White Fantasies Research Articles

LuLaRich

LuLaRich

Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

Mothers’ Hopes and Domestic Magic: White Racial Habitus and Fantasies of White Suburban Childhood

AbstractThis article is a collaborative ethnographic examination of the formation of white, middle‐class, suburban mothers’ subjectivities and mothers’ roles in the reproduction of racial inequity and structural violence. We focus on their affective labors transforming home spaces and suburban landscapes into white fantasies of childhood, which we describe as kind of domestic magic. We argue at the heart of this white racial habitus is the figure of the child and childhood. The child embodies mothers’ hopes for happy families and motivates their work and sacrifice. Our aim in this article is to show how racialized suffering and violence may not be reproduced by racial animus, neglect or ignorance but by seemingly innocuous hopes to make or conjure idyllic fantasies for children.

White Skin and the Black Mask™

White Skin and the Black Mask™

Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts

Reviewed by: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts Christen Mucher (bio) Keywords Settler colonialism, Primordialism, Indigenous peoples, Print culture Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 292. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $37.50). Edward Watts’s Colonizing the Past is one of the first monographs to apply a settler-colonial analytic to the well-worn materials of early American myth-making. Spanning U.S. literary production from 1780 to 1915, the book is a dazzling survey of the literary construct of “primordialism”— that is, “white fantasies” of the pre-Columbian past that seek to provide U.S. citizens with a whitened ancient history by displacing Indigenous pasts (4, 76). Watts divides his work into five case studies of primordialism, each of which “diminish Indians”: the myths of Welsh Indians, Lost Tribes, Mound Builders, ancient Irish colonists, and the Vikings and Normans of the Norse Revival (7). His texts range from novels and newspaper articles to poetic epics, tracing the iconic primordial figures over the long century. In the tradition of classic American studies per Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, Watts places print culture within its specific historical context while also, in the style of Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, John Carlos Rowe, and Amy Kaplan, attending to literary history as a vector of imperial violence.1 Colonizing the Past does not [End Page 491] merely assert that the narratives of “primordial whites” were connected to nation-building: It shows how they were central to it. Watts’s attempt to understand the tangle of racialization, white identity, and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century print culture is a clear, compelling, and original reading of familiar as well as non-canonical texts that “reveals the moral and racial precariousness of the settler nation” (46). While notable recent scholarship has focused on Watts’s broad subject, none has situated the production of ancient pasts in the paradigm of white supremacy and settler triumphalism as clearly and insistently as Watts has here.2 In the connections he draws between marginal texts and canonical writers, Watts also makes clear that the power of primordialism was not confined to the pens of “western” writers or removal apologists. Moreover, Watts’s deep knowledge of the print culture of the early republic and antebellum eras translates into a fascinating and useful guide to U.S. literary history. Watts’s first chapter provides a superb survey of writings on Welsh Indians, by which Watts also displays his unparalleled knowledge of the literary history of early America. Chapter 2 includes a particularly skilled reading of Lydia Sigourney’s 1822 poem Traits of the Aborigines in America and the culture of sentiment, intriguingly casting the New England writer’s anti-removal campaign as motivated not by the abhorrence of violence but rather by millennialism (75, 72). The third chapter is likewise noteworthy for its refreshing reevaluation of the “Mound Builder myth,” [End Page 492] which Watts frames in terms of the rise of industrialism and struggle over western and southern markets. Additionally, his analyses of colonialism and transatlantic folk and nationalist movements provide a thought-provoking reorientation for the immigration debates and anti-Catholic nativism of the mid-nineteenth century. Colonizing the Past is admirable in its forceful assessment of settler triumphalism—Watts boldly indicts, for example, the “genocidal print culture of Jacksonian America”—and for avoiding euphemism or under-statement (94). One of its most compelling, if subtle, arguments is that much of early nineteenth-century literary culture was engaged in developing “fiction[s] of absolution” to excuse white settlers from the theft and murder that enabled U.S. national settlement on Indigenous lands (46, 91, 128). Indeed, the book’s major contribution to the field is its clear-eyed attention to the operations of whiteness, and to the entanglement of racialization and settler colonialism. Moreover, it provides an accessible introduction to settler-colonial theory and delivers a compelling argument for the theory’s applicability to early American literature. The Atlantic orientation of the book, however, is a limitation that frequently led Watts to postcolonial...

