Off Whiteness: Place, Blood, and Tradition in Post-Reconstruction Southern Literature
Autor Izabela Hopkinsen Limba Engleză Hardback – 8 noi 2020
Off Whitenessdraws from both sides of the color line—as well as from both the male and female experience—to examine the ambivalence of Southern whiteness from three particular vantage points: place, ideality, and repeatability. Hopkins develops her analysis across nine chapters divided into three parts. In her exploration of these four writers with differing backgrounds and experiences, she utilizes both their well-known and lesser-known texts to argue against the superficial oversimplification that “whiteness requires blackness to define itself.”
Hopkins’s analysis not only successfully grapples with a wide range of post-structural theories; it also approaches the significance of language and religion with intention and sensitivity, thereby addressing areas that are typically ignored in whiteness studies scholarship. The interdisciplinary nature ofOff Whitenesspositions it as an engaging text relevant to the work and interests of scholars drawn to American and Southern history, cultural and social studies, literary studies, etymology, and critical race theory.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781621905813
ISBN-10: 1621905810
Pagini: 277
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN-10: 1621905810
Pagini: 277
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Notă biografică
IZABELA
HOPKINS
obtained
her
PhD
from
Birmingham
City
University
where
she
is
now
a
research
assistant.
Extras
Mention
whiteness
and
the
South
in
the
same
breath
and
the
conversation
inevitably
veers
off
toward
color,
but
what
if
more
were
at
stake?
What
if,
instead
of
color,
we
should
speak
of
conditions
of
whiteness
that
are
not
skin-deep?
A
while
ago,
I
was
struck
by
the
title
of
a
recent
American
comedy-drama
series
called
Hart
of
Dixie
(2011–2015).
“Hart,”
here,
is
immediately
recognizable
as
a
pun.
It
relies
on
the
parallel
between
the
symbolism
of
“heart”
and
the
historical
and
regional
connotations
of
Dixie,
while
promising
authenticity
and
perhaps
an
insight
into
the
essence
of
Southerness.
Buried
beneath
the
simple
association
between
the
common
surname
Hart
and
“heart,”
which
suggests
that
the
central
character
will
indeed
be
central
and
emotionally
rich,
lies
the
heraldic
figure
of
the
white
hart,
a
mythical
symbol
of
sanctified
beauty,
purity,
and
innocence.
The
show’s
director
adopts
this
symbolism
to
build
an
alternative
view
of
the
South,
the
view
that
has
largely
remained
obscured
by
the
infamy
of
slavery.
The
story
is
set
in
the
fictional
town
of
Bluebell,
Alabama,
which
in
this
narrative
has
come
a
long
way
since
the
Birmingham
riot
of
the
1960s,
and
equality
now
reigns
supreme.
The
town
boasts
a
black
mayor,
Lavon
Hayes,
who
lives
in
the
grandest
house,
its
architecture
harking
back
to
the
old
plantation
days.
Burt
Reynolds,
his
female
pet
alligator,
roams
freely
about
the
place,
frightening
the
occasional
visitor,
while
the
locals
have
long
become
accustomed
to
the
eccentricity
and
grown
immune.
Bluebell
oozes
quaintness
and
picturesqueness
amply
spiced
up
by
a
reverence
for
time-honored
traditions.
Baking
contests
and
pageants
galore,
and
the
sorority
of
waspish
belles
still
meets
as
it
did
in
the
days
of
yore
to
plot
good
deeds
and
charitable
enterprises—and
gossip.
In
this
cradle
of
political
correctness,
blacks
and
whites
rub
shoulders
amiably.
Whatever
social
divisions
there
may
be
are
accentuated
subtly
and
encoded
in
individual
occupations,
behavior,
and
standards
and,
largely,
left
to
the
viewer
to
observe
and
decode.
