Racism's Occlusion from the Anti-Tom Novel to Charlottesville
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“A Single White Line Running Through a Web of Blackness”: Racism’s Occlusion from the Anti-Tom Novel to Charlottesville by © David Mitterauer submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at the English Department Memorial University of Newfoundland August 2019 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador Snowflake in the diving glow Contemplating the waves over the ground A grimace of fear and awe Spreading in the crowd around Amazing, unearthly The figure’s face on the temple is me –“Veridical Paradox,” Delusion Squared i Abstract This MA thesis discusses how romance as a literary form makes the Anti-Tom novel a malleable rhetorical vehicle to carry white supremacist ideology. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of postcolonial theory and race studies, the thesis analyzes antebellum Anti-Tom novels (Sarah J. Hale’s Liberia [1853]; Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride [1854]; and Charles Jacobs Peterson’s The Cabin and Parlor [1852]) and expands the genre’s definition to include Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and contemporary white-supremacist science fictions (William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries [1978]; Ellen Williams’ Bedford: A World Vision [2000]; and Ward Kendall’s Hold Back This Day [2001]). The primary concerns of this thesis are to understand how the American slaveholding past signifies in the present political moment, to understand why the removal of the General Robert E. Lee statue catalyzed the violent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, and to understand the affective preconditions Donald J. Trump created for this violence through racist rhetoric. The thesis argues that the pastoral romance changes in each new context. In the antebellum Anti-Tom novel it is tied to an idealized white plantocratic identity that is juxtaposed with the specter of black insurrection. In Dixon, open violence becomes a constitutive part. In the science fictions, violence becomes an intrinsic component of whiteness itself. The exploration permits inter alia an understanding of how Civil-War monuments can be detached from their historical contexts and repurposed for a current political movement. The thesis calls for opening a serious inquiry by legislators, academics, and teachers into white-supremacist literature rather than eschewing white-supremacist artefacts for fear of radicalization (or out of revulsion). It is in literature that white-supremacist ideologues communicate with a wider public by abandoning the obscurity of white-supremacist sophistry and drawing on existing literary traditions. ii Acknowledgements I respectfully acknowledge the territory in which I attended this program and wrote this thesis as the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, and the island of Newfoundland as the ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaw and Beothuk. I would also like to recognize the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut and the Innu of Nitassinan, and their ancestors, as the original people of Labrador. I strive for respectful relationships with all the peoples of this province as we search for collective healing and true reconciliation, and honor this beautiful land together. I would like to thank: Andrew Loman, for being a perspicacious supervisor and sagacious mentor; for taming this monster of a thesis together with me; and for all the invaluable help and advice that far exceeded his supervisory obligations. My examiners Jason Haslam at Dalhousie University and Christopher Lockett at Memorial University of Newfoundland for their lucid observations and exceptionally helpful criticism. My parents, for the boundless support and understanding despite the long silences across the ocean. Miranda, for your unwavering support, understanding, and patience; for being an integral part of this crazy duo; and for all the adventures that await. Samuel, Patrick, Reinhold, Max & Annabelle, Raphael, Verena, Tina, Courtnee, Andreas, and Katharina, for accompanying me wherever I go—if not in person, then in spirit. iii Table of Contents “Making Arrows out of Pointed Words”—An Introduction to Hate .................................1 Chapter 1: The Chasm of 0.01%: Empire, Emancipation, and Extremism ...................... 15 Chapter 2: “The Comparatively Immaterial Question of Property”: The Pastoral Plantation and the Fear of Insurrection ........................................................................... 48 Chapter 3: “Blackened Stripes and Stars”: Romancing the Invisible Empire .................. 68 Chapter 4: “The Mischievous Isms”: Monuments for the Future .................................... 88 Conclusion: America’s “Own Inseparable Shadow” .................................................... 117 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 127 Mitterauer 1 “Making Arrows out of Pointed Words”—An Introduction to Hate While the election of Donald John Trump to the presidency of the United States of America certainly was the most surprising electoral outcome of 2016, it was far from the only one: German state elections were crashed by the anti-immigrationist Alt-Right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD);1 Austria voted in a second election round with Dr. Alexander Van Der Bellen the country’s first Green Party president into office,2 beating the far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs’ candidate Norbert Hofer only by a slim margin; and Great Britain voted to leave the European Union,3 bewitched by the arguments of its principal advocate, the far-right UK Independence Party. It was a year in which it was difficult for even the most politically oblivious not to notice “so characteristic a feature of our age” as the political pendulum’s swing towards the right in the ‘enlightened’ West. While the European Alt-Right largely gravitates towards immigration matters, its American counterpart draws on a long history of oppression of people of mixed or ‘non-white’ ancestry, with practices and rhetoric distinct from the European right that require a reading with a focus on America’s past. 1 For example, the AfD became the second strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt. 2 However, the presidential election could not avert the right seizing control in parliament, when, in 2017, Sebastian Kurz’ new Österreichische Volkspartei entered into a coalition with the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, leading to the first conservative–populist government since 2005, when a similar configuration imploded and split the FPÖ into two weaker splinter groups. Despite scandals catapulting Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache out of office and a no-confidence vote by parliament eliminating Kurz as Chancellor, the 2019 European elections, which took place right after the disintegration of government, indicate that neither party has significantly lost in popularity. 3 All the while, the EU itself appears more and more like a cabal for building a continental fortress rather than an alliance for rebuilding from fascism’s self-destructiveness and preventing the rekindling of its still red-hot embers through community and understanding—its initial aims in 1958. Mitterauer 2 Out of many possible thesis topics, I chose the Anti-Tom novel and its epigones because, in my preliminary research, I found that this nearly forgotten genre of pro-slavery narrative had surprising contemporary currency, given the present political moment of Trump’s election and the Charlottesville riots.4 As I began reading these novels at length, they seemed increasingly instructive to anyone trying to understand the Imaginary of American nationhood and the recent increase of hate crimes.5 America’s slaveholding past and the bellicose discourse that governed it reverberate strongly in present politics. Witness the magnetizing effect that a protest against the removal6 of a Confederate statue had for the newly-emerged American “Alt-Right.” In this context, one should also be astutely aware of how the present fad to obsess over Trumpian ‘alternative facts’ and online flat- earth cultists reaches back to, and possibly even further than, the antebellum ‘post-truth’ moment of “The South As It Really Is.”7 Political debate, mixed with a generous dash of 4 The Unite the Right rally was organized by Jason Kessler, a white nationalist with “Alt-Right” affiliations. In a press conference, he claimed that the motivation to “organize this event is precisely because of the hyperbolic and violent rhetoric not only from the media but members of [Showing Up for Racial Justice], Antifa and Black Lives Matter” (“Unite the Right Press Conference” 0:20-0:38) as a response to “anti-white” violence at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville at the Lee statue a month before Unite the Right. In this protest, fifty KKK members were outnumbered by an estimated 1,000 counter-protesters (Ellis). Despite resistance from within the “Alt-Right,” Kessler admitted the KKK chapter in question to the Unite the Right protest. Note that, in the official press conference, Kessler in no way addresses Confederate ‘heritage’ or General Lee as a historical figure. 5 For 2017, the FBI reported that out of 5,060 hate-crime victims of racial bias, 48.6% were African American, followed by Whites with 17.1% (“Hate Crime”). For 2015, the FBI reported 4,216 victims of which 52.2% were African American, and for 2016 4,426 victims of which 50.2% were African American. Furthermore, out of 6,370 hate crime offenders, 50.7% were White, followed by 21.3% African American