Introduction: Inexplicable Voices – Liminal Whiteness in the Early United States

Abstract

The Introduction sets out the concept of ‘liminal whiteness’ by discussing the fields of Critical Whiteness Studies and studies of liminality, and drawing together the three thematic spheres in which the book operates: Whiteness, the voice, and death, dying and the supernatural in the early United States. It argues that several authors imagine lost, negated and removed Whiteness to both challenge White civic values and express anxiety about social and racial mobility in the early US.