Introduction

This forum argues that present-day conditions demand a renewal of critical attention to racism and its modes of living-on, apart from the historical particularities of "race." The analysis of race, and of the ways in which it has been socially and historically constructed, has been enormously productive for nineteenth-century Americanist scholarship. Yet this project, initiated in the spirit of dismantling racism, may paradoxically be arriving at the point where it is causing us to lose our critical grip on racism. Forum participants address the connections between 19th and 21st century forms of racism and modes of resistance. They address the racism of exclusion as well as that of inclusion, exploring the structures of feeling governing racism for white supremacists alongside those infusing the arguments posed by white liberals; how domestic racism undergirds militarized imperial incursions beyond the US's borders; and how it attempts to colonize the feelings of minoritized populations as a means of folding them into the