| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination. By Bridget T. Heneghan. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. xxviii, 204 pp. $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-585-2.)

Whiteness studies proliferate, expanding forcefully into sometimes inhospitable areas of inquiry. The foundation of the literary scholar Bridget T. Heneghan's study rests on her generalized claim that "beginning at the time of the American Revolution and increasing until the Civil War, American consumers began preferring whiter, more finished products over dark-colored natural goods" (p. xii), here predominantly ceramics but also houses and funerary arts, because

white goods contributed to the upper and middle classes' attempt to deny its dependence on labor, to expel the "blackness" and servitude and impose an imaginary segregation even where integration was absolute. (p. xiii)

To distinguish themselves from burgeoning populations both of blacks and of those whites whose class and performance of gender roles were perceived to be outside the refined bounds of whiteness, Heneghan asserts that consumer choice reflected "a unified democracy of white people, and control over nature as well as those who labored in it" (p. xiv). As Heneghan sees it, "white things radiated refinement, order, discipline: but in doing so, they also radiated race" (ibid.).

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