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Abstract:
“I am sick to death of kinship.” Donna Haraway’s lament in 1990 was widely shared among academics who perceived that familialism had an enduring and destructive grip on American politics. Key projects from this period in my field of nineteenth-century American studies––the critique of sentimentalism, studies of family-based nationalism, and the turn to race and racial ideologies––all presumed that family relations corrupted democratic politics. From this perspective, kinship and “family values” always smuggle in hierarchy and political inequality––the “tyranny of biology,” in Wai-chee Dimock’s phrase.
But this scholarship has a crucial blind spot. It misses the fact that kinship was only reduced to biology in the nineteenth-century. Only with the secularization of kinship in the 19th-century did biological descent become the basis for defining what was truly familial and what was properly political. In this paper I examine the historical purification and secularization of kinship, a biopolitical process that created a divide between the modern family (secular but “sacred”) and the backward “clan” (damningly religious and political). Scholars like Talal Asad have shown that literature played a central role in this process. Focusing on the fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Dakota writer Zitakala-Sa, I argue that their stories allow us to see both the “enclosure” (Asad) of kinship in the literary image of the tribal clan, and uncover the costs of the biopolitical division between kinship and politics. I also hope to address the implications of this view of kinship for matters of sexuality in Jewett and Zitkala-Sa, both of whom have figured in recent work on queer kinship.
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