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines

Reviewed by: Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines Koritha Mitchell Alisha Gaines. Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2017. 213 pp. $27.95. With Rachel Dolezal's making news that no one could avoid in 2015, the analysis offered in Black for a Day is a gift. Alisha Gaines traces the history of "racial impersonation" while demonstrating that Dolezal is part of a tradition. Gaines reveals why the tradition endures, leaving readers to pass judgment on whether it is admirable. Gaines traces a "genealogy of temporary black individuals operating under the alibi of racial empathy." Like scholarly predecessors, she finds that "empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion" (8). Because American culture overemphasizes the interpersonal while ignoring the structural, racial impersonators prove willing to "walk in someone else's skin rather than in their shoes" (10). Gaines's four chapters render in-depth analyses of racial impersonations that yielded published narratives aligning with the belief that Americans value "cross-racial understanding." The journey begins with Ray Sprigle, a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for undercover investigative work and embarked on racial impersonation to win another. Gaines is therefore unequivocal: "the white impersonators in this genealogy are not passing; instead, they 'become black' only to exploit their temporary impersonations" (19). Sprigle's work is characterized by his purported desire to uncover racial violence but also by his refusal to risk experiencing any. His text therefore relies on what Gaines calls "Dixie Terror," which is mythical. After all, Dixie "cannot be found on a map" (22). Dixie Terror "exploits racism for its titillating marketability" (23). While emphasizing racism, Sprigle also admits that "in 4,000 miles of travel by Jim Crow train and bus and street car and by motor, I encountered not one unpleasant incident" (qtd. in Gaines 31). Gaines concludes: "Sprigle never learned what it meant to be a black man. Instead, he learned how to be a 'good nigger'" (31). Chapter two analyzes perhaps the most famous racial impersonator, John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me (1961), which remains in print and has sold "over a million copies in fourteen languages" (66). Gaines examines the series of stories for Sepia magazine that describes Griffin's experiences as a Black man, the book-length follow-up, the film, and diary entries that expose what was never revealed in published writings. She thus offers a lengthened genealogy of the work, one that brims with unexpected details and insights. For example, because the writers of the film version of Black Like Me had "access to Griffin's journals," the movie exposes what Griffin never admitted publicly—that he was sexually excited by the idea of his wife with his Black alter ego (75). Meanwhile, Griffin experiences unwanted sexual advances from Southern white men who take him to be Black, and Gaines's theoretical sophistication allows readers to understand the intrusions to a degree that Griffin himself may not have. Also, although Griffin's apparent capacity to be an ally to African Americans is limited, Gaines notes that "[u]nlike Sprigle, Griffin put himself in harm's way, relating the numerous consequences of his new black masculinity under the regimes of Jim Crow, including being hanged in effigy in his hometown of Mansfield, Texas, after he returned to whiteness" (81). Gaines's understanding of how gender and sexuality intersect in lived experiences often reveals the limitations of racial impersonators' empathy for African Americans. In chapter three, readers learn that Griffin mentored the author of the [End Page 173] next text to be examined, Grace Halsell's Soul Sister (1969). Halsell read Griffin's Black Like Me and pursued his guidance, which he lent throughout her journey. Ultimately living for six months as a Black woman, she spent time both in Harlem, New York and in Mississippi. Griffin had been queered while being perceived as Black, which creates for readers the opportunity for a nuanced understanding of how race inflects gender and sexuality as he guides his protégé. However, Halsell's socialization into white womanhood created a lens for...

Rendering Whiteness Palatable: The Acceptable Muslim in an Era of White Rage

In this paper, I analyze the perspectives of the Acceptable Muslim (Kassam, 2018)in two Canadian case studies: (a) Irshad Manji, a Canadian Muslim journalist and activist who has been an active commentator on a variety of issues including those related to Muslims; and (b) the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), which was the first Canadian mainstream television series featuring Muslim characters. I suggest that these case studies illuminate the figure of the Acceptable Muslim (Kassam, 2018)who is represented as a “moderate,” modern, and assimilable Muslim, and who espouses a privatized faith with few public expressions of religious/cultural belonging. Centrally implicated in Canadian debates about multiculturalism, gender equality, citizenship, and secularism, Acceptable Muslims (re)confirm the racial boundaries of the nation-state, becoming icons of multiculturalism, reanimating the whiteness at the heart of the Canadian nation-state. The Acceptable Muslim sustains the narrative of the Canadian nation-state as liberal, secular, modern, and inclusive even as it relentlessly excludes, punishes, and eliminates the Muslim Other, enabling such policies to be legitimated as “race-neutral.” Acceptable Muslims stand as sentries at the (symbolic) borders of the nation, reanimating racialized boundaries of acceptability and signalling that those beyond these boundaries can be legitimately policed by the nation-state. My analysis provides insights into how Canada has re-configured the power and persistence of its white fantasy and, through the strategic use of the Acceptable Muslim, cloaks its deeply racialized coding in more palatable grammars of multiculturalism, gender equality, and secularism.

