Representing Race and Ethnicity in American Fiction, 1789-1920

Our project, which aims to reconstruct racial discourse in American literature, tracks three critical aspects of the representation of race and ethnicity in a corpus of over 18,000 American novels published between 1789 and 1920. First, we provide a historically sensitive account of the ethnicities that most occupied the nation’s racial imaginary, registering how different ethnic groups were perceived to be biologically, geographically, or socially linked. Second, we track the descriptive terms most associated with particular ethnicities over time as we trace the changing discursive fields surrounding particular racial groups. Finally, we explore the coherence of the discourse around each race and ethnicity represented across American literature before 1920, paying close attention to the ways in which various groups did or did not exist as semantically unified groups at specific historical moments. Taken together, our three questions show not just who was under discussion and how, but also the history—and historicity—of racialization and ethnic thinking writ large. Our goal in this paper is to identify and surface the racialized language of American Fiction and to face the harms that it caused without eliding its historical violence and force. At the same time, while we feel that confronting such racism is important work, we do not want to perpetuate the harm that this language, including many slurs, continues to cause to oppressed peoples, particularly in the Black and Native American communities. To that end, throughout this paper, we have adopted the practice of Brigitte Fielder, among others, in representing particularly harmful terms using the following convention: n[-----].