White Imagination Research Articles

A City Upon Stolen Land: Westward Expansion, Indigenous Intellectuals, and the Origin of Resistance

Abstract: During the first century of American Indian intellectual history, two points of view developed to define this unique community. First, as Indigenous people, each writer represented was concerned about a particular nation, usually their own, e.g. Boudinot and the Cherokee, Apess and the Marshpee. Moreover, they wanted the whites to see their faces, as Cherokee or Marshpee, as opposed to merely "Indians," which were despised in the white imagination. Secondly, as Indigenous Christians, some, like Copway, were ministers, they evoked their version of the Brotherhood of Man idea as a way of getting whites to see Indigenous people as fellow human beings and as rightful citizens of the U.S. In the end, as Vine Deloria J.r once stated stated publicly: "All we've ever wanted from Christians is for them to behave like Christians."

One Way to Subjectivity: Bell hooks on Postmodernism Blackness

Postmodernism is a new style that emerged in American culture after World War II, characterized by formalization, decentralization and commercialization. Bell hooks’ Postmodernism Blackness argues that there is an antagonistic relationship between whites and minorities. In turn, postmodern art is an important way for minorities to challenge white hegemony and build subjectivity. The author takes Captivity by Sherman Alexie, a postmodernist writing on the Other as an example to explore the validity of this theory. On the acknowledgement of the Anglo world’s long-standing oppression of Indian ethnicity, Captivity deconstructs the white imagination of Indian ethnicity and reconstructs a narrative about white, Native American as well their relationship from an Indian perspective. At the same time, the protagonist of Indian ethnicity in Captivity has an ambiguous relationship with the white character and presents an image that conforms to white stereotypes, reflecting the author Alexie’s oscillating emotional position between whiteness and Indianness, which is rooted in his specific individual experience. Through an analysis of the context as well the text, it can be seen that bell hooks successfully portray the merging of postmodernist claims of decentrality and minority liberation demands, reflecting the significance of postmodernism for minority construction of subjectivity, but simplifies the issue of identity, ignores the complexity of identity in the real situation, and thus sees national liberation as the only way out for the ethnic minorities.

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

The Ontology of Open Mouths

Abstract The mouth agape is among humankind's most prevalent motifs, its imagery appearing across cultures, continents, and centuries, the significations of which hold all the grand preoccupations of the human experience: terror, hunger, and awe. Accepting Mikhail Bakhtin's estimation that the mouth is “the most important of all human features for the grotesque,” this article examines the disparities between different renderings of these ontological black holes and their disparate implications in horror and g/Gothic texts. While the Scream visualizes terror's sonic expression, this article introduces it alongside what I call the Swallowing: the occasion where the object of fear (the monster) takes the form of a devouring other. A challenge to essentialist interpretations of Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, analysis of the Swallowing lends support to Jack Halberstam's estimation of monsters and g/Gothic horror as narrative and cultural technologies. This article will therefore employ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's method of “reading cultures by the monsters they engender.” If we explore the Swallowing as it appears in both Black horror and Black-led horror films, what might be revealed about the ways b/Blackness has been rendered monstrous within the ideological lexicon of the white imagination? How does Black horror challenge these renderings? And further, what power might we identify in embracing monstrosity as a condition of being?

The child as mediator of racial ambivalence in Australia: ‘Egg Boy’ and the racist girl

ABSTRACT In white settler-colonial Australian imagination, ‘the child’ historically has both signalled the colony’s flourishing and is charged with anxiety about belonging and identity. This article analyses a set of events in which children were the occasion through which Australians managed racial violence and/or publicly distanced the mainstream from endemic racism. Differences between the mediating power of ‘white’ childhood versus Indigenous childhood are analysed, with a view to exploring how children are either problematized or positioned as figures of redemption, through processes of racialization.

White imagination, Black reality: recentering critical race theory in critical whiteness studies

This essay uses the concept of the white imaginary to reflect on Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) in education. It examines the field’s value but also its limitations, specifically its preoccupation with converting white people as the solution to systemic racism. The conversion approach ignores the fuller structural nature of whiteness and often privileges the needs and wants of white people over people of color. The essay argues that to better serve Black students and educators, CWS must stay connected to the central tenets of Critical Race Theory and aligned with approaches rooted in the racial knowledge of people of color, such as work on Black genius.

