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Contemporary US climate fiction articulates the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis. It often represents white, mostly privileged, characters and communities becoming destabilized, if not undone, by climate catastrophe. The existential precarity long experienced by people of color in the US and elsewhere is often figured in US climate fiction as a white apocalypse. This essay focuses on how contemporary US climate fiction stages confrontations with whiteness. Focusing on first-person narratives by Lauren Groff, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner that foreground a privileged whiteness by making it hypervisible, it analyzes how climate fiction not only reifies whiteness but also reflects, demystifies, and disrupts it. By submitting whiteness to the spotlight, these texts allow whiteness to become available for investigation and interrogation. The extent to which such critiques end up reifying or recuperating whiteness, however, remains a pressing question.
A review of whiteness through a feminist lens could not begin anywhere but with Black feminists’ critiques of white feminism. This chapter then moves on to use white celebrity feminist mogul Reese Witherspoon’s media production empire Hello Sunshine as a case study to argue that both enacting and studying white feminism or whiteness through a feminist lens, when authored by white people, cannot help but perpetuate some status quo structures of domination. But there is hope it might also serve to render those structures cogent and visible with an eye toward disrupting and dismantling them. The chapter argues that the invisibility of Witherspoon’s whiteness and the inequitable power dynamics of contemporary mainstream feminist media production cultures that she represents continue to be celebrated in the twenty-first century, just as popular feminist practices often fail to critique the complex interchanges of power between whiteness and feminism.
Chinelo Okparanta’s Harry Sylvester Bird (2022) is unique in focusing deeply on its white narrator, Harry Bird, a boy from rural Pennsylvania who longs to be Black. As a twenty-first-century white life novel, Okparanta’s book shares with its postwar predecessors a profound engagement with the meanings of whiteness. Harry Sylvester Bird offers a relentless critique of the willed blindness and hypocrisies endemic to whiteness. However, while earlier white life novels largely presented characters who are at ease with their racialized privileges as well as the violence that make such privileges possible, Harry Sylvester Bird tells the story of a young man who becomes disgusted by his race and especially by his bigoted parents. Okparanta’s novel is a powerful exploration of contemporary whiteness that demonstrates how the desire for Blackness is yet another iteration of the privilege and willed delusion endemic to whiteness.
In the US at the turn of the twentieth century, poor whites became objects of both fascination and empirical research by eugenicists and race scientists. Existing stigmas and stereotypes of poor whites were rarely challenged by these progressive reformers bent on improving American society though eugenic programs of human betterment. Researchers imagined and portrayed poor whites as a grave dysgenic threat to the racial purity of other whites. Their very existence was seen as inimical to the ideals of white supremacy that fueled the Social Darwinism of the era. As a result, poor whites were targeted for institutionalization and compulsory sterilization and durable stigmatypes of poor whites were formed.
This chapter replays the origin story of whiteness to better recover how Toni Morrison, in her field-defining Playing in the Dark (1992), identified whiteness’s hauntings by the twinned shadow of Blackness and disability. By rereading Morrison’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the chapter traces out how the critical study of whiteness needs to reevaluate and expand key ableist concepts and terms within the field lest it repeat and reinscribe disability oppression. Returning to Morrison’s foundational essay identifies interpretive strategies for a “crip abolitionist critique” that dismantles an entangled history of whiteness and disability. In its last section, the chapter then maps out this crip abolitionist methodology for whiteness studies through a reading of Victor LaValle’s 2012 novel The Devil in Silver, in which LaValle reimagines the white race traitor as an abolitionist caretaker.
This chapter examines an array of antebellum American literary texts for their constructions of working- and middle-class identities during the emergence of market capitalism. While establishing historical and cultural context for a number of popular novels published in the early 1850s, this case study compares the middle-class discourses of moral reform and individual responsibility expressed in conventional novels like The Old Brewery (1854) and the working-class discourses of artisan republicanism and cross-racial sympathy in sensational novels like Hot Corn (1854) and Walt Whitman’s recently discovered serial Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852). The analysis reveals the ways that class-accented sensational novels develop a counternarrative to American exceptionalist ideology that was championed by the middle class through documenting the impact of larger socioeconomic forces on the lived experience of the working poor, challenging prevailing stereotypes leveled against the white working classes, and insisting that class matters.
