 1910), which
conflates Jewish degeneracy and effeminacy. See Nancy Horrowitz and Bar-
bara Hyams, eds., Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weiniger (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1995).
54 Gilman documents the image of the Jew as black, Negroid, and African in
Freud, Race, and Gender, 19–20.
55 See Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 29; Daniel Boyarin, ‘‘Épater l’Embourgeoise-
ment: Freud, Gender, and the (De)Colonized Psyche,’’ Diacritics 24.1 (1994):
38; and Zillah Eisenstein, Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 1996), 38.
56 Pellegrini notes that in Freud’s hands the Jewish hysteric Ida Bauer (or
‘‘Dora’’) fades ‘‘into the figure of a ‘‘whitened’’ femininity. From this figure,
femininity emerges as a form of racial passing. The Jewish woman passes for
—is posed as—the feminine tout court, and Jewish men are thereby relocated
on the side of the universal term: the masculine’’ (Performance Anxiety, 28).
57 For instance, Jay Geller argues that in the Schreber case Freud refuses to ac-
knowledge Schreber’s feminine passive desire to reproduce a new race of men,
effectively severing the connection between Schreber’s racialized reproduc-
tive fantasy and his castration anxiety, and thus rescuing the theory of para-
noia from Jewish taint. See Jay Geller, ‘‘Freud v. Freud: Freud’s Reading of
Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken,’’ in Reading
Freud’s Reading, ed. Sander Gilman et al. (New York: New York University
Press, 1994), 180–210. Daniel Boyarin expands this argument by suggesting
that homoerotic and passive female reproductive fantasies are repressed by
Freud in the interest of creating psychoanalysis as a universal science free of
queer Jewish masculinity: ‘‘For Freud recognition of the positive attraction
that . . . being transformed into a female held for Daniel Schreber would have
involved the psychological necessity for him of facing again his own unre-
solved desires for femaleness, which in his culturally conditioned eyes was
equivalent to homosexuality.’’ This was impossible since feminization and
homosexuality were ‘‘ ‘Jewish diseases’ that Freud was anxious to overcome.’’
See Boyarin, ‘‘Freud’s Baby, Fliess’s Maybe: Homophobia, Anti-Semitism,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
290 Notes
and the Invention of Oedipus,’’ GLQ 2.1–2 (1995): 115–47, quote 138. Though
Boyarin elsewhere notes the problem with reading psychoanalysis as a re-
action formation (‘‘Épater l’Embourgeoisement,’’ 28–33), here he psychoana-
lyzes Freud’s treatment of the stigma of Jewishness.
58 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 88.
59 The passage in ‘‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’’ that corresponds to that in
‘‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’’ reads: ‘‘sexual relations in
childhood occur precisely between brother and sisters . . . supposing, then, ten
or fifteen years later several members of this younger generation of a family
are found to be ill, might not this appearance of a family neurosis naturally
lead to the false supposition that a hereditary disposition is present where
there is only a pseudo-hereditary one and where in fact what has taken place
is a handing-on, an infection in childhood?’’ (209).
60 For example Pellegrini restores Ida Bauer—whom Freud strips of her Jewish-
ness by calling her ‘‘Dora’’—to the text. See Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties,
25–28; on Freud’s use of this pseudonym, see Hannah Decker, Freud, Dora,
and Vienna, 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991), 131–47.
61 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, ed. James Strachey
(New York: Basic Books, 1957). Hereafter all references to this text will be
given parenthetically.
62 Borch-Jacobsen argues that Studies advances one of the greatest myths of our
time: Anna O.’s cure was faithfully narrated, and her hysteria cured. ‘‘The case
of Anna O., far from being the empirical origin of Freud’s and Breuer’s new
theory of hysteria, came to illustrate it after the fact, through a self-serving
revisionism that was anything but innocent. . . . [M]odern psychotherapy,
with its emphasis on the curative powers of narration and memory, has as its
founding narrative the biased rewriting of an older narrative, one that tells
only made-up stories.’’ According to Borch-Jacobsen ‘‘right at the heart of the
modern myth of remembering’’ is a ‘‘false memory.’’ Borch-Jacobsen’s conclu-
sion, to which I am indebted, is that psychoanalysis is a fiction whose central
conceit is founded upon false evidence. Of course this renders this fiction no
less powerful. See Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O., quote 60.
63 Freud’s early work (1875–92) is depicted as slow and laborious, and Studies
is a turning point: ‘‘a change in personality, one of several in his life, seems to
have come over him in the early nineties. . . . [T]hree months after the Studies
was published, we find Breuer writing to their friend Fliess: ‘Freud’s intellect
is soaring at its highest. I gaze after him as a hen at a hawk.’ ’’ This is one
among many instances in which Studies is construed as originating psycho-
analysis’s greatness. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,
ed. Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 157.
64 Feminist readings of ‘‘Anna O.’’ inform my argument throughout this sec-
tion. See Ann Douglas Wood, ‘‘ ‘Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints
and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,’’ in Clio’s Conscious-
ness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Mary S. Hart-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 291
man and Louis Banner (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 1–22; Carroll
Smith Rosenberg, ‘‘The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century America,’’ in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 197–216; Diane Hun-
ter, ‘‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.,’’ in
The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shir-
ley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985), 89–115; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady:
Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon,
1985), 155–57; Mary Jacobus, ‘‘Anna (Wh)O’s Absences: Readings in Hys-
teria,’’ in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1986), 197–228; and Diane Price Herndl, ‘‘The Writing
Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O., and Hysterical Writing,’’ NWSA
Journal 1.1 (1988): 52–74. As I discuss shortly, of these, Rachel Bowlby’s ‘‘A
Happy Event: The Births of Psychoanalysis,’’ in Shopping with Freud (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 72–81, and Koestenbaum’s ‘‘Privileging the Anus’’
are most important to the present argument.
65 Throughout I use the pseudonym ‘‘Anna O.’’ in order to emphasize that I am
not talking about a real woman but about the hysteric constructed within
Freud and Breuer’s text. In rare instances, as in this paragraph, I discuss Anna
O.’s life outside the text and refer to her as Bertha Pappenheim.
66 On Bertha Pappenheim and other female patients, see Lisa Appignanesi
and John Forester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic Books, 1992); on the
German-Jewish feminist organization that Pappenheim founded, see Marion
Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1979).
67 On Freud and Breuer’s split, see Jones, The Life and Work, 165–67, and 146–
74 passim. Sulloway takes exception to Jones and argues that Breuer rec-
ognized sexuality’s role in neurosis, and that Breuer and Freud’s break had
more to do with individual temperament and scientific style and with Breuer’s
unwillingness to make sweeping claims about sexuality. See Sulloway, Biolo-
gist of the Mind, 70–100, especially 78–80. My reading contests Sulloway’s,
but this is not my principal point. Whether or not Breuer denied the sexual
etiology of hysteria, what matters is that Freud painted Breuer as holding
this prudish position. Freud accounts for his split with Breuer in his corre-
spondence with Fliess. See Masson, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess. Koestenbaum argues that Freud transferred homoerotic feel-
ings from Breuer to Fliess. See ‘‘Privileging the Anus,’’ 72–77.
68 Jones, The Life and Work, 148.
69 In turning to this note I follow Rachel Bowlby, whose genius it was to go back
to the recorded exchange about the Anna O. case in order to interpret it. See
Bowlby, ‘‘A Happy Event,’’ passim.
70 The passages to which Strachey’s citation lead corroborate his insinuations.
Jones writes: ‘‘It would seem that Breuer had developed what we should
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
292 Notes
nowadays call a strong counter-transference to his interesting patient. At all

events he was so engrossed that his wife became bored at listening to no other
topic, and before long jealous. She did not display this openly, but became
unhappy and morose. It was long before Breuer, with his thoughts elsewhere,
divined the meaning of her state of mind. It provoked a violent reaction in
him, perhaps compounded of love and guilt, and he decided to bring the treat-
ment to an end. He announced this to Anna O., who was by now much better,
and bade her good-bye. But that evening he was fetched back, to find her in
a greatly excited state, apparently as ill as ever. The patient, who according
to him had appeared to be an asexual being and had never made any allusion
to such a forbidden topic throughout the treatment, was now in the throes of
a hysterical childbirth (pseudocyesis), the logical termination of a phantom
pregnancy that had been invisibly developing in response to Breuer’s ministra-
tions. Though profoundly shocked, he managed to calm her down by hypno-
tizing her, and then fled the house in a cold sweat.’’ Jones foregrounds Breuer’s
desire for Anna O. by describing his fear of his feelings for her; effectively he
renders the relationship shameful and implies irresponsible action on Breuer’s
part. As in Freud’s narrative, a matter of conjecture is cast as fact. See Jones,
The Life and Work, quote 147–48; and Freud, ‘‘On the History of the Psycho-
analytic Movement,’’ in The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, ed. Philip
Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 46–47.
71 Ernst Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 413 (emphasis added).
72 See Ernst Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud, 413. As Ernst Freud points
out, ‘‘the door to the Mothers’’ is an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, act 2. Leslie
Camhi suggests that ‘‘the Mothers’’ was a common euphemism used from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century to designate the suffocating feeling of
the ‘‘rising womb,’’ a common hysterical symptom. She offers as precedence
King Lear’s lines about his waning reason: ‘‘O how this mother swells up
toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy ele-
ment’s below’’ (Shakespeare, King Lear, act 2, scene 3, lines 56–58). See Leslie
Camhi, ‘‘Prisoners of Gender: Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Literature in Fin
de Siècle Culture’’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991), 49.
73 As was widely known to Freud readers, ‘‘hysteria’’ derives from the Greek
word for womb, an etymological fact to which many physicians to whom
Freud presented his work retreated in an attempt to either argue against a
psychogenic interpretation of the disease, or against the idea that men could
be hysterical. See Jones, The Life and Work, 149–51.
74 Koestenbaum and Bowlby both read ‘‘Anna O.’’ as evidence of the aspira-
tions of the men who authored it. According to Koestenbaum, male-male
collaboration is an erotically productive act that involves appropriation of
the reproductive function and creation of textual progeny. In such creative
processes, the anus is regarded as the site of conception and the maternal
body elided. Like Koestenbaum, Bowlby argues that the paternal appropria-
tion of the maternal role allows the birth of psychoanalysis to be narrated
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 293
as a fathering rather than a mothering. She focuses on Freud’s fantasy of in-

semination by three of the fathers of psychoanalysis (Charcot, Breuer, and
later Chrobak) and on his belief that he gestated the theory of hysteria. In
Koestenbaum’s analysis the homoerotic birth of psychoanalysis is privileged;
in Bowlby’s, Anna O.’s phantom pregnancy vies with Freud’s conception for
pride of place. See Koestenbaum, ‘‘Privileging the Anus’’; and Bowlby, ‘‘A
Happy Event.’’
75 Trillat, quoted in Elaine Showalter, ‘‘Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender,’’ in
Hysteria beyond Freud, ed. Gilman et al., 291.
76 Breuer writes that ‘‘in one of these states she [was] . . . relatively normal. In
the other state she was . . . ‘naughty’—that is to say, she was abusive, used to
throw cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed,
tore buttons off her bed clothes and linen with those of her fingers which she
could move, and so on’’ (24).
77 Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 12.
78 Wagner, quoted in Mark Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheti-
cism in the Hapsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 197.
79 Schorske argues that Schönerer’s anti-Semitism was imitative of U.S. racism
and notes that Schönerer turned to U.S. legislative models (in particular the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) as prototypes for his own racism and nativ-
ism. See Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 129.
80 See Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studien über Hysterie (Frankfurt: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970), 23. Mary Jacobus was the first to note the Jewish
coding of Anna O.’s ‘‘jargon.’’ See Jacobus, ‘‘Anna Wh(O)’s Absences,’’ 209.
81 Bertha Pappenheim translated the Memoirs of Glückl von Hameln (a German
Jewess who married at the age of fourteen and bore thirteen children), the
Mayse Bukh (a collection of medieval folk tales and Talmudic stories), and
the Ze’enah U’Ree’nah, or woman’s bible (a popular version of the Books of
Moses, the Five Megillot, and Haftorot), as well as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Women. See Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Move-
ment, 41, 49–50; and Jacobus, ‘‘Anna Wh(O)’s Absences,’’ 209.
82 On the transformation of Jewish voice and speech into a racial mark, see
Sander L. Gilman, ‘‘The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup, or The Penalties of
Sounding Too Jewish,’’ in The Jew’s Body, 10–37; Anderson, ‘‘ ‘Jewish’ Music?
Otto Weiniger and ‘Josephine the Singer,’ ’’ in Kafka’s Clothes, 194–216; and
Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 58.
83 See Hortense Spillers, ‘‘ ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund
Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,’’ boundary 2 23.3
(1996): 75–141, quote 89. Unfortunately Spillers too quickly dismisses the
possibility that her insight is germane to the Jewishness of psychoanalysis. As
she insists, psychoanalysis does not interrogate the ‘‘ ‘race’/culture orbit.’’
84 See Lucille B. Ritvo’s discussion of Freud’s use of Darwin’s idea of the ‘‘pri-
mal horde,’’ Darwin’s Influence on Freud, 99–109, quote 99; and Carl Degler,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
294 Notes
‘‘The Case of the Origin of the Incest Taboo,’’ in In Search of Human Nature:
The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 245–69.
5. Reproducing Racial Globality

1 Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning
of Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997).
2 See Francis Amasa Walker, ‘‘Immigration and Degradation,’’ Forum 11 (1891):
637–44; E. A. Ross, ‘‘The Causes of Race Superiority,’’ Annals of the Ameri-
can Academy of Political and Social Science 18–23 (1901): 67–89; and Linda
Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in
America (New York: Grossman, 1976), 135–58. On Ross’s eugenic thought,
see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 144–75.
3 Ross, ‘‘Causes of Race Superiority,’’ 85.
4 D. Clinton Guthrie, ‘‘Race Suicide,’’ Pennsylvania Medical Journal 15 (1909–
10): 858.
5 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a
Race Concept, reprinted in Du Bois: Writings, 549–801 (New York: Library
of America, 1986), 656. All further references will be made parenthetically in
the text.
6 See Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambigu-
ous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 93.
7 By contrast to Benedict Anderson, who cast the nation as an imagined com-
munity, Balibar suggests that all communities are imagined. Here I follow him
and suggest that the United States imagines itself as a racially homogenous,
reproducible entity. As Balibar puts it, it is in the ‘‘ ‘race of its children’ that
the nation . . . [comes] to contemplate its own identity in a pure state.’’ See
Race, Nation, Class, 93.
8 See chapter 1, 34–39.
9 Joy James argues that although Du Bois was outspoken on women’s issues,
especially suffrage, his portraits of women were invariably masculinist, and
he was unable to acknowledge the contributions to his thinking of the most
important women of his day, including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells.
Farah Jasmine Griffin follows James in excavating Du Bois’s masculinism and
in contextualizing his views on black women. See Joy James, ‘‘Profeminism
and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-
Barnett,’’ in Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American
Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997), 35–36; and Farah Jasmine Grif-
fin, ‘‘Black Feminists and Du Bois: Respectability, Protection, and Beyond,’’
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (2000):
28–53. Other articles that treat Du Bois’s representations of women include
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 295
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, ‘‘The Margin as Center of a Theory of History:

