Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction was published by Edinburgh University Press in May 2021 (paperback February 2023).
This book employs the concept of ‘liminal whiteness’ to examine fluid and precarious white citizenship in early nineteenth-century American fiction, from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J Webb. Moving beyond an anthropological framework of liminality and its focus on ritualized behavior in tribal societies, this book examines liminality as both a temporary transformative experience and a permanent condition of exclusion and loss for white men in the early United States. Liminal Whiteness contributes to a growing body of critical whiteness scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of whiteness and citizenship in the early U.S., and which resonates with contemporary discussions of white cultural anxiety and fragility.
For additional publications from this book project, please see my Publications page.
Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction was highly commended in the 2022 Arthur Miller First Book Prize, British Association of American Studies.
No Such Place on the Maps: The Settler Future
This project is a comparative literary and cultural history of early Australian and US utopian writing. Over 200 utopian communities were founded in 19th century Australia and US. These communities were set up by political and religious groups and to different extents followed common radical politics: socialism, the abolition of slavery and indentured labour, feminism, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, and land reform. All were united by the desire to make significant social improvements through settling rural domestic territory or purchasing territory overseas.
By comparing early Australian and US utopian writing and culture, this project considers how utopian thought develops in two distinct and developing national cultures –Australia as a group of British colonies moving towards federation, and the US as a post-colonial independent nation. Despite these contextual differences, shared settler utopian concerns exist within Australia and the US: the territorialisation of new domestic or foreign lands, the impulse to fictionalise utopian social experiments, and the development of white identity in concert with the displacement and erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples. The project examines how planned or imagined improvements in class, gender, the environment, technology and health in utopian writing were shaped by existing race relations in Australia and the US and how these improvements impacted discussions of race in these texts and communities.
Writers in this project include: John Lithgow, James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Griffiths, Martin Delany, Mary Fox, Catherine Helen Spence, Ernest Favenc, William Lane.
Racial Transformation in 'Postracial' Literature and Culture
This project extends the focus of my first monograph on fluid and fluctuating whiteness by examining instances of racial transformation in “postracial” USA and the resulting “whitelash”. It argues that during the Obama and Trump administrations, a renewed interest in characters changing race (through physical, supernatural or rhetorical transformation), reflects and/or contributes to both liberal fantasies of a postracial world and conservative fears of white loss.
Case studies in this project include literature (Jess Row, Rachel Dolezal, Maurice Ruffin, George Saunders), film and theatre (Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, Hamilton, Slave Play, An Octaroon), and digital culture (‘pretendians’, digital blackface and ‘blackfishing’, white genocide rhetoric, online discussions of white writers depicting non-white characters).