Browsing by Subject "Whiteness"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Nationalism
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
Throughout American history, notions of manliness have been central to concepts of national identity, and devotion to the nation has been deemed fundamental to understandings of American manhood. Yet definitions of manliness in relation to national identity have been multiform, ranging from collectivist ideals emphasizing virtue, sacrifice, and surrender to government and the commonwealth to individualist ideals stressing individualism, pursuit of self-interest, independence, and defiance of authority. Although manhood and nationalism sometimes stand in an ambivalent relation to one another, they have also served as mutually reinforcing codes of cultural and political power in the United States.
Open Access
“Parodies of whiteness”: discursive frames of recognition in Percival Everett’s i am not Sidney Poitier
(David Publishing Co., Inc., 2011-08) Demirtürk, E. L.
The paper discusses how the white supremacist norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of black vulnerability as a precondition of the white human in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Everett’s novel depicts the extent to which popular culture plays a constitutive role in the cultural governance of black bodies, as he dismantles white hegemonic discursive processes that coerce the black body into performing whiteness. Since racialized body is a script of whiteness, it is important to note that the racial script exposes the discursive exchanges in interracial encounters. The issue of how the whites reproduce the power of whiteness in the process of “scripting” blacks is represented through Everett’s satirical discourse on the everyday white discursive practices: “Parodies of whiteness” demonstrate how the black male protagonist Not Sidney undoes the white power at the moment of the constitution of the disjunctive black self, when Sidney Poitier’s image works against the particularity of Not Sidney’s identity. Whites’ urge to “see” and “recognize” the white-commodified racial paradigm (of Poitier) in Not Sidney who fails to become one, highlights the white mechanisms of power that produce blackness except as a mere “parody of whiteness”. It is in this contradictory space that Everett enables us to confront the issue of whiteness (and of race in general) as mere parody, because everyday performances of blackness (under white policing and surveillance) are as much a parody of blackness as that of whiteness.
Open Access
Whiteness
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
Throughout U.S. history, whiteness as a marker of racial identity, like masculinity as a gender identity, has often been associated with power, dominance, and the marginalization (and sometimes oppression) of others. Both whiteness and maleness have often derived their cultural force and power from being represented as universal categories, rather than expressly acknowledged as simply signifiers of race or gender. Whiteness and manhood have reinforced one another in U.S. society, usually through attempts by white males in power to deny that nonwhite males are true “men,” and thereby to exclude them from the privileges, rights, and opportunities associated with manhood in American culture.