263 pages

English

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Duke University Press - Stokes Mason Stokes

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263 pages

English

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In The Color of Sex Mason Stokes offers new ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. Stokes examines a wide range of white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915-literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film-and exposes whiteness as a tangled network of racial and sexual desire. Stokes locates these white-supremacist texts amid the anti-racist efforts of African American writers and activists, deepening our understanding of both American and African American literary and cultural history.The Color of Sex reveals what happens when race and sexuality meet, when white desire encounters its own ambivalence. As Stokes argues, whiteness and heterosexuality exist in anxious relation to one another. Mutually invested in "the normal," they support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion. At the same time, however, they threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future, since reproducing whiteness necessarily involves the risk of contaminationCharting the curious movements of this "white heterosexuality," The Color of Sex inaugurates a new moment in our ongoing attempt to understand the frenzied interplay of race and sexuality in America. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in race theory, sexuality studies, and American history, culture, and literature.

Sujets

États-Unis

American English

Ethnic studies

Inglés estadounidense

USA

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Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	08 février 2001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822380870
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1398€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Color of Sex

New AmericanistsA Series Edited by Donald E. Pease

The Color of Sex

Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and

the Fictions of White Supremacy

Mason Stokes

Duke University Press

Durham & London, 

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Rebecca M. Giménez Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard by Tseng Information Systems Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: White Fictions

 ‘‘De White Man in Season’’















Sympathy and Symmetry: The Romance of Slavery in Metta V. Victor’sMaum Guinea and Her Plantation ‘‘Children’’

Someone’s in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall 

Charles Chesnutt and the Masturbating Boy: Onanism, Whiteness, andThe Marrow of Tradition

White Sex: Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Erotics of White Supremacy 



Becoming Visible: I’m White, Therefore I’m Anxious

Epilogue: The Queer Face of Whiteness

Notes



Works Cited

Index









Acknowledgments

I sometimes think I ﬁnished this book solely to have this oppor-tunity to thank the following people. Debbie McDowell guided this project with enthusiasm and rigor in its earlier life as a dissertation. The best teacher I’ve ever had, and my favorite kind of scholar, Debbie has shaped my thinking in ways that defy traditional notions of acknowledgment. Her presence is felt in each of these pages, and the example she sets is one I intend to hang onto. Eric Lott took enormous care with early versions of these chapters. Festooned with Eric’s inscrutable marginalia, drafts long feared dead came back to life, suddenly shiny with potential. Dana Nelson, both in her scholarship and in her unﬂinching com-mitment to academic community, has been the best kind of inspira-tion. She’s fabulous. Ken Wissoker and the folks at Duke University Press have dem-onstrated an utterly invigorating faith in this project. I owe a huge debt to the anonymous readers at Duke, whose comments made the revision process interesting in ways I hadn’t thought possible. A version of chapter  has appeared previously inAmerican Quar-terly.I thank Lucy Maddox and the readers atAmerican Quarterlyfor their extremely useful guidance. I am blessed with a geographically scattered cohort of scholars whose work and friendship continue to sustain me, despite the dis-tance between us. Daylanne English, dear friend and comrade, excites me in both mind and heart. Karen Shimakawa was an early hero of mine; she’s who I want to be when I grow up. Amy Ghaemmaghami couldn’t have come into my life at a better time, oﬀering her friend-

ship and her intellect when I desperately needed both. Lisa Samuels has seen me through a variety of relocations and reorientations; I con-tinue to beneﬁt enormously from knowing her. In ways big and small, Derek Nystrom, Tim Wager, and Rod Waterman have made both my work and my life better places. Since  I have been privileged to work with a host of truly in-spiring teachers and scholars in the Skidmore English department; I thank them all for the community they have oﬀered me. My chairs during this time, Sarah Goodwin and Susan Kress, have created a space for the kind of teaching and scholarship that I’ve always wanted to do. Linda Simon, coconspirator from day one, is to me that rarest and most valuable of combinations: friend and mentor. My community at Skidmore extends beyond the halls of the En-glish department, and I thank my friends and colleagues across the college for helping me understand the real value of our collective en-deavor. In particular, I thank Jennifer Delton for disagreeing with me in the most interesting, provocative, and useful ways imaginable; this work is better for it. Susan Walzer is one of the smartest and most generous people I know; being her friend is a wonderful thing. These next are more diﬃcult to categorize: I thank Anne-Elizabeth Murdy, for understanding the roots of this work as only she can. Kim Langford and Adam Daniel, for their wide-eyed faith in the importance of good times. Mike Furlough, for almost ﬁfteen years now. Bill Verner, for his love and support when I needed them most. Michael Miller, for giving me the reason to do the most diﬃcult and important thing I’ve ever done, and for everything since then. Mike Bennett and Juan Battle, not only for providing a fabulous downstate retreat but for caring enough about family to create an ex-tended one—and for making me a part of it. My uncle and name-giver, for his creative spirit. Finally, my parents. In her life and in her death, my mother set an example of strength and sureness of character that I will always draw on. I also thank my father, whose willingness to embrace challenge and adventure comes as a welcome reminder of new possibilities, of new hope. This book was written in the spirit of such hope, and I thank all of these people for the things that made it possible.

viii

Acknowledgments

Introduction White Fictions

Were I to state here, frankly and categorically, that the primary object of this work is to write the negro out of America, and that the second-ary object is to write him, (and manifold millions of other black and bi-colored caitiﬀs, little better than himself,) out of existence, God’s simple truth would be told.—Hinton Rowan Helper

Writing and racism. White supremacy and the text. What this pas-sage from Helper’sNojoque; A Question for a Continent() makes clear is the interdependence of the two—the construction of white supremacy as a textual practice, whereby ink on a page and the circu-lation of books work to ﬁx racial identity and its supposedly atten-dant qualities. Once ﬁxed in print, Helper’s ‘‘negro’’ can be written away like so many dinosaurs, the victim of the textual weight of mid-nineteenth-century anthropology. Or of Thomas Jeﬀerson’sNotes on the State of Virginia(), where Jeﬀerson infamously writes, ‘‘Never yet could I ﬁnd a Black that had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. Religion indeed has produced a Phillis Whately [sic] but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism’’ (). In Jeﬀerson’s view, blacks are incapable of saying or thinking anything worth writing down, worth making into text. And yet so much of African American literary history, especially in the nineteenth century, attaches a supreme importance to the power of the text as a path to freedom and its attendant grace, humanity. Think of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,both a textual badge of his humanity, according to the dehumanizing racial logic of the En-