White Protagonists Research Articles

Power Dynamics and Cultural Clashes in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing: Decolonising the Discourse of Differences

This paper examines the power dynamics and cultural clashes in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing, focusing on the interactions between the white protagonist, Mary Turner, and her black servants Samson and Moses, as well as a white servant Tony. Set in colonial Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), the novel portrays the pervasive racism and superiority complex of the white colonialists. Mary’s negative perceptions of black culture highlight the colonialists’ failure to appreciate indigenous traditions, reinforcing unequal power structures. Drawing attention to theoretical frameworks such as Franz Fanon’s concept of anti-racism and Ngugi wa Thiang’o’s theory of decolonisation, this paper examines Moses’s resistance to oppression and his quest for decolonisation as manifestations of individual agency within imperialism. Moses’ journey toward decolonisation symbolises a broader struggle for psychological, cultural, and economic liberation from colonial oppression. This analysis underscores the complexities of authority and resistance, illustrating how Mary’s attitudes inadvertently trigger Moses’s decolonisation process. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of Lessing’s exploration of colonial authority, cultural differences, and the necessity of decolonisation.

Moving beyond the magic Indian Trope in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series

AbstractIn films, the Magic Negro is a stock character whose supernatural gifts promote the success of a White protagonist. A character with parallel traits found in a number of mystery series is the Magic Indian, who has supernatural connections and abilities unavailable to others. In his Walt Longmire mysteries, Craig Johnson develops a strong supernatural thread with the agency of Native American characters who can be considered Magic Indians. While Johnson's Magic Indians share similarities with Magic Negroes, they exhibit key differences in the way their spirituality is presented that make them more realistic characters serving an educational function.

Black British love matters: Asserting the transformative power of love in Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold

ABSTRACT The genre of romance has until fairly recently predominantly depicted white protagonists and presented readers with limited representations of ethnic and racial diversity. This paper provides an overview of the ever-increasing number of Black British authors who are currently addressing this significant gap in the British publishing industry and analyse Bolu Babalola’s debut Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold (2020) as a case in point. Love in Colour is a collection of short stories which questions the universality of western tales of love and celebrates Black love and heritage. My contention is that Babalola’s collection, for its innovative elements, not only evinces that contemporary Black British women’s writing, characterized by aesthetic and formal innovations, continues to “test simple generic categories”, but, in its celebration of the transformative power of love, also demonstrates that Black love matters.

Unveiling Color-Blind Racism: Racial Violence, Identity, and Resistance in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees

Racism is pervasive in society; its roots have been deeply ingrained into individuals’ lives, hindering African Americans' ability to achieve stability and peace. It is established in favor of societal convictions that primarily benefit whites to maintain their superiority and dominance over Blacks. Naturally, white people are the foundation of racial supremacy, pretending to treat Blacks equally through practices such as color-blind racism yet limiting Blacks in different fields. African Americans continue to be victims of the dominant ideology of color-blind racism, which produces significant racial tension and conflict in American culture. Correspondingly, they face racial inequities in their daily lives. This study's primary goal is to examine how racial violence still exists in the form of color-blind racism in one of Kidd's most famous novels, The Secret Life of Bees, in which Lily, the white protagonist, is prejudiced against African Americans. Eventually, Lily realizes her ingrained white racial guilt and strives to change it once she embraces the Black community by valuing their identity. In addition, the study also examines how Lily recognizes society's color-blind racist approach, which attempts to instill racism in order to impact and constrain Blacks as an inferior race. Finally, the findings of this study provide a clear picture of the hegemonic ideology known as color-blind racism and how its ideals in practice affect the lives of Black people while favoring the prejudice and discrimination of white characters in the novel.

Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720)

In this essay, I use Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720) to examine how my own scholarly reading practices more broadly reflect and have helped shape a primarily cis-gendered, overwhelmingly white feminist critical history of amatory fictions of the long eighteenth century. I have previously read Manley’s text primarily as a study in feminist rage: Violenta, the virtuous white protagonist, and Ianthe, a woman of African descent enslaved to Violenta’s family, work together across statuses to dispatch an abusive patriarch. However, Ianthe engages in this labour neither for the sake of Violenta nor to attack the system of gendered and economic violation that results in Violenta’s wrongful ruin, but to liberate herself from enslavement. This micro-critical reflection suggests that the text offers a prequel of contemporary discourses on gendered and racial rage. Whose rage is politically consequential or imaginatively possible? Who gets to enact “understandable” violence even in imaginative literature?

