This chapter attends to the formal and cultural function of Latinx racial passing in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Critical conversations about the orphan protagonist of the novel, Lola Medina, interrogate her rescue from Indian captivity and the gradual “whitening” of her dyed skin as a form of aspirational assimilation into Anglo-American society. Scholars have also studied the ways in which Lola’s captivity story is informed by the historical precedent and publications surrounding the repatriation of Olive Oatman to white American society after her five-year captivity among the Mohave in the 1850s. This contribution reads Lola’s performance of Latinx racial passing alongside the captivity narrative, newspaper articles, and visual culture from the Oatman case to argue how the idea of “passing” operates in the novel as a form of political critique and a catalyst for modernist, formal innovation. Lola’s narrative of Latinx racial passing not only illuminates an early discourse of Latinx racialization, but also catalyzes a modernist satire of Anglo-American imperialism.

Debates about Latinx literary representations of war tend to emphasize either how Latinx literature offers a means of repair for war’s ravages or, alternatively, that violence is constitutive of latinidad itself. This chapter charts a middle course through both positions by arguing that US Latinx literature highlights both irresolute, unreconciled wars and, what Jesse Alemán describes as Latinx “micro-wars” within major conflicts; such micro-wars, furthermore, often involve clashes and negotiations around the racialized boundaries of Latinx communities. Here we survey a range of Latinx representations of the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and wars of revolution and counterinsurgency in Viet Nam and Central America. Rather than waging war on an irredeemable enemy, we conclude, Latinxs lay siege to the imperial relationship championed by the US in most of these conflicts.

There is a global pattern of states using subtle and insidious legal mechanisms to threaten the citizenship status of vulnerable national minorities. In India, for instance, policies of citizenship enumeration and adjudication have classified around 2 million persons into varying categories of ‘doubtful’ citizens. While the state has not formally revoked citizenship status, it has nevertheless created complex and arduous legal processes that profoundly weaken it. Using the case of India, this chapter theorizes the antecedents, operation, and character of this form of precarious citizenship. It draws from the tradition of critical citizenship studies to argue that the precarity generated by states through these insidious routes is best understood as ‘irregular citizenship’. Irregular citizens are in the condition of suspended animation marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. States may seek to justify the practices of irregularization in the language of the rule of law. But these practices are constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms in the contexts of racializing stigmatized minorities and exceptionalist discourses related to national security. The chapter charts these dynamics in India and shows how India’s institutions – most visibly the courts – have adopted juristic techniques that legitimize irregularization despite being at odds with due process.

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

Chapter 1 provides an empirical analysis of one of the principal grievances of Argentina’s Black social movement – anti-Black racism – with an analysis of the mechanisms of racialization in the country. While erasure and denial, racial formation processes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are still present, amid growing activism and an increasingly visible transnational Black community, the primary contemporary method of racialization is through foreignization. While Miriam Gomes provides the concept, I document with empirical examples how “foreignization,” the assumption that Black people and culture are never from Argentina, hence never Argentine, functions as a racialized mechanism that reproduces the pervasive myth of Argentina’s homogeneous Whiteness. I illustrate this mechanism by analyzing four racialized practices that were salient throughout my fieldwork: afrophilia, afrophobia, curiosity, and insecure Whiteness. By showing how both Blackness and Whiteness are constructed in racialized encounters, I demonstrate how racial hierarchies are reproduced by illuminating the symbolic capital invoked through such exchanges.

How are dictionaries shaped by social history, and how far do dictionaries themselves shape social history? Wordlists and dictionaries (broadly defined) reflect particular perspectives and may be adapted for new audiences. This chapter maps the most significant historical intersections of English dictionaries and Anglophone societies. It spans the shift from English as a colonized to a colonizing language, from the medieval period to around 1900. Its building blocks include intersecting conceptions of gender roles, the family, social status, work and industrialization, as well as urbanization and racialization. Some other concepts remain implicit. Education (inside as well as outside the home) interconnects every section. It was in religious contexts that Latin was codified and methods were perfected for organizing words within books as well as books within libraries. The idea of the nation was later shaped by the Oxford English Dictionary with history and by the state with nineteenth-century mass primary education. Overall, tensions between human agency and determinism are brought constantly into the foreground. The focus on English lets me contrast revisions of the ‘same’ text within the limits of a handbook chapter. My anecdotal approach relates social changes to identifiable revisions and initiatives by individual lexicographers.

The children of Afghan refugees provide important insight into the way that universities can be crucial sites of racial formation. This chapter explores how second-generation Afghan American college students navigate their racial and ethnic identities and build community on a college campus. The results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted at George Mason University, located in Northern Virginia, which is home to one of the largest Afghan diaspora populations in the country. Findings revealed the disparate impact that the withdrawal of the US military and subsequent arrival of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into the United States had on students, the role of family and collectivist culture in their decision-making, how ethnic student organizations were a method of ethnic preservation and co-ethnic support, and how attending a university with a large Afghan student population exposed internal conflicts within the community. This chapter provides important insight for universities aiming to create inclusive environments and support the diverse experiences of second-generation immigrants, Muslim, and Afghan American students.

This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.

Edward Long’s History of Jamaica was published in 1774 and has been in print ever since. It was a text designed to legitimate slavery as central to Britain’s wealth and power and to encourage new white settlers to come to the island. A judgment by Lord Mansfield had persuaded the slave-owners that they could no longer rely on the law to protect their ‘property’ in enslaved men and women. New legitimations were necessary and Long’s encyclopaedic History, encompassing population, politics, the economy, law, and the topography and natural history of the island, was structured around a defence of slavery and natural difference. Long’s History continues to be read by numerous scholars interested in racial difference and in eighteenth-century Britain and its relation to the Caribbean. But it has never been fully contextualized either in his family history or in his place in the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment man, Long was determined to represent plantation slavery as a civilizing process for barbarous Africans. Nor has the History been thought about in terms of its relevance to the present. Key concepts utilized in the analysis of his work are introduced, including racial capitalism, racialization, reproduction and disavowal.

This chapter investigates the creation of the Instituto de Menores Artesãos at the Casa de Correção in 1857 out of the politics of regulating the circulation and containment of liberated Africans at the penitentiary. It demonstrates that the existence of the apprentice school was deeply rooted in the process of disciplining the posttraffic period, between 1850 and 1865, through disciplining the children of liberated Africans into free wage workers for postabolition labor relations. The story of the Instituto de Menores Artesãos is a history of the education of minors and that of governing women’s productive and reproductive labor from slavery to freedom. The Casa de Correção’s incorporation of the reformatory school shows how the education of poor children, including orphans and delinquent minors, attended to the project of engendering postemancipation society between the end of the slave trade (1850) and the gradual abolition of slavery initiated with the 1871 free womb law.

In 1953, a man holding the position of “Indian Councillor” at Sarnia Indian Reserve #45 stood up. Government officials had been sent to his reserve to speak to the “Indians” and explain to them how being given the right to vote in elections, and the ability to purchase alcohol legally under Canadian law, would “help” his band properly develop into good “civilized” Canadian citizens. Having listened, he responded simply: “We were the first settlers on this continent. Then, the whites came and made us Indians.”1 This short statement eloquently summarizes two centuries of surveillance-focused law and social policy targeting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. It expresses two key components of Canadian/British Imperialism; first, the creation and enforcement of an imposed and unwanted racial category of “Indian,” and second, the construction and assertion of an expected “education,” and cultural development, tied to this racial identity.