Coda: The Resurrection of Whiteness

Drawing together discussions of White citizenship throughout the book, the Coda examines the detachment between civic ideals and the individual White male in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. The eponymous trickster’s vocal mimicry across racial identities, akin to the spiritualist medium, fractures the self-contained self-made White male citizen, while at the same time enacting the ultimate social freedom to transgress those borders. The book closes with a turn to liminal Whiteness in the contemporary moment. The early US imagination of becoming less than White continues in the language of oppression, replacement, and genocide that frames White supremacist ethno-nationalist anxieties of racial mobility in the contemporary United States.