race
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.
The cross-cultural scholarship of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Geonpul woman, in The White Possessive chronicles “a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession” that reifies both the white property-owning subject and its attendant formation, the white settler nation-state; such white subjects and states differ, historically and geographically, in form and in practice, yet the iteration of dispossession is structurally essential to these formations of whiteness.[1] In the introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of
This is the shocked retort of Angela, the very light-skinned protagonist in Jessie Fauset’s 1929 novel, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, when Angela’s racial heritage is publicly revealed to her close friend, a new girl at their school. By denying responsibility for policing so-called racial boundaries, Angela challenges a system of morality structured by white supremacy and embedded in histories of Atlantic American modernity. According to this (im)moral system, Angela is required to divulge her racial heritage to protect her hitherto unsuspecting white friend. To pass, even unintentionally, is, in this context, to lie. Angela and the new girl, Mary Hastings, stand on opposing sides of a yawning chasm of cultural silence about the significance of whiteness as it exists between them in their time period, within which whiteness wields an all-encompassing power.
Amid a wave of academic writing about whiteness at the end of the twentieth century, Richard Dyer’s White (1997) helped to make visible the artificial construction of whiteness as a racial imaginary.
It was not Milly’s unpacified state, in short, that now troubled her—though certainly, as Europe was the great American sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted.”[1]
This discussion reflects on the politics of whiteness in relation to Jewishness by comparing performances of a play by Gertrude Stein that re-inscribes racist language but at the same time points up performative, non-essentialist, habitual understandings of race. It refracts these politics through a Poet's Theatre performance of Stein’s play in the context of other performance events around Habits of Assembly by Corin Sworn, a contemporary art work exhibited at the 2019 Edinburgh Art Festival.
White South African Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo, Pākehā Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera notebooks from Aotearoa New Zealand, and Anglo-Canadian Flora Denison’s The Tree of Poverty all emerged in early- to mid-twentieth century anglophone modernism. In the same period, US American and British use of “s****” and “n*****” also appeared in the letters of Wallace Stevens, and in the titles of Joseph Conrad’s and Carl Van Vechten’s writings. Critical analyses of these and other White-authored modernist works have followed, addressing White masculinity in Vachel Lindsay’s “T
[Content note: brief discussion and accompanying imagery of racialized propaganda.]
The bodily injury caused by nuclear warfare constitutes a massively collective form of modern suffering. However, for many in the West, it also represents a markedly “foreign” pain, inflicted on distant bodies in other lands. The only instances (thus far) of nuclear weapons being deliberately utilized in combat are the US deployment of the “Little Boy” A-bomb in Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” in Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. The 100,000 immediate deaths and ensuing agonies of radiation poisoning were borne primarily by Japanese soldiers and civilians and Korean slave laborers––who were, for many midcentury British and American citizens, unimaginably “foreign” bodies, caricatured and dehumanized in Allied war propaganda throughout the 1940s (fig. 1).
Contemporary archival (The National Memorial for Peace and Justice), medical (Janice Sabin, “How we fail black patients in pain”), and political (BLM) practices continue to depend on the legibility of Black pain, where pain’s visibility is assumed to make it politically transformative. Rather than an obviously valuable experience, however, Black pain requires political validation by an American whiteness all too often unable or unwilling to recognize or respond to that pain. Miranda Fricker’s “testimonial injustice” describes this ethical failing, which “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word,” producing an “epistemic dysfunction in the exchange.”
[Content note: this article contains graphic images of lynching.]
For a work that is pivotal to scholarship on Jim Crow racial violence, the phrase “Jim Crow” is conspicuously absent in Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Instead, she calls the epoch “nineteenth-century civilization,” a deceptively toothless choice of words until one begins to understand its full import.