African-American Women, Social Change, and the Sociology of W. E. B.
Du Bois,’’ in W. E. B. Du Bois: On Race and Culture, ed. Bernard R. Bell,
Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), 111–
40; Nellie Y. McKay, ‘‘The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of
W. E. B. Du Bois,’’ in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 227–43, and ‘‘W. E. B.
Du Bois: The Black Women in His Writings—Selected Fictional and Auto-
biographical Portraits,’’ in Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. William L.
Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 230–52; Manning Marable, ‘‘Grounding
with My Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women,’’ in How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy
and Society (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 82–83; Bettina Aptheker, ‘‘On
‘The Damnation of Women’: W. E. B. Du Bois and a Theory for Women’s
Emancipation,’’ in Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in Ameri-
can History, ed. Bettina Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1982), 77–88; Patricia Morton, ‘‘The All-Mother Vision of W. E. B. Du
Bois,’’ in Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 55–65; Nagueyalti Warren, ‘‘Decon-
structing, Reconstructing, and Focusing Our Literary Image,’’ in Spirit, Space,
and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, ed. Joy James and
Ruth Farmer (New York: Routledge, 1993), 99–117; Beverly Guy Sheftall,
Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880–1920 (New York:
Carlson, 1990), 161–62; and Claudia Tate, ‘‘Race and Desire: Dark Princess,
a Romance, by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,’’ in Psychoanalysis and
Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 47–85.
10 Hazel Carby, ‘‘The Souls of Black Men,’’ in Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 9–44.
11 Daylanne English, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis,’’ American Literature
72.2 (2000): 291–319. English reads Du Bois’s editorial selection of photo-
graphs for the Crisis in the context of the prevailing discourses of ‘‘racial up-
lift’’ and eugenics, and she suggests that Du Bois bridged the distance between
a politics of the individual and that of the collective by producing a distinc-
tively biosocial understanding of racial uplift in which questions of the re-
production of fit black families by fit black men figured prominently. English
builds upon Kevin Gaines’s work in Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Poli-
tics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996).
12 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings (New York:
Library of America, 1986), 357–548. All further references will be given par-
enthetically in the text.
13 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 115.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
296 Notes
14 Du Bois, ‘‘The Freedom of Womanhood,’’ in The Gift of Black Folk: The

Negroes in the Making of America (Boston: Stratford, 1924), 268.
15 On the optical foundations of racism see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White
Mask (1952; London: Pluto Press, 1967), especially chapter 5; Lewis R. Gor-
don, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age
(Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 25–88; Collette Guillaumin, Racism,
Sexism, Power, and Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29–60; Cornel
West, ‘‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism,’’ in Race Critical Theories, ed. Philo-
mena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 90–112;
and Harryette Mullen, ‘‘Optic White: Blackness and the Production of White-
ness,’’ Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994): 71–89.
16 Susan Mizruchi treats the color-coded symbols and figures Du Bois deploys.
See Mizruchi, ‘‘Neighbors, Strangers, Corpses: Death and Sympathy in the
Early Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois,’’ in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, ed.
Robert Newman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially 192,
196–97, 202.
17 Dickson D. Bruce Jr. identifies two meanings of double consciousness simi-
larly. I take exception to his third definition: ‘‘By double consciousness Du
Bois referred . . . to an internal conflict in the African American individual be-
tween what was ‘‘African’’ and what was ‘‘American’’ (301). The conflict that
Du Bois explores is between racial and national identity. See Bruce, ‘‘W. E. B
Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,’’ American Literature 64.2
(1992): 299–309.
18 Here I offer an alternative to Anthony Appiah’s claim that Du Bois remained
wed to a nineteenth-century scientific conception of race throughout his life.
See Appiah, ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,’’
in ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1985), 21–37. Appiah’s critics include Lucius Out-
law, ‘‘ ‘Conserve’ Races? In Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois,’’ in W. E. B. Du
Bois, ed. Bernard W. Bell et al., 15–38; Robert Gooding-Williams, ‘‘Out-
law, Appiah, and Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races’,’’ in W. E. B. Du
Bois, ed. Bernard W. Bell et al., 39–56; Priscilla Wald, Constituting Ameri-
cans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1995), 207–9; and Tommy Lott, ‘‘Du Bois’s Anthropological Notion of
Race,’’ in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 59–83. I
treat Appiah’s position more fully in the coda.
19 David Lloyd provides insight into the racial economy of the enlightenment
idea of a universal aesthetic. Through a reading of Kant he argues that racism
depends on the recognition of difference, the positing of a lack of identity
in the object seen; at the same time, the racialized object is the condition
of possibility for the instantiation of the universal norm against which this
lack becomes visible. See David Lloyd, ‘‘Race under Representation,’’ Oxford
Literary Review 13.1–2 (1991): 62–94; and West, ‘‘A Genealogy of Modern
Racism.’’
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 297
20 The term is Balibar’s; see Race, Nation, Class, 60.

21 On Nina Gomer Du Bois, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biogra-
phy of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993) and W. E. B. Du Bois:
The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry
Holt, 2000); and Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du
Bois (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
22 See McKay, ‘‘The Souls of Black Women Folk,’’ 239–41; Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic, 138; and Wald, Constituting Americans, 228.
23 Wald, Constituting Americans, 284.
24 There are old and new versions of this interpretation of Du Bois’s work on
the sorrow songs; see, for example, Alain Locke, ‘‘The Negro Spirituals,’’
in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert
and Charles Boni, 1925), 199; Anne Carroll, ‘‘More than Words: Represent-
ing Blackness as American,’’ Centennial Review 41.3 (1997): 471–78; and
Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–
1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 173–81.
25 As Eric Sundquist and Kevin Thomas Miles have argued, albeit differently,
Du Bois used the musical epigraphs in Souls to reveal the universal signifi-
cance of the sorrow songs, and to point out to readers that which cannot be
known—that which resides at the limit of understanding, or what Miles calls
the ‘‘Promethean limit,’’ ‘‘the boundary between two worlds’’ (201). See Eric
Sundquist, ‘‘Black and Unknown Bards: A Theory of the Sorrow Songs,’’ in
To Wake the Nations, 525–39; and Kevin Thomas Miles, ‘‘Haunting Music in
the Souls of Black Folk,’’ boundary 2 27.3 (2000): 199–214.
26 As Harryette Mullen points out, Du Bois was not the only one to depict the
sorrow songs as a matrilineal inheritance. In The Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Man James Weldon Johnson recalls his mother holding him ‘‘close,
softly crooning some old melody without words,’’ and Frederick Douglass
also attributed his knowledge of the songs to his mother. See Mullen, ‘‘Optic
White,’’ 87.
27 Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: ams Press, 1969),
34, 51.
28 Du Bois, ‘‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out,’’ in The New Negro, ed. Locke,
385–414.
29 On Du Bois’s anti-imperialism and emergent global vision, see John Carlos
Rowe, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of U.S. Imperialism,’’ in Empire: American
Studies, ed. John G. Blair and Reinhold Wagnleitner (Tübingen: Gunter Narr
Verlage, 1997), 145–66; Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘‘ ‘But a Local Phase of a World
Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,’’ Journal of American
History 86.3 (1999): 1045–77; Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and
the Unifinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2004); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 2003), especially the prologue; and Susan Gillman,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
298 Notes
Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2003).
30 Du Bois, Dark Princess, intro. Claudia Tate (Jackson, Miss.: Banner Books,
1995). All further references will be made parenthetically in the text. Available
criticism on the novel—none of which treats reproduction—includes: Arnold
Rampersad, ‘‘Du Bois’s Passage to India,’’ in W. E. B. Du Bois: On Race and
Culture, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart, 161–
76; Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Mod-
ern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 146–83;
Hanna Wallinger, ‘‘Secret Societies and Dark Empires: Sutton E. Grigg’s Im-
perium in Imperio and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess,’’ in Empire: American
Studies, ed. John Blair and Reinhold Wagnleintner,197–208; Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic, 140–45; Herman Beavers, ‘‘Romancing the Body Politic: Du Bois’s
Propaganda of the Dark World,’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 568 (2000): 250–64; Tate, ‘‘Race and Desire’’; and Bill V.
Mullen, ‘‘Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International,’’ Positions
11.1 (2003): 217–40.
31 Du Bois makes this claim in Dusk of Dawn, 752.
32 Robin Kelley points out that black communists of the period often rewrote
classic spirituals as songs of liberation. Here, Du Bois’s protagonist likewise
produces his song as one of liberation and international solidarity. See Robin
Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York:
Free Press, 1994), 118.
33 In part, propagandistic elements have led critics to regard Dark Princess as
lacking in literary merit. For instance, at first Rampersad dismissed it; later he
revised his opinion and positioned the novel as central despite artistic flaws.
Beavers comes to terms with shortcomings similarly. See Rampersad, The
Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, 202–18, and ‘‘Du Bois’s Passage to
India’’; and Beavers, ‘‘Romancing the Body Politic,’’ 256.
34 Du Bois, ‘‘Criteria for Negro Art,’’ The Crisis (October 1926), reprinted in
W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry
Holt, 1995), 509.
35 Du Bois’s ideas about romance challenge those of scholars as diverse as Leslie
Fielder, Doris Sommer, and Amy Kaplan. All view national romance novels,
nation building, and (in Kaplan’s case) U.S. imperialist projects that shore
up the nation as mutually abetting, even coextensive. By contrast, Du Bois
views romance as internationalist rather than nationalist, and as conciliatory
of antagonistic interests only insofar as it forges alliances among those who
might not otherwise recognize their common plight. Brent Edwards has sug-
gested that Du Bois’s use of romance may not be so transparent; indeed, it
may involve ‘‘melodramatic farce and sly self-parody.’’ See Leslie Fielder, Love
and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein & Day, 1966);
Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Amy Kaplan, ‘‘Romancing
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 299
the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular His-

torical Novel of the 1980s,’’ American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 659–90;
and Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 234.
36 Rampersad argues that Du Bois’s knowledge of India built on a long orien-
talist tradition within American thought that includes Whitman, Emerson,
Thoreau, and T. S. Eliot. He also suggests that the portrait of Matthew’s
mother may have been informed by Radhakrishnan’s extremely popular
book, The Hindu View of Life (1927), a racist tract in which Kali is cast as a
non-Aryan goddess. See Rampersad, ‘‘Du Bois’s Passage to India,’’ 163–64.
37 By contrast with Du Bois’s celebratory and mythologizing account, see that
of Elise Johnson McDougald, whose contemporaneous, ‘‘Negro Woman-
hood,’’ treats women’s labor and hardship in a sociological, realist idiom.
McDougald, ‘‘The Task of Negro Womanhood,’’ in The New Negro, ed.
Locke, 369–82.
38 In Marxism and Literature Williams uses the concept to denote the articula-
tion of forms of consciousness that emerge from historical conflicts that are
not fully understood, and thus expressed inchoately. Such forms of conscious-
ness correspond to the apprehension of residual hegemonic tendencies rather
than dominant ones.
39 Here I modify Arnold Rampersad’s suggestion that for Wright the black
woman was the world’s metaphor.
40 As Harold Isaacs explains, this coalition was made possible by Du Bois’s era-
sure of hostilities between Japan and China. Du Bois persisted in regarding
Japan’s attacks on China as a prelude to a Japanese-Chinese block against the
white world as late as the Manchurian invasion in 1931. See Isaacs, ‘‘Du Bois
and Africa,’’ Race 2.1 (1960): 14–15.
41 See Stuart Hall, ‘‘Race, Articulation, and Society Structured in Dominance,’’
Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: unesco, 1980), 305–45.
42 See Lenin, ‘‘Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question’’ (1920),
in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1967),
3:422–27. For discussion of the Afro-Asian dimensions of this debate see
Mullen, ‘‘Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International.’’ I am
grateful to Bill Mullen for sharing his work with me when it was still in manu-
script form.
43 See John Patrick Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N.
Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1971), 11–19; M. N. Roy, ‘‘Original Draft of Supplementary Theses on the
National and Colonial Question,’’ reprinted in Selected Works of M. N. Roy,
vol. 1, 1917–1922, ed. Ray Sibnarayan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 165–68; and M. N. Roy, ‘‘On the National and Colonial Question,’’ re-
printed in Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2, 1923–1927, ed. Ray Sibnarayan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 291–306. The debates among party
members about how to assess Garvey’s black nationalism are directly related
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
300 Notes
to Roy’s concerns. See Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an

Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 110–12, 127–28.
44 Reed objected to Lenin because he felt that Garveyism’s failure suggested
blacks’ desire for national inclusion, and because he regarded separate black
movements as divisive to working-class solidarity. See ‘‘Speech by John Reed
at IInd Congress of Communist International on Negro Question,’’ reprinted
in American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919–
1929, ed. Philip Foner and James Allen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1987), 5–8.
45 On McKay’s and Huiswood’s participation in the 1922 Comintern debate of
the ‘‘Black Belt thesis’’ see Mullen, ‘‘Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-
Asian International,’’ 228–29; and William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left:
African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1999), chapter 2.
46 The declaration is reprinted in Foner and Allen, eds., American Communism
and Black Americans, 28–30. On the debates over the ‘‘Negro Question,’’ see
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(London: Zed Press, 1983), 302–25; Roger E. Kanet, ‘‘The Comintern and the
‘Negro Question’: Communist Policy in the United States and Africa, 1921–
1941’’ Survey 19.4 (1973): 86–122; Foner and Allen, American Communism
and Black Americans, vii–xvi; and Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik, 81–176,
223–27.
47 Rose Pastor Stokes, ‘‘The Communist International and the Negro,’’ reprinted
in American Communism and Black Americans, ed. Foner and Allen, 29–31.
48 On the Sixth World Congress and the ‘‘Negro Question,’’ see Haywood, Black
Bolshevik, 227– 35, especially 232 and 259–280; and Foner and Allen, Ameri-
can Communism and Black Americans, 163–200.
49 Harold Isaacs concludes his reading of Dark Princess with this remark. Isaacs,
‘‘Du Bois and Africa,’’ 17.
50 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 639–40.
51 David Levering Lewis underscores this when he announces by way of clever
subtitle to his authoritative biography that it is not only Du Bois’s story but
the ‘‘biography of a race.’’
52 It is often assumed that Du Bois first articulated the problem of the twentieth
century as the problem of the color line in Souls. This is not the case; he first
formulated it in 1901 in an address given before the Pan-African congress—a
fact that suggests that Du Bois saw the problems of racism in the United States
as linked to problems of imperialism and colonialism throughout the world
from the outset. See Nikhil Pal Singh, ‘‘Toward an Effective Antiracism,’’ in
Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America,
ed. Wendy F. Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1998), 221; and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of
Diaspora, 1–3.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 301
53 Luisa Muraro discusses the differences between vertical and horizontal gene-
alogies in the context of Luce Irigaray’s writing. See Muraro, ‘‘Female Gene-
alogies,’’ in Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European
Thought, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 324–25. Though she does not discuss
racism or nationalism, I find her terms useful in the present context.
54 ‘‘A New England Boy and Reconstruction’’ also contains genealogical infor-
mation. In this earlier instance it is presented as family history rather than as
a detailed sketch of belonging. The chapter begins by repeating verbatim sev-
eral lines from Souls that announce that Du Bois ‘‘was born by a golden river
and in the shadow of two great hills’’ (559) and then follows with familiar lore
about the Great Barrington Burghardt clan.
55 By contrast, at Fisk Du Bois recalls being surrounded by those who dealt with
‘‘the problem of race . . . openly’’ and ‘‘strenuously denied’’ any notion of
‘‘natural inferiority’’ (Dusk of Dawn, 625).
56 Du Bois makes a similar point when relating his failed attempt to gain mem-
bership in the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution
based on his great-great-grandfather’s record of military and period service.
The secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, A. Howard Clark, wrote in re-
sponse to his request that unless ‘‘proof of the marriage of the ancestor of Tom
Burghardt and the record of the birth of a son’’ could be provided, member-
ship would be denied. As Du Bois comments, Clark of course knew ‘‘that the
birth record of a stolen African slave could not possibly be produced’’ (Dusk
of Dawn, 638).
57 Revealing the stakes of such a narration, Du Bois relates how the legal ad-
visers to his publisher wrote, ‘‘ ‘We may assume as a general proposition that
it is libelous to state erroneously that a white man or woman has colored
blood’ ’’ (Dusk of Dawn, 632).
58 See Kelley, Race Rebels, 118.
59 Du Bois makes a similar argument when he famously asserts ‘‘that a black
man is someone who rides Jim Crow in Georgia’’ (Dusk of Dawn, 666).
60 See Countée Cullen, ‘‘Heritage,’’ Survey Graphic (March 1925): 674–75. This
first edition of the poem was later republished with several changes in The
New Negro, ed. Locke, 250–53. Cullen was for a brief time Du Bois’s son-in-
law, his daughter Yolanda’s first husband.
61 On Du Bois’s relationship to Africa, see Herbert Aptheker, ‘‘W. E. B. Du
Bois and Africa,’’ Pan-African Biography, ed. Robert A. Hill (copublished by
Los Angeles: American Studies Center UCLA and Crossroads Press, African
Studies Association, 1987), 97–117; Anthony Monteiro, ‘‘Being an African in
the World: The Du Boisian Epistemology,’’ Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 568 (2000): 220–34; and Harold Isaacs, ‘‘Du
Bois and Africa.’’
62 See Appiah, ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument.’’
63 Of course in repeating his genealogical narrative in each autobiographical text
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
302 Notes
Du Bois casts it as a form of narration, as a story told and retold. As origins