The sun never sets on Bluebell, and the viewer gradually learns its endearing quirks, which inadvertently become symbolic of the South, along with the show’s heroine, Dr. Zoe Hart, freshly arrived from New York City. The director employs the old and tested device of introducing the region from a stranger’s perspective, which works as well here as it did in nineteenth-century fiction. Ambitious, driven, and erratic, Zoe is the product of a brief encounter between a successful, career-driven Northerner and a Southern gentleman doctor, who leaves Zoe a share in his practice. If this plot sounds familiar, that is because it is a modern take on a well-worn nineteenth-century literary convention. Zoe initially signs up for life in the South for a brief period, having arrived at a crossroads in her career, and she finds the place as quaint and alien as it is presented to the audience. Yet her prejudice gradually melts away, and she becomes beguiled by the sense of place. Now she is the eponymous Hart of Dixie: the South triumphs again!
The diegesis functions as a narrative of reconciliation in which a half-Northerner marries a Southerner, and they live happily ever after. Such a scenario makes it all too tempting and easy to dismiss Hart of Dixie as an inaccurate and utopian portrayal of the South, the result of the director’s immoderation in the exercise of poetic license or an impeccably liberal and somewhat white appropriation of American history. But that would be a mistake, for in fact the show, despite all its supernumerary quaintness or because of it, typifies the ambiguity that has characterized portrayals of the South. The title itself signals this ambiguity by leaving open the question of what lies at the heart of Dixie. The very absence of the race question in Hart of Dixie marks it as an antithesis to films such as D. W. Griffith’s paean to racist values, The Birth of a Nation (1915), or the more recent critique of race relations in the South, in The Help (2011). It is more akin to Hollywood’s moonlight and magnolias visions of the region immortalized in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or the romanticized adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris’s stories in Song of the South (1946). These films, and many more, peddle images of the region as racist, other, exotic, comically backward, yet also a reassuring repository of solid family values based on firmly established traditions and self-reliance. The South has become the locus of a mythology with an apparently universal allure. This mythology is essentially a “white mythology,” which is to say that it is born out of the unique sociocultural legacy of the South and revolves around conceptions of whiteness; of what it means to be white or off white. Both white and off white suggest an affinity; for, in terms of color, they are not polar opposites. Yet, despite their close linguistic affiliation, the term off white points to an ambivalence at the heart of whiteness, the ambivalence that can only stem from the existence of enduring criteria that reach beyond the visibility of color. Writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Thomas Nelson Page, and later William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O’Connor, among many notable Southern writers, typify the ambivalence of such designations by examining the allure of this legacy and its impact on the construction of Southern identity and whiteness.
The question of whiteness is far from absent from Hart of Dixie, despite its seeming color blindness. Rather, the show offers an alternative narrative to the standard fare of binary classifications, placing the black mayor among the whitest inhabitants of the town. This counter-narrative is possible because it posits historical repeatability at the center of whiteness, which relies on the replication of social and cultural standards rather than color. Because of the blighted history of the South and its race relations, the presence of white in whiteness lends itself naturally to conflations of whiteness with the visibility of skin color, race, and white supremacy. Toni Morrison’s seminal Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination examines how the presence of the black man underpins the construction of the hallmark American hero as white and superior. Yet, the words of Roxana, a manumitted white slave and one of the protagonists of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, point to a more elusive and illusive aspect of whiteness: “‘Yah-yah-yah jes’ listen to dat! If I’s imitation, what is you? Bofe of us is imitation white – dat’s what we is – en pow’full good imitation, too – Yah-yah-yah! – we don’t mount to noth’n as imitation niggers’.” Roxana separates the visibility of white from being white and identifies imitation as the modus operandi of whiteness.
To admit that imitation sustains the propagation of whiteness is to recognize the significance of the baggage of historic consciousness that the first settlers carried, a consciousness based on the reverence for birth and rank, and which predated the establishment of chattel slavery. It was also a vision built on aspiration for social betterment which, in time, came to rely on the replication of preconceived ideals in the lifeworld. Because this alternative narrative of whiteness evolved in response to a conviction of historic legacy, it could exist independently of the visibility of blackness. What is certain about whiteness is that it plays with visibility and resists monochromic classifications. When it comes to the discourse of whiteness, to borrow from Shakespeare, “nothing is/But what is not.”4 Roxana is fully aware of this antagonism, which permits her to occupy an irreconcilably undecidable position of being, simultaneously, white and non-white—the conundrum of being what she is not. And this undecidability lies at the heart of whiteness; it forms its puzzle for which the notions of white supremacy or race cannot fully account.
