race
“Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else,” Jean Rhys, shortly before her death in 1979, said to David Plante, as he relates it in Difficult Women (1983). Rhys cautioned that the story would sound familiar; however, she had told him “part of it, but not all” (Plante, Difficult Women, 47). The familiar part involved Rhys and her husband, Max, at their cottage in Devon, the stress of that time in her life, and how she, by that point, “quite gave up” on working on Wide Sargasso Sea, the Caribbean text that would mark her celebrated return to the literary scene in 1966, decades after her European, metropolitan novels of the thirties (48).
When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her contribution to Nancy Cunard’s landmark anthology of Black writing in 1934, little did she know how her own personal combination of transparency and opacity—the ways in which, so to speak, she appears “clearly enunciated” “as a subject . . . but slurred as an object”—would shape her then emergent career. Hurston’s comment on how the vernacular can encode intimacy signals this article’s interest in the centrality of mediation to understanding Hurston and her exploration of the racialized subject.
It was a Tuesday morning in April of 2020, and I had just seen the news of Ahmaud Arbery, the young African-American male who was shot while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Georgia.[1] I had been preparing to join my live virtual composition class, as I had every other Tuesday since in-person classes had shuttered and moved online in March.
The library cards and logbooks preserved in Sylvia Beach’s papers confirm the conventional image of Shakespeare and Company: the bookshop and lending library sat at the very heart of interwar modernism. The shop conjures images of Ernest Hemingway perusing the bookshelves and Gertrude Stein stopping by from her home a few streets away. James Joyce, George Antheil, and André Gide are among the many names we associate with the bookshop’s dazzling community. And the Shakespeare and Company records reflect their presence.
At one point late in Ulysses, while referencing the fictionalized account of a graphic, gruesome American lynching of a black man, a character in "Cyclops” refers to the ill-fated mob victim as a "Sambo.” Sambo is a plantation-era racial term that, by the early twentieth century, had become an enduring American stage archetype, often performed in blackface, that spun entertainment from stereotypes about black Americans as provincial and lazy. By naming his lynching victim "Sambo,” Joyce marks the lynching as a theatrical phenomenon, spectacularly American.
For someone who thinks a lot about photography, I have decidedly mixed feelings about being seen. In Canada, where I grew up and once again live, the state’s term for non-Indigenous racialized people like me is “visible minority.” The hypervisibility of racialization often confers a kind of invisibility, however. As a cis scholar of mixed Chinese descent, I am persistently misrecognized by other members of the institutions through which I move, mistaken for a student, staff member, a different Asian woman.
Why moviegoing?
“Venice,” writes Adrian Durham Stokes at the opening of his 1945 study of the city, “excels in blackness and whiteness; water brings commerce between them.”[1] This is a confident blasé opening gambit characteristic of the period and of this Faber and Faber contracted writer earlier heralded by Ezra Pound as one of the “only important writers” living.[2] Venice bothered Stokes throughout his writing and viewing life, yet Venice’s, and other, problematic whitenesses disappe
In my recent undergraduate seminar on whiteness in modern American literature at a university in Seoul, most students, aware of America’s history of racial violence and repulsed by Trumpian rhetoric, initially assumed “whiteness” to be something that operates openly and visibly, a deliberate strategy to support white supremacist ends. At a distance, within a largely racially homogenous society, this marked, legible understanding of whiteness impeded students’ recognition of its precarity and evasions, its unacknowledged investments in manufacturing innocence and coherence.