Exploring The Convergence of Social Disparities and Interracial Relationships in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings

Slavery is one of the most significant social disparities in human history. It is defined as the practice of owning and exploiting another individual as property or inferior. It is characterized by enforced labor and restraints on freedom. Specifically, slavery was a system that allowed the enslavers who possessed the power to force the enslaved people to work and limit their lives and liberty. In the United States, slavery was solely based on the race and identity of one group of people. However, given their race and skin color, many Black people in America were forced into slavery. Since enslavers considered enslaved people their property, they considered them insignificant. Therefore, this study's primary purpose is to determine how whites dominated Blacks and controlled enslaved people through slavery. Further, it analyses how the interracial bond promotes racial equality in one of Kidd’s novels, The Invention of Wings. Despite initially holding racist views, Sarah, the white protagonist in the novel, develops a close bond with Handful, a Black character. Through this relationship, Sarah gained a deeper understanding of the struggles faced by Black people and eventually became an abolitionist, committed to gradually freeing them from slavery. In addition, this study also explores how the Black characters in the novel fight tirelessly to attain their independence without losing their faith. Hence, the study results in greater insight into Sarah's Interracial relationship with Handful, including how they got inspired and influenced by each other, thus diminishing discrimination between the two races.

For fear of the Other: Simulation of Indigenous presence in horror fiction

The following article examines the portrayal of Indigenous peoples and traditions in modern horror fiction written by non-Indigenous Euro-American authors. While the figures of the noble savage, beautiful maiden and victim of white progress are some of the most enduring stereotypes associated with indigeneity, in this article I demonstrate how in modern horror Indigenous characters and traditions serve as the embodiment of evil, which the White protagonists need to defeat to ensure their own survival. If any Indigenous characters appear in these narratives, they do so mostly in the roles of helpers, which contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous characters in the genre. To illustrate these problems, I draw examples from a number of horror stories ranging from classic to pulp fiction in order to expose the genre’s latent colonial rhetoric, which reinforces the simulation of Indigenous presence in contemporary culture – a phenomenon analysed by the Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor, whose work will provide a theoretical background for my investigation.

Unsettlement: Destabilizing Development in Southern Africa's Settler Fiction

In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels' characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.

Intersectional Audiard: Masculinity and Race in Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers

This article follows the lead of Richard Dyer and Devon Carbado in naming whiteness as a racial identity and uses intersectional analysis to explore Jacques Audiard’s depiction of race and gender in Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers. Both movies depart from the gender norms of earlier Audiard films by doing away with female saviors, so making male protagonists responsible for controlling their own violence. Both films also reflect Audiard’s determination to foreground Black and Brown characters in ways that better reflect the racial and cultural heterogeneity of France and the world. And yet, unorthodox casting choices and visual framing distance these same characters of color from responsibility for violence. Such an approach might be interpreted as a challenge to film makers’ historical tendency to cast Black and Brown men as especially violent. However, Audiard’s films commonly elicit sympathy for white men who exercise violence. Accordingly, Audiard’s denial of authority for violence to Black and Brown characters intimates than they can only be sympathetic if seen to be more upright than his white protagonists.

‘The big shot had become the outsider’: Empathy and circumstance in Elia Kazan’s ‘southern trilogy’

This article brings together three consecutive films within Elia Kazan’s filmography, Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Wild River (1960) and conceptualizes an informal ‘southern trilogy’ within the director’s body of work that attempts an empathetic understanding of the situation that America’s White southerners found themselves in during a time of social and economic upheaval, whilst simultaneously petitioning for the necessity of widespread change. The suggestion is that Kazan’s personal experience as a friendly witness to the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and the resulting ostracization from his artistic community, lent the director a unique voice that imbued these films with a sense of understanding regarding the tension between personal circumstance and evolving cultural environments. Collectively the three films document Kazan’s journey as he sought to justify his political decisions through an insightful and humane discussion of how the changes taking place in the American South throughout the 1950s impacted the everyday private dramas of the region’s inhabitants. Whilst Kazan had struggled to be right in a world that he thought had gone wrong, he portrays his White protagonists as struggling with being wrong in a world that Kazan sees as going right.

A Creature Without a Cave

This article analyses prominent examples of the Wendigo myth in modern North American horror media and the implications of misappropriation by non-Indigenous creators for non-Indigenous audiences. This article’s cross-media analysis covers television, film and game media; Teen Wolf (2011–17), Supernatural (2005–20), Bruce Wemple’s The Retreat (2020) and SuperMassive Games’ Until Dawn (2015). This analysis will trace the process of these media, made by non-Indigenous white creators, removing the Wendigo’s indigeneity and placing it within fictional settings as an antagonist. I have named this observation of the Wendigo the ‘Caveless Creature’ phenomenon. The paper concludes that employing the Wendigo as a caveless creature is a common practice within horror as it easily creates a villain for white protagonists to defeat repeatedly. This construction is problematic in the horror genre as it presents an Indigenous antagonist that poses a threat to white culture for its otherness and indigeneity – while at the same time, misappropriating, discarding and demonising the Indigenous culture the myth comes from, at whim. Although this article is specifically observing the Wendigo, I argue that it is one of many caveless creatures, and the treatment of them by creators of non-Indigenous horror genre should be analysed in the future.

