White Narratives Research Articles

A New Floor for the Silenced?: Congolese Hip-Hop in Belgium

http://dx.doi.org/10.13185/ST2013.01105Contrary to most other former metropoles, Belgian postcolonial memory does not provoke much turmoil. It is dominated by white narratives, which highlight Congolese gratitude and nostalgia. This article questions this discourse by analyzing hip-hop songs of Congolese artists in Belgium. Many songs deal with the urban context, but the colonial past has recently also become a major topic. Hip-hop songs give voice to hybridity and frustration, criticizing both Belgians and Congolese. Simultaneously, they reveal a great deal of ignorance among Congolese immigrants about their country’s history, for which both Congolese parents and Belgian society are blamed. All in all, hip-hop artists denounce the neglect of the Congolese voice in postcolonial memory.

The Social Gospel in Evolutionary Time: George Washington Cable’s “Perhaps Unwise Love”

The Social Gospel in Evolutionary Time: George Washington Cable’s “Perhaps Unwise Love” Jonathan Daigle (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution George Washington Cable, 1844–1925. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-76074. In his work on science and culture in Victorian England, Douglas Lorimer identifies “the dimension of change over time” as among the most difficult aspects of racial thought to grasp.1 This claim rings especially true for the postbellum US where the emerging social sciences rationalized the link between national identity and race just as millions of former slaves gained citizenship. Multi-racial democracy was not easily imagined within the new race historicism. Shaped by evolutionary theory, this method defined history as a predictive record of unequal racial development toward the perfection of values, social systems and attributes closely identified with western European races. Invidious racialism prevailed within postbellum scientific discourses—this much is known. What needs attention is the process through which new ideas of difference and history emerged to challenge scientific racism. Familiar narratives describe a scientific shift from biology to culture and a moral climb from intolerance to acceptance. These descriptions have their uses but can belie more nuanced realities. Associating white supremacy with conservatism, anxiety and sin can conceal race’s postbellum function as a powerful but unwieldy vehicle of desire. While those who promulgated racialized accounts of progress could not fully escape the shadowy threats from below that [End Page 1] such narratives created, evolutionary constructions of human history were not merely defense mechanisms, nor did they simply consolidate self-serving systems of value and authority. Indeed, as I will show, a major postbellum argument for immediate, equitable integration derived from a deeply racialist conception of history. Toward a less familiar idea of what race meant and to whom, what it could do and how its meaning and power changed over time, this essay examines the multi-disciplinary work of George Washington Cable. The era’s leading white voice for black civil rights, Cable explored the South’s inter-racial realities in history, literature, ethnology and sociology. Because he studied race so intently from so many angles, Cable has often served as a point of entry into postbellum conceptions of difference. Starting with Edmund Wilson, who stressed the enduring timeliness of Cable’s challenge to Jim Crow, twentieth-century critics and historians typically aligned Cable with progressive racial views that resembled their own.2 Critical interest increased markedly during the civil rights movement, and it peaked again with the transnational shift in literary studies. This mini-revival is not surprising, as Cable viewed his native New Orleans not merely as a palimpsest of indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, European and Anglo-American cultures but as a multivalent site of repressive power relations and unique cultural exchanges. Several compelling studies have noted that Cable assembled and dramatized an impressive archive of hemispheric slave insurrections and coerced, voluntary and unconscious cross-cultural intimacy.3 Alongside this non-linear approach to history and culture, however, Cable also practiced race historicism as an analytical method and an end in itself, most notably in his race history, The Creoles of Louisiana (1884). In separate studies, George Handley and Stephanie Foote excavated the evolutionary narrative that runs through Cable’s most acclaimed fiction; this narrative, each points out, placed a racial limit on national citizenship.4 My essay triangulates these approaches to produce new insight into how and why Cable conscripted race’s vast narrative power for his multi-racial vision. Specifically, [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution Telegram from Oscar Wilde to G.W. Cable, George Washington Cable papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University. [End Page 3] I am interested in three tensions in Cable’s work: 1) the co-presence of race historicism and a powerful indictment of racism; 2) the co-presence of a great white narrative of civilization and a Christian historicism that explicitly rejects racial classification; and 3) the tendency to shift between uneven ideas of cultural value: one set to western standards—the art of civilization—and the other open to what Laurence Rosenwald terms “the plenitude that the world is full of...

Responsive Persistence Part II. Practices of Postmodern Therapists.

