This chapter analyzes the white supremacist fear of racial hybridity and scientific racism’s uncertain and contradictory construction of whiteness through a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) and Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854). Both New World novels, respectively written in light of and in response to the Jacksonian Indian removal and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, articulate the fractured Black Atlantic world by representing and critically contesting Anglo-Saxonism’s cultural pathology. The essay shows how antebellum debates about the “racial” character of two different antiquities – ancient Egypt and the medieval Norse settlement of America – function as an imaginary filter for negotiating fears of racial hybridity and degeneration in the removal/antebellum present. Next to uncertainties as to the civilizational significance of writing, these literary works reveal a Black Atlantic literary counterdiscourse that explores the economic and social undercurrents of racial slavery – a form of labor whose continued existence depended on the incessant circulation of imaginary “scientific” constructions of a “natural” hierarchy within mankind.

Scholars of both American and U.S. southern history have turned attention to the Indigenous traces often overlooked at the dark heart of place-making. Such revisionism has proved no easy feat in the South, a place where “real” Indians are presumed to be largely extinct after the sweeping Removal land-clearing policies of the 1830s. Nonetheless, Indigenous traces linger – preserved indelibly in the region’s place names, cultural memories, and compensatory fictions. Especially in southern literature, Native hauntings appear to speak for themselves; but they are also uncannily, frighteningly reticent: “vanish’d,” “incomprehensible,” and “inexplicable.” As vital precursors to a traumatic regional history – their expulsion directly facilitating the rise of the South’s plantation economy – this chapter suggests that their centrality can be neither fully recovered nor reckoned with. Indeed, for southerners from a surprising range of backgrounds and moments, the Indian endures as a consistent, formative presence central to the region’s fictions of identity.

Tropes of Indigeneity both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race in the American southern context. This introduction poses Indian Removal as the underacknowledged historical thunderclap, akin to the Civil War, after which the South struggled permanently to regenerate its self-conception. In the narratives of modern and contemporary white southerners, the story of the southeastern Indian is inextricable from the white South’s story about itself - a structure built on preoccupations with loss, dispossession, sovereignty, and community. The Indian motif marks the passage from the white southern specular self to its socially constituted version, and the maintenance of that self is, in many ways, dependent on the internalization of an elaborate Indigenous fiction. What that narrative both covers over and exposes is haunting in more ways than we have realized: it is, finally, a revelatory model of not just settler colonial extermination but of the vacancies, desires, and horrors of a modernity constructed on the twin phantoms of materialism and racialism.