proliferate the solidity of scientific or biological notions of racial origination
become necessarily tenuous.
Coda
1 Anthony Appiah, ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of
Race,’’ in ‘‘Race,’’ Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), 21–22.
2 As has been pointed out the ‘‘map’’ metaphor of dna problematically har-
bors the positivist notion that mapping is an impersonal and objective activity
that directly reflects ‘‘nature.’’ See Mary Rosner and T. R. Johnson, ‘‘Telling
Stories: Metaphors of the Human Genome Project,’’ Hypatia 10 (fall 1995):
104–23.
3 See Susan Gubar, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Walter Benn Michaels, Our
America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1995). Other books that might be added to this list include Ross
Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intel-
lectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Rogers Smith,
Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997); and David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond
Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
4 See, for example Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages
(New York: North Point Press, 2000); Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiogra-
phy of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: Harper Collins, 1999); Steve Jones,
The Language of Genes: Solving the Mysteries of Our Genetic Past, Present,
and Future (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), 10–11; Kelly Owens and Mary
Claire Kind, ‘‘Genomic Views of Human History,’’ Science 286 (15 October
1999): 451.
5 Barbara Katz Rothman makes a similar point in The Book of Life: A Per-
sonal and Ethical Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Human
Genome Project (Boston: Beacon Books, 2001), 92. Also see Priscilla Wald,
‘‘Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes, and Geography,’’ New Literary History
31.4 (2000), 702–6.
6 Heléna Ragoné’s first book on surrogacy explores its racial logic. Her more
recent work suggests that when surrogates gestate unrelated genetic material,
racial differences between the surrogate and social parents are deemed ir-
relevant. Far from such a formation contravening the point I make here, it
suggests its enduring power: Connections between progeny and parents that
count are those that are genetic. See Heléna Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood:
Conception in the Heart (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994) and ‘‘Of Likeness
and Difference: How Race Is Being Transfigured by Gestational Surrogacy,’’
in Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, National-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 303
ism, ed. Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine (New York: Routledge,
2000), 56–75.
7 See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the
Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 251.
8 Deborah R. Grayson, ‘‘Mediating Intimacy: Black Surrogate Mothers and the
Law,’’ Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 525–46.
9 Dion Farquhar exits from this paradigm by suggesting that demonization of
technology (what she dubs the ‘‘fundamentalist stance’’) and neutralization
of it (the ‘‘liberal stance’’) need not be viewed as the only options. Rather,
she reads reproductive technologies as at once liberatory and oppressive; the
difference lies in technological practice, not in the technology itself. See Far-
quhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New
York: Routledge, 1996), especially 179–92.
10 On the curtailment and naturalization of the potentially radical racial for-
mation of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and related practices
(zift and gift), see Charis Cussins, ‘‘Producing Reproduction: Techniques
of Normalization and Naturalization in Infertility Clinics,’’ in Reproducing
Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, ed. Sarah Franklin
and Heléna Ragoné (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998),
66–101; and Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of As-
sisted Conception (New York: Routledge, 1997). Production of racially ho-
mogenous families has also been a long-standing issue within debates about
interracial adoption.
11 This quote is from a promotional pamphlet advertising the public programs
and events related to the exhibit, including a gallery talk that I led together
with University of Washington colleagues Janelle Taylor and Celia Lowe. Such
public programs were funded by the Animating Democracy Initiative (adi), a
programmatic initiative of Americans for the Arts funded by the Ford Foun-
dation. Notably, many of the artists included in ‘‘Gene(sis)’’ had contributed
work to similar nationally celebrated exhibitions including ‘‘Paradise Lost’’
at the Exit gallery in New York.
12 Steven Henry Madoff, ‘‘The Wonders of Genetics Breed a New Art,’’ New
York Times, 26 May 2002, sec. 2, pp. 1, 30.
13 ‘‘Onco-Mouse,’’ a creature invented to aid in cancer research, is the most fa-
mous transgenic mouse. See Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium,
79–85.
14 This argument was underscored by the curator’s and publicist’s decision to
showcase Lee’s work in the promotional materials for ‘‘Gene(sis)’’—members
of the court appeared on the cover of the Henry’s spring newsletter, on the
program for the symposium that opened the exhibit, on brochures and flyers
available at the museum, and on a souvenir bookmark—rather than those
artworks more directly focused on human genomics. In this way Lee’s work
was situated as on topic, even though its express concern was hybridity, not
genomics.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
304 Notes
15 This sentence is reported in an article that describes Kac’s Web posting after
a previous showing of Genesis. Such a post-exhibit ‘‘translation’’ of the pas-
sage was not available for the Henry Gallery installation. See Steve Tomasula,
‘‘(Gene)sis,’’ in Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, Transgenic Art, ed.
Eduardo Kac (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Association for Culture and Education,
2000), 93.
16 Madoff, ‘‘The Wonders of Genetics,’’ 30.
17 Gayatri Spivak, ‘‘Translator’s Preface,’’ in Of Grammatology, by Jacques Der-
rida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), xii. Rosher and John-
son also cite Spivak thus.
18 Thomas Fogel, ‘‘Information Metaphors and the Human Genome Project,’’
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 38.4 (1995): 540. Here Fogel discusses the
work of H. Atlan and M. Koppel.
19 My argument is not about Kac’s intent, but is rather a deliberate reading
that interprets Genesis to particular anti-determinist, anti-essentialist ends.
I underscore this point because in interviews Kac expresses contradictory
ideas about his mastery over life forms he creates on the one hand, and his
desire to undermine ideas of biological determinism on the other. See Lisa
Lynch, ‘‘Trans-Genesis: An Interview with Eduardo Kac,’’ New Formations
49 (Spring 2003): 75–89, especially 84–6.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Notes 305
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09 7032 Weinbaum / WAYWARD REPRODUCTIONS / sheet 318 of 362
Works Cited
Adams, Alice. Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Femi-

nist Theory, and Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Adler, H. G. The Jews in Germany: From the Enlightenment to National
Socialism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969.
Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race. Vol. 1, Racial Oppres-
sion and Social Control. London: Verso, 1994.
Althusser, Louis. ‘‘Freud and Lacan.’’ New Left Review 55 (1969): 51–65.
. ‘‘Ideological State Apparatus.’’ In Lenin and Philosophy, translated
by Ben Brewster, 127–88. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Amin, Samir. Accumulation on a World Scale. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1974.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Anderson, Mark. ‘‘ ‘Jewish’ Music? Otto Weiniger and ‘Josephine the
Singer.’ ’’ In Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg
Fin de Siècle, 194–216. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Appiah, Anthony. ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illu-
sion of Race.’’ In‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis
Gates Jr., 21–37. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Appignanesi, Lisa, and John Forrester. Freud’s Women: Family, Patients,
Followers. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Appleman, Philip, ed. Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principles of
Population: Text, Sources, and Background Criticism. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1976.
Aptheker, Bettina. ‘‘On ‘The Damnation of Women’: W. E. B. Du Bois and
a Theory for Women’s Emancipation.’’ In Woman’s Legacy: Essays on
Race, Sex and Class in American History, edited by Bettina Aptheker,
77–88. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Aptheker, Herbert. ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and Africa.’’ In Pan-African Biog-
raphy, edited by Robert A. Hill, 97–117. Copublished by Los Angeles:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
American Studies Center UCLA, and Crossroads Press, African Studies

Association, 1987.
Arditti, Rita, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, eds. Test-Tube
Women: What Future for Motherhood? London: Pandora Press, 1984.
Arner, Robert. ‘‘Pride and Prejudice: Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby.’ ’’
Mississippi Quarterly 25.2 (1972): 131–40.
Aronson, Amy, and Michael Kimmel, eds. Women and Economics, by Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Aschheim, Steven E. ‘‘Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.’’ In
Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, edited by Jacob Golomb, 3–20. London:
Routledge, 1997.
. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992.
Bachofen, Johann Jakob. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings
of J. J. Bachofen, translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1967.
Balibar, Etienne. Masses, Classes, and Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philoso-
phy before and after Marx, translated by James Swenson. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities. London: Verso, 1991.
Balibar, Etienne, and Cornel West. ‘‘Race and Class: A Dialogue.’’ Plenary
Address, presented at Rethinking Marxism Conference. University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 6 December 1996.
Barrett, Michèle. ‘‘Introduction to the 1988 Edition.’’ In Women’s Oppression
Today: The Marxist Feminist Encounter. London: Verso, 1988.
. The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford: Stanford
. Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis.
London: Verso, 1980.
Barrett, Michèle, and Mary McIntosh. ‘‘Ethnocentricism and Socialist
Feminist Theory.’’ Feminist Review, no. 20 (1985): 23–47.
Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989.
Bauer, Margaret D. ‘‘Armand Aubigny, Still Passing after All These Years:
The Narrative Voice and Historical Context of ‘Désirée’s Baby.’ ’’ In
Critical Essays on Kate Chopin, edited by Alice Hall Petry, 161–83. New
York: G. K. Hall, 1996.
Beavers, Herman. ‘‘Romancing the Body Politic: Du Bois’s Propaganda of
the Dark World.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 568 (2000): 250–64.
Bebel, August. Woman under Socialism. 1904. Translated by Daniel de Leon.
New York: Source Book Press, 1970.
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
308 Bibliography
and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1995.
Beechey, Veronica. Unequal Work. London: Verso, 1987.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot,
and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: ark, 1983.
Bell, Bernard W., Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Steward, eds. W. E. B.
DuBois: On Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Bell, Derrick. Race, Racism, and American Law. 3d edition. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1992.
Bender, Bert. The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection
in American Fiction, 1871–1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996.
Bennett, Bridget. ‘‘Pockets of Resistance: Some Notes towards an Explo-
ration of Gender and Genre Boundaries in Herland.’’ In A Very Different
Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val
Gough and Jill Rudd, 38–53. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.
Berg, Allison. Mothering the Race: Women’s Narratives of Reproduction,
1890–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002.
Berkson, Dorothy. ‘‘ ‘So We All Became Mothers’: Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the New World of Feminist Culture.’’ In
Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, edited by Libby Falk Jones and Sarah
Webster Goodwin, 100–15. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1990.
Berlant, Lauren, and Elizabeth Freeman. ‘‘Queer Nationality.’’ In Fear of a
Queer Planet, edited by Michael Warner, 193–229. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1993. Reprinted in The Queen of America Goes
to Washington City, 145–73. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
Bernal, Martin. ‘‘Black Athena: Hostilities to Egypt in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury.’’ In The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future,
edited by Sandra Harding, 47–63. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1993.
Bernasconi, Robert. ‘‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in
the Enlightenment Construction of Race.’’ In Race, edited by Robert
Bernasconi, 11–36. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Bernheimer, Charles, and Claire Kahane, eds. In Dora’s Case: Freud—
Hysteria—Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Bhabha, Homi K. ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the
Modern Nation.’’ In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha,
291–322. London: Routledge, 1990.
Biddis, Michael D. ‘‘European Racist Ideology, 1850–1945: Myths of
Blood.’’ Patterns of Prejudice 9.5 (1975): 11–18.
Bieder, Robert E. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 309
Blair, John G., and Reinhold Wagnleitner, eds. Empire: American Studies.
Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997.
Blassingame, John W. Black New Orleans, 1860–1880. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1973.
Bloch, Maurice. Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Blom, Ida, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds. Gendered Nations:
Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century. Oxford:
Berg, 2000.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification.
New York: Routledge, 1996.
Bowlby, Rachel. ‘‘A Happy Event: The Births of Psychoanalysis.’’ In Shop-
ping with Freud, 72–81. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Boyarin, Daniel. ‘‘Épater l’Embourgeoisement: Freud, Gender, and the
(De)Colonized Psyche.’’ Diacritics 24.1 (1994): 17–41.
. ‘‘Freud’s Baby, Fleiss’s Maybe: Homophobia, Anti-Semitism, and
the Invention of Oedipus.’’ GLQ 2.1–2 (1995): 115–47.
Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. 1895. Edited by
James Strachey, translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud. New
York: Basic Books, 1957.
Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1982.
Brier, Stephen, et al., eds. Who Built America? Working People and the Na-
tion’s Economy. Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victo-
rian Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.
Brown, Judith K. ‘‘Iroquois Women: An Ethnohistoric Note.’’ In Toward an
Anthology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996.
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Conscious-
ness.’’ American Literature 64.2 (1992): 299–309.
Butler, Judith. ‘‘Against Proper Objects.’’ Differences 6.2–3 (1994): 1–24.
Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Calhoun, Craig. Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997.
Camhi, Leslie. ‘‘Prisoners of Gender: Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Litera-
ture in Fin de Siècle Culture.’’ Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991.
Cancik, Herbert. ‘‘ ‘Mongols, Semites and the Pure-Bred Greeks’: Nietz-
sche’s Handling of the Racial Doctrines of his Time,’’ in Nietzsche and
Jewish Culture, edited by Jacob Golomb, 55–75. London: Routledge,
1997.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
310 Bibliography
Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1998.
. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Carr, Helen. Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Rep-
resentation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789–1936. New York:
New York University Press, 1996.
Carroll, Anne. ‘‘More Than Words: Representing Blackness as American.’’
Centennial Review 41.3 (1997): 471–78.
Carroll, Joseph. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1995.
Carter-Sanborn, Kristin. ‘‘Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-violence
of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.’’ Arizona Quarterly 56.2 (2000): 1–36.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca. Genes, Peoples, and Languages. New York: North
Point Press, 2000.
Ceplair, Larry, ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Non-Fiction Reader. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Cherniavsky, Eva. That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the
Imitation of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995.
. ‘‘Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame.’’ boundary 2 23.2 (1996): 85–
110.
Chopin, Kate. ‘‘Désirée’s Baby.’’ 1893. In The Awakening and Selected Stories
of Kate Chopin, edited by Barbara Solomon. New York: Signet Classic,
1976.
Chrisman, Laura. ‘‘Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.’’ Race and
Class 39.2 (1997): 51–64.
Cixous, Hélène. ‘‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das
Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’).’’ New Literary History 7 (1978): 525–48.
Clinton, Catherine, ed. Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the
American Past. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.
Comfort, Nathaniel C. ‘‘Are Genes Real?’’ Natural History (June 2001):
28–37.
Corea, Sonia, in collaboration with Rebecca Reichmann. Population and
Reproductive Rights: Feminist Perspective from the South. London: Zed
Books, 1994.
Coward, Rosalind. Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. ‘‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 311
Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.’’ In Critical Race Theory,

edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., 357–83. New York: New Press, 1995.
Croly, David C., George Wakeman, and E. C. Howells. Miscegenation: The
Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man
and the Negro. New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864.
Cronin, Helena. The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from
Darwin to Today. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Cullen, Countée. ‘‘Heritage.’’ Survey Graphic (March 1925): 674–75. Re-
printed in The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke
(New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 250–53.
Cummins, Ian. Marx, Engels, and National Movements. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1980.
Cussins, Charis. ‘‘Producing Reproduction: Techniques of Normalization
and Naturalization in Infertility Clinics.’’ In Reproducing Reproduction:
Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, edited by Sarah Franklin
and Heléna Ragoné, 66–101. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1998.
Daniels, Cynthia. At Women’s Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal
Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora
Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton, 1958.
. Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 1871. Introduc-
tion by John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May. Princeton: Princeton
. The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Pres-
ervation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. 1859. Introduction by
Ernst Mayr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Davin, Anna. ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood.’’ History Workshop 5 (1978):
9–65.
Davin, Delia. ‘‘Engels and the Making of Chinese Family Policy.’’ In Engels
Revisited: New Feminist Essays, edited by Janet Sayers, Mary Evans, and
Nannette Redclift, 145–63. London: Tavistock, 1987.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
Davis, F. James. Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
Decker, Hannah. Freud, Dora, and Vienna, 1900. New York: Free Press,
1991.
de Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. 1782.
London: Penguin, 1986.
Deegan, Mary Jo, and Michael Hill, eds. ‘‘Introduction: Gilman’s Sociologi-
cal Journey from Herland to Ourland.’’ In With Her in Ourland: Sequel to
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.
Defoe, Daniel. The True-Born English-Man: A Satyr. Dublin: Printed for Sam
Fuller at the Globe and Scales, 1728.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
312 Bibliography
Degler, Carl. In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Dar-
winism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press,
1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 1962. Translated by Hugh Tomlin-
son. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Denning, Michael. ‘‘ ‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and
American Studies.’’ American Quarterly 38.3 (1986): 356–80.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘‘Freud’s Legacy.’’ In The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud
and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass, 292–337. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987.
. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
. ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.’’ In Mar-
gins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 207–72. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin. New York: W. W. Norton,
1991.
Desmond, Jane C., and Virginia R. Dominguez. ‘‘Resituating American
Studies within a Critical Internationalism.’’ American Quarterly 48.3
(1996): 475–90.
Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 21. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1917.
Dinnerstein, Leonard, and David Reimers. Ethnic American: A History of
Immigration and Assimilation. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.
Doane, Mary Ann. ‘‘Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual
Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.’’ In Femmes Fatales, 209–
48. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Dominguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole
Louisiana. Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Donaldson, Laura E. ‘‘The Eve of De-struction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and the Feminist Re-creation of Paradise.’’ Women’s Studies 16 (1989):
373–87.
Doskow, Minna, ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels. Cranbury,
N.J: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction
and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Em-
pire Building. New York: Schocken Books, 1980.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on
Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York:
International Publishers, 1968.
. ‘‘Criteria for Negro Art.’’ The Crisis (October 1926). Reprinted in
W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections, edited by David Levering Lewis, 509–15.
New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 313
. Dark Princess: A Romance. 1928. Introduction by Herbert Aptheker.

Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1974. Reprinted, with introduction by
Claudia Tate. Jackson, Miss.: Banner Books, 1995.
. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. 1920. New York: ams Press,
1969.
. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept.
1940. Reprinted in Du Bois: Writings, 549–801, New York: Library of
America, 1986.
. ‘‘The Freedom of Womanhood.’’ In The Gift of Black Folk: The
Negroes in the Making of America, 259–73. Boston: Stratford, 1924.
. ‘‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out.’’ In The New Negro: An Interpre-
tation, edited by Alain Locke, 385–414. New York: Albert and Charles
Boni, 1925.
. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. In W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, 357–
548. New York: Library of America, 1986.
Ebert, Teresa. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor
in Late Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and
the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2003.
Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of
Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Efron, John Maurice. ‘‘Defining the Jewish Race: The Self-Perceptions and
Response of Jewish Scientists to Scientific Racism in Europe, 1882–1933.’’
Ann Arbor: umi; Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991.
Eisenstein, Zillah. ‘‘Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Social-
ist Feminism.’’ In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism,
edited by Zillah Eisenstein, 5–40. New York: Monthly Review Press,
1979.
. The Female Body and the Law. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988.
. Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the Twentieth Cen-
tury. New York: Routledge, 1996.
, ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.
Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women of the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and
the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Kate Chopin.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
Ellis, Havelock. Sexual Selection in Man. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Publish-
ing, 1905.
. Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse.
Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Publishing, 1903.
Engels, Friedrich. ‘‘Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
314 Bibliography
Staats. 4. Auflage.’’ In Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. 29, 125–271.

Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1990.
. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in Light
of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. 1884. Introduction by Michèle
Barrett, London: Penguin Classics, 1985.
English, Daylanne. ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis.’’ American Literature
72.2 (2000): 291–319.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Others: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Farquhar, Dion. The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technolo-
gies. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Feely-Harnik, Gillian. ‘‘The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Mor-
gan and the American Beaver.’’ In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship
Studies, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 54–84. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.
Fielder, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised edition. New
York: Stein & Day, 1966.
Fields, Barbara. ‘‘Ideology and Race in American History.’’ In Region,
Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, edited
by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, 143–78. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982.
Fitz, Brewster E. ‘‘Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’: Emancipating the
Readers.’’ Short Story 8.1 (2000): 78–91.
Fogel, Thomas. ‘‘Information Metaphors and the Human Genome Project.’’
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 38.4 (1995): 535–47.
Foner, Philip, and James Allen, eds. American Communism and Black Ameri-
cans: A Documentary History, 1919–1929. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. ‘‘About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in
Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry.’’ In Power: Essential Works of Fou-
cault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, edited by James D. Faubion, 176–200. New
York: New Press, 2000.
. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. New York: Vintage
Books, 1978.
. ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.’’ 1971. In The Foucault Reader,
edited by Paul Rabinow, 76–100. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Tavistock/Routledge, 1970.
Fraad, Harriet, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff. Bringing It All Back
Home: Class, Gender, and Power in the Modern Household. London: Pluto
Press, 1994.
Frank, André Gunder. Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment.
London: Macmillan, 1978.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 315
Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of

Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Franklin, Sarah. Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Concep-
tion. New York: Routledge, 1997.
. ‘‘Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Re-
production.’’ In Conceiving the New World Order, edited by Faye D.
Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 323–45. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995.
Freud, Ernst, ed. The Letters of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books,
1960.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘The Aetiology of Hysteria.’’ 1896. In The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, edited by James
Strachey, translated by James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey,
and Alan Tyson, 189–221. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1955.
. An Autobiographical Study. 1924. Translated by James Strachey. New
York: Collier Books, 1963.
. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works, vol. 21, 64–145.
. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Works, vol. 18, 69–143.
. ‘‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses.’’ 1896. In The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Works, vol. 3, 142–56.
. ‘‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.’’ 1914. In The
History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, edited by Philip Rieff, 41–99.
New York: Collier Books, 1963.
. ‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Be-
tween the Sexes.’’ 1925. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works,
vol. 19, 248–58.
. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives
of Savages and Neurotics. 1913. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Works, vol. 13, 1–161.
. ‘‘The ‘Uncanny.’ ’’ 1919. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Works, vol. 17, 219–56.
. ‘‘Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie.’’ In Gesammelte Werke, Erster Band aus
den Jahren 1829–1899, 427–59. London: Imago Publishing, 1952.
Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. Studien über Hysterie. Frankfurt: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970.
Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds. The Im-
perialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in
the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
316 Bibliography
Gallagher, Catherine. ‘‘The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of
Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew.’’ In The Making of the Mod-
ern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, edited by
Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacquer, 83–106. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987.
Ganobcsik-Williams, Lisa. ‘‘The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman: Evolutionary Perspective on Race, Ethnicity and Class.’’ In
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val
Gough, 16–44. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. ‘‘On Alternative Modernities.’’ Public Culture
11.1 (1999): 1–18.
Gay, Peter. Freud, Jews, and Other Germans. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978.
Geller, Jay. ‘‘Blood Sin: Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identity.’’
Faultline 1 (1992): 21–48.
. ‘‘Freud v. Freud: Freud’s Reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denk-
würdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken.’’ In Reading Freud’s Reading, edited by
Sander Gilman et al., 180–210. New York: New York University Press,
1994.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalisms. London: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Gerstle, Gary. ‘‘The Limits of American Universalism.’’ American Quarterly
45.2 (1993): 230–36.
Gilbert, Sandra. ‘‘Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness.’’ In Coordinates:
Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S.
Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, 124–38. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. ‘‘Fecundate! Discriminate!: Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity.’’ In Charlotte Perkins
Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 200–
218. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.
. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. ‘‘The Margin as Center of a Theory of His-
tory: African-American Women, Social Change, and the Sociology of
W. E. B. Du Bois.’’ In W. E. B. Du Bois: On Race and Culture, edited by
Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart, 111–40. New
York: Routledge, 1996.
Gillman, Susan. Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the
Occult. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003.
Gillman, Susan, and Forrest G. Robinson, eds. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead
Wilson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ‘‘The Dress of Women.’’ The Forerunner 6 (seri-
alized 1915).
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 317
. Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopia. The Forerunner, serialized (1915).

Reprint, with introduction by Ann J. Lane, New York: Pantheon, 1979.
. ‘‘Immigration, Importation, and Our Fathers.’’ The Forerunner 5
(1914): 117–19.
. ‘‘Is America Too Hospitable?’’ The Forum 70 (1923): 1983–89.
. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. 1935.
Reprint, with introduction by Ann J. Lane, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1963.
. ‘‘My Ancestors.’’ The Forerunner 4 (1913): 73–75.
. ‘‘The New Mothers of a New World.’’ The Forerunner 4 (1913):
145–49.
. ‘‘A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.’’ American Journal of Soci-
ology 14 (1908): 78.
. ‘‘With Her in Ourland.’’ The Forerunner (serialized 1916).
. Women and Economics. 1898. Reprint, with introduction by Carl
Degler, New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Reprint, with introduction by
Sheryl Meyering, Mineola, N.J.: Dover, 1998.
. ‘‘Women’s Hair and Men’s Whiskers.’’ The Forerunner 7 (1916):
64–65.
. ‘‘Working to Make Black into White.’’ The Forerunner 5 (1914):
33–34.
Gilman, Sander L. The Case of Sigmund Freud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993.
. ‘‘The Image of the Black in German Thought from Hegel to Nietz-
sche.’’ In On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in
Germany, 93–118. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
. ‘‘The Image of the Hysteric.’’ In Hysteria beyond Freud, edited by
Sander Gilman et al., 345–452. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993.
. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.
. ‘‘Sibling Incest, Madness and the ‘Jews.’ ’’ Jewish Social Studies 4.2
(1998): 157–79.
Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of
White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imaging Political Culture beyond the Color Line.
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.
. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Culture and Politics of
Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Ginsburg, Faye G., and Rayna Rapp, eds. Conceiving the New World Order:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
318 Bibliography
The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1995.
Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘‘The Yellow
Wallpaper.’’ New York: Feminist Press, 1992.
Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover, 1969.
Golomb, Jacob, ed. Nietzsche and Jewish Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.
Gooding-Williams, Robert. ‘‘Outlaw, Appiah and Du Bois’s ‘The Conser-
vation of Races.’ ’’ In W. E. B Du Bois: On Race and Culture, edited by
Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart, 39–56. New
Gopinath, Gayatri. ‘‘Funny Boys and Girls: Notes on a Queer South Asian
Planet.’’ In Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Les-
bian Experience, edited by Russell Leong, 119–27. New York: Routledge,
1996.
Gordon, Lewis R. Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a
Neocolonial Age. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth
Control in America. New York: Grossman, 1976.
Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York:
Gough, Val. ‘‘Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland.’’ In
Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, edited by
David Seed, 195–215. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
. ‘‘ ‘In the Twinkling of an Eye’: Gilman’s Utopian Imagination.’’
In A Very Different Story, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 129–43.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.
Gough, Val, and Jill Rudd, eds. A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction
of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.
Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Graham, Amanda. ‘‘Herland: Definitive Ecofeminist Fiction?’’ In A Very
Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited
by Val Gough and Jill Rudd, 115–28. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1998.
Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons, 1916.
Grayson, Deborah R. ‘‘Mediating Intimacy: Black Surrogate Mothers and
the Law.’’ Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 525–46.
Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1992.
Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmoder-
nity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. ‘‘Black Feminists and Du Bois: Respectability, Pro-
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 319
tection, and Beyond.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and

Social Science 568 (2000): 28–53.
Grollman, Earl A. Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World. New York: Block
Publishers, 1965.
Gubar, Susan. Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
. ‘‘She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy.’’ In Coordinates: Placing Sci-
ence Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and
Robert Scholes, 138–58. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1983.
Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995.
Gunning, Sandra. ‘‘Kate Chopin’s Local Color Fiction and the Politics of
White Supremacy.’’ Arizona Quarterly 51.3 (1995): 61–115.
Guthrie, D. Clinton. ‘‘Race Suicide.’’ Pennsylvania Medical Journal 15 (1909–
10): 855–59.
Haithcox, John Patrick. Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy
and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1971.
Hall, Stuart. ‘‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.’’
Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 5–27.
. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.
London: Verso, 1988.
. ‘‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.’’ In
Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, 305–45. Paris: unesco Press,
1980.
Haller, John S. Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferi-
ority, 1859–1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Handlin, Oscar, ed. Immigration as a Factor in American History. Englewood
Cliff, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959.
Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’’ Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–107.
. Modest Witness@Second Millennium: Femaleman© Meets Onco
Mouse™. New York: Routledge, 1997.
. ‘‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women,
183–202. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1986.
. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1991.
Harris, Cheryl I. ‘‘Whiteness as Property.’’ Harvard Law Review 106 (1994):
1709–91.
Harris, Olivia, and Kate Young. ‘‘Engendered Structures: Some Problems
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
320 Bibliography
in the Analysis of Reproduction.’’ In The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist

Societies, edited by Joel Kahn and Josep R. Llobera, 109–45. London:
Macmillan, 1981.
Hartman, Betsy. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of
Population Control and Contraceptive Choice. New York: Harper & Row,
1987.
Hartmann, Heidi. ‘‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Toward a More Progressive Union.’’ In The Unhappy Marriage of Marx-
ism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy, edited by Lydia
Sargent, 1–41. London: Pluto Press, 1981.
Hartsock, Nancy. Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical
Materialism. New York: Longman, 1983.
Hausman, Bernice L. ‘‘Sex before Gender: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the
Evolutionary Paradigm of Utopia.’’ Feminist Studies 24.3 (1998): 489–51.
Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Com-
munist. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978.
Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New
Herndl, Diane Price. ‘‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna
O., and Hysterical Writing.’’ NWSA Journal 1.1 (1988): 52–74.
Hickman, Christine B. ‘‘The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Cate-
gories, African Americans, and the United States Census.’’ Michigan Law
Review 95.5 (1997): 1161–265.
Higham, John. Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. 2d
edition. New York: Athenaeum, 1967.
Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist,
1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.
. Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
1897–1900. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995.
Hinsley, Curtis M. The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a
Moral Anthropology in Victorian America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1981.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-
Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
, ed. Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.
New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York:
Basic Books, 1995.
Holub, Robert C. ‘‘Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germanie,
Good Europeans, and the Great Politics.’’ In The Imperialist Imagination:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 321
German Colonialism and Its Legacy, edited by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara

Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, 33–50. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998.
Horrowitz, Nancy, and Barbara Hyams, eds. Jews and Gender: Responses to
Otto Weiniger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981.
Hubbard, Ruth. ‘‘Genes as Causes.’’ In Biopolitics, edited by Vandana Shiva
and Ingunn Moser, 38–39. London: Zed Press, 1995.
Hull, David L. Darwin and His Critics. Chicago: University of Chigago
Press, 1973.
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women
Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black
Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.
Hunter, Diane. ‘‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna
O.’’ In The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpre-
tation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon
Sprengnether, 89–115. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Irigaray, Luce. Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Translated by
Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1993.
. Sexes and Genealogies.Translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993.
. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985.
. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter, with
Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Isaacs, Harold. ‘‘Du Bois and Africa.’’ Race 2.1 (1960): 3–23.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immi-
grants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Jacobus, Mary. ‘‘Anna (Wh)O.’s Absences: Readings in Hysteria.’’ In Read-
ing Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism, 197–228. New York: Columbia
Jakobsen, Janet R. ‘‘Queer Is? Queer Does?: Normativity and the Problem
of Resistance.’’ GLQ 4.4 (1998): 511–26.
James, Joy. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American
Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Jann, Rosemary. ‘‘Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its
Discontents.’’ Victorian Studies 37.2 (1994): 287–306.
Jaywardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London:
Zed Books, 1986.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
322 Bibliography
Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Lionel Trilling
and Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books, 1961.
Jones, Jacqueline. ‘‘Race, Sex and Self-Evident Truths: The Status of Slave
Women During the Era of the American Revolution.’’ In Half Sisters
of History: Southern Women and the American Past, edited by Catherine
Clinton, 18–35. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.
Jones, Libby Falk. ‘‘Gilman, Bradley, Piercy, and the Evolving Rhetoric of
Feminist Utopia.’’ In Feminism, Utopia and Narrative, edited by Libby
Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, 116–29. Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1990.
Jones, Steve. The Language of Genes: Solving the Mysteries of Our Genetic
Past, Present, and Future. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. ‘‘Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the
Eighteenth Century.’’ In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global
Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp,
369–86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Joseph, Miranda. ‘‘Analogy and Complicity: Women’s Studies, Lesbian/Gay
Studies, and Capitalism.’’ In Women’s Studies on Its Own, edited by
Robyn Wiegman, 267–92. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.
. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of
Josephs, Gloria. ‘‘The Incompatible Menage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism
and Racism.’’ In The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A De-
bate on Class and Patriarchy, edited by Lydia Sargent, 91–107. London:
Pluto Press, 1981.
Kadourie, Elie. Nationalism. 1960. Reprint, 4th edition, Oxford: Blackwell,
1994.
Kammen, Michael. ‘‘The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Recon-
sideration.’’ American Quarterly 45.1 (1993): 1–43.
Kanet, Roger E. ‘‘The Comintern and the ‘Negro Question’: Communist
Policy in the United States and Africa, 1921–1941.’’ Survey 19.4 (1973):
86–122.
Kaplan, Amy. ‘‘ ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the
Study of American Culture.’’ In Cultures of United States Imperialism,
edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 3–21. Durham, N.C.: Duke
. ‘‘Manifest Domesticity.’’ American Literature 70.3 (1998): 581–606.
. ‘‘Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Mascu-
linity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s.’’ American Literary
History 2.4 (1990): 659–90.
Kaplan, Amy, and Donald Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.
Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem, eds. Between Women
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 323
and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Dur-

ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular
Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Kaplan, Marion. The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.
. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1991.
Kaplan, Sidney. ‘‘The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864.’’ 1949.
Reprinted in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American His-
tory, Literature and Law, edited by Werner Sollors, 219–65. Oxford:
Karpinski, Joanne, ed. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New
York: G. K. Hall, 1992.
Kaufman, Walter. Nietzsche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citi-
zenship in Early America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003.
Kelley, Robin D. G. ‘‘ ‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black His-
tory’s Global Vision, 1883–1950.’’ Journal of American History 86.3
(1999): 1045–77.
. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New
York: Free Press, 1994.
Kelly, Alfred. The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in
Germany, 1860–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1981.
Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia
with Selected Writings. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
Kevles, Bettyann. Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in the Animal
Kingdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Keyser, Elizabeth. ‘‘Looking Backward: From Herland to Gulliver’s Travels.’’
Studies in American Fiction 11.1 (1983): 31–46.
Kimbrell, Andrew. The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of
Life. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994.
Klein, Dennis B. Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement. New York:
Praeger, 1981.
Knight, Denise D., ed. The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
. The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Vols. 1 and 2. Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
. The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark: University of
Delaware Press, London: Associated University Press, 1996.
Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebel-
lum America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
324 Bibliography
Koestenbaum, Wayne. ‘‘Privileging the Anus: Anna O. and the Collaborative

Origin of Psychoanalysis.’’ Genders 3 (1988): 57–81.
Kohn, Hans. The Age of Nationalism. 1929. Reprint, New York: Harper &
Row, 1968.
. The Idea of Nationalism. 1929. Reprint, New York: Collier, 1967.
Kollentai, Alexandra. Selected Writings. Translated by Alix Holt. Westport,
Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1977.
Koven, Seth, and Sonya Michel, eds. Mothers of a New World: Maternalist
Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret
Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
. ‘‘Women’s Time.’’ 1978. In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi,
187–213. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Kuper, Adam. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an
Illusion. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Landes, Elizabeth, and Richard Posner. ‘‘The Economics of the Baby Short-
age.’’ Journal of Legal Studies 7.2 (1978): 323–48.
Landry, Donna, and Gerald MacLean. Materialist Feminisms. London:
Blackwell, 1993.
Lane, Ann J. ‘‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Rights of Women: Her
Legacy for the 1990s.’’ In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer,
edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 3–15. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1999.
. ‘‘The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.’’ In The Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ix–xlii. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman. New York: Pantheon, 1990.
Lanser, Susan S. ‘‘Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the
Politics of Color in America.’’ Feminist Studies 15.3 (1989): 415–41.
Lazarus, Neil. ‘‘Is a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?’’
Diaspora 4.3 (1995): 323–39.
Leacock, Eleanor Burke. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State in Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan.
New York: International Publishers, 1972.
Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science
Fiction. London: Women’s Press, 1988.
Lenin, V. I. ‘‘Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question.’’ 1920.
Reprinted in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, 3:422–27. New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1967.
Lewis, David Levering. W E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919.
New York: Henry Holt, 1993.
. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century,
1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 325
Linke, Uli. Blood and Nation: European Aesthetics of Race. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Lloyd, David. ‘‘Race under Representation.’’ Oxford Literary Review 13.1–2
(1991): 62–94.
Locke, Alain. ‘‘The Negro Spirituals.’’ In The New Negro: An Interpretation,
edited by Alain Locke, 199–210. New York: Albert and Charles Boni,
1925.
, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and
Charles Boni, 1925.
Loos, Adolf. ‘‘Ornament and Crime.’’ 1908. In Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern
Architecture, edited by Lüdwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, 226–31. New
York: Praeger, 1966.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lott, Tommy. ‘‘Du Bois’s Anthropological Notion of Race.’’ In Race, edited
by Robert Bernasconi, 59–83. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.
Lundie, Katherine. ‘‘Doubly Dispossessed: Kate Chopin’s Women of Color.’’
Louisiana Literature 11.1 (1994): 126–44.
Lynch, Lisa. ‘‘Trans-Genesis: An Interview with Eduardo Kac.’’ New Forma-
tions 49 (Spring 2003): 75–89.
Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in
Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Madoff, Steven Henry. ‘‘The Wonders of Genetics Breed a New Art.’’ New
York Times, 26 May 2002, sec. 2, pp. 1, 30.
Mandel, Siegfried. Nietzsche and the Jews: Exaltation and Denigration. Am-
herst, Mass.: Prometheus Books, 1998.
Marable, Manning. ‘‘Grounding with My Sisters: Patriarchy and the Ex-
ploitation of Black Women.’’ In How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society, 69–103. Bos-
ton: South End Press, 1983.
Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorian: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. 1964. Reprint, New York: New
American Library, 1974.
Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
Marx, Karl. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Edited and with
introduction by L. Krader. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, trans. and ed. The Complete Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887–1904. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Matossian, Lou-Ann. ‘‘A Woman-Made Language: Charlotte Perkins
Gilman and Herland.’’ Women and Language 10.2 (1987): 16–20.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
326 Bibliography
Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and

Communism between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press,
1999.
McCagg, William O., Jr. A History of Hapsburg Jews, 1670–1918. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race and Gender in the Colonial Con-
test. New York: Routledge, 1995.
McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons:
Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of
McDougald, Elise Johnson. ‘‘The Task of Negro Womanhood.’’ In The New
Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, 369–82. New York:
Albert and Charles Boni, 1925.
McKay, Nellie Y. ‘‘The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of
W. E. B. Du Bois.’’ In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical An-
thology, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 227–43. New York: Meridian,
1990.
. ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois: The Black Women in His Writings—Selected
Fictional and Autobiographical Portraits.’’ In Critical Essays on W. E. B.
Du Bois, edited by William L. Andrews, 230–52. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1985.
Meyering, Sheryl, ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work.
Ann Arbor: umi Research Press, 1989.
Micale, Mark S. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism.
Michaelsen, Scott. ‘‘Ely S. Parker and Amerindian Voices in Ethnography.’’
American Literary History 8.4 (1996): 615–38.
Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the
International Division of Labor. London: Zed Press, 1986.
Miles, Kevin Thomas. ‘‘Haunting Music in the Souls of Black Folk.’’ boundary
2 27.3 (2000): 199–214.
Mitchell, Timothy, ed. Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of
Mitter, Swasti. Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy.
London: Pluto Press, 1986.
Mizruchi, Susan. ‘‘Neighbors, Strangers, Corpses: Death and Sympathy
in the Early Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois.’’ In Centuries’ Ends, Nar-
rative Means, edited by Robert Newman, 191–211. Stanford: Stanford
Mohanty, Chandra Talpede, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third
World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1991.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 327
Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press,
1986.
Molyneux, Maxine. ‘‘Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate.’’ New Left
Review 116 (1979): 3–28.
Monteiro, Anthony. ‘‘Being an African in the World: The Du Boisian Epis-
temology.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
568 (2000): 220–34.
Moon, Michael, and Cathy N. Davidson, eds. Subjects and Citizens: Nation,
Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Durham, N.C.: Duke
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, Mass.: Persephone
Press, 1981.
Morgan, Henry Lewis. Ancient Society: Research in the Lines of Human
Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. 1877. Reprint,
with foreword by Elizabeth Tooker. Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1985.
Morton, Patricia. ‘‘The All-Mother Vision of W. E. B. Du Bois.’’ In Dis-
figured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women, 55–65.
New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Mosse, George. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal
Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: Fertig, 1985.
Moya, Paula. ‘‘Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity:
Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism.’’ In Feminist Genealogies, Colo-
nial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. Jacqui Alexander and
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 125–50. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Mullen, Bill V. ‘‘Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International.’’
Positions 11.1 (2003): 217–40.
Mullen, Harryette. ‘‘Optic White: Blackness and the Production of White-
ness.’’ Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994): 71–89.
Muraro, Luisa. ‘‘Female Genealogies.’’ In Engaging with Irigary: Feminist
Philosophy and Modern European Thought, edited by Carolyn Burke,
Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford, 317–33. New York: Columbia
Naifei, Ding. ‘‘A Land Where Cats Do Not Sing’’ (paper presented at the an-
nual meeting of the American Studies Association, Seattle, 1998); trans.
Liu Jen-Peng, Working Papers in Gender/Sexuality Studies 3–4. Chungli,
Taiwan: Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University,
1998.
Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. London: New Left Books, 1977.
Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Newman, Louise. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in
the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
328 Bibliography
Nicholson, Linda. ‘‘Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Eco-
nomic.’’ In Feminism as Critique, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla
Cornell, 16–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
. Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the
Family. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. 1887. Edited by Walter
Kaufman, translated by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale. New
York: Vintage, 1967.
O’Brien, Mary. The Politics of Reproduction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1981.
Outlaw, Lucius. ‘‘ ‘Conserve’ Races? In Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois.’’ In
W. E. B. Du Bois: On Race and Culture, edited by Bernard W. Bell,
Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart, 15–38. New York: Routledge,
1996.
Owens, Kelly, and Mary Claire Kind. ‘‘Genomic Views of Human History.’’
Science 286 (15 October 1999): 451–53.
Parker, Andrew, Mary Ross, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds.
Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Parry, Amie. ‘‘Penetrating Herland’’ (paper presented at the annual meeting
of the American Studies Association, Seattle, 1998); an earlier version of
this paper appeared as ‘‘From Herland to Queerland: The Homoerotic
Longings of a Feminist Utopia,’’ trans. Chen Ting, Working Papers in
Gender/Sexuality Studies 3–4. Chungli, Taiwan: Center for the Study of
Sexualities, National Central University, 1998.
Pascoe, Peggy. ‘‘Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of Race in
Twentieth-Century America.’’ Journal of American History 83.1 (1996):
44–69.
. ‘‘Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial
Marriage.’’ Frontiers 12.1 (1991): 5–18.
Patai, Raphael, and Jennifer Patai Wing. The Myth of the Jewish Race. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.
Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1988.
Patterson, Mark. ‘‘Surrogacy and Slavery: The Problematics of Consent in
Baby M, Romance of the Republic, and Pudd’nhead Wilson.’’ American
Literary History 8 (1996): 449–70.
Pease, Donald, ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives.
Peel, Ellen. ‘‘Semiotic Subversion in ‘Désirée’s Baby.’ ’’ American Literature
62.2 (1990): 223–37.
Pellegrini, Ann. Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race.
Petchesky, Rosalind. Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and
Reproductive Freedom. London: Verso, 1986.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 329
Petchesky, Rosalind, and Karen Judd, eds. Negotiating Reproductive Rights:

Women’s Perspectives across Countries and Cultures. London: Zed Press,
1998.
Peterson, Merrill D., ed. Thomas Jefferson: Writings. 1785. Reprint, New
York: Library of America, 1984.
Pierson, Ruth Roach. ‘‘Nations: Gendered, Racialized, Crossed with Em-
pire.’’ In Gendered Nations, edited by Ida Blom et al., 41–43. Oxford:
Berg, 2000.
Pittenger, Mark. American Evolutionists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–
1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
Plessy v. Ferguson. Brief for the Plaintiff in Error in the Supreme Court of
the United States. No. 210 (October Term, 1895): 27–63.
Porter, Carolyn. ‘‘Roxana’s Plot.’’ In Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, edited
by Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson, 121–36. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1990.
Posnock, Ross. Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the
Modern Intellectual. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Proctor, Robert. ‘‘Eugenics among the Social Sciences: Hereditarian
Thought in Germany and the United States.’’ In The Estate of Social
Knowledge, edited by JoAnne Brown and David Van Keuren, 175–208.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Ragoné, Heléna. ‘‘Of Likeness and Difference: How Race Is Being Transfig-
ured by Gestational Surrogacy.’’ In Ideologies and Technologies of Mother-
hood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism, edited by Heléna Ragoné and
France Winddance Twine, 56–75. New York: Routledge, 2000.
. Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart. Boulder, Colo.:
Westview, 1994.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.
. ‘‘Du Bois’s Passage to India.’’ In W. E. B. Du Bois: On Race and
Culture, edited by Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B.
Stewart, 161–76. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Rapp, Rayna. ‘‘Gender and Class: An Archaeology of Knowledge Concern-
ing the Origin of the State.’’ Dialectical Anthropology 2.4 (1977): 309–16.
Reed, John. ‘‘Speech by John Reed at IInd Congress of Communist Inter-
national on Negro Question.’’ Reprinted in American Communism and
Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919–1929, edited by Philip
Foner and James Allen, 5–8. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
Reiter, Rayna R., ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Renan, Ernest. ‘‘What Is a Nation?’’ Reprinted in Nation and Narration,
edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 8–22. London: Routledge, 1990.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
330 Bibliography
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.
Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New
York: Harper Collins, 1999.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the
World. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.
Ritvo, Harriet. ‘‘Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in Eighteenth-
and Nineteenth-Century Britain.’’ In Human All Too Human, edited by
Diana Fuss, 37–58. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Ritvo, Lucille B. Darwin’s Influence on Freud. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York:
Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Mean-
ing of Liberty. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
Robinson, Amy. ‘‘Forms of Appearance of Value: Homer Plessy and the
Politics of Privacy.’’ In Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin
Diamond, 237–61. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradi-
tion. London: Zed Press, 1983.
Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.
Rogers, Daniel. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
Rosenberg, Carroll Smith. ‘‘The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role
Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America.’’ In Disorderly Conduct: Visions
of Gender in Victorian America, 197–216. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1985.
Rosner, Mary, and T. R. Johnson. ‘‘Telling Stories: Metaphors of the Human
Genome Project.’’ Hypatia 10.4 (1995): 104–23.
Ross, E. A. ‘‘The Causes of Race Superiority.’’ Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 18–23 (1901): 67–89.
Rothman, Barbara Katz. The Book of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide
to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Human Genome Project.
Boston: Beacon Books, 2001.
. Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal
Society. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
Rowe, John Carlos. ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of U.S. Imperialism.’’
In Empire: American Studies, edited by John G. Blair and Reinhold
Wagnleitner, 145–66. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997.
, ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2000.
Roy, M. N. ‘‘On the National and Colonial Question.’’ In Selected Works
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 331
of M. N. Roy, vol. 2, 1923–1927, edited by Ray Sibnarayan, 291–306.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
. ‘‘Original Draft of Supplementary Theses on the National and Colo-
nial Question.’’ In Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 1, 1917–1922, edited
by Ray Sibnarayan, 165–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Rubin, Gayle S. ‘‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics
of Sexuality.’’ In The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader, edited by Henry
Abelove, Michèle Aiana Barale, and David Halperin, 3–44. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
. ‘‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.’’
In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–
210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Rudd, Jill, and Val Gough, eds. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.
Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989.
Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
. ‘‘The Darwin Industry: A Guide.’’ Victorian Studies 39.2 (1996):
217–34.
Russett, Cynthia Eagle. The Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of
Womanhood. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Sacks, Karen. ‘‘Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production,
and Private Property.’’ In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by
Rayna R. Reiter, 211–34. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Saks, Eva. ‘‘Representing Miscegenation Law.’’ Raritan Quarterly 8.2 (1988):
39–69.
Santaniello, Weaver. ‘‘A Post-Holocaust Re-Examination of Nietzsche and
the Jews.’’ In Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, edited by Jacob Golomb,
21–54. London: Routledge, 1997.
Sargent, Lydia, ed. The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A De-
bate on Class and Patriarchy. London: Pluto Press, 1981. First published
as Women and Revolution, Boston: South End Press, 1981.
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and
Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 1990.
Sayers, Janet, Mary Evans, and Nannette Redclift, eds. Engels Revisited:
New Feminist Essays. London: Tavistock, 1987.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.:
Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender and the Making of Modern Sci-
ence. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
Schreiner, Olive. Women and Labor. 1911. Reprint, London: Virago, 1978.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
332 Bibliography
Schriber, Marysue. ‘‘Darwin, Wharton and ‘The Descent of Man’: Blue-

