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Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination
Bridget T. Heneghan
Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity. From the Revolutionary War until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, coarse, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers knit around themselves refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially "white." Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones, and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and household servants. This book explores what it meant to be "white" by delving into the whiteness of dishes, gravestone art, and architecture, as well as women's clothing and corsets, cleanliness and dental care, and complexion. Early nineteenth-century writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use setting descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, struggled to negotiate messages of domesticity, body politics, and privilege according to complex agendas of their own. Challenging the popular notions, slave narrators such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white objects to reverse the perspective of their white readers and, at times, to mock their white middle-class pretensions.
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Cover
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
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Introduction
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1. The Pot Calling the Kettle: White Goods and the Construction of Race in Antebellum America
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2. Living on White Bread: Class Considerations and the Refinement of Whiteness
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3. Unmentionable Things Unmentioned: Constructing Femininity with White Things
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4. See Spot Run: White Things in the Rhetoric of Racial, Moral, and Hygienic Purity
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Epilogue
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Notes
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Works Cited
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Index
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Citable Link
Published: 2003
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
- 978-1-934110-99-7 (paper)