White Subjectivity Research Articles

An Imperial Past in Ruins: Joseph Denfield's Photographs of East London, 1960–1965

This paper provides a reading of changing white subjectivity in the context of South Africa's transition to republican status in the early 1960s. It explores such a theme through a reading of photographs of architectural ruins in East London that were taken by Joseph Denfield from approximately 1960 to 1965. Such an analysis is done through the lens of existing literature on this historical moment in South Africa, which highlights rapid and at times violent changes taking place nationally. What remains key in the paper is South Africa's severance of ties with the British Commonwealth and its British imperial past, which rendered the state officially more ‘Afrikaans’ in character. I argue that Denfield's photographs of ruins registered such changes by bringing into greater visibility sites that spoke to the town's British past. Through his framing, choice of subject and totalising views of sites on camera, his photographs functioned as a form of photographic persuasion that directed the viewer towards a particular temporality. These not only constructed the city's past through the lens of British settlement but reconstituted the city as ruinous under the new political dispensation.

Julie Tolentino’s Queer Mestiza: Unsettling a White Western Order of Subjectivity and Belonging

Drawing on Avery Gordon’s framework of ghostly matters, haunting, and race, I address the queer autobiographical performance by Julie Tolentino, Mestiza – Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes (1998), as an act of unsettling the boundaries of white western subjectivity and belonging. I argue that the artist mobilizes haunting by turning to autobiography, memory and the site of the body. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s ‘mestiza’ vision, on Mestiza performance scenes, on correspondence with Tolentino about the work, and on Muñoz’s work, I argue that the performance stages a lesbian of colour, mestiza subjectivity and imaginary located at the crossroads between worlds, and this act questions the racialised boundaries of social belonging. I discuss the melancholic atmospheres of the performance as structures of feeling and signs of this subjectivity.

The Traditions of Race Men

The idea of tradition has become in many ways a religious vision that reaches beyond its origin in Christian thought to now exist as a way to narrate identity quests, frame one’s spirituality, and especially situate the intellectual life. It has become a theology itself that reflects the spatial dimensions of subjectivity and in particular a powerful example of the spatial register through which white masculine subjectivity might be performed. Yet this new theological deployment of tradition needs to be read inside a wider historical frame of modern racial masculine longing. This essay articulates that frame.

Dangers to the Colony: Loose women and the "poor white" problem in Kenya

While a great deal of recent scholarship has focused on the problematic presence of so-called "poor whites" across the European colonial empires, comparatively little work has tackled their presence in Kenya. In part this may be explained by the force of Kenya's contemporary reputation as a destination for socialites and aristocrats. Yet it also reflects the fact that, until 1939, attempts by authorities to minimise the "poor white" presence succeeded. This article argues that only after this point, when existing social control mechanisms fell redundant, did a "poor white" problem in Kenya emerge. Yet to understand "poor whites" simply in terms of an anomalous conjunction of (White) race and (low) class is analytically insufficient. What the evidence presented here shows is that endeavours to manage "poor whites" centred on the management of women. Deviance was gendered. "Poor white" men were doubtless problematic in the settler colony but women, as mothers, produced them. The disciplining of a White female subjectivity demanded the policing of female deviants first of all. While there is evidence of "poor white" men throughout the history of colonial Kenya, it was only during the years of the Second World War that "poor white" women came to government attention. The endeavour to control them, moreover, brought with it the discovery of a "poor white" problem and a racialised welfare project designed to resolve it.

"The Last Bastion of Colonialism": Appalachian Settler Colonialism and Self-Indigenization

This article outlines and interrogates the neglected settler-colonial discourse of White Appalachians, in particular their construction of a White indigeneity. In order to justify occupation and reconcile themselves to the wider settler-colonial society, influential settler Appalachian scholars and activists positioned themselves as a colonized Indigenous people, advancing the once-paradigmatic Colonialist model of Appalachian exploitation. This discursive replacement of American Indians allows settler Appalachians to assert their own White subjectivity as a form of indigeneity and their ownership of the land as decolonization.

Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler Homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities

By centralizing the experiences of seven, urban, self-identified Two-Spirit Indigenous people in Toronto, this paper addresses the settler-colonial complexities that arise within contemporary queer politics: how settler colonialism has seeped into Pride Toronto's contemporary Queer politics to normalize White queer settler subjectivities and disavow Indigenous Two-Spirit subjectivities. Utilizing Morgensen's settler homonationalism, the authors underscore that contemporary Queer politics in Canada rely on the eroticization of Two-Spirit subjectivities, Queer settler violence, and the production of (White) Queer narratives of belonging that simultaneously promote the inclusion and erasure of Indigenous presence. Notwithstanding Queer settler-colonial violence, Two-Spirit peoples continue to engage in settler resistance by taking part in Pride Toronto and problematizing contemporary manifestations of settler homonationalism. Findings highlight the importance of challenging the workings of settler colonialism within contemporary Queer politics in Canada, and addressing the tenuous involvements of Indigenous Two-Spirit peoples within Pride festivals. The article challenges non-Indigenous Queers of color, racialized diasporic, and White, to consider the value of a future that takes seriously the conditions of settler colonialism and White supremacy.

Stigma and suffering: white anti-racist identities in northern Australia

White anti-racists are an influential social group within settler-colonial societies that often escape critical attention. This article explores one aspect of white anti-racist subjectivities as experienced by those who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. Although not usually discussed openly between colleagues, frustration, betrayal, and suffering physical discomfort without complaint are common experiences for whites working in remote Indigenous communities. To explain this suffering, I first develop the novel concept of white stigma. I argue that in progressive spaces where there is a concerted attempt to invert colonial power relations—what I call ‘progressive spaces’—whiteness and the privilege it represents is something to be avoided, diminished, and counteracted. When white anti-racists are interpellated as white, this is generally experienced as a stigma. Recognizing whiteness as a stigmatized identity that white anti-racists continuously attempt to rehabilitate and make liveable makes the suffering of white anti-racists intelligible. Drawing on ethnographic research with white anti-racists, I show how suffering works to manage white stigma. This exploration of stigma, suffering and love furthers our understanding of white anti-racists’ identities, and through this, liberal governance in settler societies.

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond , as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru —about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant , Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Competing knowledges in lifelong education

This is a discussion paper about access to, and participation in learning opportunities for Māori learners in New Zealand, and Indigenous learners in Australia. Teaching and learning practice in three separate institutional education programmes—one in New Zealand and two in Australia—highlight the problematic nature of inclusion based on competing knowledge systems and frameworks. These systems relate to differing worldviews about how knowledge is privileged and disseminated within society. One view is that whiteness behaviour, through a western worldview, is the erasure of inequality because it presents as the norm in many adult education teaching situations; quite often manifested as indulgent practice, but one that also reinforces the hegemony of normativity. In contrast, an Aboriginal/Indigenous worldview is one that places knowledge within a spiritual realm; constantly resituating the individual into the nexus between individual and cultural ties. The discussion here, is about ideas of whiteness behaviours being present in curriculum delivery, whereby mainstream ideals produce planes of engagement that encapsulate white subjectivities which are both visible and invisible, and represent just one chronology of whiteness. That is, consciously and unconsciously patterned behaviours of delivering curriculum, no matter what the discipline area, have the potential to produce accessibility and achievement, but many would argue that these same behaviours also reproduce inequalities. Ideas from the above theme, take on a whole new perspective with a focus on building workplace and academic skills to the exclusion of cultural identity development. Acquiring skills has the potential to provide another form of competence, yes, but may also undermine learner confidence in being able to transition successfully to further community or higher education programmes. For example, such development alone does little to improve and strengthen literacy, language and numeracy capability for learners to be able to access and undertake tertiary studies, but may do more to compound debates about whiteness behaviours implicit in the post-colonial criticism of ‘whose interest is being served’.

