Search results for "whiteness"
showing 7 items of 17 documents
Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality: An Introduction
2022
Peer reviewed
Construction of whiteness and blackness in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"
2020
Zamiast otwartego potępienia niewolnictwa, świat przedstawiony Benito Cereno rozprasza sprzeciw wobec tyranii poprzez zawiłą konstrukcję relacji podmiotowo-przedmiotowych, kontekst sytuacyjny, stłumione, nie do końca wyartykułowane wypowiedzi Benito Cereno, obrazy oraz złożoną strukturę dzieła. Za pomocą przemilczeń, zastosowania różnorodnych punktów widzenia, napomknięć, czy wyrazistej niedookreśloności, dzieło Melvilla nie tylko wpisuje się w romantyczne kwestionowanie historiografi i, ale również wychodzi naprzeciw postmodernistycznej nieoczywistości. Jest to utwór, w którym czytelnik zostaje zaproszony do bycia współautorem wypełniającym luki i przemilczenia własną interpretacją.
“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…
Digital Islamophobia: The Swedish woman as a figure of pure and dangerous whiteness
2016
This article addresses the digital culture of Islamophobic bloggers, focusing on the online circulation of a forensic photograph of a Swedish woman who was assaulted. The analysis shows how through appropriating this image, the bloggers created a unifying, imagined whiteness in the transnational Islamophobic network. The empirical analysis clarifies how this one image migrated and transformed in the blogosphere and legitimated the recurrent discursive trope of “Muslim rape.” This image became a subcultural “memory freeze frame” crystallizing the contemporary Islamophobic ideologies articulated in connection to race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality. The viral circulation of this im…
Defamiliarizing Blackness and Whiteness in Gloria Naylor’s "Linden Hills"
2018
Gloria Naylor defamiliarizes in Linden Hills (1985) both white and non-white racial categories, in this case blackness and whiteness, both of which emerge as largely performable identities. The defamiliarization of blackness is fairly direct, unfolding mostly through the predominantly negative portrayal of Linden Hills residents and the male line of the Nedeed dynasty, especially Luther Nedeed IV. The defamiliarization of whiteness is mostly indirect, taking place primarily through the exposure of Linden Hills residents’ imitation of whiteness, in particular, the pursuit of what is presented as the negative paradigm of the white materialistic success and the disastrous consequences that ste…
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…
The Trope of Sight in North American Whiteness Studies
2017
The trope of sight has been the central metaphor in North American whiteness studies sińce its very inception, that is, already before whiteness studies emerged as a separate field of study. The centrality of the trope stems not only ffom a particular applicability of the sight metaphor to render subject-object relations, but also ffom the unique presence of “sight” in the very relations between racial groups in the United States, in particular Alfican Americans, and whites. Originally, minorities were cast as objects of the gaze, while white people as subjects of the gaze, exercising the power to look, survey and pass judgment. Apart ffom exposing practices of looking employed by whites, w…