Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison

Patricia McKee

Published by Duke University Press 1999

Producing American Races

Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison

Patricia McKee

In the series New Americanists

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822397663

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Producing American Races Patricia McKee examines three authors who have powerfully influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work to argue that race becomes visible only through image production and exchange, McKee illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.
McKee provides close readings of six novels—James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and Morrison’s Sula and Jazz—interspersed with excursions into Lacanian and Freudian theory, critical race theory, epistemology, and theories of visuality. In James and Faulkner, she finds, race is represented visually through media that highlight ways of seeing and being seen. Written in the early twentieth century, the novels of James and Faulkner reveal how whiteness depended on visual culture even before film and television became its predominant media. In Morrison, the culture is aural and oral—and often about the absence of the visual. Because Morrison’s African American communities produce identity in nonvisual, even anti-visual terms, McKee argues, they refute not just white representations of black persons as objects but also visual orders of representation that have constructed whites as subjects and blacks as objects.
With a theoretical approach that both complements and transcends current scholarship about race—and especially whiteness—Producing American Races will engage scholars in American literature, critical race theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. It will also be of value to those interested in the novel as a political and aesthetic form.

Author / Editor information

Patricia McKee, Professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the author of Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel, 1764–1878 and Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James.

Reviews

“Exceptionally well written, theoretically informed, and astute. A convincing set of readings of American novels that illuminate the relation between visibility and racial identity in U. S. culture.”—Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University

“McKee’s intellectually original approach to discussing whiteness puts her book at the cutting edge of contemporary race studies. Her use of familiar novels to talk about race, identity, and complexities of visual culture is provocatively original.”—Robyn Wiegman, University of California, Irvine

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Race and Media Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter One. Reproducing Whiteness: The Wings of the Dove Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
Chapter Two. Collective Whiteness in The Golden Bowl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	64
Chapter Three. Self-Division as Racial Divide: The Sound and the Fury Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
Chapter Four. Playing White Men in Light in August Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Chapter Five. Black Spaces in Sula Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Chapter Six. Off the Record: Jazz and the Production of Black Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	202
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 256

eBook

Published: July 19, 1999
ISBN: 9780822397663