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  • The Dying Gasps of Teutonic Hegemony
  • Michael J. Shapiro (bio)

Because my locus of enunciation is Hawaii and because it’s clear that among other things the Trump Presidency will be about reestablishing dominance (materially and symbolically) for “those who think they’re white” (to use Ta Nehisi Coates’ cogent expression), I want to begin with an account of a telling encounter in the history of white dominance here. As I have noted elsewhere, an early version of American “political science” debuted (c. 1894) in Hawaii as a result of a letter that Sanford Dole, “the head of the provisional government of Hawaii and leader of the coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, wrote to ask [John] Burgess, Dean of the political science faculty at Columbia University … about the form Hawai’i’s new government should take.”1

Burgess got the gist of the inquiry. After reviewing the information Dole conveyed about the Hawaii ethnoscape, he wrote: “I understand your problem to be the construction of a constitution which will place government in the hands of the teutons [read whites], and preserve it there, at least for the present. Being wholly sympathetic to Dole’s et al. Problem … Burgess responded with suggestions about how to impose voting qualifications and governance structures that would disqualify a substantial portion of Hawaii’s non-white population (“Teutons” numbered only 4,533 out of the total population of 89,990, of which 40,622 were Hawaiians or part Hawaiians).2

As recent events attest, that strategy for preserving “white” dominance is not dead, having been picked up by the GOP during the past two election cycles as they have tried to contain the effects of non-white votes with gerrymandering and voter suppression initiatives. However, I want to rehearse an earlier historical moment of white racial angst that emerged from academia because it has resonances with the contemporary anti immigrant hysteria that the Trump campaign exploited and the Trump presidency promises to continue fanning. In the early twentieth century, a dominant strain of American sociology picked up the perceived challenge to white dominance of new immigration flows, which threatened—in their eyes—to “contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character.”3 In the early twentieth century, the threatening alien-others were not Muslims and Mexicans; they were (among others) Asians, southern and middle Europeans, [End Page 127] Irish and even those who spoke French. The then widely read sociologist, E. A. Ross, likened the flows to “race suicide,” buttressing his claim on the epistemic warranting of vision, on what he called his “practised eye”: “To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably proclaims inferiority of type [who are] inferior in looks to the old immigrants …”4

Although varying in pace, the flows that have constituted the “American” ethnoscape have been continuous. So that to refer to the “American character” at any historical moment is to essentialize an America that is always in flux and thus radically contingent; it is a population that results from forces that have impelled bodies to move. To promote the identity politics immanent in Ross’s account—as in contemporary identity fantasies about what is essentially American—is (temporally) to arbitrarily freeze time and (spatially) to employ what Milan Kundera calls a “median context”: “every people in search of itself thinks about where to locate the margin between its own home and the rest of the world.”5

Thus, now as in the past the racialization of bodies requires a misleading temporalization as well as an invention of a “median context” in which one conjures away the arbitrariness of their location, denies the otherness within, and imagines that their identity manifests a “purity and simplicity.” However, rather than throwing more critical concepts into the teeth of the “hounds with the sharpest teeth.”6 the “inventors of new noise”7 who want to “make American great again,” I want to illustrate the contingency I have evoked with resort to Russell Banks’ novel Continental Drift, because it provides an antidote to fantasies of the “purity and simplicity” of identity. Banks’ protagonists are “conceptual personae”8 whose experiences juxtapose a world of continual flows to one in which boundaries...

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