Let boys explain the world to girls who do not know - visual representations of gender and diversity in Austrian primary textbooks and implications for diversity-sensitive education

Let boys explain the world to girls who do not know - Visual representations of gender and diversity in Austrian primary textbooks and implications for diversity-sensitive education Textbooks do not only offer information on specific topics and delineate competence development but provide insights into a society’s socio-cultural norms and values by means of representations . In particular, this refers to the diversity with which classrooms, groups of friends and families are depicted in textbooks. The contribution at hand presents a critical analysis of current Austrian textbooks for the subjects German, Science, Maths and English as a Foreign Language used in primary education. Our analysis reveals a strong tendency towards the depiction of able, white and male protagonists as the norm, presenting an ideology of power from which they explain the world. Female characters are mainly reduced to the activities of wondering, listening to their male counterparts and following their lead. While there are few exceptions, further identities such as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPoC) or people with physical and/or mental varieties can hardly be found. Applying a qualitative and quantitative content analysis, this study not only considered a numerical diversity in terms of gender, BIPoC and physical and/or mental variety but also investigated the agency of respective characters. Thus, disempowerment amplifies when identity markers intersect.

Miseducation in South African Public Schooling: the case of To Kill a Mockingbird

A racial incident revolving around the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in a South African school has prompted this examination of how set works are implicated in the dissemination race-related beliefs. The way the book is taught, it is argued, cements the continuation of the alienation of blackness by affirming ubiquitous white normativity. It perpetuates the notion that the fault lies in an ‘existential deviation’ that inheres in black people. This examination highlights how, through the purposive propagation of white normality, the book exhibits anti-black sentiments. The sympathetic white psyche that subsists simultaneously with the continuing enjoyment of racial favouritism, is appraised. The stance of the book is confronted by noting the contrived largely absent voices of black people in the narrative. This book positions the black characters as props, for the absolution of the white protagonists (and by proxy sympathetic white people) during circumstances of the unremitting and deadly racial oppression.

Transmediating difference: Fictional filter bubbles and transmedia storytelling

Transmedia storyworlds often stem from a blockbuster “anchor property” that connects numerous extensions in multiple media forms. Consequently, transmedia can potentially diversify the media industry’s narratives since each medium may follow a different character whose perspective reinterprets the storyworld’s central themes and events. However, this article argues that a narrative strategy has emerged for “transmediating difference,” wherein politically contested storylines, LGBTQ characters, and the perspectives of women and people of color are sectioned off in low-budget transmedia extensions while blockbuster narratives remain primarily the domain of straight, able-bodied, white male protagonists. This story structure reveals the resiliency of industry assumptions about marketability while also isolating the experience of transmedia audiences, allowing companies to profit from inclusive and sanitized versions of the same narrative world. Like algorithmic “filter bubbles,” transmediating difference undermines cultural pluralism, and ushers in a paradoxical new form of invisibility despite increasingly diverse representation.

The Constraints of Literary Merit in Heidi L. M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Heid L. M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear employs its protagonist, Molly’s, experience within the academy to critique the constraints that literary merit standards place on scholarly work. First, I analyze how Jacobs manifests this argument through Molly’s professors, who criticize and penalize her for straying from the traditional essay format in her written assignments. Next, I look at how, by highlighting Molly’s struggle to reconcile her identity as a Canadian writer, this novel critiques the academic presupposition that authors can only achieve valuable content through the reproduction of canonical literary modes. Further, I consider how Jacobs calls literary merit into question by positing that written works that do not meet this standard can still have scholarly value. However, because Jacobs’ novel centres around a white, heteronormative, and academically-inclined protagonist, its investigation of the constraints of literary merit may be limited. I conclude with the argument that Molly of the Mall leaves readers to question what it means that even a character with a privileged relationship to the academy encounters these constraints.

White Subjectivity and Black Nationalism in José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s Alack Sinner Comic “Vietblues” (1975)

The Argentine artist José Muñoz and writer Carlos Sampayo began publishing their Alack Sinner detective comic in the Italian magazine Alterlinus in 1974, after which its stories appeared in French, Spanish, Argentinian, and US publications. Beginning in 2015, the complete Alack Sinner was republished in several languages, winning over a new generation of readers and critics. In the fourth tale, “Vietblues” (1975), Muñoz and Sampayo liberated their storytelling from the limitations of pastiche and formula to challenge the genre conventions of the “private detective” crime narrative. The comic, set in New York City, foregrounds a white protagonist who refuses to partner with a group of Black nationalists intent on tearing down racist power structures. This article shows how the comic explores two definitions of history and political action: an idealistic, subjective, and individualistic one, and a more historical vision predicated on connections between oppressed groups. Muñoz and Sampayo argue for the possibility of interethnic solidarity while documenting their protagonist’s inability to successfully act on that promise. Key to the analysis are Muñoz and Sampayo’s treatment of race and the ways their white protagonist depoliticizes the African American experience by projecting it into himself as a dream state.

