Abstract
This article examines the loss of whiteness in Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022), in which the white population of an unspecified Euro-American nation turns non-white. It situates the novel in a tradition of speculative political and cultural discourse that invokes the loss of whiteness to explore demographic change. The Last White Man is a science-fiction enaction of contemporary white supremacist dystopian rhetoric known as the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. White supremacists’ “melancholic” fears of “macrodemographic” changes (Feola, 2021) — that white populations will be outnumbered and oppressed by non-white groups — are accelerated in the novel’s macrodermal changes, in which racial transformation is figured as a pandemic affecting only skin colour. The article reads The Last White Man as a critical whiteness text that employs white racial transformation to reveal whiteness as a constructed identity and challenge white supremacy. Hamid depicts a melancholic relationship with whiteness that at first refuses to abandon white supremacy and clings to nostalgia for white purity, before accepting demographic and individual change. His exclusive focus on white characters scrutinizes melancholic whiteness and provokes his largely white readership to imagine undertaking the process of letting go of whiteness. In overcoming white melancholy, Hamid resists reemergent dystopian white supremacist narratives regarding demographic change. In doing so, his outwardly dystopian novel becomes tentatively utopian, ending with a raceless society. Rather than offering a manual for tackling white supremacist politics today, Hamid’s experiment with genre prioritizes the affective life of white supremacy, imagining new structures of feeling beyond racial hierarchies.
On the evening of 11 August 2017, a group of young white men marched through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. Wielding now-infamous tiki torches, the assembly of alt-right, white nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi protestors chanted in “melancholic rage” (Feola, 2021: 531), “You will not replace us”. 1 Identified by the Anti-Defamation League (2017) as an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are overseeing non-white migration into predominantly white countries, this slogan voices fear and anger that people of colour, but also white women and LGBTQ people, are “displacing white masculinity as the privileged national subject” (Feola, 2021: 539). This dystopian white replacement theory argues that white people, and particularly white men, already experience discrimination in the contemporary West due to diversity and inclusion policies and will soon become a minority subjugated under non-white majority rule, facing eradication through persecution and forced assimilation. In other words, white supremacists fear no longer being white.
What if white people were literally no longer white? British Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022) asks this question in the form of a speculative novel where white people no longer exist. In this outwardly dystopian novel, a non-specific Euro-American town slowly turns non-white through a pandemic that changes only skin colour, inscribing these social fears onto the body. The novel opens, like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915), with an abrupt transformation: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown” (Hamid, 2022a: 3). 2 This transformation is total, irreversible, and never explained. Readers follow Anders, his girlfriend Oona, and Oona’s mother as they process these changes, intersecting with the characters’ experiences of family bereavement and the town’s febrile and violent response to these shifting demographics. In this article I situate The Last White Man in a tradition of speculative political and cultural discourse that invokes the loss of whiteness to explore demographic change. Like the Charlottesville marchers, the townspeople in The Last White Man have a melancholic relationship with whiteness, attempting to hold on to a fading privileged social position indexed through pale skin, which Hamid suggests must be overcome to reach a post-racial vision of the future.
In turning all his white characters into people of colour — described as a vague “dark” and “brown” throughout — Hamid reorients race in the former imperial centres and settler colonies of the Global North. With its allusions to settler colonialism and white supremacist violence leading up to, throughout, and after the first Trump administration, The Last White Man is plausibly located in America. 3 Alternatively, the novel could be set in Britain — a reading that feels even more resonant following the Islamophobic and anti-migrant riots of July 2024. Speaking on the deliberately generic setting for the novel, Hamid argues, “the contemporary context is one that, for me, is remarkably universal”, stating that his examination of ethnonationalism in Europe or America is connected to “the trend towards Hindutva in India, religious extremism in Pakistan, [and] Russian nationalism under Putin” (Tepper, 2022) in that they all hinge on the hardening of identities. This focus on the global and white characters positions Hamid on the fringes of South Asian speculative fiction, despite living in Lahore permanently for over a decade. Although he is examined in Shazia Sadaf and Aroosa Kanwal’s Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary (2024), he does not incorporate Islamic elements or Pakistani characters, unlike the other authors studied. Eschewing these local “political needs and genre aesthetics” (Chattopadhyoy, 2024: 76), his speculative texts feature more ambiguous and mobile locations: a non-specified Middle Eastern country that characters leave through magical doors in Exit West (2017), and the generic Euro-American town in The Last White Man.
