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Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop
Crises in Whiteness
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2014
Summary
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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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2014
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-8122-5
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-8123-2
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
191
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
CONTENTS No access
Acknowledgements No access
Introduction: Writing Whiteness: White Authors and Hegemonic White Masculinities No access Pages 1 - 20
Chapter One: 2000 and Late?: Passé Conversations on Race for a Post-Racial Nation No access Pages 21 - 40
Chapter Two: “The Shame Is Ours, Not Theirs”: Mark Twain’s Battle with Racialism No access Pages 41 - 78
Chapter Three: Invented Li(v)es: Gradations of Whiteness in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tribal Twenties No access Pages 79 - 112
Chapter Four: Dispossessing Race: Abolishing Whiteness in Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boys No access Pages 113 - 150
Conclusion: Dreaming of Post-Racism in a Racial Wonderland No access Pages 151 - 168
