“Is Cleopatra Black?”: Examining Whiteness and the American New Woman

In the 1920s and 1930s, conceptions of the “New Woman” and Egyptomania shaped American culture. Employing methods of critical race art history and material culture studies, I focus on a 1925 Callot Soeurs dress and silk pajamas (c. 1920–1929), taking into consideration both the semiotic qualities of Egyptian motifs as they circulated in early twentieth century American visual culture as well as the sensuous material aspects of the garments. Through primary sources like cosmetic advertisements, fashion magazines, and costume manuals, I contextualize the figure of Cleopatra as a symbol of white beauty and power in this period. Weighing both visual and material aspects, I argue that the repeated act of wearing these garments by white-presenting women placed them in a performative valence, where the wearer ironically became a white woman through her appropriation of Cleopatra and Egyptian motifs. Further, these motifs conferred modernity, cosmopolitanism, class status and an acceptable sexuality upon the wearer. As such, I address how material objects shape subjectivity, simultaneously reflecting and producing racialized and gendered discourses. By focusing on white womanhood, I draw upon critical studies of whiteness in order to disrupt its invisible normative status. This essay traces its operational logic and aids in dismantling the pervasive power of white supremacy that continues to circulate today.

Tom and Friends

Chapter 1 locates the treatment of poor whites in the new plantation tradition of post-Reconstruction southern literature, with especial focus on Thomas Dixon’s work, his respondent Sutton Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt, whose 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream analyses the ascendance of poor whites into formerly bourgeois spaces. Focusing on Dixon, the chapter discusses how racial anxiety relates to the myths surrounding the protection of white womanhood during the Lost Cause era, while also revealing that, for all of Dixon’s pronouncements regarding white unity, a closer look at his work reveals a fundamental disdain for poor whites that, while lacking the outright violence against blacks we see in his works, nevertheless bears a resemblance to the racist language meted out against blacks. Analysis of Sutton Griggs, whose novel The Hindered Hand responds to Dixon directly, further challenges the latter's racist assumptions.

FEMINIST STORYTELLING AND THE PROBLEM OF WHITE FEMINISM

This article considers the problem of white feminism and how it is narrated. Part One argues that common strategies for solving this problem focus on reforming white feminist subjectivity; although these strategies have not achieved their desired effects, they remain popular because they narratively satisfy demands of feminist storytelling. They thus become traps. Part Two turns to literary studies for a methodological reorientation for Christian theology: away from ethics as a redemptive project pursued at the site of white feminist subjectivity, and toward a critical project that understands white womanhood as a textual figure in need of ongoing interpretation.

The American Actress’s Starring Playbook, 1831–1857

This chapter examines the professional strategies of three American actresses of the 1830s through the 1850s: Josephine Clifton, Charlotte Cushman, and Matilda Heron, who competed with English stars in the context of intensifying respectability politics around theater. They appealed to nationalism, pursued original repertoire, and tried to align themselves with genteel white womanhood. As women with no family alliances in the industry, they faced the pitfalls of negotiating an industry largely controlled by male power brokers and in which appeals to respectability remained tenuous. The comparison between them demonstrates that the starring system made it possible for some women to pursue unconventional independent lives for the time even as they strained to appear to conform to narrow constructions of genteel white womanhood.

White Womanhood and/as American Empire in Arrival and Annihilation

American science fiction stories, such as U.S. historical narratives, often give central place to white, Western male subjects as noble explorers, benevolent colonizers, and border-guarding patriots. This constructed subjectivity renders colonized or cultural others as potentially threatening aliens, and it works alongside the parallel construction of white womanhood as a signifier for the territory to be possessed and protected by American empire—or as a sign of empire itself. Popular cultural narratives, whether in the world of U.S. imperialism or the speculative worlds of science fiction, may serve a religious function by helping to shape world-making: the envisioning and enacting of imagined communities. This paper argues that the world-making of American science fiction can participate in the construction and maintenance of American empire; yet, such speculative world-making may also subvert and critique imperialist ideologies. Analyzing the recent films Arrival (2016) and Annihilation (2018) through the lenses of postcolonial and feminist critique and theories of religion and popular culture, I argue that these films function as parables about human migration, diversity, and hybrid identities with ambiguous implications. Contact with the alien other can be read as bringing threat, loss, and tragedy or promise, birth, and possibility.