This article, a companion to Part I of this series of articles, discusses how therapists informed by social constructionist and postmodern ideas enact persistence in their work with families. Transcripts and video-recordings of therapy interaction facilitated by selected major champions for three postmodern (collaborative) therapies: Michael White (narrative therapy), Harlene Anderson (collaborative language systems approach), and Bill O'Hanlon (solution-oriented therapy) were examined for persistence practices. The article offers a range of possible ways in which postmodern therapists may enact their influence in facilitating generative and helpful conversations with families and remain responsive to clients' preferences and understandings. Implications for family therapy practice, training, and supervision are discussed.

Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave

The Heroic Slave (1853) was perhaps the most significant of Douglass's responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist blockbuster, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Working against the sentimental abstractions inflecting white narrative and visual aesthetics in the period, Douglass's fictive technique invokes the visual realism of the daguerreotype. Written at a moment at which the very existence of African American freedom seemed to be under threat, the novella produces enabling fiction of self-emancipation directed not only at the slave South, but seeking to generate a futurist political vision, based on inclusive citizenship, for free black people in the North. In doing so, it marks a retreat from the celebratory transnationalism that had infused Douglass's earlier politics.

Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact

Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact

Resistance through re-narration: Fanon on de-constructing racialized subjectivities

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty's overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon's insights into conversation with Foucault's discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon's historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners.

Warriors, authors and baseball coaches: the meaning of metaphor in theories of family therapy

This article examines the metaphors family therapists use in their theories to reveal aspects of the theories which are not explicitly stated, using Whitaker's symbolic experiential therapy, Minuchin's structural therapy and White's narrative therapy as examples. Such examination, drawing on social constructivist understandings of metaphor and meaning making, reveals that Minuchin's metaphors of family as organism and therapist as artist and warrior emphasize the family as relatively holistic and the therapist as relatively interventionist. In contrast, Whitaker's metaphor of family as ecological system or team and therapist as coach emphasizes the interdependence and context sensitivity of the family and relative powerlessness of the therapist to impose change. Finally, White, reflecting his explicitly post‐structural commitment, uses the metaphor of therapy as a journey undertaken with a map and as therapy as an act of re‐narrating a story.

Marking a Marginal Past: Schooling and Dispossession in the Franklin Harbour District

In this paper we review the colonisation of the Franklin Harbour district in South Australia from the 1850s, focusing on public education and social memory. In the late nineteenth century schooling was entirely in women’s hands. Women teachers, notably the McEwen sisters, were important contributors to the district educationally, socially and economically. However, women’s and Aboriginal histories are marginalised in the district’s social memory. Women teachers barely register and the fraught relationships between the Barngarla people and white settlers are subordinated to a white masculinist narrative of progress.This article has been peer-reviewed.

I Am Jack's Radical Self-Degradation: A Pedagogical Argument for the Inclusion of the Indigenous Narrative in the Postmodern Legal Education

An American legal education begins with a first-year curriculum which is largely uniform across the spectrum of institutions: Contracts, Torts, Constitutional Law, Property, Civil Procedure, and the like are considered the requisite basis for the continued study of law. In the course of learning the basic precepts underpinning these areas of law, first-year law students are exposed not only to the majority rules and those which govern the jurisdictions which contain the law school itself, but also minority rules and important lines of alternative reasoning, because incorporating these alternative analyses is critical to providing future practitioners of the law the proper tools with which to practice. It goes without saying that the value gained from exposure to the minority rules is not insignificant, but this is not the end of the discussion of legal pedagogy and the best way to educate legal thinkers.In analyzing legal pedagogy, it is important to determine not only the quality of the instruction, but what it is that is being taught. Of equal importance is the converse – an analysis of what is not being taught. The typical legal education does not usually incorporate an understanding of the nature of the law as a narrative, and further, it reinforces the silencing of alternative cultural narratives, or story-based understandings of legal concepts, in favor of the “color-blind” jurisprudence and pedagogy that is only color-blind in that it only sees white (i.e., non-colored) western narratives as viable. This article explores the value of incorporating native narratives into the traditional legal education, in a manner similar to the study of the common law of other jurisdictions for the purpose of learning basic concepts of law.The article proposes the inclusion of the indigenous narrative in the baseline legal education by including cases from tribal courts in the case method of legal study, and considers this proposal through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically as illustrated by David Fincher’s film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club.

Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse

The authors argue that the application of critical methods to fragments in successive discursive formations, including oral traditions, double meanings, epithets, fictions, and fantasies, reveal that Americans have always almost known of their biracial heritage. This re-examination of archival evidence in conjunction with critiques of novels, neologisms, and epithets enables the authors to reinterpret narratives of whiteness, particularly those surrounding Jane McCrea, America's first national martyr. Though claimed as a pure, white woman, we argue that underground traditions and a succession of discursive formations lend credence to the possibility that she exemplifies America's biracial past.

