From Melville to Saunders: Using Liminality to Uncover US-American Racial Fantasies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.357Keywords:
American Africanism, White supremacy, nineteenth-century romance, twenty-first century fantasy, Whiteness, anti-Blackness, liminalityAbstract
This paper offers a comparative reading of Herman Melville’s romance Moby Dick“ (1851) and George Saunders’s fantastic ghost story Lincoln in the Bardo “(2017), tracing the reverberations of Toni Morrison’s ‘American Africanism’ as a specific kind of White supremacist discourse in both novels. After sketching nineteenth-century romance and recent fantasy literature as liminal genres fitting for a critical negotiation of the equally liminal Africanist presence, this paper shows how both novels employ liminality as a shared narrative strategy to transport their criticism on White supremacy and anti-Blackness.Downloads
Published
2022-08-02
How to Cite
Seuberth, Lisa. “From Melville to Saunders: Using Liminality to Uncover US-American Racial Fantasies”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, Aug. 2022, pp. 41-54, doi:10.5283/copas.357.
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.