Marking Whiteness

The title of the volume captures the stark absence of the acknowledgement of Whiteness at the core of Anglophone Modernism and in Modernist Studies. “Modernity’s Self” names the powerful impact of Whiteness as a process of subject construction in specific cultural moments of British late imperialism and post-Reconstruction US history. In this co-edited collection, the essays analyze both the silence around Whiteness (“Modernism’s Other”) and the consequences of marking its presence. In doing so, the volume opens up spaces to reconcile the field’s unaddressed tolerance of, if not compliance with, racist ideologies permeating both modernist cultural production and scholarship with the goal of recovering a more inclusive and diverse understanding of the field. The essays collectively respond to two questions: How can interrogating Whiteness, which is an analytical category intrinsic to modernist aesthetics and institutional positioning, change Modernist Studies as a field? What can methodologies, pedagogies, and institutional forms look like as this transition begins and continues?

The collection is divided into three parts to address the practices of Whiteness in modernist studies: Aesthetics, Intersectionality, and Inter/disciplinary Practice. We begin with aesthetics because modernism is the aesthetic produced in dynamic relation to the cultural formations of modernity: perceived rapid changes in labor, transportation, technology, and perceptions of body, mind, and even character. Essays in this section examine how the production of Whiteness is baked in as a positive value in assessing the value of cultural production. The second section focuses on the embodiment of Whiteness, primarily through the gendered and racialized female body, as a deflective practice that unmarks Whiteness while making it central to cultural crises around morality, national borders, and futurity. The third section considers the tacit prioritization of Whiteness as a positive value through institutional structures and pedagogical practice; these case studies ruminate on the generative potential of isolating and marking these effects. In each essay, scholars examine the stakes of marking Whiteness as a category of analysis distinct from, yet wholly imbricated with, racial categorization, given the potential for reification inherent in all strategies of marking.