The Unkilled: White Supremacy’s Insidious Preservation of Black Lives

Abstract

Alongside white supremacy’s long history of death and erasure is an equally long shadow history of its preserving black lives for its own economic and ideological ends.

Drawing a line from nineteenth century artifacts like black automatons, artifacts of lynchings made from black flesh, and plantation practices that force survival, to contemporary art, poetry, and policy, my dissertation examines the preservative impulse of white supremacy and the black response to it, both in the literal and the literary world.

Far from a benevolent action of white supremacy, this impulse toward what I call “colonial preservation” is selfishly motivated. Whether it is done by a nineteenth century plantation owner preserving the lives of the enslaved by combatting suicides or the British Museum claiming to protect rare artifacts, this is a form of preservation that in fact ends the life of those it is visited upon in order to convert them for use in the ego formation of empire.

Using the nineteenth century as a starting point rather than a container, I am able to put texts from that period, ranging from the writings on automata of Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Frederick Douglass to novels such as Ellis’ Steam Man of the Plains and Martin Delany’s Blake; or Huts of America in conversation with twenty-first century works including the poetry of Danez Smith, the graphic novel Black, and visual art by Steve McQueen and Hiro Murai.