Description
Book SynopsisOffers fresh ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. This book examines white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915 - literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film - and exposes the perverse infrastructure of whiteness.
Trade Review“A stunningly conceived, lucidly written, well supported, nuanced, and absolutely compelling analysis of a culturally repressed and underanalyzed body of important literary materials. Stokes demonstrates with amplifying brilliance the operative interdependence of whiteness and normative heterosexuality.”—Dana Nelson, author of
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men“An engaging and well written exploration of nineteenth-century ‘fictions’ of white supremacy that manages to combine wit and erudition.”—Gayle Wald, author of
Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth Century U.S. Literature and CultureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: White Fictions
1. “De White Man in Season”
2. Sympathy and Symmetry: The Romance of Slavery in Metta V. Victor’s
Maum Guinea and her Plantation “Children” 3. Someone’s in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall
4. Charles Chesnutt and the Masturbating Boy: Onanism, Whiteness, and
The Marrow of Tradition 5. White Sex: Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Erotics of White Supremacy
6. Becoming Visible: I’m White, Therefore I’m Anxious
Epilogue: The Queer Face of Whiteness
Notes
Bibliography
