Race, labour, and the future of the past: King Lear’s ‘true blank’

Abstract

This essay argues that our nostalgic desire for narratives and paradigms of devoted domestic service – from Downton Abbey to King Lear – are both implicated in, and comprise part of, a racial project: the propagation of whiteness. Looking in particular at Kent’s status as his master’s ‘true blank,’ I suggest that ‘devoted service’ is articulated in racialized terms, and thus the search for an idealized, valorized service rehearses the rhetorical and real terms of white supremacy. In their investment in familial metaphors, texts which traffic in the terms of ‘good service’ also stage the literal reproduction of whiteness. The essay therefore ends by suggesting that attending to the interstices of critical race and queer theory can offer a mode of critical resistance to the generation and genealogy of whiteness encoded in the practices of ‘devoted service’ and in our perennial and often deeply problematic attempts to recover them.