Nevertheless, both Exit West and The Last White Man firmly belong to the genre of postcolonial speculative fiction because they follow the inclination to take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things. (Hopkinson 2004: 9)
In Exit West, a “colonization in reverse” (Anam, 2018: 654) takes place, as migrants from the Middle East and Africa teleport to Greece, Britain, Australia, and the US, offering a speculative reimagining of the migrant crisis. As Al-Nakib argues, the novel “provides an imaginative cartography of ‘what could happen if’”, asking its readers to consider alternatives to the violence of national borders (2020: 243). In The Last White Man, Hamid again inverts the “meme of colonizing the natives”, this time turning white people non-white, and asking “what could happen if” ethnicity suddenly changes. While initially setting up a white supremacist vision of dystopia, he then inverts this genre, refusing to capitulate to its narratives of apocalypse and instead “think[ing] about new ways of doing things” beyond white supremacist identity politics and racial hierarchies.
In the first part of the article, I establish the novel as a speculative enaction of contemporary white supremacist dystopian fears. In the political dystopia, as popularized in George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), characters suffer under “an extremely negative or evil fictional state usually dominated by fear” (Claeys, 2016: 7) that pursues its ideological goals and suppresses individual freedoms through violence and propaganda. White supremacist dystopian rhetoric and texts imagine a government persecuting white people in their ruthless pursuit of racial equality. In The Last White Man, this fear is actualized in the darkening of white characters’ skin; rather than face oppression by the state, they are persecuted through an inexplicable epidemic. 4 Through the reactions of Oona’s mother, who retreats down a right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole, and the violence around the town, Hamid explores a melancholic attachment to whiteness and a white nation that refuses to let go — not simply of skin colour, heritage, or culture, but of a valued political position. Once white people start turning dark, characters must grapple with the fact that whiteness is a power structure built on top of perceived appearance, which results in personal alienation and social unrest.
In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how Hamid resists and overcomes this melancholic attachment to whiteness through characters who accept demographic and individual change as the initial dystopia turns tentatively utopian. The Last White Man is part of a tradition of white racial transformation narratives that imagine the physical loss of whiteness to challenge white supremacy. 5 As a work of critical whiteness studies that “returns to white people the problem of whiteness” (Yancy, 2012: 6), Hamid’s exclusive focus on white characters scrutinizes melancholic whiteness and provokes his largely white readership to imagine undertaking this process of letting go of whiteness. In a novel about personal and social grief, Hamid suggests that racial transformation is a natural process and uses the plot device to envisage a society that looks to the future rather than the past. In ending with a raceless society, a form of post-racial utopia, Hamid does not offer a manual for tackling white supremacist politics today; nor does he depict radical social structural change. Instead, his experiment with genre imagines a society in the process of becoming with new structures of feeling beyond racial hierarchies.
Melancholic whiteness and the supremacist dystopia
In interviews and essays accompanying the publication of The Last White Man, Hamid speaks of undergoing his own racial transformation post-9/11: I wasn’t white, but I was, you could say, white enough. And then after 9/11 all that changed. When things didn’t go back to how they were it got me thinking: what is this thing — white America — that I used to have a probationary membership to? (Adams, 2022)
Hamid’s reflection on a probationary whiteness encapsulates a critical whiteness studies perspective that whiteness is not an innate biological condition, but a social construct: not simply a phenotype, but, as Celine Levine-Rasky writes, “a way of ‘doing identity’” (2013: 18) that does not have a straightforward relationship with heritage. Whiteness is a form of property (Harris, 1993) or, as Sara Ahmed understands, “an orientation that puts certain things within reach” (2007: 154). It affords a sense of ownership of and ease in the nation, particularly institutional and professional spaces, as Ahmed illustrates through her experience of the university. Malleable and shifting, whiteness can be partially extended beyond pale-complexioned Europeans; it can also be removed or erased from those “enrolled in it at birth” (Ignatiev, 1997: 3) for failing or refusing its values, such as poor rural white groups described as “not quite white” (Wray, 2006) for lacking respectability or industriousness. For Ivy League graduate and McKinsey consultant Hamid, access to whiteness came from being “a relatively well-paid, university-educated inhabitant of cosmopolitan cities” (Hamid, 2022b), which generated his sense of belonging in America. This probationary whiteness was suddenly revoked due to his appearance and Muslim faith, leading to his dis-ease in the nation.
