How whiteness claimed the future
- Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions.Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.…
Author details: | Mariya Dimitrova NikolovaGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110799996 |
ISBN: | 978-3-11-079999-6 |
ISBN: | 978-3-11-079971-2 |
Title of parent work (English): | American Frictions |
Subtitle (English): | the always new vs the always now in US-American literature |
Publisher: | De Gruyter |
Place of publishing: | Berlin |
Reviewer(s): | Nicole WallerORCiDGND, Sabine BröckORCiDGND |
Supervisor(s): | Nicole Waller, Sabine Bröck, Dirk Wiemann |
Publication type: | Doctoral Thesis |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2023/03/20 |
Publication year: | 2023 |
Publishing institution: | Universität Potsdam |
Granting institution: | Universität Potsdam |
Date of final exam: | 2020/10/22 |
Release date: | 2023/04/17 |
Tag: | anti-black representation; avant-gardism; futurity; newness; white violence |
Volume: | 7 |
Number of pages: | 178 |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät / Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik |
DDC classification: | 8 Literatur / 81 Amerikanische Literatur in Englisch / 810 Amerikanische Literatur in in Englisch |
License (German): | Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz |