On the Weird Nostalgia of Whiteness: Poor Whites, White Death, and Black Suffering

Abstract

On the Weird Nostalgia of Whiteness:Poor Whites, White Death, and Black Suffering Christian Ravela (bio) "I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives" —James Baldwin (1985)1 "Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry." —Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)2 James Baldwin probably would have found Donald Trump's campaign slogan—Make America Great Again—quite familiar, but less for its bombastic claim of American greatness than for the way it expressed what Baldwin called a weird nostalgia. Revealed in the slogan's Again, this weird nostalgia constitutes the present as a fallen state from a former glory and promises its return in the future. Of course, all nostalgia is idealistic. It selects, ignores, and often completely fabricates elements of the past in order to imbue it with a halcyon glow that outshines the present. What makes the slogan's nostalgia so weird is not so much its idealistic rendering of the past but the peculiar relationship that its idealization of the past has to suffering. As Baldwin claims, those caught in nostalgia's grips come to suffer much as they "test…[themselves] and very often lo[se] their lives" to nostalgia's dream.3 Yet, this dream of the past is not a vision [End Page 27] of heroics but a "vanished state of security and order."4 Surely, this is a sad and unheroic dream that indexes a miserable underlying state of affairs. The desire to be rid of suffering is what pushes the dreamer, yet the pursuit of that desire, ironically, leads to more suffering. Thus, what makes this nostalgia so weird and truly tragic is how this cycle of suffering—alleviation of suffering leading to more suffering—is propelled by a fantasy of the past. This article explores an earlier instance of this weird nostalgia in order to unpack its articulations of suffering, temporality, whiteness, and race. Through a comparative analysis of the figures of poor whites in Erskine Caldwell's and Margaret Bourke-White's (1975) You Have Seen Their Faces (Faces) and James Agee's and Walker Evans's (2001) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Famous Men), I argue these figures function as narrative tropes of white death to render suffering as a transcendent event that intimates a redemptive future and a return to pastoral origins.5 However, white death is undermined by whiteness's contradictory relation to embodiment.6 As a result, Face's and Famous Men's lapsarian drama of white death relies upon the spectacle of black suffering to provide both the necessary enfleshment of white death and the libidinal charge for its emancipatory dream of redemption.7 Thus, blackness forms the internal contradiction of whiteness's weird nostalgia, exposing what makes it truly weird—its paradoxical refusal to attend to suffering while simultaneously addressing it. To address suffering, one must move away from the drama of white death to examine the seeming permanence of black suffering. Even though Faces and Famous Men are not such a project, they disclose the narrative underpinnings of whiteness as an "undesirable historical form to which suffering, and action, have been relegated" both past and present.8 On the Representations of Poor Whites and Time Criticism on Faces and Famous Men has often positioned them antagonistically to one another on aesthetic, moral, and political terms.9 There are good reasons for such readings. On the one hand, Caldwell's omniscient narrator and plain reportage style offers readers an 'objective' account of Southern tenant life and history. Bourke-White's photography draws on a host of visual traditions, particularly sentimentality, to emotionally draw in Faces's middle class readership.10 On the other hand, Agee's highly self-conscious narrator, fragmented narrative structure, scrambled temporal order, complex intertextual references, and dizzying linguistic strategies refuse any possibility to detached objective reporting.11 Unlike Bourke-White, Evans's photography offers a quiet and detached...