Critical eating studies provides an important framework for understanding the construction of whiteness. This methodology allows literary critics to trace the material history of food, its marketing as well as its production, and the metaphorical valence of the body politic. Because of the tense relationship between white racial ideals and bodily pleasure, US literature often juxtaposes purity politics with the desirous, hungering body. This chapter gives an overview of major scholars at the intersection of food, literature, and race (Doris Witt, Anita Mannur, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) as well as readings of works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov that feature whiteness as an ideal impossible to embody and food as a challenge to its ineffability. Contemporary foodie culture reveals the appropriative impulses of whiteness, while satires by Ben Lerner and Jordan Peele perhaps show the way to bite back against the reign of biopolitical purity.
This chapter names and surveys a racially attuned subgenre of US historical fiction, the historical novel of whiteness. It studies a variety of authors from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, all of whom used the historical novel form to question the coherence and ontological status of “whiteness” as a racial concept. The essay focuses on three historically situated companies of works that epitomize the subgenre: novels of European–Native American contact from the 1820s, “color-line” novels from the Jim Crow era, and African American historical fiction from the post-1945 period. In all the novels under review, whiteness is shown to be a mutable, contingent, surprisingly unstable phenomenon, even as it is also shown to have been a powerful, all but hegemonic force throughout US history.
In this article, we argue that Brazilian tan lines constitute a new site of race and class struggle on and over women’s bodies. Popular in Rio’s socially and geographically marginalized periphery, fita (electrical tape) bikinis leave sharp and shocking tan lines that call attention to the contrast between lighter and darker skin. Brazil’s funk music sensation Anitta brings this aesthetic practice to the global stage as part of her brand, disrupting hegemonic beauty norms and attracting attention for herself and her fans. Through the public display of their bronzed sensuality, Brazilian women accrue “visibility capital” as they create new forms of bodily value and self-esteem in what we call a look economy. While global beauty hierarchies continue to promote and glorify whiteness, Anitta and fita tanners simultaneously turn heads (in person), attract eyeballs (online), and lay claim to the right to represent Brazil.
Frances Burney’s Evelina conjures silly, embarrassing, ludicrous, and morally sunk social pitfalls that its young heroine must studiously avoid in her progress toward social legibility, political safety, and material stability. Prompted by Daniel Cottom’s “the topology of the orifice,” this book shows that an orifical reading of Evelina coaxes open what the marriage plot aims to shut down, making the novel available to unpredictable genealogical connections. This. book traces one such line of descent to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and a performance by Bob the Drag Queen from the reality show We’re Here. Contextualizing Evelina in this way exposes the eighteenth-century marriage plot’s promotion of whiteness – specifically, whiteness as a sign of the social and sexual self-discipline that promises, in advocation against collectivity and queer intimacy, to keep us “safe” from one another as we attend to individuated prospects of “well-being.”
This chapter examines the implications of mapping Latinx theater history through a singular narrative of race and cultural resistance. Scholars have written the history of Latinx theater as the story of minoritarian struggles for representation against the dominant white gaze since the 1960s. I assess how the narrative of overcoming racial oppression has taken a decidedly romantic form since it tells the story of how Latinx communities move from oppression toward an emancipatory future, and how, in turn, this romance’s linear temporal plot defines Latinidad as brown and as antithetical to whiteness. The “romance of Latinidad,” I argue, has served generations of Latinxs artists to craft an aesthetic and a cultural politics of resistance. However, the story of brown resistance consolidates a post-1960s brown/white racial binary that erases non-brown Latinxs from Latinx theater history. After tracing the generations of artists included in the resistance narrative, the chapter turns to Latinidad’s pre-1960s past and discusses the biography and racial ideologies of Josefina Niggli (1910–83), the Mexican American playwright whose whiteness and folkloric representations of Mexicans trouble the romance of brown resistance. Indeed, the analysis seeks to account for Latinidad’s antiracist possibilities by reckoning with Latinx theater’s collusions with racism.
Hans Kundnani’s Eurowhiteness is an attempt to bring the question of race in Europe to the forefront. Such attempts are of service to academic and public debate. However, there are reasons to questions the far from nuanced construction of Kundnani’s protagonist, the ‘pro-European’, and the descriptions of the causes and implications of Brexit. A more careful reconstruction of European integration and a summary of the history of the United Kingdom could have made this book less tendentious.
