The “Facts” of Blackness and Anthropological Worlds

This chapter discusses the origins and development of sword and sorcery in the pulps and fanzines of the 1930s. It starts with Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and reads these stories in relation to contemporaneous fanzine commentary. show an intricate process of worldbuilding whereby race is located at higher and higher levels of meaning even though its correspondence with actual “races” is deeply questioned. This interpretive strategy mirrors the work of cultural anthropologists who were critiquing biological racism, thus demonstrating that race was not so much being critiqued as it was being elevated to a different order of meaning. It details these interpretive strategies in order to show the simultaneous reproduction of race in the building of sword and sorcery as a genre with the embedding of race in anthropological thought.

Romance and Racism after the Civil War

This chapter discusses the rebirth of the plantation romance from the 1900s through to the 1940s, discussing two key popular fictions: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. It contextualizes the plantation romance as a genre that speculates on the past and on historiography itself. Such popular fictions re-tell the story of Reconstruction, not just to do a historical critique of it as misguided or as a failure, but to produce perceptual strategies that renew racisms along different lines. It shows how Gone With The Wind transforms racial perception from one based on status and character to one based on creating racial contexts.

Racial Worldmaking

This introduction describes the theory and method of racial worldmaking. Critiquing the dominant approach of racial formation theory for analyzing race in the humanities and social sciences, it distinguishes an approach based on racial salience - how, when, and where we notice race. It describes the interrelations among genre and race in terms of larger theories of worldbuilding. The archive of popular fiction from 1893 to the present is established and linked to major, overlooked modes of black and Asiatic racialization. This archive challenges prominent historical accounts of race and racism in the twentieth century.

Racial Counterfactuals and the Uncertain Event of Emancipation

This chapter discusses alternate histories of the Civil War in relation to U.S. Equal Protection jurisprudence and race discrimination law. It shows how the racial counterfactual shapes what counts as discrimination in an important anti-affirmative action legal case, Ricci v. Destefano. In particular, it analyzes the prominent use of racial counterfactuals by the Supreme Court justices in order to organize the perception of race. It then surveys alternate histories of the U.S. Civil War and describes their logics of narrative explanation. Finally, it turns to Terry Bissons’ Fire on the Mountain and Steven Barnes’s Lion’s Blood as examples of a strategic use of the racial counterfactual in order to envision different understandings of racial freedom and equality.

Reconstructing Racial Perception

This chapter interprets Frank Yerby, one of the most successful African American historical romance writers in U.S. publication history, in relation to the conjunction of plantation romance and historiography. It shows how Yerby, writing in the aftermath of Gone With The Wind, develops narrative strategies that both critique the way in which Mitchell refigures racial perception and construct different modes of perception. The chapter compares Yerby’s and Mitchell’s plantation romances in order to detail an early narrative practice of anti-racist racial worldmaking.

Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.

Futures Past of Asiatic Racialization

This chapter pursues the connections between the modes of storytellling built in future war stories and the new global logics of race described in the previous chapter. It takes the body of literature typically thought to be the most responsible for sensationalizing racist representations of Asiatic persons - future war yellow peril stories - and suggests instead that their narrative strategies act irrespective of the representation of Asiatic persons. Race and genre interact to achieve certain cognitive effects. It traces these cognitive effects across Homer Lea’s popular military history Valor of Ignorance, Marsden Manson’s political pamphlet, Yellow Peril in Action, and popular future war stories by M.P. Shiel and H.G. Wells. It shows how the genre of future war and these ways of noticing race interact in producing the yellow peril as real.

Worlds of Color

This chapter describes how the term “world” becomes a category of racial meaning. Tracking the new coining of phrases such as “colored world,” “yellow world,” and “brown world” during and after the Russo-Japanese War, it shows the ways in which this discourse constructs new ways of seeing that are linked less to scientific racism or social Darwinism and more to modes of futurology that animate race as a historical tendency in the world. It analyzes popular and influential histories of the future such as B.L. Putnam Weale’s Conflict of Colour (1909), Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), and Brooks Adams’s Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History in relation to newspaper discourse on the yellow peril in order to see how race is used as forecast.

On the Possibilities of an Antiracist Racial Worldmaking

This conclusion synthesizes the main analyses of the book and explores its implications for transforming our conventional ideas about the literary and historical foundations of race and racism. It then analyzes the work of W.E.B. DuBois for the way in which he navigates genre, race, and world in several of his works including Black Reconstruction, “The Comet,” and Worlds of Color. In DuBois, this conclusion finds the possibilities of an anti-racist racial worldmaking.

Alternate Histories of World War II; or, How the Race Concept Organizes the World

This chapter analyzes Korematsu v. U.S. for the development of the legal doctrine of “strict scrutiny” and how it shapes racial perception. It then surveys alternate histories of World War II, focusing on those modes of storytelling that dramatize the defeat of the U.S. by Germany and Japan. The chapter isolates a particular narrative technique - the index - as it is used across both legal storytelling and alternate histories. Finally, it engages Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle as an example of an alternate history that shows the limits of our capacity to imagine an anti-racist world.