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

Gretchen Murphy’s Shadowing the White Man’s Burden undertakes to explore the complex dynamic of U.S. expansionism and domestic racial ideologies through discussion of four minority writers of the turn of the century. Her point of departure, as suggested by the title, is Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” published as a response to American actions in the Philippines. One purpose of Murphy’s study is to challenge historical assumptions that imperial policy was simply an extension of white racial views, especially in regard to African Americans and Asians. In place of this perspective, the author identifies a pattern of ideological complications that become evident when literary texts engage an international viewpoint.

She begins with Kipling and shows that both for the writer and his audience matters were not simple. Kipling seems doubtful about the project of “civilizing” local populations. While he argues that the best white men should take up this “burden,” he anticipated that they would be sacrificed to it. The poem was used to argue both for empire and against it. White readers and policy makers agreed on the inferiority of the people in the lands being taken over, but they disagreed over whether it was worthwhile to try to force on them the practices of American civilization and modernity.

Murphy then examines the careers and works of four writers: Frank Steward, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Ranald MacDonald. Steward had a series of pieces published in Colored American Magazine, for which Hopkins was literary editor. These short stories were based on his service with the American military during the Spanish-American and Filipino wars. A version of local color, they take the point of view of an American officer dealing with the local women. The officer’s race is never specified, a point which Murphy believes reveals the true objective, which is to claim black equality. The stories in fact reinforce imperial views of the premodern character of Filipinos. Similarly, Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903), set in Africa as a “passing” novel, offers no significant critique of Western attitudes. What Hopkins had to contend with was the views of those in charge at the magazine that African Americans had no business concerning themselves with international matters.

With Eaton and MacDonald, the concern is Japan. As a nation on the rise and open to Western ideas and practices, it seemed to be an exception to the rule that nonwhites would always be inferior. Eaton tried to push this idea by using the Russo-Japanese War as an occasion to encourage American identification with the Japanese. Murphy directly connects this effort to the debate over Asian immigration policy. She points out the irony that it was precisely the taking on of American traits like aggressiveness and modern technology that created resistance. Finally, Ranald MacDonald, half-Scot, half-Chinook, a resident of the borderlands of the Northwest, was never able to publish his own version of his adventure in Japan. The reason for his failure seems to have been a problem of audience. White Americans did not trust the narrative of a “half-breed” who identified as British.

Gretchen Murphy has successfully brought together transnational and empire studies with a multiethnic perspective. She has presented the case for a deeply ambiguous understanding of the status and work of the minority cosmopolitan in a racialized world.