Chapter 1 provides an empirical analysis of one of the principal grievances of Argentina’s Black social movement – anti-Black racism – with an analysis of the mechanisms of racialization in the country. While erasure and denial, racial formation processes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are still present, amid growing activism and an increasingly visible transnational Black community, the primary contemporary method of racialization is through foreignization. While Miriam Gomes provides the concept, I document with empirical examples how “foreignization,” the assumption that Black people and culture are never from Argentina, hence never Argentine, functions as a racialized mechanism that reproduces the pervasive myth of Argentina’s homogeneous Whiteness. I illustrate this mechanism by analyzing four racialized practices that were salient throughout my fieldwork: afrophilia, afrophobia, curiosity, and insecure Whiteness. By showing how both Blackness and Whiteness are constructed in racialized encounters, I demonstrate how racial hierarchies are reproduced by illuminating the symbolic capital invoked through such exchanges.

Lauren Dembowitz’s chapter focuses on race and visual culture, drawing on Blake’s notion of the “bounding line” with its “infinite inflexions and movements” that recast the visual image without relying on the inhumanity and philistinism of mass production. These “inflexions and movements” allow us to imagine new possibilities for familiar images, such as that of the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Baartman. Rather than write off these images as racist stereotypes, we can, with Dembowitz’s Blakean method, attend closely to how the material history of the visual text is imbricated with the history of race, which is subtly transformed with each new iteration. As Dembowitz powerfully concludes, the image compels us to “contend with the ways we are ‘intimately connected’ with, ‘bound up in,’ and ‘dependent upon’ that figure and the real women she overwrites for understanding how racial capitalism lives on in our present.”

In Sydney’s north, planning for an eruv began in the early 2000s by a group of Shabbat-observant Jews. What looked like an innocent project that did not involve much more than erecting a couple of poles in inconspicuous colours with wire attached to them, most of them on private land with the consent of the owners, became a several years-long dispute in which the imagined boundary turned into a real one for many residents, which they sought to prevent by recourse to planning law. This chapter explores how residents and councillors in St. Ives mobilised planning law to draw the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness. By analysing public documents, including a survey on the eruv commissioned by the Local Council as well as Council meeting minutes, media reports, and submissions to local newspapers, I trace the implicit religious and racial boundaries of belonging in this Australian suburb that the eruv rendered visible and I examine how the planning law regime participated in protecting these boundaries, thereby affirming White Christian settlers as rightful inhabitants of this suburban land.

Part II centers Greece within British cultural heritage discourse, asking how British narratives about Greece shift after the Greek wars for independence produce a modern nation to vie with Britain’s depiction of itself as cultural (and material) heir to classicism. The temporal forms I identify in this part – inheritance and irony – define Britain in relation to Greece, both historically and geopolitically. Across Part II, I consider Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, their display in the British Museum, the conspiracy to whiten them on the eve of World War II, and the claims of universal cultural heritage that began in the nineteenth century and still feature in their exhibition. These narratives and their trajectory, I argue, demonstrate how classicism develops in and through cultural and eventually racial supremacy.

On the first two days of September, two musicals opened that offered descriptions of different peoples of colour for white Broadway audiences: Sissle and Blake’s The Chocolate Dandies (African Americans); and Friml, Stothart, Harbach and Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (Indigenous peoples of Canada). Problematic stereotypes were performed in both instances, though The Chocolate Dandies featured Josephine Baker and Elisabeth Welch in its cast. Musicals opening later in the month included a new edition of The Passing Show and George Gershwin’s musical written expressly for London, Primrose, with a book by Guy Bolton supervised by George Grossmith, Jr.

Looking at Stephen Crane’s Maggie and William Faulkner’s Light in August, this chapter suggests that racial in-betweenness may be one of the driving forces of American literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the distinction between whiteness and blackness plagued not only literary authors, but also legal institutions. In a series of court cases, judges had to decide which immigrant groups counted as white and could hence be naturalized. This chapter proposes that at this juncture, law and literature are closely interconnected. At a time when the judiciary struggled to make sense of petitioners who were racially in-between, literary texts zoom in on figures who are either mixed race or racially indeterminate. Crane’s novella presents the idea that in the late nineteenth century, the Irish were seen as “whites on probation.” Faulkner’s novel focuses on a protagonist who is rumored to be a “mulatto”, but turns out to be half Mexican. Focusing on the “off-whiteness” of Irish and Mexican characters in American literature, this chapter argues that whiteness is ultimately a fiction, and that it is in the pages of literature that the construction of whiteness can best be observed.

The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term ‘transgender’ and prefixial ‘trans’ was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If ‘trans’ as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin ‘queer,’ and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.

The “crisis of evangelicalism” that arose in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, who was supported by 80 percent of American evangelicals, provides a case study in the challenge of determining who counts as a “true evangelical” or a “true Christian.” The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to Christianity helps to clarify much of the controversy. The anxieties of modernity have forced all Christians, liberal and conservative, to explore new approaches to prescriptivism.

The introduction outlines the systemic violence that supports liberal society in early America. Focused on the Boston Massacre, it uses the courtroom representations of John Adams in defense of British soldiers to understand how hostile racial difference organized society and how such differences opened the way for the empowerment of White individuals. Here Whiteness and racial hierarchy become key markers in the formation of how violence is deployed in America.

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

Chapter 4 focuses on democracy, specifically the creation of a violent American political process. By the 1840s, the right to vote expanded to include nearly all White men in the United States. The establishment of this racialized and gendered space put the nation at the global forefront of White male political participation. These voters elected militant candidates, used violence to set boundaries around the electorate, and physically intimidated political opponents. They demonstrated the import of Whiteness and violence to democratic development. The chapter covers Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the election of 1828, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and Bleeding Kansas.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”