Representations of Whiteness in American Visual Culture from the Perspective of African American Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory

Representations of Whiteness in American Visual Culture from the Perspective of African American Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory Name: Jenna Stivey 12160830 Course: Master Thesis Comparative Literature Supervisor: Daan Wesselman Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Chapter One: Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory” and Lynching Photography 10 Chapter Two: Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives, “Prosthetic Memory” and the Graphic Novel 25 Chapter Three: Satirizing Whiteness: “Multidirectional Memory”, “Grotesque Realism” and the Horror Film 40 Conclusion 60 Works Cited 65 Acknowledgements I dedicate this thesis to my friends and family, who have supported me throughout the process. Also, to all of the teachers and students I have encountered at the University of Amsterdam this past year whose intelligence and passion have inspired me endlessly. I especially want to thank my supervisor, Daan, who has shown me patience and understanding and helped me to push myself and grow academically. 1 Introduction This thesis is first and foremost led by the cultural objects I have selected. In them, I have observed a contemporary zeitgeist dedicated to representing whiteness, specifically in the American context and born, I believe, from the increased racial tension in the United States. Alejandro de la Fuente’s introduction to the 2017 special edition of Transitions responded to Trump’s presidency, stating that ‘whiteness is the common denominator behind Trump’s support’ (3). Whether conservatively championed through overt racism within the increased presence of alt-right groups in America, or accepted and overlooked by those fortunate enough to be unaffected by policies that threaten the lives of women, people of colour and the LQBTQ+ community, whiteness was ‘[t]he unifying and most consistent commonality among Trump voters’ (3). Though it may be an oversimplification to attribute whiteness as the fundamental basis of the motivations and causes of the current political climate in the United States, Fuente’s inclusion of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the 900 “separate incidents of bias and violence against immigrants, Latinos, African Americans, women, LGBT people, Muslims, and Jews” following the first 10 days of Trump’s election (3) points to a relationality stronger than correlation. This focus on whiteness, however, which calls into question its violence, privilege and pervasive invisibility has gained momentum in visual culture and my analysis of a collection of lynching photographs, a graphic novel and a film look at how representations of whiteness are mediated through different visual forms in a way that reverses, subverts, appropriates and unravels the historically traumatic and contemporarily perpetuated oppressive white gaze from the perspective of African American cultural trauma and collective memory. Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (translation, 1967) draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan (1949 original, 1977 English translation by Sheridan) to express how the gaze relates to race and produces the racialized looking practices of white 2 domination and black subjugation. Lacan locates the “mirror stage” as an event in early childhood development whereby the image reflected in the mirror confirms and settles a sense of wholeness in the subject. According to Fanon, because blackness is visually different to whiteness, colonized black subjects are fixed by white subjects as “the Other” in a way that objectifies and dehumanizes the black body, fulfils the desire for wholeness in the notion of white identity and fragments the black subject’s conception of self. He states: “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating” (42). W. E. B Du Bois in the seminal text on African American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, also thinks through this concept in his notion of “double consciousness”. The dominating white gaze, he argues, produces a meditated sense of self for African Americans as the process of “othering” under white domination conditions a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others" (8). That is, the external, racist conceptions of blackness in the United States under the “white supremacist gaze” (hooks, “Glory”, 50) puts into contention a unified sense of self for African Americans which leads to a negating fragmentation. Michel Foucault conceptualizes the gaze as a function of knowledge and power whereby bodies are produced and regulated by systems of surveillance within the dominant structures of society (Discipline and Punish, 1977). bell hooks brings into conversation the psychoanalytical notion of the gaze with Foucault’s discursive understanding of its function and applies it to cultural representations of race in the United States. She thus locates the gaze and the control of images as fundamental in the formation, consolidation and maintenance of white supremacy and racial domination in the United States since slavery. And, because of this exercise of white dominance through the gaze and its realisation through representation, she argues that: [a]ll black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness” (345). In her book, 3 Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks outlines that her “thinking about representations of whiteness in the black imagination has been stimulated by classroom discussions about the way in which the absence of recognition is a strategy that facilitates making a group "the Other” (“Representing Whiteness”, 338, emphasis added). Here, what hooks addresses is the unacknowledged position of privilege that whiteness occupies and argues it is this lack of critical engagement with its hegemonic status that allows white supremacist structures to operate and exercise dominance. Crucially, she states that the absence of this critical attention means that white people are either resistant, or find it difficult, to comprehend the terrorizing representations of whiteness in the collective imagination of African Americans which “makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures…” (341). To represent whiteness in a way that attends to this collective African American perspective of terror thus works to recognize constructions of whiteness and white supremacy as they pertain to the longstanding infliction of African American cultural trauma. And, to produce, analyse and reframe images of whiteness in this way is to “…disrupt the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness” (341), uncover repressed memories of its role in African American subjugation and cultural trauma, and interrupt contemporary structures of white supremacy which perpetuate the oppression of African American people. hooks also emphasis the role of memory as important to unveiling and conceptualizing notions of whiteness as it equates to a “terrorizing imposition” in the cultural imagination of African Americans. She argues that “…we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future” (5). I therefore draw on the field of “memory studies” particularly as it pertains to theorizations of collective and cultural trauma. This field of study finds its initial roots in thinking through the horrors of the holocaust as the aberrations it caused led to much ethically-based theoretical 4 discussions on how to represent such horrors which arguably defy the parameters of representation (Adorno: 1982; 1997, Lyotard: 1990). Though it emerged from this event, Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional model of memory” suggests that these theories on trauma and memory can be applied to instances of collective and cultural trauma outside of the Shoah as he states that the era of decolonization shares a connection with the development of a public memory of the holocaust (7). Rothberg’s model pivots around Richard Terdiman’s claim that “memory is the past made present” (quoted in Rothberg, 3). Rothberg establishes that: The notion of a "making present" has two important corollaries: first, that memory is a contemporary phenomenon, something that, while concerned with the past, happens in the present; and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or action. (3-4) The performative aspect of memory which he outlines emphasizes the “constructed side of our relation to the past” (4) as recollections are mediated through representations. This relates to concept of cultural trauma developed by Jeffrey Alexander who locates the attribution of collective trauma as a “socio-cultural process” which requires certain criteria to be fulfilled, such as determining the perpetrators and the nature of the pain, in order to productively deal with event(s) that induce “acute discomfort [in] the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (10). Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” also identifies the social production of memory based on the evidence that second and third generations belonging to a certain culture remember and identify with collective trauma even when they (historically speaking) have no direct experience of the event(s) (15-16). Ron Eyerman associates this with the cultural trauma of African Americans specifically and locates slavery as a “primal scene” (a term borrowed from psychoanalysis) by which African Americans collectively

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