0000000000134498
AUTHOR
Klara Szmańko
showing 5 related works from this author
Reminiscing in white in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone
2018
The article focuses on the representation of whiteness in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993), in particular on how the aesthetic and the socio-historical strata of the novel intersect, how by saturating the imagery of Bone with whiteness, Ng conveys the first person Chinese American narrator’s positionality and the positionality of other Chinese American characters as members of the Chinese American community and members of broader American society. The images involving whiteness compose a kind of the palimpsest overwritten with personal and communal ethnic watermarks as well as repressed, surfacing and semi-articulated history of Leila’s family that she channels into the narrative, having engaged…
Construction of Whiteness and Blackness in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno
2020
Rather than resist slavery directly, the narrative world of Benito Cereno disperses the rejection of tyranny through the intricate construction of subject-object relations, the situational context, Benito Cereno’s stifled, semi-articulated statements, the imagery of the narrative and its complex narrative structure. Through silences, multiple viewpoints, innuendos, refusal to solve certain issues definitely while being explicit about this indeterminacy, Melville’s narrative not only inscribes itself in the Romantic questioning of historiography, but also gestures towards postmodernist inconclusiveness and the writerly text in which the reader is invited to be its co-author who fills out the…
Oppressive Faces of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress
2018
Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress contributes significantly to the literary debate on the definition of whiteness. The socio-historical construction of whiteness emerging from the novel is amplified by white imagery dovetailing with the claims made about white people directly. For the African American first person narrator, Easy Rawlins, living in post-World War II Los Angeles, whiteness mostly spells terror. The oppressive faces of whiteness consist in the following trajectories: property relations, economic exploitation, labour relations, the legal system, different miens of oppressive white masculinity denigrating blackness, spatial dynamics of post-World War II Los Angeles and the w…
“At the Western Palace”: The Dehumanization of Whiteness, Americanness, and Chinese-Americanness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
2021
The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of…
Between Solid America and Fragile Chinatown in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
2021
The article traces mixed affiliations of the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), permanently split between the world of Chinatown and broader American society outside Chinatown, both places crucial for the narrator in the on-going process of subjectivity construction. While both of these worlds constantly interpellate her, each of them entails a fair measure of hindrance and empowerment. The article undermines the criticism leveled at Kingston’s The Woman Warrior by a section of the Chinese American community represented primarily by Frank Chin. Chin accused Kingston of pandering to white tastes and white readers’ expectations of Chinese American authors. That, acco…