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Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction


 Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. It brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US including natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism and spiritualism. Moving beyond an anthropological framework of liminality and its focus on ritualised behaviour in tribal societies, this book examines liminality as both a temporary transformative experience and a permanent condition of exclusion and loss for White men in the early United States. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, the book argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Liminal Whiteness contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of Whiteness and citizenship in the early US, and which resonates with contemporary discussions of White cultural anxiety and fragility. Fears of losing Whiteness in the early US were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.