This article examines the role that William Elliot Griffis's work played in Ozawa v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that Japanese immigrants were not “white persons” and therefore were ineligible to naturalized citizenship. Griffis, a prominent authority on Japan, had spent decades arguing that the Japanese were white. While Ozawa is an important case study in U.S.-Japanese relations and critical race theory, Griffis's previously unrecognized part in it further demonstrates the durability of racial thought even in the mind of an individual who sought to partially reshape such ideas.
A global lens on European military history exposes the racist foundations upon which European empires have gone to war around the world over centuries. The racisms and nationalisms embedded in the narration of Europe’s military past prevent it from fully making the global turn. The study of war and militarization without the global turn enables the continued avoidance of questions that inherently challenge the nationalist, patriotic, and frequently racist and misogynist foundations that have long shaped the field. Moreover, European military historiography tends to ignore the many wars of anti-colonial resistance fought against colonizing powers in the long nineteenth century. Yet they were as much a part of European military history as any other wars. To globalize European military history, scholars must include analysis of anti-colonial resistance within the standard approaches to “military history.” Situating European military history more firmly in the global unsettles assumed knowledge about European military dominance, opening new possibilities for historians to consider armed struggles against empire within the same field of study as the recognized staples of European military history.
From the Enlightenment, liberal political economic thought, and the history of science, to the nation-building, ideas of citizenship, and border-setting that have defined European political and geographical space, and to racial capitalism and imperialism’s foundational role in shaping modern European economies, politics, law, and modernity, race has been central to modern Europe’s history, including its most painful episodes, and to the “global turn” in writing European history. Antiracism associated with internationalism, anticolonialism, and decolonization has also profoundly shaped European history and its writing – especially the “global turn.” Yet, considerations of economic, intellectual, political, religious, and other aspects of European history continue to neglect race and racial thought. This chapter examines the literature produced by the global turn on the role of race and racism in European history and reflects on its persistent marginalization in narratives of European history.
Henry “Enrique” Tarrio—the former Afro-Latino leader of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group—positioned himself as a prominent leader of the January 6 insurrection. Our current understanding of Latine politics, and ethnoracial politics more broadly, would call this a striking paradox. Tarrio’s views highlight that Latines’ view of their place in the ethnoracial hierarchy can vary. We argue that an understudied phenomenon, aspirational status, particularly on ethno-cultural and socioeconomic dimensions, can help us understand variation in Latines’ attitudes and behaviors. While some Latines may adopt a minoritized status and align themselves closer to ethnoracial minorities, others may align themselves closer to whites. We explore how these forms of aspirational status, as well as racial resentment, impact Latines’ political attitudes toward the January 6 insurrection. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), we find that Latines who aspire to a higher ethno-cultural status that approximates whiteness, as well as those who aspire to a higher socioeconomic status and who distance themselves from Black Americans, are more likely to be supportive of the insurrection. This paper contributes to the overall understanding of the heterogeneity of Latine political attitudes and illustrates the role of status in shaping political attitudes among Latines.
This article traces five hundred years of European and American academic and public music discourse through two disparate examples: Vicente Lusitano, a sixteenth-century Portuguese composer of African descent, and anti-Black comments directed at musicians Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones in the 1984 documentary I Love Quincy. These threads converge in the present day, as discourse involving Lusitano increasingly contains a form of anti-Blackness that parallels what is presented by the film’s white director, Eric Lipmann, and more recent popular music discourse that echoes his perspective. Moreover, the longitude of Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure offers a unique vantage from which we can observe recursive rhetorical devices – denial, fantasy, and erasure – over time and in varied cultural contexts. Because these tropes support contemporary American anti-Black viewpoints as well as similarly flawed and destructive argumentation from historically distant European societies, we can see the continuity of denial, fantasy, and erasure in five hundred years of discourse as a sign that these musical cultures favor domination.
How, given the murder of those demanding a more representative political system at Peterloo in 1819, did more Britons, at home and in the colonies, get to vote by 1885?
How did social democracy seed new forms of politics that came of age in the global revolts of 1968, exposing its contradictions and compromised foundations, and hastening its demise after 1976?
How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?