Chapter 3 - Still Looking for the Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature

Summary

American writing midwifed the white–nonwhite binary that continues to shape formulations of racial difference in the United States. In surveying the emergence of whiteness in American literature, it becomes evident that the literary record was key to imagining this constructed racial category and making it synonymous with Americanness. Through its portraits of English settlement, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the creation of a slave-for-life caste, and the expansion of national boundaries as divine destiny, American literature cemented an ideological whiteness that defined a single racial group as the inheritors of American rights and privileges and further guaranteed a social stratification that would engender continued racial hauntings.