From Melville to Saunders: Using Liminality to Uncover US-American Racial Fantasies

Authors

  • Lisa Seuberth Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.357

Keywords:

American Africanism, White supremacy, nineteenth-century romance, twenty-first century fantasy, Whiteness, anti-Blackness, liminality

Abstract

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.

Author Biography

  • Lisa Seuberth, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

    Lisa Seuberth is a doctoral candidate at the Chair of American Literary Studies (Prof. Dr. Kley) at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). She passed her First State Examination in December 2020 in English and French and is currently working on her project on White supremacist and anti-Black discourses in contemporary US American literature. Her research interests mainly concern Postcolonial Studies, African American Studies, and Critical Race Theory with a special focus on Critical Whiteness Studies. In her research, she focuses on the role popular and prestigious literatures play in the constant (re-)construction of racialized US-American identities.

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Published

2022-08-02

Issue

Vol. 23 No. 1 (2022)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons 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.

How to Cite

“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, https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.357.

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