This work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants in order to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities, particularly that of whiteness, were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.
List of Figures
Preface: Questioning Whiteness
1. Introduction: Race, Whiteness and Women Immigrants
2. Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin's Claim to Assimilation
3. "Why Couldn't We Have been Either One Thing or the Other?": Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and Autobiography of Sui Sin Far
4. "This Hideous Little Pickaninny" and the Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism and Willa Cather's My Antonia
5. Epilogue: Assimilation and Re-Racialization of Immigrant Bodies