Whiteness As a Category of Literary Analysis Racializing Markers and Race-Evasiveness in J.M

Whiteness as a Category of Literary Analysis Racializing Markers and Race-Evasiveness in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

SUSAN ARNDT

HE “HABIT OF IGNORING RACE” is widely considered, as Toni Morrison puts it, “a graceful, even generous, liberal ges- ture.”1 Yet, as Colette Guillaumin argues polemically, “Race T 2 does not exist. But it does kill people.” Though it is impossible to classify people genetically in terms of ‘races’, the invention of ‘races’ has given rise to a symbolic order of race.3 It has produced political and cultural positions and hierarchies and continues to exist both structurally and dis- cursively. These structures, discourses and hierarchies need to be ex- plored, analyzed, and challenged. Hence, we are in need of a double movement of thought which leads us away from ‘race’ as a biologistic construct and simultaneously towards race4 as a social position and ana-

1 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1992): 9–10. 2 Collette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (London: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 1995): 107. 3 For the concept of the symbolic order, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Sur le pouvoir sym- bolique,” Annales 32.3 (1977): 405–11; Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 4 ‘Race’ and, correspondingly, ‘white’, ‘black’, and ‘coloured’ are used in single quotation marks, whenever these terms are categories of ‘race theories’ and, as such, refer to biologistic constructs; capitalization and writings in italics, refer to social positions and/or as analytical categories. 168 SUSAN ARNDT º lytical category of knowledge, which is most appropriately to be performed on the basis of the methodological concept of the “racial turn.”5 Transgressing Shankar Raman’s notion of the ‘racial turn’, I use this concept additionally to cover the movement of thought performed by Critical Whiteness Studies.6 The late-twentieth century gave rise to the academic field of Race Studies, which largely performed as Black Studies. Research in this field aimed to dismantle and challenge the processes of racialization, yet tended to focus on blacks and failed to consider the way in which whiteness contributed to racism, its structures and discourses.7 Overcoming this asymmetry, the research field of Critical Whiteness Studies takes whiteness into account in addition to blackness and in its complex relationship to blackness, thus resituating ‘race’/race as a relational category of knowledge and criticism.8

5 See Shankar Raman, “The Racial Turn: ‘Race’, Postkolonialität, Literaturwissen- schaft,” in Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Miltos Pechlivanos, Stefan Rieger, Wolfgang Struck & Michael Weitz (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1995): 255. 6 See Susan Arndt, “‘The Racial Turn’: Kolonialismus, Weiße Mythen und Critical Whiteness Studies,” in Koloniale und postkoloniale Konstruktionen von Afrika und Menschen afrikanischer Herkunft in der deutschen Alltagskultur, ed. Marianne Bech- haus-Gerst, Sunna Gieseke & Reinhard Klein–Arendt (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007): 11–26. 7 Relying on critics such as Paul Gilroy, and in accordance with black emancipation movements, I tend to apply ‘Black’ as a marker for all non-white positions which are faced with racial ‘Othering’, exclusion, and discrimination conducted by whites. The capitalization refers to both, its being a construct and social position, on the one hand, and a product of Black intellectual, academic, and political resistance movements and processes of emancipation, on the other. I use italics to indicate that whiteness/white(s) is a construct and social position, but that it differs from the Black position in as far as it does not emerge from a politics of self-empowered renaming. 8 This approach has already been practised by theoreticians such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said, yet reached the status of a theoretical grounding with writings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Ruth Frankenberg in the 1990s. Cf.: Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: F. Maspero, 1961); Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); Albert Memmi, Le racisme: description, définition, traitement (1982; Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). For an introduction to this field, see Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham NC & London: Duke UP, 1997); Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. Maisha Eg- gers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche & Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2005).