Cousin theory: Brown kinship and the nineteenth-century domestic novel

This essay discusses kinship relations in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (England, 1868) and Jorge Isaacs’s María (Colombia, 1867). We begin by differentiating between what we frame as white and brown cousin relationships. The former, we argue, solidify the capital accumulation made possible by the expansion of empire and colonial modernity, while the latter engage with forms of relationality that are expected within the limits of colonial respectability and exceed propriety as a form of corporeal resistance. Despite their writing in different national, cultural, and linguistic traditions, both Collins and Isaacs stage an opposition between white and brown cousins that inevitably positions whiteness as the macrostructure through which subjectivity comes to align with the colonial matrix of power. Even so, we conclude, they invite a resistant reading that foregrounds the local political possibilities of brown cousin kinship to frustrate colonial hegemony.