Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America

485 Pages·2020·44.118 MB·English

by  Duncan Bell

Dreamworlds of Race

Dreamworlds of Race
Empire and the Utopian Destiny
of Anglo-A merica
Duncan Bell
Prince ton University Press
Princet on & Oxford
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943856
ISBN 9780691194011
ISBN (e- book) 9780691208671
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sarah

One dream of the earliest poets has never quite faded from the minds of men.
Foretold by prophet and seer; vaguely described in popu lar myth; lying far
back in some ideal past, or yet to be realized in the distant future by the
triumph of religion or the gift of the higher powers, somewhere past or to
come is a golden age, a wide community of men in all that is highest and best,
free from the common ills of life, under the protection of some beneficent
owner,— a world state, may we say, whose “officers shall be peace, and her
exactors righ teousness.” This is a dream that has visited the poet in his
moment of inspiration, or the common man under the stimulus of contrasted
evils, or prophet and priest through the sight of faith; but can we venture to
say of our own age that, first of all generations, it has begun to look forward, at
least in some half- conscious way, to such a conclusion of time no longer as a
dream of the imagination merely, but as the vision of a possibility, from the
standing- ground of facts and sustained with reasons? The unity of mankind,
the smallness of the earth, the swiftness of communication, and the growth of
world- wide interests,— these things are certainly making familiar to our
thoughts the fact that the necessary conditions of this result already exist.
george burton adams,
“a century of anglo- saxon expansion” (1897)
The contents of our dreams, imaginings, hopes, fantasies, and inventions
should not be mistaken for ele ments of our waking world. Nevertheless in
another sense dreams, desirous projections, utopian hopes are a part of our
real ity. That we have the ones we have is a fact about us. They do not come
from nowhere.
raymond guess, real ity and its dreams (2016)

contents
Acknowl edgments xiii
1 Introduction: Dreamworlds of Race 1
Axes of the Angloworld 1
The Shape of Th ings to Come: Empire, War, Racial Union 6
Anglotopia: Racial Futurism and the Power of Dreams 18
Biocultural Assemblage: A Note on Race 25
Cyborg Imperium: Racial Informatics, Infrastructural Space 35
2 The Dreamer of Dreams: Andrew Car ne gie and the Reunion
of the Race 42
Introduction 42
Anglo- America and the Logic of Historical Pro gress 43
The True Philosophy of History: Methodological Racialism and
the Germanic Ele ment 56
Contesting Car ne gie 65
The Vortex of Militarism: Empire, Race, International Law 73
Racial Providence: The Po liti cal Theology of Unity 88
Onward and Upward: And Some Day All under One Government 95
3 Americanizing the World: W. T. Stead and Cecil J. Rhodes 100
Introduction 100
English-S peaking Man and the Economy of the Universe 103
The Great Social Nexus: Global Governance by Journalism 115
A Kind of H uman Flux: Stead’s Racial Utopia 121
Star Gazer: Rhodes and the English- Speaking World 129
The Grey Archangel: Americanizing Rhodes 141
ix