White Boy (American Hunger) and the Angel of History: Russell Banks's Identity Knowledge

Abstract

Identity studies, the predominant project of American literary scholarship and pedagogy for more than a generation, emerged from and continues to be informed by its practitioners' desire for an antiracist subject matter and an antiracist subjectivity. No contemporary American writer of fiction has more passionately shared, conscientiously explored, or incisively critiqued this desire than has Russell Banks. Discovering their defining, if unwanted, inheritance of racial privilege, the white protagonists of Banks's The Book of Jamaica (1980), Continental Drift (1985), Rule of the Bone (1995), Cloudsplitter (1998), The Darling (2004), and “Djinn,” the stunning opening story of his collection, The Angel on the Roof (2000), all look to forge new and reparative American identities. Necessarily incomplete, relational, and creolized, the transformed selves that these characters struggle to engender depend not merely on cognitive or discursive acknowledgment of the continuing social production and privilege of whiteness but also on physical and emotional exposure to black experience and involvement in black lives. Yet their very efforts at reparative identity knowledge and practice risk incubating new outbreaks of originary racial exploitation and violence. Drawing on unpublished Banks manuscripts as well as on his major fiction, this analysis of Banks's work places it in intimate dialog with the informing commitments and problematics of academic identity studies and asks whether we might find in Banks's writing and thinking lessons for our own.