Racializ-ed/ing identities on stage: Muslims, angst and response in Snookered and Does My Bomb Look Big in This?

The early twenty-first century covers the period when British Muslims found representation in British theatres more than ever before and introduced themselves to both White and non-White audiences with works that highlight their identity and culture. Although theatrical performances by British Muslim playwrights often deal with the sometimes homogeneous and sometimes heterogeneous Islamic cultures of Muslims, the thematic and character-based approach of most of the playwrights is related to the racial positioning of Muslim identity in the distorted narrative frame and White imagination. This article describes how the phenomenon of ‘racializ-ed/ing identity’ as a reflection of the exclusion of Muslims from the theatres as experienced by many minorities in the British theatre industry has been brought to the stage as a counter-attack by British Muslim playwrights. At this point, Ishy Din’s Snookered (2012) and Nyla Levy’s Does My Bomb Look Big in This? (2019) are discussed in the context of the racialization of Muslim identity and the representation of Islamic anger and response.

The intellectual body, the body intellectual

AbstractMedieval Studies is embodied through whiteness, limited by whiteness, and created by the white imagination. In this field, as it is, objectivity is white subjectivity. In this paper, I argue that unless we practice embodied criticism, there is no way to think about the time and space we define as “Medieval Studies” without inhabiting whiteness. Embodied criticism sanctions, if not requires, that we find entry points to history that are not historical. By valuing all of ourselves, by making our critical landscape all of us, we make it impossible to abandon, overlook, or forget the present as we engage with the past. The Middle Ages that I think about and write about is one that is processed through me. In this Middle Ages, nothing that affects how I am in the world is deemed anachronistic because the theoretical, political, social, and legal forces that govern how I operate in the world are the ones that affect how and what I know about history, how and what I think about space. In it, there is value for the questions grief yields. Any work I produce as I process history is radically transparent as a production by me of me, a Muslim, Iranian‐American body in this place and time.

White Imagination in Search of a Canon

White Imagination in Search of a Canon

Review: The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, by Christopher J. Lebron

Review: <i>The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea</i>, by Christopher J. Lebron

The White Settler Imagination of Hometown Hockey

The White Settler Imagination of Hometown Hockey

The Spatial Dimensions of White Supremacy: Reinventing the Lowcountry Plantation in the Gullah/Geechee Nation

AbstractEach year, millions flock to the US Lowcountry South in search of the illusory appeal of a bygone era; one that never existed outside the white imagination. The contemporary grand narrative of long defunct plantations, standing as beacons of a once‐held hope that the South would rise again, offers a cultural commentary on the state of racial politics in the United States—connecting the social and discursive practices of white supremacy to contemporary daily operations across an entire geographic region, in ways that illustrate the structural dialectic between capitalism and race‐making.

Five years later, but centuries in the making

Five years later, but centuries in the making

The Hollywood Indian Stereotype: The Cinematic Othering and Assimilation of Native Americans at the Turn of the 20th Century

This paper intends to demonstrate that the misrepresentation of Native Americans in cinema furthers the logic of differentiation at play in popular culture, focalizing on an irreconcilable enemy image upon which the American self is constructed. The Indian looking glass magnifies America’s lack of self-knowledge. Following Frederic Jackson Turner’s theory of the frontier and the mythologizing of the West at the turn of the 20th century, the Hollywood industry recycled the dual stereotype of the noble Indian and the bloodthirsty savage. This dichotomy deployed through American cinema and literature fits the evolving curve that defines the limits of a cohesive norm and the dominant vision of what the country is, of what it means to be American. As powerful social agents, movies from the period helped shape the way America thought about Native Americans and contributed to a rewriting of History, summoning those fantasized images manufactured by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, dime novels, the paintings of Frederic Remington, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, or Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. I argue that the disappearance of the positive representation of Indians in the 1910s is part of a wider process of assimilation that legitimizes and reinforces the position of white mainstream society. More specifically, this essay investigates the process through which the Hollywood Indian became a necessary ideological tool supporting the All American Hero and the war effort in both World Wars. King Vidor’s Northwest Passage (1940), a work of implicit propaganda used by the National Education Association, makes the Natives an analogy for the Nazis, thus substituting an enemy image for another. George B. Seitz’s The Vanishing American (1925) is also an emblematic example of the use of a dissolving enemy image. As a biased Darwinism inflected the collective consciousness of what was then thought to be their forthcoming extinction, Native Americans had to merge into the conforming frame of the master race, most effectively through the agency of the Office of Indian Affairs and within Indian boarding schools. The Vanishing American culminates with its main character’s demise: Nophaie’s sacrifice proves the two races can never be mixed, and that if assimilation is to take place, it is only through a whitening process that would lead to the obliteration of the Natives. When Nophaie dies, the moment of his passing is described through a skin color change, his face turning white. While the end of the twenties marked the arrival of synchronized-sound cinema, the Natives lingered “voiceless into the margins”, as a silent mirror image that could not speak, epitomizing what the American self was not (Kilpatrick 1999). To this day, white imagination remains unable to articulate the other’s language and to see beyond these immutable images.

