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

Abstract

AbstractScholarly 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.