Race and the Making of the Mormon People by Max Perry Mueller (review)

Max Mueller's ambitious new work follows the history of what he terms Mormon "restorative racial universalism." This was a nineteenth-century ideological project promising that all peoples, if they followed the Mormon gospel, could become "white and delightsome," to borrow a phrase from the Book of Mormon, regardless of their past ancestry. Mueller traces the attempted implementation of restorative racial universalism from its articulation on paper to its writing upon living bodies and its eventual supersession by more unyielding racial schemas. This later process ultimately resulted in whiteness becoming not an aspirational category as before, but an inherited status and a defining feature of Mormonism well into the twentieth century.

Mueller begins his analysis by offering a close reading of the Book of Mormon, a text that he contends formed a primary lens through which early Mormons saw race. According to the Book of Mormon, Native Americans, the putative Lamanites in the text, would become white if they read the Book of Mormon and repented of their wicked ways, thus lifting a curse of darkness that God had placed on them. Within such a narrative, literacy became part of what it meant to be fully human and fully Mormon and, therefore, a crucial component of being restored to a universal white human family. Mueller then follows the missions of white Mormons to market the Book of Mormon to Native Americans. When those missions failed to convert large numbers of native peoples, Mormons altered their restorative racial universalism into a narrative about how, at least in the near term, a few Native Americans would become white Lamanites through their exemplary behavior and literacy, while most would remain in yet another category, the "Indian" who was obstinately warlike, dark, and illiterate. Such categorizations helped justify Mormon violence in Utah against indigenous peoples who would not take upon themselves the traits that white Mormons had constructed on paper.

Yet, nonwhite individuals were not passive actors in the Mormon project to construct race on paper. Mueller shows how people with "red" and "black" ancestry wrote themselves into Mormonism's racialized "archive," a term that he uses to variously mean Mormon collective memory and the LDS Church's archives. Here, Mueller examines documents composed by Ute Mormons, like Wakara, and African American Mormons, like Jane Manning James. In his careful reading of their documents dictated to others (James) or formed as a pantomime of writing (Wakara), Mueller argues that these nonwhite individuals tried to create "a writerly self, a self that the writer as well as the intended reader would have to recognize and contend with," thus subverting the conventions that had excluded their voices or reduced them to "character[s] in the Mormons' faith-promoting history" (206, 210). Even if their writing remained "coded in a (white) universalized form" within the Mormon archive, such writerly selves could "'talk back,' or even 'write back' to criticize the hegemonic culture that marginalize[d]" them (58).

To hold together the long, wending arcs of his stories, Mueller borrows frameworks from influential studies on race, literacy, and resistance, filling his footnotes with references to figures like Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Colin Kidd, and James C. Scott. Though he cites it only in passing, however, Jill Lepore's prize-winning The Name of War: King Philipp's War and the Origins of American Identity (1999) forms the inspirational template for Mueller's study. Lepore's work showed how Puritan projects of memory and literacy were tied to projects of constructing race and imperial expansion, as well as how a select few Native Americans resisted these racialized imperial projects through the technologies of empire itself, such as literacy; all of these points find conceptual parallels in Mueller's work.

Yet, to see Mueller as derivative of Lepore misses what he accomplishes in his text. Mueller, like no scholar before him, shows how crucial literacy and literary practices were to the Mormon...