White Hegemony

2021 ◽  
pp. 5414-5414
Keyword(s):  
White Hegemony

scholarly journals Heterotopian Disorientation: Intersectionality in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth

Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Marlena Tronicke
Keyword(s):  
White Privilege ◽  
First Century ◽  
Country House ◽  
Spatial Disorientation ◽  
Lady Macbeth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
White Hegemony ◽  
Blind Spots

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism.

The Land Question in South Africa: 1913 and Beyond

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherryl Walker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Agrarian Change ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Question ◽  
White Hegemony

Since 1913, the “land question” in South Africa has revolved around the major inequalities in access to and rights over land between the black majority and the white minority of the population, and how these disparities should best be understood and overcome. The roots of this inequality are commonly traced back to the promulgation of the Natives Land Act in June 1913, which provided the legal framework for the subsequent division of the country into a relatively prosperous white heartland and a cluster of increasingly impoverished black reserves on the periphery. Historians have cautioned against according this legislation undue weight within the much longer history of colonization, capitalist penetration, and agrarian change that has shaped modern South Africa. The spatial divide of white core and black periphery has, however, been central to the political economy of 20th-century South Africa. Beginning in the 1950s, the apartheid government attempted to maintain white hegemony, drive an urban–industrial economy, and deflect political resistance by turning these reserves into the ethnic “homelands” of African people. This involved increasingly repressive policies of urban influx control, population relocation, and the tribalization of local administration in the reserves. Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the post-apartheid state has struggled to develop an effective land reform program that can address the crosscutting demands for land redistribution, local development, and representative government that this history has bequeathed. For many analysts, these ongoing challenges mean that “the land question” remains unresolved; for others it means that the question is itself in need of reformulation. In order to review these developments, a three-part periodization is used to organize the discussion: (1) the segregation era (1910–1948), (2) the apartheid era (1948–1990), and (3) the transition to democracy and the post-apartheid era that began in 1990.

The Violent Weight of Whiteness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Yancy
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Site ◽  
White Hegemony

What is the lived experience of the black male body within the context of white America in the twenty-first century? How can we describe the deep existential and psychic dimensions of black male bodies as they negotiate their lives within the context of white hegemony? How do their bodies continue to be truncated according to a distorted and racist imago in the white imaginary? The black male body, within the context of this white imaginary, constitutes a site of “contamination.” As such, then, within the white body politic, black male bodies are thereby always already targets of the state, deemed “criminals,” “monsters,” and “thugs.” Textual testimony, coupled with social, political, and existential phenomenological analyses, demonstrates the sheer gravity of being black and male in a mythical postrace America.

De/Constructing White Supremacy: Contending Antipodal Politics in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe ◽  
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African American Youth ◽  
Racial Stratification ◽  
Native Son ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Inferiority Complex ◽  
American Society ◽  
White Hegemony ◽  
Collective Psyche

Arguably, fear, anger and despair dominate the poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas’s daily existence in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Nevertheless, old lies of white supremacy that have held black people in perpetual turmoil are crushed through violent reaction when Bigger strikes at white hegemony through the killing of Mary Dalton. This backlash throws the white community into panic mode. Apparently, African Americans’ increased susceptibility to the inferiority complex of the 1930s was dictated by the dubious racial stratification that allotted a place of superiority to the white race over the black race, which was considered inferior. This misconception was supported by Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races ([1853] 1915) and Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1926). Bigger’s humanity, like that of other African-American youth of this period, is overwhelmed by the racial prejudices of the supremacist whites which demand that they must be meek, submissive and self-debased. As summed up at the trial of Bigger, American society gives black people no options in life and essentially denies them the basic rights of all humans to fulfil their destiny in relationship to the measure of their intelligence and talents. These denials have led to anger, shame and fear which have snowballed into crime and murder. We may, without difficulty, agree that Wright’s portrayal of the killing of Mary is not in any way designed to make Bigger a hero of the black protest against racial marginality. Rather, Bigger is created to accentuate the effects of suffocating social conditions that could turn an individual into an American “native son” raised in an atmosphere of transcendental hopelessness and weaned on the diet of violence, hatred and viciousness which provided the immediate platform for the launching of a backlash against American racism. Using the foregoing as its standpoint, this article examines white/black antipodes and race tensions in Richard Wright’s Native Son. It employs the Freudian conceptual construct of the human psyche, divided into the id, ego and superego, as a theoretical framework. A parallel of the hypothesis is conceived to expound the white/black taxonomy in race discourse. In Freudian psychology, the id is irrational and it projects pleasure principles. The ego is, however, rational and mature, while the superego mediates between the id and the ego. These paradigms are used to explore the collective psyche of race theorists in the paper. 

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Kendra Marston
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Western World ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Depressive Episodes ◽  
White Hegemony

The introductory section opens with a discussion of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, examining this text’s significance as part of a broader cultural moment in which the depressive episodes of white women are used to provide commentary on the moral decay of the Western world. It situates the book’s analysis within the fields of postfeminist media studies and critical race and whiteness studies. The Hollywood manifestation of postfeminist melancholia is attributed to several factors, including a resurgence of interest in feminist politics, conflicts in US race relations, and the shifting image of the US internationally. It then argues for the examination of this cinematic figure’s relationship to a politics of white hegemony, briefly exploring Hollywood’s history of utilising stories involving ethnic appropriation as a means of assuaging national anxieties associated with earlier socio-political movements, such as the civil rights movement and sexual revolution.

Porcelain ethics: a critical linguistic analysis of the treatment of race in the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
National Association ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Social Work Ethics ◽  
Social Work Practitioners ◽  
White Hegemony

The linguistic treatment of race – or lack thereof – in the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics upholds hegemonic whiteness, the cornerstone of racialisation and attendant ideological and material violence of myriad forms. The Code: endorses and deploys language that renders race an ahistorical, decontextual commodity to be possessed; forgoes rigorous engagement with defining race as a situated and historically harmful social construction; and narrates the prescription of ostensibly universalisable social work ethics from a position distinctly influenced by and beneficial to hegemonic whiteness. This article delineates these propensities evident in the language of the Code and recommends a shift by social work practitioners, educators, researchers and scholars towards racial ethics that resist closure, embrace unsettlement and validate incommensurability in an effort to subvert white hegemony and actualise more authentic and comprehensive racial justice.

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