Yet, this ambivalence of whiteness does not disturb the ease with which black and white are yoked in a dichotomous marriage, the marriage that has led to commonplace assumptions in contemporary cultural theory that “whiteness requires blackness to define itself.” The urge to explain whiteness in relation to the exploitation and subjugation of the racial other is particularly prevalent in contexts marked by Western expansionist ambitions such as that of the United States. The existence of chattel slavery was a contentious topic in nineteenth-century America, a subject heatedly debated between the North and the South, not because of its inherent iniquity and absurdity, but for different economic and political reasons aimed at promoting the interests of the two regions. Indefensible and incomprehensible by modern standards, chattel slavery was defensible, though not unanimously, in nineteenth-century Southern states. It inspired impassioned declarations like that of John C. Calhoun, who, speaking for the whole region, thundered before the Senate in 1837 that “we of the South will not, cannot, surrender our institutions.” It was, however, the association of slavery and its ugly offspring, servitude, bondage, lack of agency and personhood, all disseminated through minstrel shows, black figure advertising, and the spectacle of lynching, that spurred on the genesis of a feeble notion of white privilege and homogeneity. Yet, these outgrowths of slavery as criteria for the conception of whiteness prove inadequate insofar as they rely on the black body, transmogrifying it into a strange fruit for consumption through disempowerment and castration, all the while dispensing with the actuality of the black body.
Calhoun’s impassioned defense of “our institutions” suggests that there was more to the South than chattel slavery. After all, Southerners, first and foremost, prided themselves on their aristocratic genealogy. The popularity accorded to Sir Walter Scott’s heroes in the region had nothing to do with their status as slave owners, but with the values of heroic courage, chivalry, and honor they internalized—in short, the values associated with nobility pre-ordained by virtue of birth and place. To speak of white pride, however ephemeral and spurious, as a direct corollary of slavery is to overlook the troubling fact that the first settlers arrived in the New World equipped with the concept of bond servitude that had long been practiced in England and that white indenture predated and later existed alongside chattel slavery. Those subjected to bond servitude were the poor and landless, laborers and the Irish under the English occupation of their country. Immigration did not materially improve their fortunes and, in the words of Marquis de Chastellux, who visited Virginia in 1782, the poor European Americans had “little but their complexion to console them.” Two centuries later, the benefits of this white privilege were still scarce in evidence, and Ellen Glasgow, reminiscing about her childhood in the South, was able to observe that “‘the poor whites’ had nothing but the freedom of malnutrition.” Although white, as a skin color, began to symbolize privilege and freedom, it was certainly not synonymous with whiteness that plays out against social, cultural, and historical expectations and proscriptions.
To lock whiteness into the black and white dichotomy reduces the complexity of the construct, or what Mike Hill terms its “epistemological stickiness and ontological wiggling.” And if Benjamin Franklin’s classification is to be trusted, it would also be a perilous undertaking, as one would be hard pressed to find a white person, and not only in America. Writing in 1751, Franklin declares: “All Africa is black or tawny; . . . America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.” With one stroke of the pen, Franklin tars most European nations with the same brush, but his classification of the Saxon and English as white foregrounds the veneration of the Anglo-Saxon heritage in the nineteenth century—the heritage that became pivotal to constructions of whiteness. If anything, Franklin’s taxonomy points to a symbolic definition of whiteness that moves beyond the corporeality of the body and suggests a divide between whiteness proper and the visibility of white. Writing a century later, Herman Melville was aware of this propensity of whiteness toward the symbolic. In Moby-Dick, he wrestles with the proliferation of its significations that vacillate from innocence, mourning, and blankness to alterity, finally conceding that “not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul.” The success of Melville’s effort, and also his failure, lies in the identification of the arbitrariness of whiteness, which forces him to leave the question unresolved.
