Liminal Whiteness in Early U.S. Fiction

Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.