"Miscegenation"

Elise Virginia Lemire

"In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this "amalgamation" of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of whites with blacks, the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In "Miscegenation," Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race."--BOOK JACKET.