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

In our own political present, when the global projection of U.S. power has been profitably marshaled alongside “postracial” rubrics of neoliberal multiculturalism and colorblindness and the meaning and function of “race” has been obscured even as structural racisms persist in shaping life chances, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden makes for remarkable reading—especially given that the book’s historical focus is 1890 to 1914.

Finely argued and assembled, Gretchen Murphy compellingly demonstrates how, in a moment of renovation in U.S. imperial culture, “U.S. Americans reexamined domestic racial conflicts in light of a newly perceived global mission of overseas commercial, military, and cultural expansion” (1). Rather than presume that the axes of racial conflict had stable and monolithic contours, Murphy suggests that it is precisely the “discursive skirmishes … amid a tangle of conflicting global racial theories” that composed ethnic, national, and imperial modes of identification (12). Such ambiguities were historically sedimented in what Murphy evocatively calls the “shadows” of the white man’s burden. These shadows function doubly in the book. Murphy looks both at multiethnic writers—Frank R. Steward, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Ranald MacDonald—who “follow[ed] routes of U.S. global power,” as well as at the ways “whiteness itself is shadowed or called into question by these authors’ categorical challenges to racial definitions” (2–3).

Through a combination of meticulously researched historicization and close analysis of literary forms and figures, Murphy’s argument unfolds in three parts. Part 1, “Reading kipling in America,” historically situates the “interpretive uncertainty” (30) of Rudyard kipling’s oft-cited 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippines.” Readings of the poem were mobilized widely by politicians and opinion makers alike, from Theodore Roosevelt to Thomas Dixon, in order to provide answers to the vexed and linked questions of the goals of U.S. imperialism and the constitution and value of whiteness. Yet such answers were by no means univocal or predetermined, as Murphy demonstrates. Rather than officiate over which interpretations of Kipling were true, accurate, or intended, Murphy forwards a much more productive historicist approach to show how such ambiguity was itself symptomatic of the race concept’s incoherence and internal contradiction. In doing so, Murphy animates a context in which the white man’s burden was triply seen as “the colloquial expression of a supposed Anglo-Saxon kinship with Great Britain, as the fragile product of new theories of evolution and racial degeneration, [and] as a prerequisite for democratic self-government inside and outside the United States” (57).

After illustrating the discursive instability of whiteness and U.S. imperialism, part 2, “The Black Cosmopolite,” turns to the writings of Steward and Hopkins in the widely distributed Colored American Magazine. In line with recent histories of black cosmopolitanism, Murphy examines the formal strategies through which black “participation in a world mission” from the Philippines to Jamaica to South Africa was deployed to signify full national citizenship in the wake of Reconstruction (78). But her subtle readings of Colored American Magazine reveal how such participation was also importantly utilized to assert, and perhaps also to parody, belonging in Anglo-American civilization itself. Steward’s little-known “local-color” short stories on the Philippines become crucial here, reproducing the “gendered and sexual intimacies of empire” notable in other black orientalist writing of the period (90). However, just as Murphy suggests in her discussion of whiteness and imperialism in part I, such assertions of civilizational belonging are constituted through their discursive instability, registered here in the figure of Steward’s “de-raced” protagonist, someone who “has [a race] that must be deliberately left unspoken and negated” (98). In one of the book’s most speculative moments, this de-raced figure’s achievement of imperialist belonging “echoes rather than displaces African American oppression...