“Fitt for Faire Habitacion”: Kinship and Race in A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande

Abstract

This essay attends to the nexus of family, kinship, and blood in A vewe of the present state of Irelande through the intersection of critical race theory and queer theory. In A vewe, this essay argues, race colludes with genealogy and chronicity to achieve its structural effects, which work to construct both racial genealogies as well as racial futures. In particular, this essay looks at the concept of kincogish to propose that this Irish form of affinity both underscores and resists colonial modes of familial organization marked by consanguinity and lineal descent. The racialized strictures of straight, White temporality and genealogy, I suggest, also rely on the language and distinctions of epidermal race, as the English mandate for a “fairer waie” attempts to map both the land and the bodies of the Irish in the visual lexicon of light and dark and tries to discipline temporality and terrain by means of straight genealogy and White futurity.