Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

Brigitte Fielder’s “Radical Respectability and African American Women’s Reconstruction Fiction” begins with the serialization of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping and then considers additional work by Harper and Julia C. Collins in exploring tensions between radical anti-racism and what has become known as “respectability politics.” Tracing contemporary assumptions about respectability and its limitations in reverse chronology, Fielder asserts that African American women’s Reconstruction fiction did not simply embrace the politics and processes of respectability but often refused respectability’s directionality toward outward approval. Examining concepts of self-respect and self-interest, the chapter highlights moments when texts refuse to prioritize white and/or male characters over Black women’s perspectives – a radical deviation from the usual politics of the respectable. Fielder thus locates the roots of respectability’s critique as more fully present and available to African American women writers of the late nineteenth century than most critics have acknowledged.