Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Chapter 4 opens with Henry James’s The American (1877) and the novel’s “quiet” absorption in race: the narrative propels itself through a “physiognomical surveillance” of every face to reveal supposedly racial and hereditary origins. This begins the chapter’s focus on race not only as a conceptual category, but as a perceptual category.

Charles Dudley Warner’s two-volume sequence of his travels through Northern African was published in 1876 (Mummies and Moslems) and 1877 (In the Levant). Like James’s The American, Warner’s travel books are not only geographical but also “physiognomical tours.” Warner represents the Levant through the American “racial palimpsest” that is the result of the race-inscribing process of “conquest, enslavement, emancipation, and immigration” (145). For Warner, there is a binary of “civilization” and “barbarism” or “savagery,” with Europeans usually standing in for the civilized. Yet within this binary are shades and, thus, degrees of civilization and savagery. Warner, for example, also talks about white people as savages, too, when it comes to the Irish, Jews, and Greeks, all of whom are sometimes seen as white and sometimes as savage.

Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley sent his dispatches to the New York Herald from Africa in 1877 and had a large readership.