How Whiteness Claimed the Future: The Always New vs The Always Now in US-American Literature

Mariya Nikolova

Published by De Gruyter 2023

How Whiteness Claimed the Future

The Always New vs The Always Now in US-American Literature

Mariya Nikolova

Volume 7 in the series American Frictions

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110799996

Overview
Contents

About this book

Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.

Author / Editor information

Mariya Nikolova, University of Potsdam, Germany

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	V
Before chapter one Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Movement
1 The Spectrum of white violence & spectral blackness in Don DeLillo’s Zero K Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2 Reaching the limit, or how Kathy Acker used blackness to abandon Haiti and arrive home safely Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
3 Against dominant visuality, or the cut as critique* Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
Futurity
4 Ten easy steps to inherit the future. Visualizing renewal and the old prodigal boy in Marylinne Robinson’s Gilead Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
5 Another town, another story Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
6 Beloved endings* Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
Newness
7 Newness and negativity in the northern history of the new Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
8 Instead of conclusion* Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
9 Acknowledgements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	162
Works cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	176

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Scholars in the field of American Studies, avant-garde studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Studies
Pages
- Front matter: 5
- Main content: 178
Keywords: Avant-garde; Antiblackness; ideology; narration

eBook

Published: March 20, 2023
ISBN: 9783110799996

Hardcover

Published: March 20, 2023
ISBN: 9783110799712