American Racial Dystopia: Expansion and Extinction in Poe and Hawthorne

Abstract

It is a critical commonplace to read the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in terms of blackness, whether such blackness signifies the writer’s engagement with nineteenth-century racial discourse and anxieties over the instability of racial categories or suggests a more universalized moral stain, corruption, or despair. This essay examines what happens when we analyze these writers’ engagements with redness—the ways in which their creative production both responds and contributes to the development of redness as a fraught and complex category of meaning in the early nineteenth century. While this essay reads Poe’s and Hawthorne’s preoccupation with redness to signify primarily an engagement with the “Indian question,” that is only part of a broader network of meaning. Triangulating their fiction, contemporaneous speeches on Indian removal, and utopic discourses of progress and expansion, Karafilis analyzes Poe’s and Hawthorne’s resistance to a utopic vision that, while presented as timeless, depends on repressing, recoding, and aestheticizing anti-indigenous violence in favor of a historically specific, dystopic vision of white annihilation that ultimately and inevitably issues from racial violence.