Conclusion

Following our archival discoveries and our resultant exploration of the extensive, unstable, and fluid replayings of this melodrama, Boucicault's The Octoroon has been and continues to be as powerful a vehicle for eliciting rethinking about colorism, the constructedness of racialized categories, the dynamics of race and desire, and the hegemony of white privilege in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth.