Searching for Order in the “White Atlantic:” Racism, Nationalism, and the Interracial Relationships in the United States and Germany, 1877-1917

Holger Dressler will delineate the transatlantic cross-fertilizations of racism and nationalism at the turn of the 19th century, laying particular emphasis on scientific and public discourses on interracial relationships in the post-Reconstruction United States as well as in the German colonies in Africa. Seen from a perspective that ventures beyond the confines of the nation state, parallels in these discoursessuch as strategies of internal and external othering or paternalismpoint to the existence of a transatlantic discursive space, which Dressler refers to as the “White Atlantic.”