In The Last White Man, Anders’s rapid skin colour change embodies Hamid’s sudden experience of being markedly not white. Anders’s response to his racial transformation fictionalizes Hamid’s feeling that he “had lost something profound” (2022b) in his exclusion from partial whiteness. Turning dark is framed as theft, “a crime that had taken everything from him, that had taken him from him” (5). What has been taken, beyond the epidermal, is his sense of ease in moving about the world, as Ahmed identifies. Anders’s “easy with myself and easy with you smile, a let’s do this smile, generous, inviting”, is “missing, the feeling that made it possible missing, and [he] did not know if it would ever return” (12). He loses his sense of self and self-confidence, feeling “like he had been recast as a supporting character on the set of the television show where his life was being enacted” (48). No longer being white in appearance, he experiences the microaggressions people of colour face, fearing that he is being surveilled in shops and perceived as a threat on the streets.
Anders’s racial transformation speaks to reemergent white nationalist fears that white people could be treated as no longer white, even if they retain their pale skin, and that they will soon be a persecuted minority in the nation. As Michael Feola has recently argued, this white anxiety can be read as melancholia for a lost social status in the face of demographic shifts. Feola draws on Freud, who characterizes the condition in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915). While both mourning and melancholia can involve the loss not just of a person but also of an abstraction, “such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal” (Freud, 2007: 19), melancholia is an intensification and extension of mourning, refusing to let go of the lost object to the extent that it defines the sufferer. It is a narcissistic state, in which the individual is defined by their relationship with the lost object, and being “slighted, neglected or disappointed” is felt like losing a loved one (Freud, 2007: 27). The melancholic defines themselves as a victim of both the original loss and how they are treated by others. They have “a delusional expectation of punishment” (Freud, 2007: 20), believing that they are important enough to be punished because they remain attached to their lost object. This “self-tormenting” is “without doubt enjoyable” because it elevates their loss and centres their identity as a victim (Freud, 2007: 27). Melancholia, to quote Anne Cheng, is a “legislation of grief” (2000: 8; emphasis in original) in that it transforms an experience of loss into an ongoing identity position.
For Feola, this melancholia can be seen in white nationalist anxieties about losing one’s country and position: Such a melancholia is evinced, for instance, in the central trope of much literature of white anxiety: the nation is not just slipping away from its racialized core but is being taken from its rightful heirs and given to undeserving others. The politicized subject of whiteness is, in this sense, formed as the subject of melancholic rage. (2021: 531)
Here, whiteness is property owning — it possesses the nation, shaping its institutions and norms in its own image. Melancholic whiteness is the attachment to a white nation and its white inheritors’ attendant superiority. The melancholic white nationalist cannot let go of a white dominated past in the face of non-white civil rights and social mobility, the progress and rising nation-ownership of “underserving others” who are growing in number through higher birth rates than white Americans. Although most explicitly articulated in spaces such as the Unite the Right rally, this white grievance has become increasingly mainstream in legacy media and political parties, from anti-migrant rhetoric and state violence against immigrants, to legislation to end “diversity, equity and inclusion” measures. 6 White anxiety is felt transnationally too: in the postcolonial melancholy Paul Gilroy identifies in post-Windrush Britain, where white English people are figured as “a vulnerable, wounded, and unjustly treated people […] a minority in their own fading land” (2011: 188); in the “loss of national reality” in post-White Australia policy where Euro-Australians fear that recent Asian immigrants will reverse white domination over non-white groups (Hage, 1998: 222); and in Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement Theory that Muslim migration to France is a conquest “upend[ing] natural human hierarchy” (Bossen, 2024: 7). Melancholic white subjects believe they are victims of a national theft at the hands of non-white subjects. Having formed their identity through loss, they find the “affective and identity-based rewards” of being in a community with like-minded people — radio call-ins, social media groups, the comment section of an online newspaper article, political rallies, extremist websites — that reinforces the victim’s good feeling that they are right to be aggrieved and that something should be done (Ioanide, 2021: 325).
