Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, by Duncan Bell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell Marilyn Lake (bio) Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, by Duncan Bell; pp. ix + 465. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, $42.00, £32.00. “No one was white before he/she came to America,” wrote African-American writer James Baldwin in the magazine Essence (1970–present) in 1984. “It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country” (Baldwin qtd. in Richard Delgrado and Jean Stefancic, eds. Critical White Studies: Looking Beyond the Mirror [Temple University Press, 1997], 285). The condition of whiteness was also a preoccupation of W. E. B. Du Bois, Baldwin’s fellow countryman, whose 1910 essay “The Souls of White Folk” identified a “new religion of whiteness” sweeping the world: “Wave upon wave, each with increasing virulence is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time” (Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” Independent [1910], 339). Both Du Bois and Baldwin saw Americans’ subjective identification as white as crucial to their sense of personal and national self and the related conceit that the United States was and must remain a white man’s country. In Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, the third volume in his self-styled “loose trilogy dedicated to analyzing the metropolitan settler imaginary” (3), Duncan Bell draws on Du Bois’s essay on the advent of the religion of whiteness to locate “Anglo-Saxonism” as the “foremost” expression of what Bell calls “transnational whiteness” (7). He argues that the “Prophets of ‘the religion of whiteness’ . . . galvanized efforts to institutionalize racial supremacy within and beyond the borders of Europe and the Angloworld” (8). Despite his focus on Anglo-America, Bell is not interested in American forms of subjective whiteness. He does not see the defensive and proprietorial dimensions of whiteness identified by Du Bois (“Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen,” [“Souls of White Folk,” 339]) and relatedly, the pivotal role of the rise of Asia in provoking such proprietorial assertions—and in provoking them afresh today as evident in current concerted efforts by the West to contain a newly resurgent China. In the nineteenth century, Asian immigration to former British colonies precipitated the expression of a new sense of self and galvanized the possessive claims advanced by self-styled white men’s countries against those they called Asiatics. Du Bois defined the [End Page 705] global dimension of the color line in 1910 as “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (Gustave Spiller, “The Problem of Race Equality,” Universal Races Congress Papers [1911], 39). In London, the following year, the organizers of the Universal Races Congress, at which Du Bois spoke, stated their goal as the discussion of “the general relations subsisting between the peoples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-called coloured peoples, with a view to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings and a heartier cooperation” (Du Bois qtd. in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 [Henry Holt, 1994], 283). The increasingly virulent assertions of whiteness, they feared, could lead to war. Bell is a British historian of ideas writing of Anglo-American dreams of Anglo-Saxon union from a British metropolitan perspective. His tendency to conflate the English idea of Anglo-Saxonism—at heart a theory of Teutonic history—with postcolonial formations of whiteness impedes his ability to explain the failure and fractured nature of the vision of Anglo-American unity that he delineates. His characterization of his subject as “the metropolitan settler imaginary” elides a conceptual distinction between two different subject positions—metropolitan and settler—key to understanding the ascendancy of whiteness (3). Bell’s focus in Dreamworlds of Race is the utopian vision of Anglo-American racial union that excited the imaginations of elite political thinkers, mostly British, in the late nineteenth century. He locates this dreaming in the context...