Transforming Whiteness: Seeing (And) Shifting Representations of Whiteness in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2009 Transforming whiteness: Seeing (and) shifting representations of whiteness in twentieth-century American literature and film Meredith McCarroll University of Tennessee Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation McCarroll, Meredith, "Transforming whiteness: Seeing (and) shifting representations of whiteness in twentieth-century American literature and film. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2009. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6008 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Meredith McCarroll entitled "Transforming whiteness: Seeing (and) shifting representations of whiteness in twentieth-century American literature and film." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. La Vinia Delois Jennings, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Meredith McCarroll entitled ―Transforming Whiteness: Seeing (and) Shifting Representations of Whiteness in Twentieth Century American Literature and Film.‖ I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. La Vinia Delois Jennings, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Charles Maland_________________ Mary E. Papke__________________ Christine A. Holmlund____________ Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges_______ Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) Transforming Whiteness: Seeing (and) Shifting Representations of Whiteness in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree University of Tennessee, Knoxville Meredith McCarroll May 2009 ii Copyright © by Meredith McCarroll All rights reserved iii Acknowledgements As anyone working on a project like this knows, the process is collective and its completion feels surreal. I am filled with gratitude for more people than I can name as I reach this closure. First, I thank my extended family for all of their support which took various forms— from empty cabins to child-free weekends. I especially thank my mother, Phyllis Braswell, for first encouraging me to ask questions, and my brother, Matt McCarroll, for showing me to always doubt easy answers. I owe any success I ever find to the support of my partner, Jeff, whose generosity and love astound me each new day. I thank him for giving and giving, and for knowing when to stop. To my son, Jasper, born in the midst of this journey, I am grateful for his patience as I was gone and his occasional insistence that I stay. Together, we helped the dogwoods bloom. I owe much gratitude to the mentors that I have had over the years. To Michael Lodico for being the first teacher to make me feel that I had something worth saying. To Jay Wentworth for his joyful and enthusiastic refusal to take less than he deserved. To Lynn Sanders for showing me that there is more to life than literature and that literature can give more to life. To Chip Arnold for calling me out and daring me to ―aspire‖ further. To Loretta Williams for showing me my own whiteness and expecting me to deal with knowledge responsibly. Finally, to La Vinia Jennings for seeing this project when I could not, for talking me off many a ledge, and for keeping me laughing in spite of myself. My gracious committee, Mary Papke, Chuck Maland, and Chris Holmlund, stepped far beyond the reaches of any job description to help bring this project to fruition. I would not have reached a conclusion without their steady and patient presence. Finally, I thank Keely Byars-Nichols for being my editor, co-author, co-parent, partner, mentor, and friend. iv Abstract Transforming Whiteness: Seeing (and) Shifting Representations of Whiteness in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film both explores the ways that whiteness has remained unseen in American socio-political realms and in American cultural texts and points to ways of seeing beyond the white/non-white dichotomy in order to revision race. The word ―transforming‖ functions as an adjective, signaling the ways that whiteness has changed shape, and also as an active verb, looking at ways that we may shift whiteness out of its position of dominance. As critical race and whiteness scholars have demonstrated, as long as whiteness maintains its invisibility, it maintains its privilege. Adding to and opening up this criticism, Transforming Whiteness focuses on figures, moments, and texts that have not been interrogated for their privileging of whiteness and maintenance of a racist and oppressive hierarchy. Integral to the dissertation project is the dismantling of the dichotomy in the very method of the study; rather than focus on whiteness as a stagnant identity, a sort of racial ―other‖ from a different vantage point, the focus follows white privilege as it is written onto black and multiracial bodies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Concluding optimistically, in order to deconstruct whiteness, I argue that those who create and interpret cultural texts must tackle the white/non- white dichotomy that has remained dominant in America through social and political movements that attempted to shift racial roles without fully acknowledging the constructed but powerful role of whiteness. Paul Haggis and Christian Lander exemplify a deconstruction of the dichotomy to allow a multidimensional and mutable racial perspective as they decenter whiteness by positioning it alongside multiple racial identities and by addressing the conflation of markers of identity such as class, geography, gender, and religion, respectively. v Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Depression-era Communism and the “Negro Question”: Whiteness and Communism in Richard Wright’s Native Son .............................................................. 19 ―Blasted into revolutionary awareness‖: White Communism in Native Son ............................ 20 Richard Wright, Communist ..................................................................................................... 26 ―Communism is the Americanism of the Twentieth Century‖: The Popular Front ................ 42 Conclusion: The End of an Era ................................................................................................. 66 Chapter Two: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night: Whiteness at the End of the Civil Rights Movement ................................................... 71 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: A Film of the Integrated Civil Rights Movement ................ 74 White Privilege and Black Power—The Transition of 1966 .................................................... 94 In the Heat of the Night: At a Crossroads ................................................................................. 98 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 119 Chapter Three: The Failure of Trey Ellis’s Cultural Mulatto: Passing as White, Passing as Black in Bamboozled and Erasure .............................. 122 Passing as White ..................................................................................................................... 129 Passing as Black ...................................................................................................................... 146 Chapter Four: “Claiming”: White Ambition, Multiracial Identity, and the New Racial Passing ............................................................................................................................ 157 Black becomes White: Passing in the 1920s........................................................................... 163 Toward Whiteness: Claiming Multiracial Identity in the Twenty-First Century ................... 169 ―You‘re Obviously Something‖: Misidentification and Multiracial Narratives ..................... 176 The ―Cablinasian‖ Identity of Tiger Woods ........................................................................... 180 Outing Vin Diesel ................................................................................................................... 183 The New American Passing: Claiming Multiracial Identity ................................................... 186 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................