In white nationalist melancholia, the loss of the nation, via changing demographics and anti-racism policies, is articulated in rhetorical fantasies of mass violence and oppression against them, appropriating the historical or ongoing persecution experienced by non-white or minority groups. White populations are not just declining but, extremists believe, are the victims of “genocide” and “extermination” at the hands of Jews, Muslims, Hispanic migrants, and Black people (Feola, 2021: 535). The genre of white supremacist dystopian fiction imagines the end point of this rhetoric. While the most popular political dystopias (1984, The Handmaid’s Tale) critique totalitarian or authoritarian states from a liberal perspective, believing that no one should be persecuted due to their beliefs, gender, sexuality, or race, white supremacist dystopian texts rally against these ideas of equality. These “multicultural dystopias”, as termed by Edward K. Chan (2019: 139), provide a fictional counterpart for their authors’ white supremacist movements. In these novels, such as the work of neo-Nazis Harold Covington and David Lane, and most infamously William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978), white people lose their civil rights in the form of hate crimes, police brutality, and the separation of white children from parents, usually under a Jewish-led government that demonizes white men, and aided by white liberals who act as “race traitors” by promoting interracial families (Chan, 2019). These texts express melancholic whiteness in that they conjure an enemy that has not just slighted white men but actively imperilled them, justifying their belief that they have been robbed and should not let go of a white nation. For the characters and intended readers, the required response is for white men to fight back and re-impose white rule — the fantasy repossession of the melancholic’s lost object — as fulfilled in Covington, Lane, and Pierce’s texts that all end in the violent creation of white-only Americas. 7 Their dystopias turn into “white power utopias” that “eliminate the ‘threat’ of multiculturalism” (Chan, 2019: 154) through secession or race war. These genre fiction examples are notably fringe, and primarily satisfy a white supremacist fantasy, but they augment an already existing and increasingly dystopian mainstream political language noted above. 8 It is these rhetorical and fictional imaginings that The Last White Man imitates and in turn dismantles.
The Last White Man’s lost whiteness dystopia
White victimhood in these rhetorical and fictional dystopias is made concrete and written onto the body in Hamid’s novel, in which white people no longer exist. The “macrodemographic” changes (Feola, 2021: 535) feared by white nationalists — slowly taking place through increasing non-white birth rates and declining white birth rates — are accelerated through the macrodermal changes, as white characters suddenly transform through darkening skin colour. This is a speculative enaction of the white replacement theory, with a trickle and then a flood of white people no longer appearing white, which extinguishes the white demographic. In the novel, whiteness is both a property that can be lost or removed — an individual stops being identified as white — and has its ownership of the national property imperilled as white people become a minority demographic. As more people turn dark, the social order breaks down: the shelves are empty, people hide indoors, public violence breaks out, and militias form to hunt down and lynch non-white and formerly white people. When these militia come to Anders’s door, he thinks: [H]ow self-righteous they were, how certain that he, Anders, was in the wrong, that he was the bandit here, trying to rob them, they who had been robbed already and had nothing left, just their whiteness, the worth of it, and they would not let him take that, not him nor anyone else. (91)
The vigilantes feel that that they are already victims of the theft of the nation and attempt to hold onto what they previously were left with, white skin, which is itself slipping away in the pandemic. Whiteness is not just their physical appearance but what it represents: an ease in the world and superiority over people of colour. It is such a prized possession that it drives people to violence against others and themselves to prevent or reject its theft. On seeing Anders’s new appearance, his boss remarks “I would have killed myself” and characters hear reports of suicides and deaths from an experimental “drug or concoction that made you white again” (35, 110). This melancholic attachment to whiteness is so strong that it obliterates the self.
Oona’s mother acts as a mouthpiece for white nationalist dystopian rhetoric in the novel. Visiting white supremacist websites and consuming right-wing media, she espouses a conspiracy theory that racial transformation is an eradication “plot against their kind”: [S]he was afraid, for what could she do, but there were those among them who would stand up, stand up and protect her, and she had to believe in them, and be ready, be ready as best she could, to preserve herself, and especially her daughter, her daughter who was the future, was the future of everything, for without her daughter, without all their daughters, they would be lost, a field with no shoots, no saplings, no life, a desert, covered in sand, with lizards from far away scampering about, and strange cactus growing where once there were hearty crops, […] and she had to be worthy of her roots, and pull herself together, pull through, for her daughter, for herself, for her people, and do what must be done. (49-50)
Hamid’s free indirect interior monologue emphasizes Oona’s mother’s rambling as her argument weaves talking points of white genocide with repeated self-reassurance that it will be stopped through violence. Oona’s mother’s reproductive futurism adopts the rhetoric of white nationalist concerns that falling white birth rates will lead to the end of the white nation (Feola, 2021: 535). The end of white reproduction is not just dystopian but post-apocalyptic, with the fecund seedlings and productive crops transformed into the barren and alien desert.