Secret Histories and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus Go to the Movies

Secret Histories and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus Go to the Movies Charles P. "Chip" Linscott (bio) In a 2017 "Tate Talk," Arthur Jafa contended that Kahlil Joseph makes music videos that employ "music as a structure for a visual pattern."1 Jafa went on to argue that these musically founded visual patterns reveal "continuities [or] secret histories" at work in Black music and Black visual culture. Jafa's insights are teeming with acute implications for the study of Black music video and Black film, and thus I want to trace the operations of these "visual riffs on [the] music" through a brief series of notable works while suggesting that such a method is more widely applicable. For now, I focus on the relationships between music and image in William Greaves's groundbreaking Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), with music from Miles Davis's In a Silent Way (1969); Spike Lee's music video "Tutu Medley" (1986) for four tracks from Miles Davis's album Tutu (1986); and Kahlil Joseph's short film and gallery installation Wildcat (2013), which features Alice Coltrane's music as reworked by Flying Lotus. Careful analysis of the interplay of the musical works and their visual counterparts reveals the vital imbrications of Black sociality, improvisational praxis, Black arts of remixing and sampling, and the specific difficulties and triumphs of Black cultural production. Such analysis goes beyond traditional distinctions regarding form and content, extending deeply into history, theme, theoretical and philosophical positions, and notions of Black artistic praxis and cultural memory. Along with Jafa and Joseph, I mean to ask how music seeps into and across these moving images, providing opportunities for deeper understandings of both when taken together. In analyzing the complicated interrelationships shared by these particular musical and moving-image objects, we find "secret histories" that are deeply staked into Black culture, with face-value meanings doubling, tripling, and blooming exponentially into other denotations. From signifyin' to slave songs, code switching in perpetual eras of white supremacy, and the encrypted messages of hip-hop lyricism, the "secrecy" relies on close attention to what we might call underground continuities in the artworks and their contexts. [End Page 145] It is important not to fetishize the secrecy of the maps and historical continuities posited by Jafa, however. "Maps to follow" and "histories to uncover" do not imply the necessity for arcane exegesis performed only by rarified audiences.2 Instead, these concepts insist on some cultural literacy and sensitivity—that is, an awareness of Blackness and appreciation of some of its innumerable creative and historical forms. Jafa is pushing for audiences to feel the undercurrents in the work, to be sensitive to the overtones and undertones that go unnoticed during surface-level, hegemonic appreciation. In short, the music provides a map for the creation of the images, but history underpins the music and the image in toto and is essential to the deep appreciation of both. What I (following Jafa) mean is that there is a fecundity in the artworks that is best understood by carefully attending to the interplay of music and images, but comprehension—reading the map, so to speak—hinges on understanding elements of Black history and Black expressive culture that often lie buried under white hegemony. Jafa explicitly points out that although Black musicians have dominated genres such as jazz and hip-hop, Black filmmakers have struggled to achieve "broad recognition in industrial and critical spaces limited by the white imagination."3 There is great depth to be found in pieces such as those analyzed here, but to truly feel the spirits at play in the pieces requires some work. This sort of investigation entails what I would call a retroactive visibility, whereby the overlooked musical foundations of particular Black films and music videos become clear alongside the complex temporalities at work across lineages of Black filmmaking. Retrospection as a form of present-future clarification recalls Avery Gordon's poetic theoretical formulation of haunting. As Gordon so memorably argues, "The ghost or apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known to us, in its own...

