UNIVERSITY of WINCHESTER FACULTY of ARTS White Atlantics

UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER FACULTY OF ARTS White Atlantics: The Imagination of Transatlantic Whiteness in Film ANNEMARIE KANE Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2010 UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ARTS Doctor of Philosophy White Atlantics: The Imagination of Transatlantic Whiteness in Film Annemarie Kane The purpose of the project is to investigate the politics of hegemonic white Atlantics in film. Case studies were selected as paradigmatic of specific historical moments in the development of white Atlanticist discourses. The focus of analysis in each case was the representation of racialised whiteness in a context of its gradual decentring and a concomitant emergence of transnational identities in a post-national discursive paradigm. The argument presented here is that the white Atlantic is a political construct variously both resisted and produced in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic paradigms of racialised transatlantic whiteness. As such it is capable of mutation and inflection as it is deployed in the mobilisation of power. A range of textual analysis techniques and tools, including semiotics, genre and narrative analysis, were applied to the selected case studies. The methodology employed was derived from post-structuralist accounts of discourse as both constitutive and productive of identities, in which film may be understood as part of the cultural repertoire of signifiers of ‘what is on the mind’ of the producers and readers of white Atlanticist discourse. The project is limited by its substantive scope and methodological approach. Substantively, its scope is limited to film. Interrogation of other expressive forms would enlarge the scope to readings. The methodology also leads to an emphasis on a reading of the text, while the audience is assumed. An ethnographic methodology may offer 2 different results. Most significantly, the project is limited by its case study scope. A fuller interpretation of the development of the white Atlantic in film requires a considerably more substantive transatlantic genealogy to interrogate its polyvalence in different times and locations. The project extends the academic study of racialised whiteness which has mainly been focused within national boundaries. It also extends the contemporary development of work on transatlantic whiteness of which the substantive research has been mainly of a historical nature. In extending the range of research in these ways, the project identifies and offers a reading of contemporary white Atlanticist discourses and their development. The case study readings suggest that, in the context of the progressive decentring of whiteness, polyvalent discourses of racialised transatlantic whiteness have emerged, articulated, in particular, via available tropes of romance and masculinity. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Jude Davies and Carol Smith for their continued support and encouragement to the end. I am grateful to Jude for his positive and inspirational guidance, and above all for his patience. I am indebted to Carol for her insights and rigorous standards. Without them, this thesis would not have been written. I also wish to thank my examiners, Will Kaufman and Laura Hubner. Their astute comments have resulted in a better piece of work and have prompted new directions for study. Finally, special thanks must go to my partner David, who has lived and breathed this project with me. His support has been unflagging ! 4 Contents Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Themes and Issues 9 Chapter 2: Methodology 63 Chapter 3: ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’: Woody 80 Allen’s Black and White Jewish Atlantic Chapter 4: White Atlantic Romance: A Really 127 Special (White) Relationship Chapter 5: Post-9/11 Anxiety and New 152 Atlantics Conclusion 211 Bibliography 214 Filmography 222 5 Introduction This project interrogates the politics of white Atlantics in film. It deploys the construct of an imperialist ‘white Atlantic’ as an heuristic device to explore the politics of polyvalent transatlantic discourses in film. Film case studies are analysed for their discursive content, and are grouped in terms of their Atlanticist positioning. The first chapter is concerned with ‘Themes and Issues’ and departs from the emergence of two areas of study in the academy: transatlanticism, particularly in the wake of Gilroy’s work, and whiteness studies. It provides an overview of scholarly debates linked to these discursive constructs. It goes on to consider connections between them in historical and contemporary contexts, specifically their historical contingency and mobilisation by competing interest groups. It also explains the terms ‘default identity’ and ‘racialised whiteness’ as they are used in the project to position identities relationally and in discourse. The chapter uses the construct ‘white Atlantic’ as an heuristic device to explore and problematise hegemonic uses of transatlantic whitenesses. It includes a genealogy of cinematic white and Jewish Atlantics to contextualise the case studies which follow. The Methodology chapter addresses the question of why films are the chosen medium to examine. It argues for the nature of film as a medium which produces racial identity as apparently self-evident, with concomitant implications for representations of identities. It critically examines the reliability and validity of textual analysis as a method and considers to what extent it can be claimed that film operates as discursive practice. 6 The first case study chapter, ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’, uses the construct of a Jewish Atlantic to explore the politics of Allen’s 1970s romances. The films are discussed in terms of their mobilisation of a counter hegemonic discourse in opposition to a post-World War Two rightward shift in US culture and politics. This theme is linked to Allen’s problematising of ethnic absolutism and critiquing the privileging of whiteness. The chapter considers how successful Allen is in achieving these ends, and whether his films finally privilege his version of Jewish masculinity as the default identity. The second content chapter, ‘White Atlantic Romance’, explores the politics of white Atlanticist discourses in the sub-genre of the London transatlantic romantic-comedies of the last two decades. The genealogy of the genre is traced back to Allen’s 1970s romances, in a further exploration of the relation of white and Jewish Atlantics. The chapter explores the context of the sub-genre’s emergence and argues that the Curtis films expressed a political re-orientation of British white Atlanticist discourse in the Blair- Clinton era. It offers a close reading of Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, UK, 1994) to argue that on the one hand it exploits the possibilities offered by polysemic racialised and queer constructions of white Atlantics; while on the other it privileges white, bourgeois, English masculinity, as the default, Atlanticist identity. The discussion argues that by the turn of the century, the films express a marginalisation of the racialising and queering of white Atlanticist discourses, as evidenced by the later development of the transatlantic, white, heterosexual rom-com as a sub-genre of romantic comedy. At the same time, the genre expresses rifts in the Special Relationship after the election of G.W. Bush. The chapter concludes with a summary tracing the development of the genre up to and including Love Actually (Richard Curtis, UK, 2003). 7 The final content chapter ‘Post- 9/11 Anxieties’ examines three case studies in the context of a shift in European attitudes to America in the Post-9/11 era. It argues that intertextual relays of the white Atlantic romance narrative and of narratives of white masculine crisis are deployed in the service of articulating differently inflected discourses of Atlanticist renewal in each of the film examples. The chapter suggests there is a continuity of themes pre- and post- 9/11. 8 Themes and Issues The notion of a white Atlantic is a contested and contradictory one, suggestive of both fixity and liminality, of both dislocation and relocation. Interrogation of its content, borders and boundaries has emerged in response to recent reorientations in ways of seeing and narrating racial identities. Whether it is possible to identify a real or metaphoric white Atlantic is a question that has been posed since the development of two distinct, but historically not unrelated, discursive fields in the academy: the deployment of post- national(ist) cultural paradigms in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and, contemporaneously with Gilroy’s work on the black Atlantic, work on white identities and constructions of whiteness. Whether there can be identified a multiplicity of polyvalent Atlantics is a question which arises out of this work. One thread of enquiry has developed from suggestive paragraphs in The Black Atlantic and from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (1992) concerning the Jewish diaspora and its relation to the black Atlantic. The idea that there is a Jewish Atlantic, and a consideration of its relation to whiteness and blackness, has emerged, complicating further the discursive field of Atlanticist paradigms. Why interrogation of these Atlanticist discourses have emerged in recent years, and what further questions they raise are questions to be addressed in this opening chapter. The overall focus of the study is an interrogation of the politics

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