Later, after everyone turns dark, her conspiracy websites predict a “descent into crime and anarchy, and cannibalism, cannibalism out of hunger, and worse, out of vengeance, and blood would flow, and all should prepare for the end” (Hamid, 2002a: 149-50) as people of colour hunt formerly-white people, somehow being able to know “who we were, [and] what we were” even when formerly-white people “could not see one another” (150). These websites do not elaborate how formerly-white people will be identified but figure people of colour as predators with an innate ability to still spot whiteness. In The Melancholy of Race, Anne Cheng writes that racist institutions “do not want to fully expel the racial other” because they engender white melancholy with their assumed threats to the white nation (2000: 12). The same can be said of these conspiracy websites that need to imagine people of colour as nearby threats even when there is no longer a white demographic. The white melancholic imagines a residual invisible whiteness because it enables the continuation of white identity after epidermal whiteness has ended; they can still define themselves as white, even if only as a victim; they can still “self-torment” (Freud, 2007: 27) that punishment is coming. They refuse to let go of whiteness, instead clinging to an ongoing oppression at the hands of people of colour, which in this doomsday imaginary means the end of the world itself.
Widowed and having recently lost a child to addiction, Oona’s mother is a prime candidate for finding community in extremist spaces. She transfers her grief for a person onto an ideal and will not let go; melancholic whiteness offers her a purpose and hope that the lost object can be reattached. Coming together in a community of like-minded melancholics sustains Oona’s mother; she feels “positively jolly, on a high” (62), akin to white Trump voters in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work who feel “hopeful, joyous, elated” at the prospect of Trump confirming their fears and promising to fix them (2016: 225). At first denying any militia violence is taking place, Oona’s mother soon justifies it and “looked as though all was well with the world, and the planet was headed in the right direction, and wrongs would be righted, and the future was bright, with grounds for optimism again” at the prospect of racial order being restored (62). Mistaking thunder for an explosion one evening, she “felt a little thrill, felt that something was happening, something big, maybe the tide was shifting, maybe at last real heroes had come” (111). Righteous violence is required to preserve what is left of the white nation and Oona’s mother gleefully hopes for the fantasy reckoning imagined in the pages of white supremacist dystopias.
From melancholia to mourning; rejecting dystopia for utopia
Hamid rejects the reckoning that Oona’s mother desires and retreats from the dystopian track the first half of the novel sets up. Oona notices how “life in town was going back to normal, or if not going back to normal, at least stopping becoming increasingly abnormal” as more white people change (105). Extra-judicial violence wanes, people return to work, and the vandalism from riots is cleaned up. In The Last White Man, dystopia is a provocation that asks its readers to embrace the end of absolutes rather than turn to or excuse violence. Both Exit West and The Last White Man are examples of worlds in-between dystopia and utopia, that offer “glimpses of transformation towards more hopeful albeit opaque worlds” beyond “fixity, categorisations, [and] separateness” (Mohr, 2021: 63, 73) — of borders in Exit West and of race in The Last White Man. Hamid’s “unwillingness to write a full-on dystopia” (Adams, 2022) rejects white nationalist desires for hardening borders and racial purity in the face of social uncertainty. Writing on the rejection of dystopia in Exit West, Nasia Anam argues that Hamid makes the “apocalypse” of reverse migration “quotidian, arbitrary, manageable […] defusing the apocalyptic by normalizing it and integrating it into the fabric of human life” (2018: 674; emphasis in original). As in The Last White Man, riots and militias in Exit West abate as the country acclimatizes to these new freedoms of movement and social structures that teleportation offers. Overturning the apocalyptic framing of non-white migration, the West “face[s] apocalyptic conditions as simply that — conditions to which one adapts, as opposed to catastrophic civilizational collapse” imagined in white nationalist rhetoric (Anam, 2018: 675). In The Last White Man, racial transformation is another condition that the townspeople slowly adapt to by letting go of attachments to whiteness and the white nation.
