Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop: Crises in Whiteness
Stephany Rose
Language: English
Pages: 204
ISBN: 073918122X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop examines white American male literature for its social commentary on the construction of whiteness in the United States. Whiteness has always been a contested racial identity in the U.S., one in a state of construction and reconstruction throughout critical cultural and historical moments. This text examines how white American male writers have grappled with understanding themselves and their audiences as white beings.
Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop specifically brings a critical whiteness approach to American literary criticism and strengthens the growing interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies in the humanities. Critical whiteness studies shifts the attention from solely examining people and perspectives of color in race discourse to addressing whiteness as an essential component of race ideology. The primary contribution of this perspective is in how whites construct and see whiteness, for the larger purpose of exploring the possibilities of how they may come to no longer construct and see themselves through whiteness. Understanding this is at the heart of contemporary discussions of post-raciality.
Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop uses the following texts as canonical case studies: Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach. Each underscores the dialectic of formation, deformation, and reformation of whiteness at specific socio-historical moments based upon anxieties about race possessed by whites and highlighted by white fictionists. The selected writers ultimately serve dually as co-constructors of whiteness and social critics of their times through their literature.
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Subconscious level, people perceive race as somewhat performative for others. Race remains perhaps the most perplexing yet central element of the society and culture of United States.15 When envisioned as the matrix of white supremacist-capitalist-heterosexual-patriarchy,16 race in its totality abides within the foundation of the United States of America and continues to shape the institutionalized practices of civic and social factions of the United States. Consequently, race impacts our lives.
Words, what is seen or understood by the conscience is not always what is. In order to criticize society and remain popular with his mass audience, Twain often employed humor to mask offense. The use of satire, embellishment, and exaggeration as his personal tools is seen early in his career as a writer with his newspaper sketches. Having already The Shame Is Ours 45 been introduced to public censorship by editors in San Francisco who refused to publish an article of his indignantly.
Minorities. One knows George’s racial composition is not questionable because Nick does not label his national or linguistic community. Yet he is, in fact, described as a degenerate Nordic stock, Invented Li(v)es 99 which requires him to be dominated, when contextualized by accepted perspectives of eugenics and Social Darwinism of the time (25). George’s lack of wealth and breeding, signified through his labor in comparison to the leisure of the others, in this society darkens his whiteness.
Ceaselessly’ into a Nordic past as recollected within the climate of the Tribal Twenties, when conceptions of whiteness both narrow and become a sign not of skin color but of national identity.59 Decker’s statement tenders several accepted truths: (A) the denigrating of new immigrants not from northern Europe with images of illicit culture of the gangster/mob nature, (B) the reality that what whiteness is, or how it is defined, is evolutionary, and (C) the continued movement in the nation away.
Belafonte quotes Paul Robeson reciting a poem: “Calculate carefully. And ponder it well, and remember this when you do—my/ two hands are mine to sell; they made your machines and they can stop them too.”68 This poem speaks to the genius and the power of the human will to create and destroy unnatural machinations. But can the essence be carried further to relate to anything created by man, even ideas? If the human mind is genius enough to construct race, then is it genius enough to destroy race.