prints of American Society.’’ Studies in Short Fiction 17.1 (1980): 31–38.
Schrift, Alan D. ‘‘Nietzsche’s Contest: Nietzsche and the Culture Wars.’’ In
Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture and Politics, edited by
Alan D. Schrift, 184–201. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Shalev, Carmel. Birth Power: The Case for Surrogacy. New Haven: Yale
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial
Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
. ‘‘Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration,
and Race.’’ Diaspora 4.2 (1995): 181–99.
Sheehan, James J. German History, 1770–1866. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989.
Sheftall, Beverly Guy. Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women,
1880–1920. New York: Carlson, 1990.
Shipman, Pat. The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and
Abuse of Science. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston:
South End Press, 1997.
Shiva, Vandana, and Ingunn Moser. Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological
Reader on Biotechnology. London: Zed Books, 1995.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Cul-
ture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
. ‘‘Hysteria, Feminism and Gender.’’ In Hysteria beyond Freud, edited
by Sander Gilman et al., 286–344. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993.
Siegel, Sandra. ‘‘Literature and Degeneration: The Representation of ‘Deca-
dence.’ ’’ In Degeneration, edited by Sander Gilman, 199–219. New York:
Sieveking, Paul, ed. The British Biographical Archive: 1601–1929. London:
K. G. Saur, microfiche 1170, 1984.
Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for
Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
. ‘‘Toward an Effective Antiracism.’’ In Beyond Pluralism: The Con-
ception of Groups and Group Identities in America, edited by Wendy F.
Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree, 221–42. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1998.
Slusser, George E., Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, eds. Coordinates:
Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1983.
Smith, Barbara, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York:
Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.
Smith, Douglas. Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 333
Smith, Jonathan. ‘‘ ‘The Cock of Lordly Plume’: Sexual Selection in the

Egoist.’’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.1 (1995): 51–77.
Smith, Rogers. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Smith, Stephanie. Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-
Century American Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
, ed. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History,
Literature, and Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin
America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Sommerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of
Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2000.
Spillers, Hortense. ‘‘ ‘All the Things You Could Be Now, If Sigmund Freud’s
Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race.’’ boundary 2 23.3
(1996): 75–141.
. ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.’’
Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65–81.
, ed. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the
Modern Text. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ In Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg, 171–216. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
. In Other Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1987.
. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.
. ‘‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.’’ In Race,
Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 262–80. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
. ‘‘Translator’s Preface.’’ In Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida,
ix–lxxxvii. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Stanworth, Michelle. ‘‘Reproductive Technologies and the Deconstruction
of Motherhood.’’ In Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood,
and Medicines, edited by Michelle Stanworth, 10–35. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1987.
. Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicines.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987.
Steinburg, Stephen. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1981.
Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1982.
Stevens, Jacqueline. Reproducing the State. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
334 Bibliography
Stocking, George. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color, against White World-Supremacy.
1920. Reprint with introduction by Madison Grant, Westport, Conn.:
Negro Universities Press, 1971.
Stokes, Mason. The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions
of White Supremacy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.
Stokes, Rose Pastor. ‘‘The Communist International and the Negro.’’ Re-
printed in American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary
History 1919–1929, edited by Philip Foner and James Allen, 29–31.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
Strathern, Marilyn. Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the
New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1992.
Sulloway, Frank. Freud: Biologist of the Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Sundquist, Eric. ‘‘Black and Unknown Bards: A Theory of the Sorrow
Songs.’’ In To Wake the Nations, 525–39. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1993.
Takaki, Ronald. From a Different Shore: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
, ed. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston:
Little Brown, 1993.
Tate, Claudia. ‘‘Race and Desire: Dark Princess, A Romance, by William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois.’’ In Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire
and the Protocols of Race, 47–85. New York: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the
Nineteenth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King,
Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality
in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Thomas, Brook, ed. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents.
Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.
Thomas, Heather Kirk. ‘‘The White League and Racial Status: Historicizing
Kate Chopin’s Reconstruction Stories.’’ Louisiana Literature 14.2 (1997):
97–115.
Tomasula, Steve. ‘‘(Gene)sis.’’ In Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics,
Transgenic Art, edited by Eduardo Kac, 85–100. Ljubljana, Slovenia:
Association for Culture and Education, 2000.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 335
Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Trautmann, Thomas R. Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Valverde, Mariana. ‘‘When the Mother of the Race Is Free: Race, Repro-
duction and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism.’’ In Gender Conflicts:
New Essays in Women’s History, edited by Franca Iacovetta and Mariana
Valverde, 3–26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
Van Evrie, John H. Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the
Races; An Answer to ‘Miscegenation.’ New York: J. Bradburn, 1864.
Veblen, Thorstein. ‘‘The Barbarian Status of Women.’’ American Journal of
Sociology 4 (1899): 503–14.
. ‘‘The Economic Theory of Women’s Dress.’’ Popular Science Monthly
46 (1894): 198–205.
. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. Reprint, New York: Penguin
Books, 1967.
Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary
Theory. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983.
Von Braun, Christina. ‘‘Blutschande: From the Incest Taboo to the Nurem-
burg Racial Laws.’’ In Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature,
History, and Culture, edited by Gisela Brinkler-Gabler, 127–48. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995.
Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form.
. ‘‘Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes, and Geography.’’ New Literary
History 31.4 (2000): 681–708.
Walker, Francis Amasa. ‘‘Immigration and Degredation.’’ The Forum 11
(1891): 637–44.
Wallace, Alfred R. ‘‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of
Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natural Selection.’ ’’ Anthropological
Review 2 (1864): 158–87.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. ‘‘Class Conflict in the Capitalist World-Economy.’’
In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1991.
. ‘‘The Ideological Tensions of Caplitalism: Universalism versus
Racism and Sexism.’’ In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1991.
. The Modern World System. Vols. 1–3. La Jolla, Calif.: Academic
Press, 1972–88.
Wallinger, Hanna. ‘‘Secret Societies and Dark Empires: Sutton E. Grigg’s
Imperium in Imperio and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess.’’ In Empire:
American Studies, edited by John G. Blair and Reinhold Wagnleitner,
197–208. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997.
Ward, Lester Frank. ‘‘Our Better Halves.’’ The Forum 6 (1888): 266–75.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
336 Bibliography
Wardly, Lynn. ‘‘Reassembling Daisy Miller.’’ American Literary History 3.2

(1991): 232–54.
Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London:
Verso, 1992.
Warner, Michael, ed. Fear of a Queer Planet. Minneapolis: University of
Warner, Michael, and Lauren Berlant. ‘‘Sex in Public.’’ Critical Inquiry 24.2
(1998): 547–66.
Warren, Nagueyalti. ‘‘Deconstructing, Reconstructing and Focusing Our
Literary Image.’’ In Spirit, Space, and Survival: African American Women
in (White) Academe, edited by Joy James and Ruth Farmer, 99–117. New
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since
1800. London: Longman, 1981.
Weigman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.
Weinbaum, Alys Eve. ‘‘Marx, Irigary, and the Politics of Reproduction.’’
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.1 (1994): 98–128.
Weinbaum, Alys Eve, and Brent Hayes Edwards. ‘‘On Critical Globality.’’
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 31.1–2 (2000): 255–74.
Weindling, Paul. Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unifi-
cation and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989.
Weiniger, Otto. Sex and Character. 1903. Reprint, London: William Heine-
mann, 1910.
Welke, Barbara Y. ‘‘When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks
Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914.’’
Law and History Review 13.2 (1995): 261–316.
West, Cornel. ‘‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism.’’ In Race Critical Theories,
edited by Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, 90–112. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002.
Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperial-
ism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
White, Deborah Gray. ‘‘Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Ante-
Bellum Plantation South.’’ In Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and
the American Past, edited by Catherine Clinton, 56–75. Durham, N.C.:
White, Richard Grant. The Fall of Man, or The Loves of the Gorillas: A Popu-
lar Scientific Lecture upon the Darwinian Theory of Development by Sexual
Selection. London: G. W. Carleton, 1871.
Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. Durham, N.C.:
Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, Mass.:
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Bibliography 337
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. 1958. Reprint, New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1983.
. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford
. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
. The Sociology of Culture. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.
Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United
States. New York: Free Press, 1980.
Wilson, Christopher. ‘‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Steady Burghers: The
Terrain of Herland.’’ Women’s Studies 12 (1986): 271–92.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. ‘‘Kate Chopin and the Fiction of Limits: ‘Désirée’s
Baby.’ ’’ Southern Literary Journal 10.2 (1978): 123–33.
Wood, Ann Douglas. ‘‘ ‘Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and
Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America.’’ In Clio’s Consciousness
Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, edited by Mary S.
Hartman and Louis Banner, 1–22. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South: 1877–1913. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1951.
Yanagisako, Sylvia J., and Jane F. Collier. ‘‘The Mode of Reproduction in
Anthropology.’’ In Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference, edited by
Deborah L. Rhode, 131–41. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Young, Iris. ‘‘Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems
Theory.’’ In The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate
on Class and Patriarchy, edited by Lydia Sargent, 43–69. London: Pluto
Press, 1981.
Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race.
Young, Robert. Darwin’s Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
Yuval-Davis, Nira, and Floya Anthias, eds. Women-Nation-State. London:
Macmillan, 1989.
Zackodnik, Teresa. ‘‘Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts,
and Racial Identity.’’ American Quarterly 53.3 (2001): 420–51.
Zamir, Shamoon. Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought,
1888–1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Pre-
colonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1997.
Zetkin, Clara. Selected Writings, edited by Philip Foner. New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1984.
Zihlman, Adrienne L. ‘‘Misreading Darwin on Reproduction: Reduction-
ism in Evolutionary Theory.’’ In Conceiving the New World Order: The
Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp,
425–39. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
338 Bibliography
Index
‘‘Aetiology of Hysteria’’ (Freud), origin story, 184–186; and talk-

159–164, 168–171, 177, 185, 287 ing cure, 171–173, 178. See also
n.37, 291 n.59 Breuer, Josef; Freud, Sigmund;
Africa: Du Bois on, 199, 207, 219– Pappenheim, Bertha
220, 222–225 Anthropology, 2, 12, 110, 116, 119;
African Americans, 18–23, 37, 40– Friedrich Engels’s use of, 9, 110,
42, 71–72, 74–76, 187–226; Kate 116–119, 122–125, 132–133, 135,
Chopin on, 15–23, 40–42; W. E. B. 142–143, 279 nn.28–29; of Lewis
Du Bois on, 187–226; Charlotte Henry Morgan, 125–133, 230. See
Perkins Gilman on, 74–76; and also Morgan, Lewis Henry
Plessy v. Ferguson, 40–43; and Anti-Semitism, 52–55, 159, 165–171,
‘‘Race Suicide,’’ 71–72, 188–189 179–186, 217; and Josef Breuer,
Amalgamation, 57. See also Misce- 179–183; and Martin Charcot,
genation 166, 219; and Freud, 10, 146–
American Studies, 5, 11 147, 159, 165–170, 181–186, 217,
Ancient Society (Morgan), 115–116, 281 n.2, 290 n.57; and Nietzsche,
125–133 52–53, 261 n.57. See also Jews
Anderson, Benedict: criticism of, Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 225,
24–25, 255 n.26; Imagined Com- 227–229, 297 n.18
munities, 26–33; on miscegena- Arendt, Hannah, 180
tion, 29–31; on nationalism,
24–33, 35–37, 39, 107, 139, 295 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 120–122,
n.7; on racism, 30–33, 257 n.36, 141, 279 n.28
on ‘‘The True Born English-Man’’ Balibar, Etienne, 106, 187, 189; on
(Defoe), 26–27 kinship, 38, 141–142; on nation,
‘‘Anna O.,’’ 10, 171–173, 175–186, 34–41, 295 n.7; on race, 34–
291 nn.62, 74, 294 n.76; Freud’s 38, 142, 189, 256 n.30, 257 n.36;
revision of, 175–177, 183; hysteri- on racism and nationalism as
cal pregnancy (pseudocyesis) of, ideologies, 34–35, 39, 142; on
171, 175, 177–178, 182, 293 n.70; reproduction, 37, 257 n.34; on
language use of, 172, 178–181; as sexism, 36–39
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Barrett, Michèle, 113–115 debate on, 209–211; of feminism,