Positioning the Portrayal of White Protagonists in O.A Bushnell’s the Return of Lono and Ka’a’awa

This paper explores the role of literature in the post-truth age through reading on O.A Bushnell’s the Return of Lono and Ka’a’awa. A Hawai’ian novelist, Bushnell contextualizes the earliest interactions between the native Hawai’ian (Kanaka Maoli) and the white settlers which began with the arrival of Captain Cook’s expedition in 1778. Through his fictions, Bushnell underlines positive portrayal of the white characters to provide a counter-discourse to the generally accepted history of Hawai’ian colonialism. Through first person point of view, white characters become the central figure in both of Bushnell’s fictions. Through reading on O.A Bushnell’s narration, this paper aims to elaborate how the Hawai’ian natives also become a willing partner in western colonialism which highlights their colonial complicity. The concept of colonial complicity is employed to highlight the participation of the natives in promoting Western way of thinking. The analysis argues that although Bushnell contextualizes the complicity of the Hawai’ians in promoting Western discourse, resistance also occurs through creation of a hybrid culture. This paper concludes that in the post truth era, literature should always strive to uncover the truth based on subjective interpretation instead of abiding of a universal truth.

Hollywood imagines urban Africa, and it’s as bad as you think

ABSTRACT Since 1918, the Hollywood film industry has represented Africa on film, portraying the continent and its peoples through long-standing stereotypes. This paper specifically focuses on film representations of urban Africa over time. We analysed 50 films produced in a 100-year time span and present a three-category typology of portrayals of African cityspaces. The categories include “the absent city,” in which urban spaces are fully ignored in favour of rural landscape images that represent “Wild Africa” for the West. Most of the films we reviewed, particularly those produced before 1965, occupy this category. A second category is “the exotic colonial city,” which introduce urban scenes that emphasise city street markets. These images work to highlight a long-standing civilised/primitive binary that contrasts white protagonists with the “exotic” Africa and Africans they encounter. The third category is “the Afropessimist city.” This approach to urban representation has emerged as the primary vehicle for portraying African cities in the twenty-first century, emphasising images of urban poverty, corruption and violence. Looking forward, like African-produced films, the Afrofuturist cityscapes in the 2018 film, Black Panther may indicate a turn from 100 years of Hollywood stereotype, although we have reasons to remain cautious.

Visual Identity and the Queer Aesthetics of Passing

The theatricality of passing as heterosexual in the face of legislative, medicalized, and stigmatized homophobia serves as the primary lens through which I analyse three European, gay coming-out films from the 1990s. In all three films – the Swedish-Norwegian film Sebastian (När alla vet, 1995), and two British films Beautiful Thing (1996) and Get Real (1998) – the physical bodies of the white protagonists complicate normative binaries and stereotypical queer aesthetics ascribed to homosexuals in the late 20th century. Specifically, these three films serve as cultural artifacts about the time period, lending insight into how late 20th-century governmentsfrom the two regions treated the homosexual experience through the implementation of legislative, medicalized measures, specifically regarding HIV/AIDS.

Ethical Whiteness and the Death Drive

This article looks at two controversial war films—Eye in the Sky (dir. Gavin Hood, UK/South Africa, 2015) and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, US, 2016)—both of which feature white female protagonists as conflicted but central participants in the racialized domains of war and political machinations. While one film takes on a serious ethical polemic (the innocent lives of civilians caught in the visual crosshairs of drone cameras) and the latter is a romantic comedy following the adventures of a journalist in Afghanistan, both visually capture important ethical questions around white imperial violence, the disposability of brown lives, and the current political shift of and toward white women in positions of intense power. The article argues that these two technologies of domination—visual culture that entertains its citizens and political practice that secures its citizenry—are profoundly interlinked public archives in which to read what here is called “ethical whiteness,” its relationship to the death drive, and the gendered currency of both. Using the figure of the little brown girl that sits at the center of Eye in the Sky, the fetish object central to the story, alongside the comedic characterology in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the article underscores how ethical whiteness is tightly bound up with the death drive but in a way that destroys through the empathetic dimension. Analyzing these widely circulated visual moments of “ethical whiteness” exposes a pernicious social text that prioritizes the necropolitical through the necro-pedophiliac.