This book explores a remarkable parallelism in American literary and legal histories: the parallel between naturalism and naturalization. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the influx of unprecedented waves of immigration, the judiciary is at a loss to define who is “white” and who is not. In the courts of law, “whiteness” becomes a performance of cultural assimilability rather than a biological fact. It is this same cultural code of whiteness, this book argues, around which the literature of naturalism revolves by engaging in naturalization debate of its own.
Mita Banerjee
Naturalismus /U.S.A. Popkultur Hautfarbe gender studies Kapitalismuskritik Norris, Frank Crane, Stephen Sinclair, Upton amerikanische Rechtsgeschichte Einbürgerung /U.S.A. whiteness Dreiser, Theodore Naturalisierung