Hamid offers resistance to and a way through white supremacy by framing racial transformation as a process of mourning instead of melancholia, where the individual and society move beyond their attachments to the lost object. After its total transformation, the town feels like “a town in mourning, and the country a country in mourning […] but at other times it felt like the opposite, that something new was being born” (173). Racial transformation is another stage of life in this town, but also a shift to something hopeful, of rebirth. There is an opposition between death and birth here, but they do not cancel each other out because they are different points along a process — mourning concludes with the mourner looking towards the future and embracing a new love object. The mourner feels that loss will be “overcome after a certain lapse of time” (Freud, 2007: 20) unlike the melancholic, who remains “psychically stuck” (Cheng, 2000: 8). In the novel, the three central characters grapple with losing loved ones (Anders’s mother and then father; Oona’s father and brother), with racial transformation coinciding and even catalysing their acceptance of personal loss. In Oona’s transformation, the loss of her brother and the loss of whiteness converge. After turning dark she feels “melancholy […] a sadness at the losing of something” (122) of herself, including the memories formed with her brother, but this melancholy lifts, [F]or the lightness was stronger than the melancholy, the sense that she was escaping a prison she desired to escape, for her life had become fraught, and for so long there had been no way out, there had been that feeling, the feeling that there was no way out, but now it seemed that there might be a way out, that she could shed her skin, as a snake sheds its skin, not violently, not even coldly, but rather to abandon the confinement of the past, and, unfettered, again, to grow. (122-23)
Hamid figures Oona’s racial transformation as a natural process, a condition that one adapts to and can form a new self through, unencumbered by the weight and confinement of their past trauma such as bereavement. Racial transformation is therefore liberatory and stimulating rather than a violent loss and portent of civilizational collapse. Hamid’s lengthy sentences in the novel, often an entire paragraph long like the one above, compel this forward momentum in the reader as he emulates his characters’ evolving thought processes. There is always motion as thoughts and feelings are traversed and expounded, capturing the fluid nature of how individuals respond to seismic changes and encouraging gradual progress towards the end of melancholia.
Oona’s mother undergoes the most significant transformation as her initial espousing of this melancholic whiteness is replaced with mourning. Freud writes that in mourning, “reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (2007: 20). When confronted with the person or ideal truly being lost and not returning, the mourning individual can let go, unlike the melancholic. Oona’s mother undergoes the reality test when the apocalypse does not come and she herself turns dark. After a short period of self-isolation, she “seemed, if anything, improved for having changed, or if not improved, then relieved in a way, like someone who was terrified of roller coasters” after they disembark (Hamid, 2002a: 140). She visits white supremacist conspiracy sites less frequently “because they alarmed her and she did not wish so much to be alarmed, not anymore, and the contrast between them and the world around her was just too bewildering” (151). The dystopian and apocalyptic imaginary of melancholic whiteness has failed to materialize and its subjects start to escape its grasp.
Oona’s mother still clings to a residual whiteness at the end of the novel, requiring a final intervention. The novel concludes with Oona and Anders starting a family and Oona’s mother tells her dark granddaughter “of how it had been of what they had really come from, of the whiteness that could no longer be seen but was still a part of them”. However, the girl “held her grandmother’s hands, and said stop, that was all, just one word, stop”, severing Oona’s mother’s attachment for good, who “felt loss, a potent sense of loss” but “finally shook her head and somehow, somehow, smiled” (177-78). This intervention declares that mourning for whiteness is completed, with Oona’s mother brought into the present and towards a new object of love, the child. Through the family, Hamid moves past whiteness and the white nation as something lost and rather something that has ended, a state that has been moved beyond rather than stolen, as previously felt.
