Introduction
Introduction
Writing Race on the World’s Stage
This introductory chapter briefly explores the ways in which Americans re-examined racial conflicts in light of a newly perceived global mission of overseas commercial, military, and cultural expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines cultural debates surrounding the relationship between whiteness and empire, highlighting the literary responses of four multiethnic U.S. writers: Frank R. Steward, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Ranald MacDonald. These writers used literary forms to complicate the popular association of whiteness with national mission or global progress. In their writings, nonwhite soldiers, scientists, explorers, and diplomats travel abroad, altering the racial scripts of empire by revealing the U.S. national mission for global power and leadership to be, instead of white, potentially multiracial. And yet they also detach race from empire by challenging whiteness itself as a social, scientific, and legal category—a strategy referred to as “shadowing the white man's burden.”
Keywords: Americans, global mission, cultural expansion, twentieth century, whiteness, empire, global power, white man's burden
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
