Cormac McCarthy's Racial Fictions: Race in Blood Meridian's Colonial Imagination

Abstract

Situated within contemporary studies of Cormac McCarthy's work, this article argues that existing discourse around Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian suffers from a lack of critical engagement with the novel's racial and colonial politics. Using racial capitalism as a framework, the article posits that McCarthy's novel can be read not only as a story about American storytelling traditions, but how these traditions are themselves contingent on the reproduction and reification of white supremacy. This rereading of Blood Meridian additionally takes into account how the novel's narrativization of white supremacy and settler colonialism manifests in both the novel's form and content, arguing that the novel stages encounters with blackness and Indigeneity to mimic the mechanisms through which white supremacy was (violently) produced.