Resisting melancholic whiteness in Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man

Murray, HL ORCID: 0000-0002-4956-5235 (2026) Resisting melancholic whiteness in Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man Literature Critique and Empire Today, 61 (1 Brea). pp. 112-127. ISSN 3033-3962, 3033-3970

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	dystopia, melancholy, utopia, Mohsin Hamid, post-racialism, racial transformation, white supremacy
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of the Arts Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of the Arts > English
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	04 Nov 2025 08:26
Last Modified:	17 Mar 2026 08:31
DOI:	10.1177/30333962251414785
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3195191
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