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 FiguresPreface: Questioning Whiteness1. Introduction: Race, Whiteness and Women Immigrants2. Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin's Claim to Assimilation3. "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 Far4. "This Hideous Little Pickaninny" and the Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism and Willa Cather's My Antonia5. Epilogue: Assimilation and Re-Racialization of Immigrant Bodies
