Clannishness: Jewett, Zitkala-Ša, and the Secularization of Kinship

Abstract

Scholarly critiques of the racial and imperial dimensions of domesticity have overlooked a deeper biopolitics of kinship that is tied to the secularization process. For late nineteenth-century reformers, “clannishness” names a sociological problem common to recalcitrant populations, from “uncivilized” Indians to “degenerate” Yankees and “mountain whites of the South.” But writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Zitkala-Ša use literary resources to evade what Talal Asad calls the “grammar” of subjectivity in secular discourses. Their experiments with first-person voice uncover a transpersonal understanding of kinship that is illegible in domestic and reformist discourse.

The case of Sparkle Rai: A violent patriarchal narrative of conspiratorial kinship and race

“…Marshall Sahlins (2011) argues that anthropology misanalyzed kinship as a separate categorical domain, rather than as an embedded cultural practice, what he calls “a mutuality of being,” encompassing both biological and social forms of relatedness (Sahlins 2011, 2). Further, the postmodern demands of neoliberal capital have secularized kinship (Bentley 2019), colonizing earlier philosophical, cosmological, and theological claims to patriarchal power that could now “naturalize” gender inequality within emerging national and global biopolitical spaces (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995, 5). Within the context of the United States, these dynamic social strategies embedded in inter‐ and intra‐group conflicts over the hegemonic control of resources deploy durable social facts that reproduce social class, anti‐Blackness, and ethnic assimilability.…”

What Was Boston Marriage? Sarah Orne Jewett and Biography

“…However, Bentley looks no further into Jewett's biographical situation even though she does so for Zitkla Sa. 6 Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden reframe Jewett's regionalism in a range of rarely discussed short stories through scholarship on the ecogothic, but they only implicitly rely on Jewett biography and briefly draw on a letter from Jewett to Fields about her distress over "the life and death of trees." 7 Vesna Kuiken produced the greatest quantity of work on Jewett in the five years under discussion, and all of her readings depend on the materials of biography.…”