Whiteness and the Postracial Imaginary in Disney’s Zootopia

Drawing from strategic whiteness and postracism as critical frames, and utilizing critical rhetorical analysis, this manuscript argues that the 2016 Disney animated hit film Zootopia is a postracial narrative developed by the White imagination to embody an ideal diversity that sustains whiteness. This project seeks to expose how, within the film Zootopia, whiteness toils as a strategic rhetoric to maintain its dominance, benefiting logics of postracism that hinder White liability and any possibilities for White ally-ship. This project offers two identified primary themes. First, the metropolis, Zootopia, is strategically constructed a postracial space of the White imaginary. Second, the film reinscribes racial “Otherness” on Black masculine bodies while centralizing whiteness and romanticizing racism through the common anti-racist White hero trope.

Using the Rotted Names: Wallace Stevens’s Racial Ontology as Poetic Key

This essay takes up Adrienne Rich’s unexplained assertion that Wallace Stevens’s racial and racist language is a “key to the whole” of his poetry. Focusing mostly on Stevens’s 1941 diptych “The News and the Weather,” the essay begins an anthology of critical approaches to the racial Stevens, the language of which has been read as a device by which white protagonism defines itself in opposition to characteristics marked as “black,” as a “blackface” critique of white gentility, and as a melancholic attempt to locate the limits of the white imagination. Reviewing and critiquing such theses, the essay argues that Stevens’s speakers seek in blackness a figure for their own nonbeing and thus speak of blackness in language in which its own fullness of being is denied. This reading, then, interrogates how Stevens’s poetics rely not just on racial difference but on the dehumanization created by the language with which that difference is enforced.

"I'm a Motherfuckin' Monster!": Play, Perversity, and Performance of Nicki Minaj

This article explores Nicki Minaj's play with the fraught, perverse, sexual subjectivities available to women of the African diaspora under the white supremacist imagination of dominant culture. Popular representations of black women's bodies as hypersexual, in corporeal excess and erotic desire, and abject—at once incapable of attaining white Western beauty standards and dangerously tempting to white men (and thus white hegemony)—are historically persistent images that overdetermine black women's sexual subjectivities. These hegemonic hermeneutics, which relegate black women's bodies as monstrous, circumscribe the freedom of desire and self-making available to black women, who are often forced to play the role of either the "whore or asexed," which Hortense J. Spillers identifies in "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words" (2003, 165). In examining Minaj's playful embrace of the perverse through her simultaneous sinister and honest heteronormative desires alongside queer challenges to heteropatriarchy, this article looks to open up the way we critically discuss black women hip-hop artists and their use of their bodies as sites of sexual play and desire by embracing the monstrous.

Technicolor Racism or Caricature Assassination? Satirizing White Anxiety About the Obama Presidency

ABSTRACTUsing the theory of iconography, this article deconstructs the “Politics of Fear” caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama, featured on the cover of The New Yorker magazine, to investigate White imagination about the couple's socio-cultural identities. Published before the 2008 Democratic nominating convention, the caricature set the couple within the Oval Office and depicted Barack in an Arab-style tunic bumping fists with an armed Angela Davis-esque Michelle dressed in fatigues. We examine defenses of the image as satire against anti-Obama caricatures. We also examine original and secondary survey data to uncover the determinants of support for the caricature. We argue that the caricature gave a unifying visual form to disparate trepidations about the Americanness and religious identity of the Obamas. Our article concludes by situating the controversy over the cover alongside longstanding suspicions by Whites that Barack Obama has deceived Americans about his religious identity and loyalty to American ideals.

Addressing the “Negro Problem”: Rethinking the Coon and the Mammy in King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies

This article explores two 1940s B-horror zombie movies to argue that the revitalization of the “coon” and the “mammy” from the slave era in the early twentieth century was part and parcel of the dominant culture’s efforts to contain and control the “monstrous black” of the white imagination. Furthermore, I posit that the dehumanization and Othering that characterized white America’s treatment of African Americans is not a thing of the past. The article advocates for a transatlantic and trans-temporal orientation from scholars, which would allow them to reassess Hollywood films in relation to the systemic racism that pervades American culture and that circumscribes the choices that African American actors had in the past and continue to have today.