Kindred specters: Mourning, ethics, and 'social death

This dissertation takes the political struggles of Reconstruction America as the point of departure for an exploration of kinship in terms of mourning. Given that it witnessed intense legal and political debate centered on the intersection of civil rights and kinship (the legalization of black marriage, antimiscegenation rhetoric, etc.), the Reconstruction era is particularly available for an investigation of the relationship between kinship, mourning, and what sociologist Orlando Patterson calls "social death"---understood as a domain of ontological suspension that attends the negation of slave kinship relations. Taking my cue from historian Eric Foner's notion that Reconstruction is "unfinished," together with Jacques Derrida's notion of "semi-mourning" (demi-deuil), I argue that Reconstruction is less an historical period in our nation's history---one with relatively fixed temporal boundaries---than an ongoing, interminable process of mourning. Hence, many of the texts that I read do not fall within the temporal parameters that conventional historiography understands as "Reconstruction": that is, the years from 1863 to 1877. These texts include literary works by Charles Chesnutt, Toni Morrison, Faulkner and Poe, as well as legal texts concerned with slavery, segregation and miscegenation.;Understanding Reconstruction in terms of mourning, moreover, allows us to ask what the ethical and political debates raised by a nation emerging out of the depths of slavery and war might have to say about more contemporary debates around kinship. Given the centrality of gay marriage to these debates, I turn to the politics of gay and lesbian kinship as a means to interrogate the merits of constructing an historical analogue between Reconstruction and contemporary politics. The objective is to survey the historical landscape for the ghosts of Reconstruction, slavery, racism, miscegenation, and homosexuality---precisely where we might least expect them to appear, and where their convergence results in unanticipated and aberrant kinships. My central claim is that the process of mourning, contrary to conventional wisdom, does not begin with the physical loss of the other; rather, death, absence, and mourning haunt relations of kinship from the very beginning. Mourning, that is, conditions the possibility of kinship.