Race-Making and Romanticism: Notes on Pedagogy and the Position of Whiteness

Abstract

Recent discussions often conflate the project of developing an antiracist Romantic studies with the project of discovering an antiracist Romanticism, the elements of which could be culled from its revolutionary texts and radical figurations. This essay considers the risks of this conflation and the critical investments it protects. First, I discuss how and why some scholars are liable to skip over the task of considering the extent of Romanticism’s racism. Next, I relate my experience teaching an upper-level undergraduate course titled “Race-Making and Romanticism,” in which we explored how Romantic literature registered and participated in the early nineteenth-century project of forging whiteness and consolidating logics of anti-Blackness. Finally, I reflect on how my approach to antiracist work is a function of my position as a white cis male, suggesting that those of us in the position of whiteness would do well to consider our attachment to Romantic authors and texts as a structural relation that exceeds the dynamics of identification and disavowal.