Racial technological bias and the white, feminine voice of AI VAs

ABSTRACT This essay illuminates the ways that tech corporations harness the specter of white femininity and program it into artificially intelligent virtual assistants (AI VAs). Specifically, AI VAs reflect characteristics of white femininity in voice and cultural configuration for the purposes of white supremacy and capitalistic gain. These characteristics serve to not only uphold whiteness as both normative and technologically superior, but also rationalize neoliberal logics. I specifically focus on the projected supremacy of white voice and the use of AI VAs as playing into the white fantasy of exit, what James Brook and Iain A. Boal deem “another ‘white flight.’”

What is the Future? Weirdness and Black Time in Sorry to Bother You

Most critics trace the inception of the Weird to H. P. Lovecraft, whose infamous racial politics undergird the uncanny representations that constitute the genre. These critical arrangements are evident in Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. This essay argues that Riley's film literalizes discourses that equate black people with animals and thus highlights how the white fantasy about black sub-humanity persists despite a neoliberal progress narrative invested in the notion that racism is obsolete. The Weird in Riley's film at once reveals the perversely uncanny nature of racism itself and rejects the notion that racism is a function of time rather than of a deeper, ontological crisis in white consciousness. If the future is a construct upon which we project our post-racial "hopes for tomorrow," then Riley's film asks, "What is the future?" Because for the black person, as Sorry to Bother You shows us, the past is prologue.

Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury

Reviewed by: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury Faedra Chatard Carpenter FAIRVIEW. By Jackie Sibblies Drury. Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. September 14, 2019. Fairview had yet to start, but as I walked down the aisle, Roc Lee’s sound design—nostalgic sitcom tunes—sashayed through the air, setting the tone. As I settled in, listening to the theme of Good Times, I observed how set designer Misha Kachman devised the cross-section of a single-family home: living room and parts of a pastel-hued dining room/kitchen that suggested a distinctly African American middle-class suburbia. The cultural and class particularity represented by the space was strengthened by the oversized family portrait that gazed at the audience from the living room wall, a photo that conjured church directory or school yearbook formality. The photograph intrigued me. Something seemed amiss. My eyes were drawn to the contours that traced the bodies in the portrait. I assessed the image with suspicion. Something is going to happen with that picture . . . but what? Prior to this time, I had managed—through chance and will—to avoid details about the Pulitzer-winning Fairview. While I was cognizant of its acclaim, I heeded warnings to sidestep the script and bypass field discussions until I had a chance to see it. Yet and still, two details proved impossible to evade: 1) Fairview wrestles with race, and 2) the play begets a buzzworthy surprise. Subsequently, I was keenly aware of my own positionality and evaluative impulses as an active spectator—an awareness that was augmented by the play’s design. Accordingly, I should forewarn readers that in service of sufficient critical engagement, this review divulges significant spoilers. For those who would like to experience the intentions of Fairview fully, I suggest returning to this review once they have seen or read the play. Once Woolly Mammoth’s production of Fairview commenced, my attention toward the portrait was overtaken by the play’s first wave of archetypical characters: Beverly, the frenzied mother and B. Smith wannabe (Nikki Crawford); Dayton, her placating husband (Samuel Ray Gates); Keisha, their smart, athletically gifted high school senior (Chinna Palmer); and Jasmine, Beverly’s fierce and fabulous sister (Shannon Dorsey). Deftly directed and performed, the initial and purposefully one-dimensional countenance of these characters soon revealed this play’s layered textures. Fairview began simply enough: Beverly frantically prepared her mother’s seventieth birthday [End Page 367] bash. As her anxiety increased, the play revealed that appearances are paramount—the appearance of success, domestic bliss, and familial synchronicity overpowers inconvenient truths. DuBoisian double-consciousness quickly emerged and soon expanded to include Fanonian hailing and current critiques of surveillance. These tropes redoubled during act 2, when the first act’s sitcom-styled drama silently repeated itself. Instead of the onstage performers vocalizing their lines, the audience heard voice-over commentary from projected shadows that were (thanks to Colin K. Bills’s lighting design) framed within the façade’s upper windows. Click for larger view View full resolution Samuel Ray Gates (Dayton) and Nikki Crawford (Beverly) in Fairview. (Photo: Teresa Castracane.) While the Black actors reenacted act 1, the voices —audible signs of white gazes—offered cavalier commentary on racial narratives, stereotypes, and experiential otherness. The theme of surveillance activated word and deed; white thoughts soon became white scripts that Black bodies were driven to enact. The puppeteering became so domineering, that act 3 gave white fantasies of Blackness shape and form—birthed into caricatures that invade the once-seemingly stable space. Behaviors on stage rallied into the ridiculous. The lines between real and mediated became incoherent chaos, perverting sitcom slapstick into destructive, prop-obliterating pandemonium—the madness of racism incarnate. While Fairview articulates varying forms of racist hostilities within dominant, Eurocentric culture, this thematic reveal was accentuated variously in the Woolly Mammoth production. The irrationality of racism was portrayed by scenic segues that traversed from the all-too-familiar to the all-too-surreal. For instance, something did happen with that family photograph: it literally framed the explosive entrance of the “très sexy” grandma Bets (Laura C. Harris). With Bets and other purposefully exaggerated racial impersonations...

