Elegies, White Dissent, and the Civil War Dead

American literary history tends to discount Civil War elegies as unvaryingly predictable and, with a few canonical exceptions, unworthy of sustained attention. Chapter 3 proposes instead that we reconsider the genre as an essential archive of white plasticity and incorporation. When considered together, the hundreds of elegies to the Civil War dead printed and reprinted between 1861 and the turn of the century constitute perhaps the best archive we have for assessing, first, the conflicted nature of Northern white feeling in response to sectional reconciliation and, second, the capacity for white nationalism to transform such dissent into a technology for supremacist belonging. As a genre, Civil War elegies thus organized those psychic, social, and political incorporations that enabled the white subject to assert misrecognition without disrupting belonging, dissent from nationalism’s projections without disrupting citizenship, and occupy several competing strands of attachment without disrupting white supremacy’s defining claim to racial exceptionalism.

The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Racial Regime

“The Pathological Sublime” shows how Kant’s location of aesthetic experience in the subjective yet universal judgment of taste generates a concept of representation that is fundamentally racial and developmental. He labels Edmund Burke’s alternative approach to aesthetic affects “pathological,” meaning an unfree state based on sensation, fear or desire. The pathological subject is the antithesis of the ethical human who can participate in civil society through sharing the common sense that grounds aesthetic universality. Burke’s reflections on the sublime horror inspired by the sight of a black woman mark the limit of the argument for universality he bases on sensations. Where Frantz Fanon’s racial phenomenology of being seen in Black Skin White Masks dramatizes his “lived experience” of being barred from human identity, Burke’s anecdote foregrounds the anxious abyss into which the encounter with blackness throws the white subject and his representational schemas.

Remaking inequalities in the neoliberal institution

Firstly this chapter discusses how Dreamfields’ 'oasis in the desert' allegedly built to transform urban children is changing urban culture in unanticipated ways. Besides grafting cultural capital onto students, it actively seeks out those who already have the capitals it requires to excel in the education market. Secondly, it explores how race and class are lived out in Dreamfields’ neoliberal regime. Whiteness does not rely on the white subject to be materialised, while the racialised subject is conceptualised through the lens of class. Both pathological blackness and dirty whiteness can be 'lost' through the application of middle-class behaviours, yet this shift requires labour, loss and conformity. Thirdly, the allure of the ‘good life’ acts a powerful tool of neoliberal governance that motivates many parents, students and teachers to willingly embrace Dreamfields’ demands. Finally, the chapter reviews how recent policy developments further centralize education and curtail participation, yet suggests there are cracks appearing in this consensus.

Moving Unsettlement: Excursions into Public and Pedagogical Memory

This paper reflects upon my recent durational performance art work, memoration #2: constituent parts, which I undertook in Kingston, Ontario in response to the bicentenary celebrations of John A. Macdonald’s birth. The performance and its discussion in this paper invoke temporal and political through-lines from the colonial policies instituted by John A. Macdonald to contemporary structures of racial power and dominant settler mythologies that continue to shape mainstream Canadian imaginaries and spaces. I suggest that a strategic performance of the white settler body -- the embodiment of the exalted white subject, as articulated by Sunera Thobani -- can produce disturbances to the perpetuation of white settler dominance in the lands now known as Canada. memoration #2 interferes with icons of material culture that imbue white settler emplacement and infiltrates civic space, university architectures, sites of memorialization and celebratory impulses that assume state and white settler primacy. Further, as an intervention into sites that are inscribed into daily life with disregard for their bonds to historical and ongoing colonial nation-building, the performance works to reveal the well-honed practices of biased amnesia that contribute to the maintenance of colonial beliefs, systems and values. By scrutinizing the embodied, symbolic and relational gestures of this performance, this paper considers the potential, complexities and limits of performative acts that aim to resist colonial power from a critical white settler positionality and invites reflection on non-colonial futures.

Interrupting White Possession and Unsettling State Borders

It is both a pleasure and a significant responsibility to review two field-shaping works in critical indigenous studies. The White Possessive showcases the unique intellectual contribution of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, both within Australia and internationally. Prising apart concepts of race, ethnicity and cultural difference, her book makes visible and accountable the patriarchal white subject of possession that subtends them. Mohawk Interruptus is a rigorous ethnographic account of the intra-subjective and intersubjective dimensions of academic disciplines and political practices that produce and police the ‘authenticity’ of Indigenous people. Both books should be read and studied by scholars across academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, they break new ground for researchers in law, sociology, women’s studies, critical race and whiteness studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, political theory and cultural studies.