Nation, Family, Intimacy: The Domain of the Domestic in the Social Imaginary

ABSTRACT The institution of domestic work and the figures of the domestic worker (the ‘maid’) and the employer (the ‘madam’) – both of which are always raced and gendered – seem to carry a powerful and affective metaphoric and symbolic load in post-apartheid South Africa. The article explores this phenomenon as linked to the dual nature of domestic work – as both a lawful and regulated contemporary social practice and a central feature of what may be termed the apartheid social imaginary – an implicit social understanding of the way in which things stand between fellow citizens in the terms of Charles Taylor. Domestic work is suitable for this kind of transposition, because of its association with intimacy and family – both markers of nation – as well as its location in the social order of apartheid – the domestic domain. In order to trace some of the sources and meanings attached to contested understandings of domestic work, the article examines the representation of white Afrikaans-speaking women's subjectivity and agency in historical accounts – one of the particularistic strands through which the symbolic relationship between white female employer and black female domestic worker may be accessed. This is based on a symptomatic reading of Hermann Giliomee's account, in his book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, of white Afrikaans-speaking women's subjectivity and the way in which this is constructed in relation to white men and black others, as well as work by revisionist feminist authors to whom Giliomee is partly indebted.

THE STIGMA OF WHITE PRIVILEGE

Beginning in the 1970s, the efforts of the Australian settler state to help its Indigenous minority shifted away from ‘assimilation’ and embraced the principles of ‘self-determination’. According to the rhetoric of the self-determination era – explored in this article as the ‘liberal fantasy space’ – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians should be in control of efforts to improve their lives, ultimately making state intervention redundant. A by-product of this shift was to radically change the role of non-Indigenous people who sought to participate in Indigenous development. No longer in charge of Indigenous advancement, they were now cast as partners and supporters. This article explores some of the complexities of White anti-racist subjectivities in the self-determination era. It draws on ethnographic research with a group of progressive Whites who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. A striking feature of contemporary White anti-racist discourse is a reluctance to claim any agency in the process of Indigenous improvement. I argue that applying the concept of stigma to White privilege is a novel and productive approach to understanding this desire for self-effacement. White stigma works in a parallel fashion to the case of liberal Germans who believe the German collective identity is irrevocably tainted by the Holocaust. In the Australian case, the negative characteristics associated with Whiteness act as a barrier to the broader goal of constructing ethical White subjectivities fit for the ‘liberal fantasy space’ of post-colonial justice. In their attempts to overcome this barrier and transcend White stigma, White anti-racists mobilise the identity tropes of missionary, mother, and child. Ultimately, these efforts at self-fashioning point to the ultimate fantasy of decolonisation: the desire of White anti-racists to disappear.

The Whiteness of the Soldier-Speaker in Brian Turner's Here, Bullet

In Brian Turner's collection of Iraq War poems Here, Bullet (2005), the soldier-speaker minimizes his white military subjectivity in order to preserve his own individuality. Turner meets the representational challenges of first-hand war poetry through his emphasis on narrative descriptions, his focus on natural objects and mundane particularities, juxtaposed with references to ancient Iraqi culture, and through the surrealism of his imagery. Together, these poetic strategies enable him to process and articulate his experiences in Iraq without succumbing to the paradoxically empowering and obliterating effects of his own uniformed whiteness in occupied Iraq. In the process, Turner gives space to a multiplicity of "observation posts" that decenter the lyric consciousness and enable the reader's empathy.

Attacking Trust: Hawai'i as a Crossroads and Kamehameha Schools in the Crosshairs

American law in particular, renders indigenous claims inarticulable by racializing native peoples, while simultaneously normalizing white subjectivity through invocation of a colorblind ideology. The inherent contradiction in these two positions – race matters/race does not matter – is played out in the frictions surrounding lawsuits against native Hawaiian entitlements. This paper will look at recent litigation and political mobilization aimed at forcing Kamehameha Schools to eliminate the admissions preference it gives Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) students. Kamehameha Schools is a large multi-campus private institution serving over 6,000 K-12 students in Hawai'i. It was founded in 1887 for the purpose of benefiting Kanaka Maoli youth. The attacks against Kamehameha Schools can be understood in the context of a recent discourse that represents all Kanaka Maoli preferences or entitlements as illegal racial preference, rather than part of efforts toward native recovery from the violences of colonization.

