Anti-Supremacist Speculations. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

Abstract

While the prevalence of White supremacist groups in the US seems to be on the rise during the 21st century, popular cultural productions of this period suggest an increase in awareness concerning the social construction of Whiteness and its dependence on the degradation of non-Whiteness. As a test case for this hypothesis, the fantastic ghost story Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is examined in terms of its engagement with the discursive practice Toni Morrison termed American Africanism, a specific form of White supremacist discourse that targets African Americans in particular. Morrison’s analytical catego-ries are applied to the contemporary novel to verify whether its anti-supremacist program at the story level matches its own discursive practice.