The sun never sets on Bluebell, and the viewer gradually learns its endearing quirks, which inadvertently become symbolic of the South, along with the show’s heroine, Dr. Zoe Hart, freshly arrived from New York City. The director employs the old and tested device of introducing the region from a stranger’s perspective, which works as well here as it did in nineteenth-century fiction. Ambitious, driven, and erratic, Zoe is the product of a brief encounter between a successful, career-driven Northerner and a Southern gentleman doctor, who leaves Zoe a share in his practice. If this plot sounds familiar, that is because it is a modern take on a well-worn nineteenth-century literary convention. Zoe initially signs up for life in the South for a brief period, having arrived at a crossroads in her career, and she finds the place as quaint and alien as it is presented to the audience. Yet her prejudice gradually melts away, and she becomes beguiled by the sense of place. Now she is the eponymous Hart of Dixie: the South triumphs again!
The diegesis functions as a narrative of reconciliation in which a half-Northerner marries a Southerner, and they live happily ever after. Such a scenario makes it all too tempting and easy to dismiss Hart of Dixie as an inaccurate and utopian portrayal of the South, the result of the director’s immoderation in the exercise of poetic license or an impeccably liberal and somewhat white appropriation of American history. But that would be a mistake, for in fact the show, despite all its supernumerary quaintness or because of it, typifies the ambiguity that has characterized portrayals of the South. The title itself signals this ambiguity by leaving open the question of what lies at the heart of Dixie. The very absence of the race question in Hart of Dixie marks it as an antithesis to films such as D. W. Griffith’s paean to racist values, The Birth of a Nation (1915), or the more recent critique of race relations in the South, in The Help (2011). It is more akin to Hollywood’s moonlight and magnolias visions of the region immortalized in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or the romanticized adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris’s stories in Song of the South (1946). These films, and many more, peddle images of the region as racist, other, exotic, comically backward, yet also a reassuring repository of solid family values based on firmly established traditions and self-reliance. The South has become the locus of a mythology with an apparently universal allure. This mythology is essentially a “white mythology,” which is to say that it is born out of the unique sociocultural legacy of the South and revolves around conceptions of whiteness; of what it means to be white or off white. Both white and off white suggest an affinity; for, in terms of color, they are not polar opposites. Yet, despite their close linguistic affiliation, the term off white points to an ambivalence at the heart of whiteness, the ambivalence that can only stem from the existence of enduring criteria that reach beyond the visibility of color. Writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Thomas Nelson Page, and later William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O’Connor, among many notable Southern writers, typify the ambivalence of such designations by examining the allure of this legacy and its impact on the construction of Southern identity and whiteness.
The question of whiteness is far from absent from Hart of Dixie, despite its seeming color blindness. Rather, the show offers an alternative narrative to the standard fare of binary classifications, placing the black mayor among the whitest inhabitants of the town. This counter-narrative is possible because it posits historical repeatability at the center of whiteness, which relies on the replication of social and cultural standards rather than color. Because of the blighted history of the South and its race relations, the presence of white in whiteness lends itself naturally to conflations of whiteness with the visibility of skin color, race, and white supremacy. Toni Morrison’s seminal Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination examines how the presence of the black man underpins the construction of the hallmark American hero as white and superior. Yet, the words of Roxana, a manumitted white slave and one of the protagonists of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, point to a more elusive and illusive aspect of whiteness: “‘Yah-yah-yah jes’ listen to dat! If I’s imitation, what is you? Bofe of us is imitation white – dat’s what we is – en pow’full good imitation, too – Yah-yah-yah! – we don’t mount to noth’n as imitation niggers’.” Roxana separates the visibility of white from being white and identifies imitation as the modus operandi of whiteness.
To admit that imitation sustains the propagation of whiteness is to recognize the significance of the baggage of historic consciousness that the first settlers carried, a consciousness based on the reverence for birth and rank, and which predated the establishment of chattel slavery. It was also a vision built on aspiration for social betterment which, in time, came to rely on the replication of preconceived ideals in the lifeworld. Because this alternative narrative of whiteness evolved in response to a conviction of historic legacy, it could exist independently of the visibility of blackness. What is certain about whiteness is that it plays with visibility and resists monochromic classifications. When it comes to the discourse of whiteness, to borrow from Shakespeare, “nothing is/But what is not.”4 Roxana is fully aware of this antagonism, which permits her to occupy an irreconcilably undecidable position of being, simultaneously, white and non-white—the conundrum of being what she is not. And this undecidability lies at the heart of whiteness; it forms its puzzle for which the notions of white supremacy or race cannot fully account.
