(Mediating Whiteness: Subjects, Bodies, Icons)


	1:25-3:55P M

As is often noted in institutional histories of the Humanities and
their transformation within the U.S. academy, the 1960s and early 70s
were marked by the proliferation of interdisciplinary programs geared
toward the study of nonwhite races and ethnicities (e.g.,
Afro-American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies).   By
the late 1980s, scholars within these interdisciplinary formations
were issuing a call for the critical study of whiteness.  As Hazel
Carby notes, for instance, the signifier “people of color,” however
important to the imagination of subaltern political agency, is
troubling in its implication that white people are unmarked by race,
or “color.”   This course will investigate the various and uneven
responses to this call within the arena of “whiteness studies”
(so-called); within post-colonial and diasporic studies; within the
intellectual projects where the turn to whiteness was originally
encouraged.  The title of the course is intended to mark our critical
distance from approaches to whiteness that attend primarily to the
register of experience (the testimonial) and/or to the dialectics of
identity and difference (the racial imaginary).  Rather, we will
consider both experience and identity as an effect of their mediation
by social and cultural technologies of whiteness (including, for
example, US. legal codes and judicial procedures; industrial and
post-industrial organizations of labor; civic institutions; academic
disciplines; film; television: the internet;  etc).

The course will be arranged in three interlocking and overlapping
sections: the first, on “The Epistemologies of Whiteness,” will
address both the production of whiteness in the colonial and
post-colonial context(s) as object of (legal, historical, and
scientific) knowledge and the reproduction of white privilege
in the modern organization of knowledge and its disciplinary
protocols.  We will consider the historical elision of whiteness with
categories of universality, as well as the limitations of contemporary
moves to particularize whiteness.  In the second section on
“Incorporating Whiteness,” we will turn our attention more
specifically to mediations of white  embodiment, ranging from
comparative anatomy and racial taxonomies to segregation and the
organization of (sub)urban space.  This section will also attend to a
host of work on Irish, Eastern and Southern European immigrations to
the U.S. and the political and performative dimensions of “becoming”
white.  We will examine the creation of white bodily norms and
coordinates through racial (cross)identification; contemporary
valorizations of whiteness as camp; the “new abolitionism,” or the
project of eliminating whiteness through willed disidentification.
The final section of the course on “The Commodity Aesthetics of
Whiteness” will address visual and virtual technologies of whiteness,
with particular emphasis on film.  If, as Cheryl Harris has suggested,
whiteness signifies protection from commodification, how do film and
other media (re)mark their dissemination of whiteness (and what Paul
Gilroy has termed its “dazzle”) as a global image-commodity?  We will
investigate the articulations of whiteness within a commodity-based
multiculturalism (as consumer hail; as iconic identity), reading
particularly for the ways that contemporary mobilizations of whiteness
vest its privilege in the capacity for interface and access, rather
than the warrant of corporeal integrity.

Reading for the course will likely include critical writing by Stuart
Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Eric Lott, Robyn Wiegman, Mike
Davis, Ruth Frankenberg, Aida Hurtado, Robert J.C. Young, Howard Omi,
Michael Winant, David Roediger, Theodore Allen, Fred Pfeil, Ella
Shohat, Robert Stam, bell hooks, and Richard Dyer.  While the critical
and historiographical materials will comprise our primary materials
for the course, we will also consider selected films (Imitation of
Life, Touch of Evil; Fargo), television (The Real
World),  and fiction (provisionally, Jessica Hagedorn’s
Dogeaters, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, Octavia
Butler’s Dawn).  In addition to active participation in
discussion, work for the course will include a 15-20 page paper,
occasional response papers, and an oral presentation.