Bombshells and Balaclavas

The performative media work of Australian artists Abdul Abdullah and Cigdem Aydemir is addressed at the precise rendering of a form of white fantasy about the Islamic Other that also neatly captures the terms of the immigration debate in Australia. Their art works appeal to the possibility of a different encounter between white Australia and immigrants from Islamic cultures, one that is informed by the mediated discourse of white paranoia but not contained within it. Gesturing to more beneficent outcomes while still inhabiting ‘the liminal spaces of inclusion/exclusion’ in Australia with all its attendant ironies.

Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular

Meeting at the Watchtower:Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular Zachary Manditch-Prottas (bio) His Goat, Our Lamb: Soul on Ice and James Baldwin as Instructive Victim In his prison-time memoir Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power ideologue provocateur, attacked the racial authenticity and manhood of perhaps the most acclaimed and accomplished African American author of the decade, James Baldwin. Cleaver's critical aim was Baldwin's personal sexual practices and corresponding racial psychology, not his prose. Cleaver asserted that Baldwin's sexuality was, in essence, the manifestation of a "racial death-wish" (101). He argued that Baldwin's sexuality was a concession of his black manhood and signaled his engagement in an unachievable attempt to "becom[e] a white man in a black body" (103). Baldwin stood as the formative example of an evidential link between black male homosexuality and interracial homosocial obedience; a type of "succumb[ing] psychologically" (135) that manifested not solely as an involuntarily induced psychic condition but also as a literal act of masochistic interracial submission. Soul on Ice has acquired an infamous canonical status in African American letters as the era's most candid and illustrative declaration of the phallocentric interplay of racial and sexual politics. Cleaver's attack on James Baldwin is the most notorious and frequently cited example of homophobia in the Black Power era. The essay "Notes on a Native Son," in which Cleaver addresses Baldwin, has emerged in particular as ground zero terrain for considerations of black gay men as, to borrow a phrase from Robert Reid-Pharr, intraracial abject "scapegoat[s]" (603): those sacrificed in efforts to stabilize heterosexual black masculine subjectivity and prospective nationalist collectivity. Following this reasoning, Baldwin has served as the iconic embodiment of an internal racial boundary that at once threatened and fortified the union of heterosexuality with authentic black masculinity. Marlon Ross has suggested that the consistent centering of Cleaver's lambasting of Baldwin has overdetermined the perception of Black Power as unequivocally coupled with openly homophobic masculine posturing ("White Fantasies"). I agree with Ross that Cleaver's position on homosexuality and his focus on Baldwin to illustrate his position has significantly, and unfairly, saturated scholarly consideration of the relationship between masculinity and the Black Power ethos. A significant consequence of Ross's proposition is that Baldwin has been repeatedly victimized through persistent reproductions of the terms of Cleaver's discourse. In this respect, in critical evaluations of Cleaver's position, Baldwin's subjectivity is ironically and repeatedly usurped by those very sexualized terms of discourse that are being interrogated. In the context of Ross's argument, he suggests that centering Huey Newton's speech "On the Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements" would make for a vastly different narrative of Black Power, masculinity, and sexuality. In matters of gender and sexual progressiveness, Newton rightfully stands as Cleaver's epochal [End Page 179] opposite. Newton's evolution and public disavowal of homophobia and sexism is largely credited to the influence of James Baldwin as well as Jean Genet. It is notable, however, that Newton's 1973 essay, "Eldridge Cleaver, He Is No James Baldwin," can be read as the pioneering work in the now-familiar positioning of Baldwin as victim to interrogate Cleaver's homophobia and sexism and to question his sexuality. Newton's essay, while in fact quite deft in much of its psychoanalytic reading of Soul on Ice, functions largely as a curious piece of popular archival gossip. The most widely mentioned, but rarely closely considered, element of the essay is Newton's claim that in 1967, shortly after the publication of Soul on Ice, he saw Baldwin and Cleaver share an erotic kiss. Whether the story is true or revealing of Cleaver's "true" sexual identity is beside my point here. Newton's story is noteworthy because he uses Baldwin, whose privacy is presumably of no concern as he is, in Newton's words, "an admitted homosexual," as corporeal evidence of Cleaver's mindset and suppressed identity. Newton suggests that Baldwin kissed Cleaver to "expose" Cleaver. Of the kiss, Newton concludes that Baldwin, "who had neither written nor uttered a...