Hell for white men: masculinity and race in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

As an historical work, Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, is embedded in the invocation, production and dissemination of cultural memory. Drawing on Peter Burke's discussion of social amnesia as the ‘adjustment of the past to the present’, this reading of a canonical Australian text points to the necessity of an active re-engagement with historical context in order to tease out suppressed or neglected narratives that run counter to, or intersect uneasily with, a later audience's assumptions about the past. The reading of the trilogy offered here examines cultural texts—both the trilogy and the texts from the period in which it is set—that allow us to understand the role of Chinese immigrants in the formation of white Australian narratives of settlement. Although the overt presence of Chinese in the trilogy is minimal, this reading will suggest that the debates their presence raised for white settlers, particularly when viewed through acclimatization theory and the cultural positioning of white women, are central to understanding Richardson's portrayal of Richard Mahony, a white settler who fails to adjust to settler life in Australia. An attention to the historical circumstances invoked by references to the Chinese in Richardson's trilogy sheds new light on the instability of Mahony's identification with Australia, which is so often read as inherent in Mahony alone, rather than as inherent in the historical and cultural conditions of the white settler in nineteenth-century Australia.

Re-thinking white narratives: Popular songs and protest discourse in post-colonial Zimbabwe

Throughout history song, in whatever form, has played a pivotal role in the life of man. It has chronicled man's struggles and joys and has acted as a consciousness-raising tool to a nation's, moral, political and social problems. It is a dynamic living art form, which is responsive to developments in a society. Artists have, and still use it as a vehicle of expression of societal values, a medium of information and a popular form of entertainment. In this respect, the economic and political meltdown in Zimbabwe over the past decade have given rise to protest songs as artists became the mouthpiece of a population that is enduring economic hardships. One such artist is Samm Monro, popularly known as Comrade Fatso. He is one of the emerging young musicians who, through his protest music, has become an inspiration to ordinary Zimbabweans from all walks of life because his songs are insightful commentaries on what is happening in their country. This paper discusses the protest discourse that his wide audience finds appealing. The focus is on the lyrics from excerpts of four songs on his album Chabvondoka.

Writing Arthur, Writing England: Myth and Modernity in T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone

The tendency in previously published work on T. H. White's Arthurian texts has been to consider either biography or educational aspects and to consider nationalism (if at all) in terms of White's pacifism. The Sword in the Stone (1938) represents the first installment of White's fictional series of works based on Arthurian mythology, specifically Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth century romance Le Morte Darthur (1485) and this article will argue that it offers a paradigmatic example of Rosemary Marangoly George's assertion that a home is as political an act as imagining a nation. Establishing either is a display of hegemonic power (George, 4) and betrays the cultural unease and uncertainty of the British interwar experience. The novel recounts the boyhood of King Arthur, also known as the illegitimate Wart, under the stewardship of his foster father Sir Ector in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage and details his education for kingship through a series of fantastical lessons under the tutelage of Merlyn the magician. This article will suggest that far from offering simplistic laudatory allegories of English identity or a return to the known as personified by place, White's narrative is a hybridized and metalinguistic construct that incarnates the fragmentation English identity underwent during the period of its composition. Noting that the text's evo- cation of medieval English pageantry, the pastoral and the fantastic turns on the question of legitimate and illegitimate identities, this article will argue that the narrative examines the late-imperial interwar difficulties of articulating national and individual models of identity. In this context, the text's representational strategies will be interrogated as being simultane- ously contiguous to the traditions governing the recycling of Arthurian mythology and the reprocessing strategies employed by twentieth-century

On Flags and Fraternities: Lessons on Cultural Memory and Historical Amnesia in Charles Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy"

