Transforming whiteness: Seeing (and) shifting representations of whiteness in twentieth-century American literature and film

Author

Meredith McCarroll, University of Tennessee

Date of Award

5-2009

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

La Vinia Delois Jennings

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.

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