The novel casts aside its initial dystopian frame to embrace new beginnings, concluding with the all brown family. In the final sentence Anders caresses his daughter’s face and contemplates the future: [H]e imagined her an old woman, after he and Oona had gone, and he felt it hitting him, this image of his daughter many years hence, and he placed his brown hand on the side of her brown face, soothing her, his brown daughter, his daughter, and miraculously she let him. (180)
The repetition of “brown” reinforces the “deep and undeniable brown” (3) of the novel’s opening sentence. Yet this unnecessary — even artificial — insertion of “brown” is to emphasize how natural brownness now is to Anders and the world of the novel. Brown is not only how characters physically appear but is also the colour of a better future; brownness is not only undeniable but is now warmly embraced just as a father caresses his daughter. In the novel brownness is ambiguous — it can refer to several groups of people with South Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Latin American, or Indigenous heritage, which supports Hamid’s aim to write a novel that speaks to multiple locations. Brownness, as Hamid experiences, can be “white enough” (qtd. in Adams, 2022), and at times sit outside the racial binaries of “black and not black, Asian and not Asian, white and not white” (Pérez, 2015: 104), evading specific historical contexts. In the novel, the ambiguous dark appearance of most of the town (and all formerly-white people) suggests that race has ended, detaching appearance from heritage and context, and ushering in a post-racial world.
The limitations and possibilities of Hamid’s post-racial utopia
A world without racial discrimination is a utopian vision. The utopia has long been a vehicle for colonization and white supremacy since Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516) yoked imperial expansion in the Americas with the settlement of the perfect island nation. Utopian fictions prompt readers to ask not just where and when this perfect society may occur but also who it is for; a utopia for a majority may be exclusionary or nightmarish for the minority. In the US, there is a long history of white-only utopias, from nineteenth-century texts where non-white people have died out (Mary Griffith’s “Three Hundred Years Hence” (1836), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880)), to the aforementioned contemporary white supremacist novels where the utopian ethnostate is “the only justified, rational, natural reaction” to white persecution in the “multicultural dystopia” (Chan, 2019: 152, 139). In response, a tradition of anti-racist utopias in the US and beyond has emerged that imagine a better future for previously excluded groups, from Black utopias in the nineteenth century (Martin Delany’s Blake (1859), Sutton E Grigg’s Imperium et Imperio (1899)), to Indigenous futurisms and works such as Hamid’s borderless Exit West. Going further, some contemporary post-racial socialist and feminist utopias such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) imagine “the erasure of racial difference in the future” (Chan, 2015: 19) through state-run programmes of interracial reproduction. Similarly, through epidermal change rather than interracial relationships, The Last White Man imagines a better world beyond racial categorization and its innate hierarchies.
There are critiques to be made of Hamid employing racial transformation to imagine the end of white supremacy. Fast-forwarding to the loving brown family in the final five pages shows the end of melancholic whiteness but it also evades the hard work of tackling white supremacy and abolishing whiteness as a power structure. For Chan, the post-racial utopia can “limit our understanding of what it means to be a raced Subject” today (2015: 201) by engineering a hybrid society of mixed-race families rather than dismantling power structures. The end of white skin through racial transformation is not the same as “abolishing the white race” that critical whiteness scholars such as Noel Ignatiev call for, which involves white people rejecting their whiteness and challenging its assumed membership, through “confronting the institutions that reproduce race” and refusing “to draw upon the privileges of whiteness” (1997: 4, 5). Rather, the opposite occurs in The Last White Man, as whiteness is at first removed rather than rebuffed and characters must come to accept and then embrace the change.
In her dissenting review, Namwali Serpell argues that the novel engages in “magical thinking” to end whiteness without “unhealthy attachments” or “obsessive shrines left over”, nor a reckoning with what white supremacism has wrought for centuries (2022). Arguably Hamid is naïve in his imagination of a post-whiteness future with only a short period of social unrest and his opaque setting is a way to evade interrogating specific histories of whiteness. The most significant critique that Serpell makes is Hamid’s lack of multiracial interiority: “those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel” (2022). No sustained attention is given to how these fleeting characters feel about the world changing around them. Will characters of colour have to let go of the racism they have experienced? If they refuse, will they be branded melancholic by the new all-brown society? In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed conceives of the “melancholic migrant” who refuses to “get over” racism when a multicultural society declares it over: “The melancholic migrant is thus a rather ghostly figure, haunting contemporary culture as a kind of unnecessary and hurtful remainder of racism” (2010: 143, 148). With its focus on the town’s rebirth, The Last White Man largely has no room for these ghosts. However, Hamid offers a brief uncomfortable remainder in the form of Anders’s only non-white colleague, a slight dark man who cleans their gym. After his own transformation, Anders patronisingly offers to train him in weightlifting. The cleaner declines “not with a smile, or not with a smile on his lips, although perhaps with one in his eyes, it was difficult to tell, honestly it could have been the opposite of a smile”, and adds “what I would like is a raise” (170-71). Hamid depicts no structural changes to institutions such as education, the economy, the family, or the law. In fact, the reader is to assume that this world is currently the same as ours outside the change to skin colour. Physical racial difference and racial hierarchies may be removed but the legacy of racialized labour is a reminder that racial transformation has not, or at least not yet, overcome material racialized inequalities.
