The two books under review explore how the racial formations of background epistemologies and ideologies shape and have shaped cultural formations in the Anglosphere. White Writers, Race Matters largely confines its analytical remit to twentieth-century “white-authored protest fiction about racism in America,” attempting to come to grips with the endurance of liberal race novels, and racism liberalism, in the United States (3). Black Prometheus, meanwhile, is a book about nearly everything—or, at least, everything after 1492. Hickman’s ranging, audacious volume approaches Romantic-era (capaciously defined) conflicts over slavery, abolition, colonialism, and racialization from a postsecular perspective, urging us to see these antagonisms as instancing a cosmological struggle among competing conceptions of divinity, and, indeed, as a struggle among gods themselves.
White Writers, Race Matters takes up white-authored liberal race fiction as a literary tradition, and a “self-conscious tradition” at that (6). For Jay, this literary tradition addresses itself to a...
