Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States

Abstract

Abstract Even as Black Lives Matter thinkers underscore white supremacy’s manifestation in the unremarkable and all-too-often unnoticed unfolding of ordinary life, literary critical methods remain impeded by longstanding biases toward unconventional texts, visionary writers, and nonconforming ideas. The result is that we’re left without adequate methods, vocabularies, and archives for apprehending white supremacy’s urgent ordinariness. In Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States, Travis M. Foster suggests that genre provides the best route out of this impasse. Through rigorous new interpretations of four popular literary and cultural genres—campus novels, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons—Foster unpacks how conventionality played a crucial role in both reconstituting and resisting taken-for-granted operations of white supremacy and antiblackness in the wake of emancipation. Arguing that genre provides a scale and a method for rendering ordinariness newly available to close analysis, Foster reveals the specific conventions and strategies through which antiblackness constitutes white social worlds far removed from the color line, while also surveying whiteness’s remarkable capacity to adapt itself to new conditions and incorporate internal differences. Simultaneously, using genre analysis to trace forms of black resistance that manifest within the radical collectivity of black social worlds, rather than through more familiar liberal politics of dissent, he highlights practices of freedom and community that refuse the very political conditions proffered by white supremacist logic. The result is an original and important new account of popular literature’s role in refashioning and resisting white supremacy in an emergent postemancipation climate.