Introduction

What does it mean to think about the conjunction of race and kinship in early America? What does it mean to presume that there is a conjunction at all?¹ The five articles herein explore this conundrum, revealing that the archives of the early Americas are littered with such intersections. Indeed, their work makes apparent that race, so frequently framed as a genealogical concept preoccupied with heritability, was instrumental in defining kinship—or who could or could not be considered related in blood, bond, or diplomacy—in law, fiction, religion, empire, and the construction of the self. The intersection of race and kinship yields definitions and strategies for governance, settlement and colonization, domination and regulation and simultaneously becomes a site of potential resistance, survival, and endurance in the eras of European and U.S. colonialism. In lieu of an attempt at a comprehensive statement on the state of race and kinship in early American studies, these articles gesture toward numerous locations wherein beliefs and practices about identity and affiliation converge and collide, shaping national boundaries, international relations, intimacy, and self-identity in the process.

The intersection of kinship and race has long sat at the nexus of settler colonial imaginaries. To take but two evocative examples that might serve as imperfect bookends to settler visions as they structured early American colonial and imperial projects, we can consider Henry Neville’s utopian pamphlet Isle of Pines (1668) and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family (1871). Henry Neville, a republican politician and satirist, chronicled the stranding of five survivors of an English shipwreck on an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean in 1569. The survivors, who were on their way to establish a trading factory in the East Indies, are the factory bookkeeper George Pine and four women—the factory master’s daughter, Sarah English; two servants, Mary Sparkes and Elizabeth Trevor; and an enslaved woman, Philippa. If the pamphlet served as an imaginative account of the constitution of social relations, it did so in the context of English imperialism, and it privileged concerns with sex, kinship, and race in the constitution of social relations.

In Neville’s telling, once the possibility of survival is secured, Pine, as the patriarch of the island, gratifies his sexual desire and then establishes exogamy, both of which are rent by racial (dis)order. Pine first has sex in private, and then, “custome taking away shame,” begins to have sex in public, first with the white servants, then with his master’s daughter, and finally with the enslaved woman, Philippa.² In accordance with the emerging racial order that deemed women of African descent as at once beautiful and monstrous, Pine claims this last act to be against his will and as a result of a conspiracy among the women.³ In short order, all the women are pregnant, and the populating of the “Isle of Pines” begins in earnest. Depicting a scene that nineteenth-century ethnographers would call “promiscuous intercourse,” the children and the parents engage in endogamous sex out of necessity, until, at some point, George Pine establishes rules of exogamy. When Pine reaches the age of sixty, having increased the population of the island from the original 5 to 565 people, all his children and grandchildren, he establishes rules of exogamy and thus, in establishing rules of kinship, creates modern sociality and nationhood on the island. “I took the Males of one Family, and married them to the females of another, not letting any to marry their sisters, as we did formerly out of necessity.”⁴ This practice results in four nations descended from the original four women on the island—George Pine remains the patriarch who transcends exogamic, national division.

This institution of kinship, which created social order and rules of sexuality, consigns “promiscuous intercourse” to the past and is the basis of social harmony that persists on the island until the death of George Pine. In the aftermath of his death, the “Phils”—the group descended from Pine and the enslaved Philippa—are the source of growing disorder and all-out war...