Beddoe, John, 53–54, 56 83–88, 90–91, 96; German, 49,
Bederman, Gail, 88; on Columbian 52–53, 55
Exposition, 269 n.42 Combahee River Collective State-
Bellamy, Edward, 89 ment, 111–112. See also Feminism:
Berlant, Lauren, 101, 103–104, Marxist and socialist
274 n.78 Comintern (Communist Interna-
Binswanger, Otto, 165 tional), 208–211
Biological determinism, 244, 246 Concept metaphor(s), 30, 126, 130–
Biology: as essence of race, 37, 129– 133, 163, 255–256 n.23
132, 137, 199, 224–225, 227–229, Conrad, Joseph, 86
244, 246; and genetics, 227–228, Coward, Rosalind, 120
242–244; reproduction as a form ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’ (Du Bois),
of, 1–2, 28, 129–132, 139–140. See 201–202
also Race; Racial science Croly, David. See Miscegenation:
Bowlby, Rachel, 178, 294 n.74 1864 pamphlet
Breuer, Josef, 10, 159–160, 175–179, Cullen, Countée, 223–225
181–182, 292 n.67, 293 n.70; on Cyborgs, 236
‘‘Anna O.,’’ 171–173, 176–183,
294 n.76; and anti-Semitism, ‘‘Damnation of Women’’ (Du Bois),
179–183; relationship with Freud, 207
171–173, 175–179, 181–182, 292 Dark Princess (Du Bois), 11, 12, 190,
n.67, 293 n.70; and talking cure, 200–214, 222, 225; black mater-
172–173, 178. See also ‘‘Anna O.’’ nity in, 201, 205–209, 212–214;
Marxism in, 208–211; ‘‘National
Carby, Hazel, 191 and Colonial Question’’ in, 209–
Carr, Helen, 136–137, 278 n.22 211; racial globality in, 10, 190,
Chalmers, Catherine, 236–239; 208–215; sorrow songs in, 201,
‘‘Rhino Mouse’’ (photograph), 206
237, 238 Darwin, Charles, 6, 9–12, 145–159;
Charcot, Martin, 166, 173, 219, 287 Darwinian (evolutionary) theory,
n.36, 289 nn.49–51; anti-Semitism 9–10, 145–159; Darwinism, 2, 116,
of, 166, 219 145, 266 n.3, 286 n.29, 287 n.32;
Chopin, Kate, 8, 11–12, 53, 58–59, Descent of Man, 10, 147–154; on
162, 233; ‘‘Désirée’s Baby,’’ 15–20, natural selection, 145, 148, 285
22–23, 26, 34, 37–38, 40–43, 46– n.28; Origin of the Species, 147–
47, 60, 233; genealogy as method- 148; on race, 10, 145, 147–148,
ology of, 8, 16–18, 42–43, 47, 151–156, 159; relationship with
59–60; as local colorist, 15, 43; on Alfred Russell Wallace, 149; on
Reconstruction, 18–19, 22–23; on reproduction, 153–156; on sexual
slavery, 20–23, 40–41, 252 n.4 selection, 10, 145, 147–155, 171,
Colonialism, 11, 83–88, 90–91, 201– 283 nn.8, 11, 284 nn.14, 22, 285
202, 209–211, 221–226; Comin- n.28; on women’s sexual agency,
tern (Communist International) 145, 149–156, 159
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
340 Index
de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 194–196, 206; wife Nina Gomer,

72 196. See also Dark Princess
Deegan, Mary Jo, 78 Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois), 11, 190,
Defoe, Daniel: ‘‘The True Born 215–225
English-Man,’’ 26–27
Derrida, Jacques: on ‘‘concept Ebert, Teresa, 277 n.19
metaphors,’’ 164, 255 n.23; on Egypt, 55–59; in 1864 miscegenation
‘‘the supplement,’’ 118; on ‘‘The pamphlet, 57–58; Nietzsche on,
Uncanny,’’ 288 n.44 49, 55–58; orientalized, 58–59,
Descent of Man (Darwin), 10, 147– 263 n.66
154 Ellis, Havelock, 149–150, 283 n.11
‘‘Désirée’s Baby’’ (Chopin), 15–20, Engels, Friedrich, 6, 9–12, 106–144;
22–23, 26, 34, 37–38, 40–43, on Johann Jakob Bachofen, 120–
46–47, 60, 233 122, 279 n.28; feminist reactions
dna, 245. See also Gene(sis) to, 107–108, 110–115; on German
Doyle, Laura, 51 nation formation, 117–118, 139–
‘‘The Dress of Women’’ (Gilman), 141; on Iroquois, 122–125, 133,
157–158 137; on kinship, 115–119, 122–125,
Du Bois, W. E. B., 10–11, 187–229; 128, 135–137, 141–142; on Henry
on Africa, 199, 207, 219–220, Maine, 119–121; on J. F. McLen-
222–225; anti-imperialism of, nan, 120–122; on Lewis Henry
11, 201–202, 208–215, 221–226; Morgan, 9, 110, 116–119, 122–125,
on black maternity, 188–190, 132–133, 135–136, 142–143, 279
192–193, 195–198, 201, 205–209, nn.28–29, 280 n.30; on ‘‘National
213–214, 225; ‘‘Criteria of Negro Question,’’ 278 n.23; The Origin
Art,’’ 201–202; ‘‘Damnation of of the Family, Private Property and
Women,’’ 207; Dark Princess, 11– the State, 9, 106–110, 115–125,
12, 190, 200–214, 222, 225; on 132–144; on state formation, 117,
death of son Burghardt, 191–197, 133–141; treatment of race, 106,
208, 213–214; on double con- 117–118, 128–129, 135–141. See
sciousness, 194–195, 297 n.17; also Origin of the Family, Private
Dusk of Dawn, 11, 190, 215–225; Property and the State
feminist criticism of, 190–191, English, Daylanne, 191, 296 n.11
295 n.9; and Marxism, 199–201, ‘‘Ethnical Periods’’ (Morgan), 126–
209–212; personal genealogy of, 128, 132
215–226, 302 nn.54, 56; on racial Eugenics, 6, 156–157, 191, 296 n.11.
globality, 10, 190, 199–226; on See also Racial science
Reconstruction, 189–190, 192– Evolution. See Darwin, Charles
193; on Romance as form, 201–
202, 300 n.35; on sorrow songs, Fabian, Johannes, 126–127
198–199, 201, 206–208, 222– Feminism: and anti-racism, 62–65,
223, 298 nn.25–26; The Souls of 87–93, 107, 111–115, 140–144;
Black Folk, 11, 190–199, 201, 206, French, 3, 82; genealogies of, 62–
208, 213, 215, 222; on the ‘‘Veil,’’ 65, 77–78, 81–92, 107–115; of
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Index 341
Feminism (continued ) 175–179, 181–182, 291 n.63, 292

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 61– n.67, 293 n.70; relationship with
105; Marxist and socialist, 3–4, 9, Martin Charcot, 166, 173, 219,
107, 110–115, 124, 140–141, 143– 289 nn.49–50; on ‘‘seduction
144, 277 n.15; materialist, 107, theory,’’ 174, 287 n.37; Studies in
112–115, 277 nn.18–19; mater- Hysteria, 164, 171–173, 175, 178,
nalist, 8–9, 62, 78–81, 87, 91, 291 n.62. See also ‘‘Anna O.’’;
272 n.60; second-wave, 8, 62–65, Anti-Semitism
77–92, 107–115; and theories of Frye, Marilyn, 83
nationalism, 24–25, 64, 140–144.
See also Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gale, Zona, 65
Fermin de Vargas, Pedro, 29–30 Galton, Francis, 157
Fields, Barbara, 41 Gellner, Ernest, 24–26, 30–33, 35–
Foucault, Michel, 8, 11, 43–49, 63, 36, 39, 107, 255 n.25; on nation-
91, 113–114, 144, 217; on ‘‘effec- alism as false consciousness,
tive history,’’ 44–45, 217; on 26–27, 30, 35; on race, 30, 32–33,
‘‘episteme,’’ 47–48, 249 n.9; gene- 256 n.29
alogical method of, 8, 43–44, 46, Genealogy, 8–11, 17–23, 36–46, 59–
59–60, 91; History of Sexuality, 65, 190–218; as critical method-
43–44; on Nietzsche, 44–49, 91; ology, 8, 43–49, 59–60, 160–161,
‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ 191–193, 215–218, 234, 259 n.49;
44–48; on sexuality, 43–44; treat- W. E. B. Du Bois on, 191–193,
ment of race, 45, 48, 144, 260 215–226; of feminism, 62–65,
n.52. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich 77–78, 81–92, 107–115; Michel
Frazier, Franklin, 208 Foucault on, 8, 43–46, 59–60,
Freeman, Elizabeth, 101, 274 n.78 91; Freud on, 161–164; horizon-
French Revolution, 51 tal, 218; Jews and, 161–166; of
Freud, Sigmund, 9–11, 145–186, 189, nation, 37, 61–62, 80, 188–189,
217, 219, 288 n.42; ‘‘Aetiology of 193–199, 218; Nietzsche on, 8,
Hysteria,’’ 159–164, 168–171, 177, 44–45, 48–49, 60, 63–64
185, 287 n.37, 291 n.59; ‘‘Anna Genesis: book of, 242–243
O.,’’ 10, 171, 175–177, 181–185, Gene(sis): Henry Gallery exhibition,
291 n.62, 293 n.70, 294 n.74; 233–246, 305 n.14. See also Chal-
and Darwin, 10, 145, 147, 158– mers, Catherine; Kac, Eduardo;
159, 170–171, 184, 283 n.8, 286 Lee, Daniel
n.31; use of genealogical meta- Genesis: installation by Kac, Ed-
phor, 161–164; on hysteria, 10, uardo, 239–246, 305 n.19
147, 159–167, 170–184, 293 n.73; Genetics: and contemporary art,
on incest, 161–165, 182–184; and 233–246; and race, 227–228,
Jews, 10, 146–147, 159, 165–170, 230–231, 234–236, 238–239, 242,
181–186, 281 n.2, 290 n.57; on 246. See also Gene(sis)
Oedipus complex, 184–186; on The German Ideology (Marx), 108
primal horde, 184, 186; relation- Germany, 132–141, 146–147, 219;
ship with Josef Breuer, 171–173, Engels on, 117–118, 139–141, 278
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
342 Index
n.23; gender relations of, 133, on incest, 169–170, 182–184; on

140–141; imperialism of, 49, 52– Jewish language, 167, 179–180
53, 135; nation, 46, 117–118, 135, Gilroy, Paul: and ‘‘Black Atlantic,’’
139–141, 278 n.23; Nietzsche on, 13; and ‘‘raciology,’’ 53, 55–56,
45–46, 50–53, 55; race of, 138– 247 n.4
139; and Romanticism, 51; state Gliddon, George, 56–57
formation of, 133–141 Goldberg, David Theo, 52
Gilbert, Sandra, 86–87, 89. See also Gough, Val, 82–83, 273 n.64
Gubar, Susan Gramsci, Antonio, 13
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 8, 12, Grant, Madison, 72, 188
61–105, 107, 162; and colonialism, Gubar, Susan, 86–87, 89, 228. See
83–88, 90–91, 96; and Darwin- also Gilbert, Sandra
ism, 67, 266 n.13, 285 n.28; ‘‘The
Dress of Women,’’ 157–158; femi- Haggard, Rider, 86
nist criticism on, 61–62, 64–65, Hall, Stuart, 13–14, 209
77–78, 81–85; The Forerunner, 65, Haraway, Donna, 277 n.18
189; Herland, 77–105, 129; on im- Harris, Cheryl, 20–21
migration, 67–70, 72–74, 76–77, Hartmann, Heidi, 111
89–90, 266 n.14; imperialism of, Hegel, G. W. F., 48, 52
83–88, 90–91, 96, 266 n.14; ‘‘Is Hennessy, Rosemary, 114–115
America Too Hospitable?’’ 72– Herland (Gilman), 77–105, 129;
74; The Living of Charlotte Perkins colonialism in, 83–88, 90–91, 96;
Gilman, 61–62, 65–69; maternal- eugenics in, 90, 93–98; feminist
ist feminism of, 8–9, 62, 78–81, criticism on, 81–85; origin story
129, 272 n.60; ‘‘My Ancestors,’’ of, 79–80; patriarchy in, 81, 83,
68–69; ‘‘The New Mothers of a 85–86; race in, 78–87, 94–100;
New World,’’ 272 n.60; personal rape scene in, 95–97; reproduc-
genealogy of, 61, 65–70; on race tion in, 79–80, 129; sexuality in,
mixing, 61, 70–71, 74–75, 77– 93–105. See also Gilman, Charlotte
78, 93–97, 245, 268 nn.26, 28; Perkins
relationship to Beecher family, 67, History of Sexuality (Foucault),
69; and E. A. Ross, 70, 72–73, 43–44
90, 268 n.22; on sexuality, 62– Horsman, Reginald, 136–137
64, 79–80, 82–83, 92–105; ‘‘A Howells, William Dean, 65, 158
Suggestion on the Negro Prob- Huiswood, Otto E., 210
lem,’’ 74; With Her in Ourland, Human Genome Project, 228
89–91; Women and Economics, Hunter, Robert, 70
65, 82, 88, 93–94, 285 n.28; ‘‘The Hybridity, 56–57, 236, 238. See also
Yellow Wallpaper,’’ 77, 82. See Lee, Daniel; Miscegenation
also Herland
Gilman, Sander L., 52, 166–170, Imagined Communities (Anderson),
179–184; on anti-Semitism, 167, 26–33
179–180; on Freud, 167, 169, Immigration: restriction against,
179–180; on gender, 167–168; 70–74, 76–77, 188–189, 229–
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Index 343
Immigration (continued ) 165–166, 169–171, 181–182. See

230, 245, 266 n.14, 267 n.19; to also Anti-Semitism
United States, 53–54, 70–71, 75– Jim Crow Laws, 41–42, 199, 223,
77, 266 n.17, 267 n.20; ‘‘Yellow 259 n.44
Peril,’’ 72 Jones, Ernest, 159, 175–176, 293 n.70
Imperialism: and Charlotte Perkins Josephs, Gloria, 111–112
Gilman, 83–91, 96; Lenin on,
209–210; treatment by Bene- Kac, Eduardo: Genesis, 239–246,
dict Anderson, 32; treatment by 305 n.19; and translation, 243–
W. E. B Du Bois, 11, 199–202, 246
208–215, 221–226 Kinship: Etienne Balibar on, 38, 141–
Incest: Freud on, 161–165, 182–186. 142; Friedrich Engels on, 115–119,
See also Engels, Friedrich: on kin- 122–125, 128, 135–137, 141–142;
ship; Morgan, Lewis Henry: on Donna Haraway on, 226; Lewis
kinship Henry Morgan on, 117, 119,
Irigaray, Luce, 82 121–123, 128–133, 135–137; and
Irish: Nietzsche on, 53–55; as pur- national identity, 133–136, 141–
veyors of racism, 262 n.60; 142, 144, 189; and racial identity,
racialization of, 54–55, 263 n.69 38, 104–105, 135–137, 141–142,
Iroquois: Friedrich Engels on: 122, 189, 212–215. See also Genealogy:
137; Lewis Henry Morgan on, of nation, nationalism
121–123, 129–133, 136–137. See Knox, Robert, 56
also Native Americans Koestenbaum, Wayne, 178, 294 n.74
‘‘Is America Too Hospitable?’’ Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 166
(Gilman), 72–74 Kristeva, Julia, 82, 255 n.20
Italians: Nietzsche on, 53–55; racial-
ization of, 54–55, 262 n.64, 263 Lane, Ann J., 77–78, 89
n.69 Lee, Daniel, 234–236, 238–239
Lenin, V. I. (Vladimir Ilyich), 209–
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 21 210
Jakobson, Janet, 104 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 116
James, Joy, 191, 295 n.9 The Living of Charlotte Perkins
Jargon. See Jews: language of Gilman (Gilman), 61–62, 65–69
Jefferson, Thomas, 75 Lloyd, David, 52
Jews, 10, 146–147, 165–171, 179– Loos, Adolf, 100, 157–158
186; Freud and, 10, 146, 159, Luxemburg, Rosa, 107
165, 169–171, 174–175, 184–
186, 281 n.2, 290 n.57; hysteria Maine, Henry, 119–121
of, 165–166, 170–171, 174–175, Malthus, Thomas, 6–7
178, 181; language of (Yiddish, Marcus, Steven, 43
Jargon, Mauscheln), 167, 178– Marr, Wilhelm, 181
181; Nietzsche and, 52–55, 261 Marx, Karl, 6, 110, 149, 274 n.1;
n.57; racialization of, 146, 165, and Friedrich Engels, 106–144;
169–171, 180–181; sexuality of, feminist responses to, 106–107,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
344 Index
140; The German Ideology, 108; Morgan, Lewis Henry, 9, 103, 115–
on Lewis Henry Morgan, 116– 133, 135–137, 140–141; Ancient
117, 140–141; on the ‘‘National Society, 115–116, 125–133; Fried-
Question,’’ 210, 278 n.23. See also rich Engels on, 9, 110, 115–119,
Engels, Friedrich; Origin of the 122–125, 133–137, 142–143; on
Family Private Property and the ethnical periods, 126–128, 132; on
State Iroquois, 121–123, 129–133, 136–
Marxism, 1, 13, 34–36, 106–144; 137; on kinship, 117, 119, 121–123,
and ‘‘black belt’’ thesis, 211–212; 128–133, 135–137, 140–143; on
W. E. B. Du Bois and, 199–201, private property, 123–125; treat-
209–212; and feminism, 3–4, ment of race, 126–133; treatment
9, 106–117, 140–141, 143–144. of time, 126–128. See also Engels,
See also Comintern (Communist Friedrich; Origin of the Family,
International); Engels, Friedrich; Private Property and the State
Marx, Karl Mosse, George, 24
Maternal body, 4, 16–17, 21–23, Mullen, Harryette, 42, 187
40–41, 166, 176–178, 188–198, ‘‘My Ancestors’’ (Gilman), 68–69
201, 204–209, 212–215, 218,
225; hysterical, 166, 176–178, 293 Naifei, Ding, 101, 264 n.4
n.73; racialization of, 17, 21, 23, Nation, 11–13; Kate Chopin on, 16–
40–41, 188–190, 192–193, 195– 23; Friedrich Engels on, 117–118,
198, 201, 204–209, 212–215, 218, 139–141; etymology of, 28–29;
225. See also Reproduction genealogy of, 37, 61–62, 80, 188–
Matriarchal theory, 120–125. See 189, 193–199, 218; racialization
also Morgan, Lewis Henry: on of, 16–19, 22–23, 30–43, 61–62,
kinship 70–77, 118, 134–136, 138–140,
Mauscheln. See Jews: language of 188–189, 192–193; as white,
McClintock, Anne, 24–25 Anglo-Saxon, 21–23, 40–43, 189,
McKay, Claude, 210 204. See also Anderson, Benedict;
McLennan, J. F., 120–122, 141 Balibar, Etienne; Gellner, Ernest;
‘‘Melting Pot,’’ 74 Nationalism
Michaels, Walter Benn, 228 Nationalism: Benedict Anderson
Miller, Larry, 233 on, 24–33, 35–37, 39, 295 n.7;
Miscegenation, 17, 29–31, 57–58, Etienne Balibar on, 34–41, 295
74–75, 93–94, 163, 188, 192–193, n.7; conjoined with racism, 8, 31–
198, 238–239; as crime, 20, 251 39, 62–63, 104–105, 188–189, 193,
n.4; and Egypt, 56–58; 1864 pam- 196–197; conjoined with sexism,
phlet on, 57–58, 263 nn.70–71; 36–39; feminist theories of, 24–
etymology of, 57–58, 238–239; 25, 64, 140–144; Gellner, Ernest
Gilman on, 74–75, 93–94; laws on, 24–26, 30–33, 35–36, 39. See
against, 18–19; ‘‘subgenation’’ as also Nation
contra, 264 n.72 Native Americans, 12, 37, 71, 107,
Modern episteme, 47–48, 239, 246, 122, 125–131; Friedrich Engels on,
249 n.9 122, 137; Lewis Henry Morgan
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Index 345
Native Americans (continued ) Pace v. Alabama, 18

