Racial liminality and American constructions of race: negotiating, imagining, and creating color lines in the 1890s
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Pekarofski, Michael.
Racial liminality and American constructions of race: negotiating, imagining, and creating color lines in the 1890s. Retrieved from
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TitleRacial liminality and American constructions of race: negotiating, imagining, and creating color lines in the 1890s
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (v, 245 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionThe decade of the 1890s was a period characterized by racial violence, the ongoing entrenchment of the Jim Crow state, and the legitimization of scientific racism. It was also a time when race and racial construction were in a considerable state of flux, formation, and development. Rather than constituting easily defined and clear-cut constructs, blackness, whiteness, and other categories often entailed complex, dynamic, and nuanced conversations and negotiations taking place in a variety of settings, texts, and historical situations. More often than not, such discourse centered around the presence of racially liminal figures, individuals or groups who did not fit neatly into specific racial categories. This liminality stemmed from the fact that their physicality, background, and identity remained unfixed or open to question. However, it was also created by the fact that racial categories themselves were often in a considerable state of flux, uncertainty, and formation. Real or imagined, individual or collective, racially liminal figures, appeared white, though that whiteness was often questioned, contested, and subject to change over time and space. Playing a central role in the evolving racial discourse, the presence of racially liminal figures often challenged and expanded the nation’s understanding of race and the nation’s understanding of itself. By examining the widespread and sustained concern with such racial in-betweenness, this project examines how Americans came to terms with race in the 1890s. Moreover, this study hopes to establish the centrality of the racially liminal figure to the ongoing process of racial construction and the maintenance of racial caste during this period. In the 1890s, racial liminality problematized, confounded, and contested the steady rise of cultural and political narratives which promoted white supremacist, racial separatist, and scientific racist agendas. Though racially liminal people, racially liminal bodies, and racial liminality in the abstract were often used in the service of an anti-racist agenda, white supremacists were more than capable of using racial liminality to serve their own goals and objectives. This study analyzes the multi-faceted ways racially liminal figures shaped, contested, and problematized the formation and solidification of a fixed binary of race.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionGraduate School - Newark Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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