On accountability: Towards a white middle-class queer ‘post identity politics identity politics’

Writing about white middle-class queer subjectivities is a necessarily difficult task. Partly, this is because of ongoing debates over identity politics (and indeed post-identity politics), and partly because writing as a white middle-class queer always appears to invoke a particular ‘yes but’ (‘yes I am white and middle-class but I am also queer’). In this article I outline one way of engaging in a white middle-class queer praxis that takes into account these two issues, and uses them as a starting place from which to think about the intersections of whiteness, queerness and class in potentially novel ways. Drawing on the work of Jodi Dean, I elaborate what I term a ‘white middle-class queer post-identity politics identity politics’ that centres issues of reciprocity and accountability by considering the role of others in the constitution of the self. Recognizing the fundamental indebtedness that arises from this represents one means through which to negotiate a speaking position as a white middle-class queer that evokes an altogether different ‘yes but’, one that is mindful of race and class privilege.

Organizing Whiteness: Gender, Nationality and Subjectivity in Postcolonial Hong Kong

This article looks at the negotiation and construction of new white subjectivities in the changing global workplace of Hong Kong. It explores how recent changes in the social and political landscape are being accompanied by complex transformations of work and working identities. Drawing on research conducted with white expatriates in the period since the return to Chinese rule in 1997, it reveals that whiteness, Britishness and gender are simultaneously both critical and unstable concepts that affect the ways in which these changing working identities are being managed and performed. The article explores interviews with a selection of British expatriates working in different contexts and identifies the key discourses that they draw upon as resources to position themselves as they talk about their working lives. These show that, while the colonial heritage is still evident, the interplay between global and local discourses and the formation of white, gendered subjectivities means that spaces are being created to renegotiate the established privileges and forms of entitlement on which work relationships have hitherto been based.

Ethnoscaping Canada's boreal forest: liberal whiteness and its disaffiliation from colonial space

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.

Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom! I n his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd En­ gler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Ab­ salom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Some­ what testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the inter­ connection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white­ looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention. Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor, Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s iden­ tity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship.1 For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘le­ gitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and ‘One of a few exceptions to such a tendency, Barbara Ladd’s study delves into the subjectivity that interracializes Bon and elucidates why, “[although both [Quentin and his father] imagine Bon as a creole possessed of the expected creole decadence and capable of corrupting the innocence of Sutpens, it is only in Quentin’s narrative that Bon is constructed as black” (540). Ladd asserts that both Mr. Compson and Quentin, as historically conditioned subjects, invest in their narrative reconstruction their own anxiety over America’s constantly embattled providential design. Thus, Ladd argues, their fashioning of Bon varies due to the different historical forces that frustrated the American mission—i.e., Old World colonialism for Mr. Compson as the first postbellum generation, and racial “amalgamation” for his son. And, alienated from the lost cause, the narrators find their own identities in the respective Bons they construct: “it is really not very far, in terms of metaphorical development, from Jason’s creation of Bon (and by extension of himself) as cynical or fatalistic European charged with the seduction ofthe South through the unveiling of the white ne­ gro—the beautiful octoroon woman or ‘apotheosis of chattelry’ (AA 89)—to Quentin’s creation of Bon (and by extension himself) as the white negro, a man who has inherited both the violence and the illegitimacy, and whose blood demands vengeance. Both Jason’s and Quentin’s accounts are dramatizations of the white southerner’s sense of his own construction by postbellum history” (Ladd 542). 3 4 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their preCivil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle.... The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608). Margo Crawford’s 2004 psychoanalytical study of racial mixture in Absa­ lom, Absalom! shows the same problem. For, while revealing how the novel’s white subjects cannot represent “interracialness” as a coherent Other but only as “abstract contradictions,” and thus exposing their own “meconnaissance, the recognition that is misrecognition, the‘me’ that is‘not me’” (76), Crawford fails to apply her critical paradigm to the white subjectivity that has made Bon—her most discussed example—“interracial” in the first place. Given that the narra­ tors do not...