I think South, which I love, and then I think racist, which I hate, and those two ideas are stuck together in this flag--forever. --Mary Elizabeth, Any Day Now come up to courthouse, and I see flag waving there. This flag ain't like one got at school. This one here ain't got but a handful of stars. One at school got a big pile of stars--one for every state. --James, in Ernest Gaines' Sky Is Gray When Pat Buchanan remarked several years ago that if there is room for We shall overcome in our country, then there is room for Confederate flag, I was struck again by obtuseness of his (and others') failure to see why flag flown by an army fighting to preserve slavery (albeit among issues) is offensive, not only to descendants of slaves but also to all who find institution reprehensible--like writer Reynolds Price, for example, who argues against, simply put, offending others: As a white native of Warren County, North Carolina, who was born only 68 years after end of Civil War and slavery; as a man who knew several elderly men and women who had been born slaves; and as great-grandson of at least one slaveowner, I can see no appropriate present use for any of several Confederate flags outside a museum or a serious historical film or dramatic reenactment that makes no attempt to defend rebel cause. Perhaps a few generations from now stain of which so appallingly blots entire Confederate enterprise, will have faded in its power to offend; but as direct descendant of many otherwise decent souls who supported awful machine of slavery and who defended their holdings against Union forces, I'd have to say that any present display of flag in situations than those named above seems to me a moral insult. (155) Around time that Buchanan and others began to defend Confederate flag against those who would have it taken down from state buildings (the mid-1990s), I found myself bringing up issue of flying Confederate flag when teaching Charles Waddell Chesnutt's conjure tale Po' Sandy. In Po' Sandy, Chesnutt illuminates clearly how a symbol of Old South--whether it be a kitchen built off of main house, as in Chesnutt's story, or a Confederate flag--cannot be separated from history of slavery and just represent romantic side of time period or southern pride. Not only should one not ignore not-so-romantic side of coin, reality of that other side reveals illusory nature of romance. As Louis Rubin writes, There is nothing sentimental or pathetic about heritage of Civil War. What it is is tragic--people, most of them ordinary, decent people, fighting hard and well for a cause that was basically wrong. Thank God it was lost (46). In her book Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in Imagined South, Tara McPherson suggests that, while Americans seem to recognize the horrors of slavery, we remain unable to connect this past to romanticized history of plantation .... The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our representations of material site of those atrocities, plantation (3). Chesnutt's short story illustrates that romanticizing plantation home goes back at least as far as nineteenth century--indeed, for as long as romance writers have used Old South as a setting for their books and entertained readers with their sentimentalized portrayal of that place and time. Po' Sandy is second story in Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899). The reader learns in first story, Goophered Grapevine, that John, white narrator of each story's frame, and Annie, his wife, have recently moved to North Carolina from North. Subtleties in Goophered Grapevine reveal that although move was ostensibly made for Annie's health, it also allows John to take advantage of cheap land and labor in post-Civil War South. …

Mentoring Beyond Homophobia: Reauthoring for Cultural Competence

Using the narrative paradigm for teaching about cultural competence in the context of prejudice, this paper presents a conceptual framework for helping students reach beyond homophobia and heterosexist bias to integrate the ethics of the profession into their practices with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations. Drawing from the theoretical writings of Michael White's narrative approach to therapeutic practice, the model organizes around the constructs of mentorship, story deconstruction, and "reauthoring." Designed to reach out to undergraduate students through examining prejudice (homophobia) and the concept of privilege as a derivative of power (heterosexism), this pedagogical approach uses the structures of dialogue in the form of a reauthoring journal and parallel self-examination as the tools for mentorship.

RECONSTRUCTING RACE AND FREEDOM IN ATLANTIC MODERNITY

This essay offers a dialectically intertextual reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative within a reconstructed account of Atlantic race history. As such it provides one kind of answer to Paul Gilroy's call to consider “the Atlantic as one, single complex unit of analysis” in order to build a “transnational and intercultural perspective.” The essay pursues a transcultural Atlantic perspective that moves beyond strictly racial paradigms (those that would segregate, say, discussion of Anglo-British from Afro-British cultural legacies); yet it also brings into view how, paradoxically, it is in part their race narratives that link these traditions. That is, the essay argues that both black and white narratives pivot on the scene of a sea crossing and an accompanying experience of self-loss that is recuperated, ultimately, under the sign of race. Anglo-authored texts from Oroonoko to Billy Budd regularly practice what Toni Morrison calls Africanism, subsuming the African-Atlantic story within their own Atlantic freedom plots, while African-Atlantic texts directly challenge this erasure and rewrite the Atlantic story—yet also do so as the story of a race's quest for its freedom. The core historical contribution of the essay is to trace this dialectical relation between Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions (as the author refers to them) to the seventeenth-century revolutionary period in which the will to freedom was first defined as a racial trait. This history allows us to appreciate just how shrewdly Olaudah Equiano managed the paradoxes of the racialized Atlantic freedom quest.