Hamid’s exclusive centring of white interiority, not seen in his other works, demonstrates the novel’s primary focus of white engagement. The novel specifically speculates what it could mean to end whiteness for white people, imagining it as a process to be worked through and moved beyond, not clung onto. Hamid employs the speculative to make concrete what theorists of whiteness such as Ignatiev want to achieve: the end of whiteness and of race itself. Speculative texts are modal: by design they ask the reader to imagine what could happen. What ideally could happen to white people without whiteness? White people will not magically turn dark but with Hamid’s utopian impulse they can be imagined without these violent attachments to identity and the nation. With a predominantly white readership in mind, the novel is a provocation for these readers to imagine what it would feel like to resist melancholic whiteness.
Without racial distinction, Hamid envisions a society in a state of flux and becoming. In his New Yorker interview, he rejects the idea that a society without the distinctions of race is more homogeneous, resisting the connotation that homogeneity means an ethnostate, and instead arguing that race “simplifies, often in binary terms. It’s the original zero/one, the original binary code”, which flattens individuals. Racial transformation helps to “imagine our way out of” and “excavate our way out of” race (Hamid, qtd. in Leyshan, 2022) by asking white readers what they can gain rather than lose by existing outside whiteness and racial identity itself. It brings forward a world of “eliminativism”, which African American philosopher Sheena Michele Mason defines as “the position that the concept of race, whatever it is, should be eradicated from human society” in order to “undo racism” (2022: 1). In The Last White Man, the end of race offers “a new kind of sight” (136) with individuals “seeing themselves in each other and, in many ways […] seeing themselves more fully” (Mason, 2022: 7) rather than categorizing people into racial groups. Ignatiev hopes that after the abolition of whiteness and race, “former whites, born again, will be able to take part, together with others, in building a new human community” (1997: 5). While Hamid eschews the worldbuilding “described in considerable detail” (Sargent, 1994: 9) expected of speculative fiction, in firmly rejecting the white nationalist dystopian framing of demographic change, the novel offers tentative hope that a post-racial society could build this new human community, starting with new structures of feeling and interpersonal relations beyond the categorization and hierarchy of race.
Conclusion
The Last White Man works with the potent and provocative trope of white racial transformation, examining both its dystopian resonances and utopian possibilities through genre fiction. Hamid’s novel directly engages with white nationalist and supremacist dystopian fears, making these fears concrete and corporeal before challenging and exorcizing them. Race is the central feature of his speculative imagination, which inverts the utopian “meme” of white colonization (Hopkinson, 2004: 9) and then undercuts the corresponding white supremacist dystopia. He fulfills what science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson asks of dystopian fiction: to be “always in service to the main project, which is utopia” (2018). In The Last White Man, Hamid creates the white supremacist’s dystopia in order to provoke his readers to imagine themselves outside the dystopia that is white supremacy itself. At the same time, Hamid refuses to outline a perfect society, instead leaving his post-racial world open to the possibility of improvement to come. The result is an example of “formally experimental […] anticolonial or postcolonial fiction” such as his earlier Exit West (Al-Nakib, 2020: 243); The Last White Man is an ambiguous genre work that sits between dystopia and utopia to focus on the individual’s response to and processing of change. Hamid asks his primarily white readership to work through and let go of their attachments to whiteness, even though, unlike his characters, they will retain their white appearance. Scrutinizing the process of white racial transformation through the eyes of his white characters is a deliberate strategy to dismantle the affective barriers upholding white supremacy. This critical sustained gaze on whiteness means that Hamid is less interested in the representational politics of other South Asian and postcolonial speculative fiction writers. Instead, through the exploration of melancholic whiteness he prioritizes provocation — a provocation to contemplate a different world beyond white supremacy. Speculative writing provides a vision of what could be; it is up to his readers to bridge the gap between the present and the world without whiteness yet to come.
