Kingsblood Royal - or the bizarre making of Race

 One of my favourite american authors is Sinclair Lewis, who saw a surge in popularity after 2016 election of Donald Trump. The reason for a public interest in Lewis authorship was back then his book it can't happen here which dealt with the danger of a fascist take-over in the US by democratic means, something that was actually quite close due to Lindberghs popularity. A year ago I however read another novell of his, Kingsblood Royale which dealt with the question of race in the american 1930's.

Sinclair Lewis - an early
20th century writer that 
perhaps is more relevant today
than ever before.

The main character of Kingsblood Royale is Neil Kingsblood, a sucessfull middle-class american whom upon his father's request start to investigate his family ties. His father was a strong believer that the Kingsblood family were actually of royal descent in Europe but Neils research points in the direction that family had african american lineage. According to contemporary racial debate, this led to Neil being labelled as an african american, since it was enough with one drop of black blood to loose your status as a white according to state legislation. 

The book then tells the story of Neils struggle to initially keeping this a secret, an attempt which however fails. Following his coming out as an african american the entire city starts to turn against him, were neighbors for instance tries to make his family move since having an african american in their vicinity would make real estate prices going down. Neil therefore turns to the black community, which after a short period hesitation welcomes him as a african american, even though he looks white. 

In many ways Kingsblood royale can be seen as a classical story in which marginalized groups come together in solidarity, and are more openminded than the majority population. This is one of interpreting the books message, but what strikes me as a scholar is who early Lewis were in discussing how race is not biologically but socially constructed. This for instance becomes clear when Kingsbloods supporters tries to convince him that he should just admit he had misunderstood his pedigree and that they there after would welcome him back as white. It is here rather clear that the lived experience of being marginalized is real, but that the reasons for marginalizing somebody is entirelly social constructed. 

After the publication of Kingsblood Royale it went through a rather curious development. In the same year a group of white supremacist tried to make FBI buy and burn all the copies, whilst an american preacher came out as 1/64 african american and welcomed in by the NAACP. This development shows that already in the 1920's people were aware of race not being a stable, but a rather unstable category. 

Sweden, as well as most part of Europe, have for a long period of time not spoken about race, but rather about ethnicity. Race is within public discourse not necessarily viewed as a social category, but rather as a biological fact proven by ones skincolour. After that Swedish scholars to a wider degree have come to be interested in the question of race - and none the least how the swedish race is constructed - there have been a public upheavel against critical race studies. Often the field is misrepresented as focusing on biological factors (i.e skincolour) and by ultra right wing supporters critical race studies have been criticized as a "racist science" following the step of the institute of eugenics. In my view this critique, as well as the public reception of the critique, makes Kingsblood Royale as one of the most important books to swedish discourse on academia today. Perhaps the story of Neil Kingsblood can help illuminate why critical race studies are needed, as well as one what they actually reflect. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The use of history and why historians should mind the gap

Image
 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: a Background

Image
This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...
Read more