Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Gretchen Murphy

Published by New York University Press 2010

Shadowing the White Man’s Burden

U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Gretchen Murphy

Volume 24 in the series America and the Long 19th Century

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814795989.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

During the height of 19th century imperialism, Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem “The White Man’s Burden.” While some of his American readers argued that the poem served as justification for imperialist practices, others saw Kipling’s satirical talents at work and read it as condemnation. Gretchen Murphy explores this tension embedded in the notion of the white man’s burden to create a new historical frame for understanding race and literature in America.
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden maintains that literature symptomized and channeled anxiety about the racial components of the U.S. world mission, while also providing a potentially powerful medium for multiethnic authors interested in redrawing global color lines. Through a range of archival materials from literary reviews to diplomatic records to ethnological treatises, Murphy identifies a common theme in the writings of African-, Asian- and Native-American authors who exploited anxiety about race and national identity through narratives about a multiracial U.S. empire. Shadowing the White Man’s Burden situates American literature in the context of broader race relations, and provides a compelling analysis of the way in which literature came to define and shape racial attitudes for the next century.

Author / Editor information

Murphy Gretchen :

Gretchen Murphy is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas-Austin. She is the author of Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire.

Reviews

Through a careful and attentive comparative analysis of literature and history, [Murphy] demonstrates the constructed nature of race in the imperialist mind and shows that, for many, the United States was never able to fix its own white identity strongly enough to fully participate in the & white mans burden, but with every foray into international empire-building, it opened itself up to internal scrutiny about its own racial heterogeneity.

Murphy's analysis has much to offer to scholars in the humanities...Shadowing the White Man's Burdenis an exciting contribution to transnational analysis, African American Studies, and a welcome gift to scholars in various fields interested in deconstructing concepts of race and nation in the modern era.

Shelley Streeby,author of American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture:
This impressive book, which is based on extensive archival research, shows how the transformation of racial categories at the turn of the 20th century was a multidirectional process that often generated new meanings. Murphy reveals how multiple imperial histories shaped changing ideas about race and how readers and writers who engaged the trope of the white mans burden exposed contradictory ideas about whiteness as a domestic and transnational racial construct. Shadowing the White Mans Burden is part of an exciting new body of work on race in transnational contexts. It is one of the best accounts we have of the significance of literature in transformations of and contests over race in this period.

Harilaos Stecopoulos:
Gretchen Murphy's new book is a compelling work that synthesizes critical race theory and U.S. empire studies to produce an original analysis of whiteness in national and international contexts . . . Shadowing the White Man's Burden is a valuable book that makes an important contribution to the growing body of work on U.S. imperialism. Scholars interested in the topic would do well to attend to this remarkable achievement.

Matthew Pratt Guterl:
This beautifully argued and engaging literary history addresses a fairly simple question: How did the distinctive multiracial nature of the United States transform that country's sense of itself as an empire? The result is a fascinating and rewarding book worth reading closely and carefully.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Writing Race on the World’s Stage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Reading Kipling in America
1. The Burden of Whiteness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
2. The White Man’s Burden or the Leopard’s Spots? Dixon’s Political Conundrum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
Part II. The Black Cosmopolite
3. The Plain Citizen of Black Orientalism Frank R. Steward’s Filipino American War Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
4. Pauline Hopkins’s “International Policy” Cosmopolitan Perspective at the Colored American Magazine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Part III. Pacific Expansion and Transnational Fictions of Race
5. How the Irish Became Japanese Winnifred Eaton’s Transnational Racial Reconstructions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
6. American Indians, Asiatics, and Anglo-Saxons Ranald MacDonald’s Japan Story of Adventure Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	280

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Keywords: America; burden; create; embedded; explores; frame; Gretchen; historical; literature; mans; Murphy; notion; race; tension; this; understanding; white

eBook

Published: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780814759592