Yet, this ambivalence of whiteness does not disturb the ease with which black and white are yoked in a dichotomous marriage, the marriage that has led to commonplace assumptions in contemporary cultural theory that “whiteness requires blackness to define itself.” The urge to explain whiteness in relation to the exploitation and subjugation of the racial other is particularly prevalent in contexts marked by Western expansionist ambitions such as that of the United States. The existence of chattel slavery was a contentious topic in nineteenth-century America, a subject heatedly debated between the North and the South, not because of its inherent iniquity and absurdity, but for different economic and political reasons aimed at promoting the interests of the two regions. Indefensible and incomprehensible by modern standards, chattel slavery was defensible, though not unanimously, in nineteenth-century Southern states. It inspired impassioned declarations like that of John C. Calhoun, who, speaking for the whole region, thundered before the Senate in 1837 that “we of the South will not, cannot, surrender our institutions.” It was, however, the association of slavery and its ugly offspring, servitude, bondage, lack of agency and personhood, all disseminated through minstrel shows, black figure advertising, and the spectacle of lynching, that spurred on the genesis of a feeble notion of white privilege and homogeneity. Yet, these outgrowths of slavery as criteria for the conception of whiteness prove inadequate insofar as they rely on the black body, transmogrifying it into a strange fruit for consumption through disempowerment and castration, all the while dispensing with the actuality of the black body.
Calhoun’s impassioned defense of “our institutions” suggests that there was more to the South than chattel slavery. After all, Southerners, first and foremost, prided themselves on their aristocratic genealogy. The popularity accorded to Sir Walter Scott’s heroes in the region had nothing to do with their status as slave owners, but with the values of heroic courage, chivalry, and honor they internalized—in short, the values associated with nobility pre-ordained by virtue of birth and place. To speak of white pride, however ephemeral and spurious, as a direct corollary of slavery is to overlook the troubling fact that the first settlers arrived in the New World equipped with the concept of bond servitude that had long been practiced in England and that white indenture predated and later existed alongside chattel slavery. Those subjected to bond servitude were the poor and landless, laborers and the Irish under the English occupation of their country. Immigration did not materially improve their fortunes and, in the words of Marquis de Chastellux, who visited Virginia in 1782, the poor European Americans had “little but their complexion to console them.” Two centuries later, the benefits of this white privilege were still scarce in evidence, and Ellen Glasgow, reminiscing about her childhood in the South, was able to observe that “‘the poor whites’ had nothing but the freedom of malnutrition.” Although white, as a skin color, began to symbolize privilege and freedom, it was certainly not synonymous with whiteness that plays out against social, cultural, and historical expectations and proscriptions.
To lock whiteness into the black and white dichotomy reduces the complexity of the construct, or what Mike Hill terms its “epistemological stickiness and ontological wiggling.” And if Benjamin Franklin’s classification is to be trusted, it would also be a perilous undertaking, as one would be hard pressed to find a white person, and not only in America. Writing in 1751, Franklin declares: “All Africa is black or tawny; . . . America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.” With one stroke of the pen, Franklin tars most European nations with the same brush, but his classification of the Saxon and English as white foregrounds the veneration of the Anglo-Saxon heritage in the nineteenth century—the heritage that became pivotal to constructions of whiteness. If anything, Franklin’s taxonomy points to a symbolic definition of whiteness that moves beyond the corporeality of the body and suggests a divide between whiteness proper and the visibility of white. Writing a century later, Herman Melville was aware of this propensity of whiteness toward the symbolic. In Moby-Dick, he wrestles with the proliferation of its significations that vacillate from innocence, mourning, and blankness to alterity, finally conceding that “not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul.” The success of Melville’s effort, and also his failure, lies in the identification of the arbitrariness of whiteness, which forces him to leave the question unresolved.