Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by Travis M. Foster

Abstract

Reviewed by: Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by Travis M. Foster Brigitte Fielder FOSTER, TRAVIS M. Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 176 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Travis Foster's Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States reads the "ordinariness" of literary genre against the ordinariness of anti-Black racism in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. In popular genres, Foster traces "the interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms," showing how generic reading experiences encouraged both shared racial identification and shared racist sentiment (2). If genres, as Foster holds, "produce and give substance to the ordinary," exhibiting habitual practices of writing and reading, they also evidence "habitual practices of racism" (15, 5). Utilizing familiarity and nostalgia, the ordinariness of genre also contained racism's ordinary forms. Overwhelmingly, Foster does not examine texts that focus on racial relations or racial violence. His first three chapters deal with texts whose casual—everyday—forms of racism might easily be overlooked by readers who have only learned to attend to more overt forms of racist violence, particularly alongside histories of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. That such racism might fly under the radar illustrates how deeply embedded anti-Black racism is in US literary culture. These texts were not expressly concerned with race, even as they exhibit a shared investment in white supremacy; it is often their understated commitments to whiteness to which Foster attends. [End Page 310] Foster's first three chapters take up genres that effectively work to reinforce white identity among readers, even across various points of difference. Attending not only to generic similarities but differences, Foster highlights not genre's confinements but its elasticity. He here compares genre's ability to include variation with "the capacious elasticity of whiteness" (19). The genres of the book's early chapters foreground whiteness's absorptive ability, incorporating European immigrants, people of different classes, and those with different geographical origins and orientations and political positions. By foregrounding inclusion, racial exclusion is subtler, often implied rather than said outright, but foundational to the establishment of white national fantasies and white social practices. The first two chapters treat forms aimed at gendered readerships: the campus novel and the women's periodical The Ladies' Home Journal. Both, Foster argues, produced ideas of fraternity and sorority that were mutually constituted alongside post-war white nationalism. Of campus novels, Foster writes, "white sectional reconciliation remained the genre's foremost concern into the early twentieth century" (24). The camaraderie displayed here is dependent upon whiteness, even (or perhaps especially) as it reaches across divides of class, region, and gender. Campus novels here become "populist fables" in their pretense at universality while leaving racial exclusion implicit (33). Playing on nostalgia in these narratives of forging friendship across difference, this genre's overarching script lends itself to "sectional reconciliation and transsectional whiteness" (38). Although some of the campus novels Foster discusses take up women's college experiences, the second chapter more closely examines white sororal attachments and friendship. Like white campus life, "white women's culture and white women's friendships collaborated as constituents within the ordinariness of postbellum antiblackness" (44). This chapter takes as its primary example The Ladies' Home Journal, which evidenced similarly reconciliationist rhetoric in women's friendship formation. Reading and friendship are coupled in the periodical's framing, imagining potential readers as a sororal community of friends and "forging American womanhood into a distinctly white nationalist disposition" (51). Such a disposition arises from the journal's various expressions of anti-Blackness, in representations of Black characters, uses of nostalgia, and mundane uses of anti-Black humor, as well as the habitual exclusion of Black writers from its pages. The readerly friendships forged here were carefully and clearly segregated. The book's third chapter turns to the Civil War elegy as a form that brought together dissenting positions with relation to the war and even assessments of its value—united under a shared position of white mourning. Foster treats distinctions amid this broader genre in order to illustrate how differing approaches to mourning the (white) war dead were still incorporated into a...