“From Typee to Clarel: ‘Across the Chasm’”

racialized “Other”—can have over a white subject and narrator. Ahab’s sublime vision dominates the entire crew of the Pequod. And the sublime novel uplifted some readers, enabling them to respond creatively to the text. The black abolitionist and intellectual, James McCune Smith, and Clara Guernsey, a popular writer and reformer from Rochester, New York, creatively reinterpreted Melville’s sublimity in Moby-Dick. Guernsey, who published six novels and numerous stories in well-known magazines, was a friend of the Senecas and eventually became an adopted member of their tribe. Two of her novels, The Merman and the Figure Head (1871) and The Shawnee Prisoner (1876) vividly reveal Melville’s influence on her as a writer; and The Merman and the Figure Head is the most sustained engagement with Moby-Dick in the Civil War era. In it Guernsey transforms Moby-Dick into a domestic tale of interracial romance; and she focuses on and gives voice to characters who are silent in Moby-Dick: the white whale and sea creatures, especially the protagonist, a merman, who lives in a republican society of mer-people off the coast of Massachusetts, whose fancy for humans is his undoing. “From Typee to Clarel: ‘Across the Chasm’” Samuel Otter University of California, Berkeley Neither persistent critical narratives of decline or exhaustion nor Melville’s weariness with his typecasting as “the man who lived among the cannibals” should obscure the importance of Typee in the epic reflections of Clarel. In Clarel, Melville rewrites his Marquesan encounters. Memories of Nuku Hiva mark the terminus of the poet’s pilgrimage in the Holy Land. When critics do avoid a narrative of loss in moving from Typee to the poetry, they tend to interpret Melville’s Pacific depictions as retrieving a balance or repose associated with the South Seas. I would like to suggest something different: that the Marquesas continue to disorient and surprise and that these effects are valued, maybe given the highest value, by the poet. Tommo’s view of Nuku Hiva at the beginning of Chapter 7—the ascent that gives access to gaps, the line of sight that turns out to be composed of precipitous ridges—seems to have made a deep impression on Melville. Much of the pleasure and the challenge of reading Typee and Melville’s other prose and poetry involves the longing to, as Tommo puts it, stride “from summit to summit” and the necessity of heeding gaps. Melville continually figures such interrupted rhetorical advances. In Moby-Dick, the narrator describes both the course of the ship and an experience of reading: “The strange, upheaving, A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 125

The search for authenticity

In the popular imagination skinhead identity has come to be inextricably connected to a white-racist identity. This article explores this tenet through an ethnographic exploration of an online skinhead newsgroup, a milieu where racial markings are seemingly absent. The empirical findings expose that ‘racism’ is read ambivalently by the newsgroup's skinheads. ‘Racism’ is not viewed as a constituting component of skinhead identity; however, there is widespread commitment to a ‘white identity’. This article concentrates on the processes which give rise to a digitalized (white) skinhead identity, (re)established online in and through textual performances. Narratives of whiteness articulated through the node of skinness, reveal the salience of racial bodies in the virtual world. However, the imagined relationship between skinheads and racism is not straightforward. The skinheads of this research do not enact an explicit discriminatory racism, but rather they imagine whiteness as a performative condition of skinness, a notion that necessitates a figurative (and literal) aggressive relation to ‘otherness’.

'Going Bush': Black Magic, White Ambivalence and Boundaries of Belief in Postcolonial Kenya

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which contemporary white Kenyans know about, talk about and sometimes interact with what they call 'witchcraft' and 'magic' in ways they find deeply discomfiting. Although white Kenyans are at pains to justify their postcolonial advantages in Kenya in terms of a level-headed and pragmatic kind of personhood, many of them interact with indigenous religious ontologies more than ever, sometimes as manipulators of the occult and sometimes as its fear-stricken victims. Because of these contradictions between ideology and experience, white narratives about 'witchcraft' and 'magic' are frequently riddled with tensions and equivocations. Many white Kenyans find creative rhetorical strategies for dealing with these tensions, strategies that sometimes fly in the face of simple models of 'belief ' as a commitment to truth value by treating it as a state of vulnerability that can lay one open to mysterious ontological forces.

Enslaved Africans’ Rivalry with White Overseers in Plantation Culture

Conventional wisdom about the Old South excludes slaves from the ranks of plantation overseers. However, a preference for restrictive types of evidence and a race-sensitive system for assigning titles in plantation culture raise questions about the accuracy of conventional wisdom. Reexamining conventional scholarship and supplementing it with slave narratives and legal resources suggest that slaves served as overseers more frequently and more competently than previously reported. First, an analysis of both Black and White narratives across the Old South reveals many instances where slaves performed the duties of overseers without carrying that title. Second, drawing on a comparison with the rivalry between Black and White urban workers, an analysis of salary data for White overseers suggests that their competition for work with slaves contributed to other factors that depressed their value to planters.