This course considers aesthetic strategies often explicitly disassociated with political crisis: representations of romantic love and family life. Stories of love and family, whether celebratory or critical, are often presented as if they have little to do with broader political and economic conditions. This means that such stories are treated as if they are independent of the forces of nationalism, empire, capitalism, racism, or structural hierarchies of sex and gender. Even when they appear connected to these forces, love and family are often read as transcending them or revealing the ultimate power and dignity of human choice. This course explores the aesthetics and politics of one dominant genre within this field, “family romance,” in order to examine the intimate linkage of sexuality, domesticity, and political economy. This exploration will historicize family romance in relation to colonial and anti-colonial struggles over self-representation, arguments about the allegorical forms of nationalism, and debates concerning the political legitimacy of realism. It will also seek to unsettle historical progress narratives and disentangle aesthetic practices from their presumed political agendas, asking how specific aesthetic practices can be used for divergent political aims. Our main literary texts will focus on the United States and may include work by Charles Brockdon Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala-Sa, Junot Diaz, Fae Myenne Ng, and Toni Morrison (final authors and time period to be determined), but we will work to situate these texts within broader transnational circuits. Our approach will be infused with aesthetic and political questions derived from studies of romance, realism, and post-modernism as well as feminist, queer, anti-racist, post-colonial, and anti-capitalist critique.