Iglesias, LisaMaye, KristenMoskowitz, AlexLee Adams, Amanda2025-07-082025-07-082025-07-08https://hdl.handle.net/10166/6754This project interrogates how early American literature stages the racialized body as a contested site of power, perception, and discipline through the work of William Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip (1836), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853), and Sui Sin Far’s Its Wavering Image (1912). Through a historical materialist lens, I trace the afterlives of colonialism and slavery—ongoing structures of violence that sediment in the racialized ordering of the social—and examine how these texts mobilize narrative as a fugitive strategy, locating in the margins of literary form a critique of dominant racial ontologies. While the figures at the center of these texts are often retroactively framed within a “mixed race” discourse, my analysis resists imposing contemporary identity categories, instead attending to the historical and epistemological work of racial ambiguity: how it becomes legible to the state, how it is surveilled, eroticized, commodified, and ultimately weaponized in service of racial capitalism and settler sovereignty. Apess’s eulogy functions as a counter-historiography, reclaiming Metacomet not only as a symbol of Indigenous resistance but as a rupture in the settler colonial narrative of inevitability. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I argue that Apess stages race as an unstable and contested construct, using performance as a mode of political intervention that resists fixed racial legibility and asserts Indigenous futurity—a fugitive practice resonant with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s Undercommons. Brown’s Clotel, situated at the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and labor, exposes the libidinal economy of slavery and the contradictions embedded in Jeffersonian democracy. Rather than succumbing to a narrative of tragic archetype, Clotel’s racial and gendered position destabilizes legal and ideological boundaries, foregrounding Black female body as both a juridical problem and a theoretical site. Far’s Pan occupies the racial threshold marked by Xine Yao’s term “oriental inscrutability”—her perceived unreadability becomes a mechanism through which white desire and nationalist anxiety co-produce her racialization. Across these texts, I argue that narrative form becomes a method of dissent, a praxis of disruption wherein authors refuse the coherence of racial ideology and instead foreground race as a structure of feeling—unstable, relational, and always already in crisis. These works not only historicize the emergence of monoracial paradigms but also render visible the affective and political stakes of ambiguity, situating racial perception as a battleground through which the violences of nation-building are both masked and maintained.en-USRacial CapitalismCritical Mixed Race StudiesAmerican LiteratureColonizationMultiracial IdentityMixed Race19th CenturyIndigenous StudiesAsian American StudiesAbolitionistsAfrican American StudiesThesispublic