on, 121–123, 125–133, 135–137; Pan-Africa, 204–205, 208, 222.
nationalist discourse and, 136–137 See also Dark Princess: ‘‘racial
‘‘The New Mothers of a New globality’’
World’’ (Gilman), 272 n.60 Pan-Asia, 204–205, 208, 222. See
‘‘New Women,’’ 78–80, 90–93, also Dark Princess: racial glo-
284 n.15 bality in
Nicholson, Linda, 117 Pappenheim, Bertha, 172, 178, 180,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 11–12, 15, 294 n.81. See also ‘‘Anna O.’’
43–55, 63–64, 217; and anti- Parker, Ely S., 116
Semitism, 52–53, 261 n.57; on Parry, Amie, 99, 264 n.4
Egypt, 55–58; Foucault on, 44–49; Patriarchal theory, 119–121
genealogical method of, 8, 44–46, Patriarchy: Friedrich Engels on,
48–49, 60, 63–64; on Germany, 108–110, 124–125
45–46, 50–53, 55; on Irish, 53–55; Pellegrini, Ann, 167–168, 290 n.56
on Italians, 53–55; on Jews, 52– Plessy v. Ferguson, 18–19, 41–42, 258
53, 261 n.57; On the Genealogy of n.42, 259 n.44
Morals, 48–51, 55–56, 58; on race, Post-structuralism, 113–115, 245
45–46, 48, 51–55, 263 n.71 Psychoanalysis, 9–10, 159–186; birth
‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ of, 159–160, 171–173. See also
(Foucault), 44–48 Breuer, Josef; Freud, Sigmund
Nott, Josiah, 56–57
Queer Nation, 101, 274 n.78. See
On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietz- also Herland: sexuality in
sche), 48–51, 55–56, 58 Queer sexuality, 92–93, 95–105,
Origin of the Family, Private Property 111–112, 232
and the State (Engels), 9, 106–
110, 115–125, 133–144; Iroquois Race: Etienne Balibar on, 34–
in, 122–125; kinship in, 9, 115– 35, 189, 256 n.30; as biological
118, 122–125, 134–135, 140–143; essence, 35, 37, 189, 225, 227–
Marx in, 106, 116–117; matri- 229; Darwin on, 10, 145, 147–148,
archal gens in, 119, 122–125, 128, 151–156, 159; W. E. B. Du Bois
133, 144; matriarchal theory in, on, 186–226; Friedrich Engels
120–125; Lewis Henry Mor- on, 106, 117–118, 128–129, 135–
gan in, 110, 116–119, 122–125, 141; Michel Foucault on, 45, 48,
132–133, 136–137; patriarchy in, 144, 260 n.52; Ernest Gellner
108–110, 124–125; state forma- on, 32–33; and genomics, 227–
tion in, 117, 133–141; treatment 231, 236–246; Irish as, 54–55,
of nation in, 117–118, 139–141; 263 n.69; Italians as, 54–55, 262
treatment of race in, 117–118, n.64, 263 n.69; Jews as, 146, 165,
128–129, 135–141. See also Engels, 169–171, 180–181; as legal con-
Friedrich struct, 18–22, 41–42, 259 n.44;
Origin of the Species (Darwin), 147– Lewis Henry Morgan on, 126–
148 133; Nietzsche on, 45–46, 48,
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
346 Index
51–55, 263 n.71; in relation to concept, 1–2, 4, 209; of race, 4,

nation, 16–19, 22–23, 30–43, 61– 16–23, 70–74, 94–97, 118, 132,
62, 70–77, 118, 134–136, 138–140, 153–156, 188–189, 192–193, 196–
188–189, 192–193; as reproduc- 199, 212–214, 229–232. See also
ible essence, 4, 16–23, 70–74, Maternal body; Miscegenation;
94–97, 118, 132, 153–156, 188– ‘‘Race/reproduction bind’’
189, 192–193, 196–199, 212–214, Reproductive technologies, 4, 39,
229–232. See also Miscegenation; 230–234, 244, 257 n.37
‘‘Race/reproduction bind’’ Rich, Adrienne, 3, 82, 279 n.27
Race mixture. See Gilman, Char- Ritvo, Lucille, 158, 286 n.31
lotte Perkins: race mixing; Roach, Joseph, 15
Micegenation Robb, Susan, 223
‘‘Race/reproduction bind,’’ 5–7, 17– Roediger, David, 21
18, 24–25, 34, 36, 47, 64, 91, 105, Rogers, Daniel, 12
107, 145–146, 148–149, 186, 189, Rome, Roman, 122, 134–135
215, 223–226, 229–232, 239, 242, Roosevelt, Theodore, 70
246 Ross, E. A., 70–73, 90, 188–189
Race suicide, 57–59, 70–77, 90, Roy, M. N., 210
188–189, 204. See also Ross, Rubin, Gayle, 92
E. A.; Walker, Francis Amasa
Racial globality. See Du Bois, Saks, Eva, 20–21
W. E. B. Sanger, Margaret, 6
Racial science: nineteenth century, 8, Santayana, George, 25–26
32, 48, 53–55, 145–146, 167, 188, Schönerer, Georg von, 180
217–220, 223–224 Schorske, Carl, 180
Racism: Benedict Anderson on, 30– Slavery (U.S.), 40–41, 134, 204–
33, 257 n.36; Etienne Balibar on; 208; Kate Chopin on, 40–41, 252
34–38, 142, 189, 257 n.36; con- n.4; W. E. B. Du Bois on, 204–
joined with nationalism, 8, 31–39, 208; Charlotte Perkins Gilman
62–63, 104–105, 140–144, 188– on, 75–77; maternity in, 206–208
189, 193, 196–197; conjoined with ‘‘Sorrow songs’’ (Du Bois), 198–
sexism, 36–39 199, 201, 206–208, 222–223, 298
Rapp, Rayna, 108 nn.25–26
Reconstruction, 8, 18–19, 22, 37, The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 11,
189–190, 192–193; black family 190–199, 201, 206, 208, 213, 215,
during, 41, 207–209 222
Reed, John, 210, 301 n.44 Spencer, Herbert, 157
Renan, Ernest, 15 Spillers, Hortense, 183
Reproduction: Etienne Balibar on, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 112–
37, 257 n.34; as biological pro- 113, 245, 275 n.2
cess, 1–2, 28, 129–132, 139–140; Stoddard, Lothrop, 72, 188
Darwin on, 153–156; feminist Stokes, Rose Pastor, 211
theories of, 3–4; as keyword, 2–3; Strachey, James, 175–176, 181,
as labor, 3, 4, 108–109; as modern 293 n.70
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Index 347
Strauss, Claude-Levi, 116 189, 204, 218; as property, 20–21,

Studies in Hysteria (Breuer and 253 n.10
Freud), 164, 171, 173, 175, 178, Williams, Raymond, 2–3, 252 n.6;
291 n.62. See also ‘‘Anna O.’’ on keywords, 2–3, 247 n.2; on
‘‘A Suggestion on the Negro the structure of feeling, 208–209,
Problem’’ (Gilman), 74 223, 300 n.38
Sulloway, Frank, 158–159, 287 n.32 William the Conqueror, 67–68
Surrogacy: gestational, 231, 304 n.6 With Her in Ourland (Gilman),
89–91
Transatlantic, 7, 12–14, 233, 242, Women and Economics (Gilman), 65,
244, 250 n.11 82, 88, 93–94, 285 n.28
Transgenics, 236–246. See also Chal- Woodward, C. Van, 19, 22
mers, Katherine; Kac, Eduardo World systems theory, 31–32, 35–36;
Translation, 242–246. See also and Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34–35
Freud, Sigmund: use of genealogi- Wright, Richard, 209
cal metaphor; Kac, Eduardo
‘‘The True Born English-Man’’ ‘‘Yellow Peril,’’ 72
(Defoe), 26–27 ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ (Gilman),
77, 82
United States: citizenship of, 21, Yiddish. See Jews: language of
23, 218; nationalism, 16–17, 20,
22–25, 188–189, 217–219; racial
formation of, 16–17, 21, 23–25,
188–189, 204, 218–220
Veblen, Thorstein, 65, 100, 157–158
Wald, Priscilla, 197

Walker, Francis Amasa, 70–71, 188,
267 n.20
Wallace, Alfred Russell, 149
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34–35
Warner, Michael, 102–104
Westermarck, Edward, 184
Whiteness: and imperialism, 199–
200; legal valuation of, 20–21,
41–42; as basis of nation, national
belonging, 21–23, 40–43, 188–
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
348 Index
Chapters 2 and 5 are revised and expanded versions

of previously published articles. Chapter 2 appeared
as ‘‘Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Racial Nationalism and the Reproduction of
Maternalist Feminism,’’ in Feminist Studies 27.2 (Sum-
mer 2001): 271–302. Chapter 5 appeared as ‘‘Repro-
ducing Racial Globality: W. E. B. Du Bois and the
Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism,’’ in Social
Text 67 (Summer 2001): 15–41. Reprinted by permis-
sion.
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09
Alys Eve Weinbaum is an assistant professor of

English at the University of Washington.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weinbaum, Alys Eve
Wayward reproductions : genealogies of race and nation
in transatlantic modern thought / by Alys Eve Weinbaum.
p. cm. — (Next wave)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8223-3303-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-8223-3315-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Race—Philosophy. 2. Race awareness—History.
3. Genealogy (Philosophy) 4. Human reproduction—
Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series.
ht1523.w45 2004 305.8'001—dc22
2003022989
Tseng 2004.2.26 08:09

Alys Eve Weinbaum - Wayward Reproductions_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trasatlantic Modern Thought (Next Wave)_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic ... Wave_ New Directions in Women&#39;

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alys Eve Weinbaum - Wayward Reproductions_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trasatlantic Modern Thought (Next Wave)_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic ... Wave_ New Directions in Women&#39;

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Wayward

in Transatlantic Modern Thought

duke universit y press

Durham & London 2004

Sandy and Shelly

1. Genealogy Unbound: Reproduction

2. Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte

3. Engels’s Originary Ruse: Race and Reproduction

4. Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis:

5. The Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism:

Coda: Gene/alogies for a New

Works Cited, 307

I have been working on the cultures and politics of reproduction

Crises occur when the social formation

In its relatively short history the word ‘‘reproduction’’ has accrued

ing of citizenship. It pinpoints the dependence of Gilman’s ar-

ing within major modern thought systems. Chapter 4, ‘‘Sexual

analysis of Du Bois’s treatment of the connection between repro-

able container[s]’’ whose cultural and intellectual formations are

self-reﬂexive concept within the context of the cultural study of

Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superﬁcial

The essence of a nation is that all individuals have

Forgetting, like miscegenation, is an

‘‘Désirée’s Baby,’’ the turn-of-the-century story by the southern

white. Subsequently, Armand casts Désirée oﬀ for shaming and

genealogical quest for information about descent, whose failure

oped in the context of transatlantic racial nationalism as either

Chopin’s story anticipates the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy,

postbellum present, Chopin performs a historical straddling act

tics of property even as the meaning of property has changed over

alienable property) by the white maternal body—for in ‘‘Désirée’s

mand’s misrecognition of his predicament structures both his story

Excavating the Race/Reproduction Bind

connection that consolidates the race/reproduction bind and thus

arguments are enabled by the contributions of theorists of nation-

moral nature to be changed honorably, and too accidental to be

In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran,

on the level of manifest content but that these interrelated ideas

ism, because they too were once ‘‘taken-for-granted frames of ref-

tion’’ is historically inaccurate (the term, as discussed in the ﬁnal

tion in the nineteenth century of the Gutenberg printing press and

son joins world systems theorists in suggesting that racism origi-

and describes as ‘‘by an accident of heredity, pigmentally blue’’

ideology of nationalism and provide putatively homogeneous na-

Toward a Theory of National Reproduction

ploiters and exploited alike to construct a shared ideological world

words, it is not in practice simply the case that an ‘ethnic racism’

racism: he produces himself as white through diﬀerentiation of his

(100), belonging within which is a function of ‘‘ﬁliation,’’ ‘‘kin-

The Racial Grounding of Genealogical Critique

tion of his blackness? 38 Or is her color consciousness triggered

although Plessy does not dwell on issues of genealogical inheri-

cal version the contradictions inherent in the conceptualization of

disperses; that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal ele-

vation of the ‘‘pure’’ origin of the nation or its subjects, but in

States. Her story demonstrates that genealogical inquiry can tell

ured as ‘‘gray’’ because it brings into view wayward reproduction

of morality becomes apparent. Nietzsche alerts us to the structure

on the careful ethnographic maps of Germany with any sort of

prevailing approaches to ideas about race in Nietzsche’s philoso-

typical racial others (Jews) and German colonial subjects (Afri-

John Beddoe, an inﬂuential British doctor and ethnologist, de-

When we inspect Nietzsche’s passage closely, we see that while

Alys Eve Weinbaum - Wayward Reproductions_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trasatlantic Modern Thought (Next Wave)_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic ... Wave_ New Directions in Women'

Alys Eve Weinbaum - Wayward Reproductions_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trasatlantic Modern Thought (Next Wave)_ Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic ... Wave_ New Directions in Women'