Playing in the White: Black Writers, White SubjectsBlack Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic WorldBorrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American ImaginationBlack for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Playing in the White: Black Writers, White SubjectsBlack Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic WorldBorrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American ImaginationBlack for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

‘A Southern man can have a harem of up to twenty Danish women’: Sexotic politics and immigration in Denmark, 1965–1979

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Denmark received about 15,000 foreign workers from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, the Middle East and North Africa during a unique period of women’s and sexual liberation. As foreign men visited discos—sometimes in search of sexual relationships with Danish women—a segment of Danish men accused foreigners of taking not only ‘their’ jobs but also ‘their’ women, and depicted foreign men as hypersexual or sexually violent (e.g. in union newspapers, men’s magazines). These ‘sexotic’ depictions of foreign men had immediate and negative effects on immigrants’ lived experiences in Denmark. In gay male subcultures, ‘sexotic’ depictions of men of color served mainly to entertain white fantasies, which also affected the experiences especially of gay men of color in Denmark. Overall, sexualized stereotypes about the male Other were central to broader political discussions in Denmark in the long 1970s, including debates about Danish wage suppression, immigrant ghetto formation, and the definition of sexual liberation.

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines

Reviewed by: Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines Martha J. Cutter Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. By Alisha Gaines. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 213. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3283-4; cloth, $80.00, 978-1-4696-3282-7.) For many years, we have been told that passing is passé. Yet the recent media frenzy surrounding Rachel Dolezal proves that U.S. culture is still vehemently [End Page 787] invested in defining the boundaries of whiteness and blackness. When I flashed a PowerPoint slide of Dolezal last spring in my African American literature class, students broke into a cacophony of groans, shouts, and exclamations of "she's not black!" I was surprised that all but one of my students instantly recognized Dolezal's image and that virtually everyone had an opinion about her. The plethora of recent books on racial passing—both on African Americans who pass as white and Anglo Americans who pass as black—further demonstrates this topic's great fascination. Despite postmodern views that race is a construct, scholars often want to pin a racial passer into one category, usually as either a seeker of freedom from racial codes or a betrayer of his or her "true" race. Yet few have considered what passing tells us about our own investments in racial binaries. I therefore turned with pleasure to Alisha Gaines's thoughtful book, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy, which joins a slim list of studies of "'passing, in reverse'": the phenomenon of white people who pass for and sometimes claim to become black (p. 17). Other books on this subject include Baz Dreisinger's Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (Amherst, Mass., 2008) and some chapters in Julie Cary Nerad's edited collection, Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010 (Albany, N.Y., 2014). Gaines mentions only one of these works, although I trust that she has consulted both of them. Gaines's book is well written and compelling. Her argument that white people'sattemptsat "cross-racial empathy" and identification often fail because of their refusal to consider the larger structural and institutional causes of racism is certainly sound (p. 8). Moreover, her use of archival sources is exemplary. I have written about white-to-black passing, yet I still learned much factual information about the passers she studies, including Ray Sprigle, a journalist who published In the Land of Jim Crow (1949); John Howard Griffin, whose book Black Like Me (1961) eclipsed the accounts of all other would-be white passers; Grace Halsell, a white woman and a journalist who took on Griffin's mantle and published Soul Sister (1969); and finally, the families who switched races in the six-episode television series Black. White. (2006). The book concludes with a short examination of Rachel Dolezal, whom Gaines refuses to consider as "transracial" because the theorization of this term "falls apart" (p. 170). She explains that "blackness becomes the space of racial play, performance, and affect, whereas whiteness does not" (p. 170). This ignores that some light-skinned African Americans did play with whiteness (Jean Toomer, for example) and that some white people crossed over into blackness never to come back (Clarence King and Mezz Mezzrow, for instance). Gaines focuses on creating a genealogy of "temporary black individuals operating under the alibi of racial empathy" in order to illustrate the frequent failure of cross-racial empathy and intimacy (p. 8). Still, I found myself wondering what conclusions Gaines might have reached had she looked at less famous individuals who passed permanently into blackness. As I have argued elsewhere, passing is a slippery term with roots in deceit and disguise, magic and transformation. The examples Gaines has chosen to include support her argument that temporary assumptions of blackness cannot lead to structural or institutional change. The book might have benefited from a deeper excavation of previous scholarship on white-to-black passing and [End Page 788] empathy, but even so, Gaines offers a valuable assessment of how white people problematically inhabit the...

Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the "Magic Mike" Series

This essay analyses the theatricalized performance of stripping in the popular films Magic Mike (2013; dir. Steven Soderbergh) and its sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015; dir. Gregory Jacobs). As several pieces about the series have argued, the filmmakers align making oneself an object of desire with an ideology of the ‘entrepreneurial subject’—a versatile and flexible subject suited for a post-Fordist economy—through the figure of ‘Magic’ Mike, a contemporary factotum, played by the charismatic Channing Tatum. Following a critical dance studies approach that attends to the intersection of body and gesture with socio-political, historical, and economic structures, I suggest theatricalized sexual labour in these films reveals the racial exclusions from the ideology of entrepreneurship. Key to my reading is the concept of ‘magic’, part of Mike’s nom de strip. Mike, the hegemonically masculine, heterosexual, white male protagonist, is magic because he is magnetic and effortlessly talented, in such a way that even the material world seems animated by his thrusting pelvis. Magic functions as an ideological device that attempts to hide the labour of training and performance as well as the structures of production in which this labour takes place. Considering the appropriation of black aesthetics in Magic Mike XXL’s performances of striptease, the film seeks to evaporate the spectre of race, that is, the way the white fantasy of the entrepreneurial subject is supported by the appropriation of racialized and especially black labour. While the narrative does not confront the appropriation of black labour directly, an analysis of the performances of striptease shows the film working through the issue on another level, in the complex entanglement of flesh and fantasy, agency and objectification, and racial and gendered desire.

Fears of Disaster and (Post-)Human Raciologies in European Popular Culture (2001-2013)

This article aims at mapping the impact of ‘fears of disasters and crisis’ on European self-representations in terms of racial stereotypes, ‘white fantasies’, gender hierarchies, and heteronormativities. Its methodology is a critical discourse analysis of texts – specifically television series such as the BBC’s Dead Set (2009) and the first season of BBC US and UK, In the Flesh, (2013) and movies such as 28 Days Later (2002), L’Horde (2009), and World War Z (2013) – read through the lens of postcolonial theories, critical race and whiteness studies, the concepts of political philosophy and the theoretical insights of post-human feminism. This composite theoretical framework permits a grasp of gendered, racialised and classed fantasies behind the narratives of catastrophe and the visions of the post-apocalyptic world(s) the catastrophe is supposed to bring to life; it also allows an analysis of the meaning and articulations of catastrophe and post-world spatial constructions, and the latter’s relation to actual and imagined social hierarchies (gender, colour and class of the survivors). These are examined in order to understand whose eyes we are expected to imagine and experience the crisis/catastrophe through; the geographies of catastrophe and of post-world(s) (where in the world, and why); the relation between the undead and the living; life amongst the living before the undead threat; and the way protagonists look at the laws, rule, governmentalities, and use of violence in the past, present and future societies. These are a few of the themes that this article discusses in an attempt to uncover what fantasies of the present are hidden behind present memories of the future.

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

Social Death and Narrative Aporia in &lt;em&gt;12 Years a Slave&lt;/em&gt;

The expanding field of Afro-Pessimism elaborates a paradigmatic critique of the Human that reckons civil society’s perverse and parasitic relation to the hydraulics of anti-Black violence. Solomon Northup’s account of captivity in Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and Steve McQueen’s cinematic adaptation (2013) offer synchronic instances illustrative of the incomprehensibility of the slave’s ontological dilemma for the spatiotemporal structure of narrative: social death is the very meta-aporia that interrogates narrative as form. Blacks, pace Frantz Fanon, function instead as structurally inert props for the execution of White fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, foreclosing reciprocity and any ethical structure of desire.