Syllabus

Short Course Description

How does twentieth-century and contemporary American literature represent and critique whiteness, as both a social identity and hegemonic structure? And how might recent contributions to critical race theory assist us in answering this literary question? Since the early 1990s, a cohort of race scholars has taken whiteness as its object of study, arguing that doing so opens a singular perspective on racial formation in the United States. This course will explore what new understandings of American literature emerge through the analysis of whiteness and what literature itself has contributed to this critical project. In particular, what do we gain from considering the operations of whiteness from the position of both ethnic-minority and white writers? We will begin with theories of whiteness proposed in early- to mid-twentieth-century African-American literature and thought. As bell hooks has written, ?black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversations with one another ?special? knowledge of whiteness ? deemed special because it was not a way of knowing that has been fully recorded in written material.? In reading black protest novelists and critics, we will ask if African-American fiction might be one place where this collective ethnographic encounter is ?recorded? and, if so, what theory of whiteness it might offer. Next, we will move to historical accounts of twentieth-century European immigrants? assimilation to whiteness, and read fictional representations of their post-assimilation identities. How might such fiction both instantiate and disrupt the hegemonic notion of white universality or neutrality? Likewise, what historical role has Christianity played in consolidating white identity, especially during the postwar period, and how has contemporary fiction participated in this consolidation or sought to challenge it? Finally, we will look at the two main analytics of whiteness of the past twenty years ? privilege and supremacy ? and their presence in contemporary theory, literature, and film, asking what kind of knowledge, and which representational forms, each has enabled. Moreover, we will discuss how these understandings and forms have translated in scenes of racial formation outside the United States.