| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"Miscegenation": Making Race in America. By Elise Lemire. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. x, 204 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8122-3664-5.)
"Race" and sexuality have been linked in the American imagination in sensational ways at least since the earliest appearance of dying confession rape narratives. In "Miscegenation," Elise Lemire argues that "race" in its modern usage owes its very existence as a category of difference to the impulse of whites to define "a set of traits that are more or less sexually desirable" in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War (p. 3). In the North, postrevolutionary efforts to expand blacks' political rights raised whites' anxiety that social equality and intermarriage might follow. Northern whites set about depicting blacks as physically distasteful and socially inferior in order to prohibit interracial, and promote intraracial, coupling. Lemire contends that those depictions first racialized and then biologized desire, portraying intraracial coupling as the only vehicle for perpetuating imagined race traits and race blood.	1
"Miscegenation" explores a range of texts and images produced in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, from Federalist poetry exposing Thomas Jefferson's relations with Sally Hemings to antiabolitionist lampoons of the 1830s and pamphlets condemning Abraham Lincoln's reelection in 1864 as the road to certain race mixing.	. . .

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