Natural Born Ease Man?: Masculinity, Vagrancy Law, and Furry Lewis’s “Kassie Jones”

Long after the release of his last pre-war recordings Furry Lewis's creative voice contin- ued to reverberate through American music, inspired and inspiring, humorous, poignant, and often more recognized for his influence on later musicians than for the recordings of his own artistic peak. An image of him, aged and cantankerous, alternately perform- ing and sweeping the streets of Memphis, has blurred indistinctly into a caricatured vi- sion of a whole period of black life, labor, and artistic expression. As Lewis's recordings worked their way into white circles—appearing on Harry Smith's iconic 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, influencing rock musicians like Keith Richards, and becoming the coveted prizes of record collectors—listeners increasingly romanticized his music through an aesthetic which, George Lipsitz has argued, privileged individual emotions over collective conditions (120). For these new audiences, the value of blues and related styles lay in the music's perceived distance from the economic realities of the marketplace. Thus, seldom has Lewis's occupation as both sanitation worker and musician informed understandings of his music. Yet, when Lewis recorded Kassie Jones—perhaps his most legendary performance—he gave personal voice to a collective black masculine experience at the hands of the white economy. Bringing an appreciation of what it means to survive by wielding a broom to his manipulation of the guitar, Lewis transformed a traditional folk song into a subtle political expression of black laborers' struggles to maintain their identities as workers and men. In 1928, Furry Lewis recorded Kassie Jones for the Victor record label. A unique in- terpretation of the traditional railroad ballad Casey Jones—generally recounted by the black fireman who leaped from the train before the wreck—Lewis's recording re-imagined the narrator as an independent character rather than a conduit for the valorization of white subjectivity. Although Kassie Jones did not sell many copies (Cohen, Long Steel Rail 148), it addressed a context in which racism and exploitative vagrancy laws excluded black workers from skilled union jobs and funneled them toward unpaid or poorly paid physi- cal labor. Lewis's transformation of the voice of the fireman from mere narrator to leading role was both an aesthetic choice and a political one, and afforded him the opportunity to insert an African-American perspective on work, race, and public space into a narrative of heroic and hard-working white manhood. Incorporation of this point of view allowed Lewis to engage in a comparison of two disparate conceptions of work and masculinity in order to critique the ideologies that governed vagrancy law, access to employment, and status as a working male citizen. In effect, Kassie Jones offered an alternative vision of masculine gender identity by asserting that illegal work was merely work.

Post-Secular Nation; or how “Australian spirituality” privileges a secular, white, Judaeo-Christian culture

There is no doubt that Australia is a secular nation, but there is a tendency to argue it is becoming post-secular. This raises the question of on what premises might a national spirituality be founded in a multicultural, multifaith society? One person who has attempted to answer this theory is the writer David Tacey. I endeavour to show that Tacey’s spiritual realm is in fact unmistakably coded Christian, and by extension ‘Judaeo-Christian’. Furthermore, this constructed realm cites a white, Anglo-Celtic subject associated with settler history as most in need of spiritual salvation. I argue that in effect, and instead of offering new alternatives for social change, Tacey’s version of spirituality functions to reinforce and reproduce a transcendent narrative of the dominance of Judaeo-Christianity and white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity in Australian culture.

Face Values: Visible/Invisible Governors on the Board and Organisational Responses to the Race Equality Agenda

This article explores institutional responses to the race equality agenda in the context of further education (FE) and sixth form colleges. More specifically, it examines the experiences of black and minority ethnic governors within the environment of recent legislative changes to improve the representation of black and minority ethnic people in governing bodies and senior management within the sector. Using data from interviews with black and minority ethnic governors and diversity managers, the article explores the negotiations that participants made within these institutions as black and minority ethnic people. This exploration is framed by a problematic of visibility and invisibility – a ‘double bind’ which can restrict the role that black and minority ethnic governors are able to undertake within some college environments. The author claims that the modalities of these informal dynamics inform and affirm a conceptualisation of colleges as the ‘proper’ location of white male subjectivity.