White Women in Racialized Spaces

Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature

Samina Najmi, Rajini Srikanth, Samina Najmi, Rajini Srikanth

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791454787, 9780791454770
• eBook ISBN: 9780791488089
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Social Sciences

Explores the unique relationship between white women and racial Others in a wide variety of literary works.

At once racially privileged and sexually marginalized, white women have been energetic in calling for solidarity among all women in opposing patriarchy, but have not been equally motivated to examine their own racial privilege. White Women in Racialized Spaces turns primarily to literature to illuminate the undeniable blind spots in white women's comprehension of their advantage. The contributors cover extensive historical ground, from early captivity narratives of white women in seventeenth-century America up to the present-day trials of Louise Woodward and Manjit Basuta, both British nannies accused of causing the deaths of their infant charges in the United States. Their wide-ranging discussions also include representations of white women in Native American, Latin American, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. The volume ultimately makes the case that, by creating alternative scenarios to particular ethical, political, or emotional problems against which readers and characters test their responses, literature forms an ideal vehicle for exploring white women's actual and potential roles in their efforts to undercut the oppressive force of whiteness.

Table of contents

• WHITE WOMEN IN RACIALIZED SPACES: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature
• Contents
• Foreword: ELIZABETH AMMONS
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: SAMINA NAJMI AND RAJINI SRIKANTH
• 2. South Asians and the Complex Interstices of Whiteness: Negotiating Public Sentimentin the United States and Britain
• 3. Whiteness and Soap-Opera Justice: Comparing the Louise Woodwardand Manjit Basuta Cases
• 4. Mother Teresa as the Mirror of Bourgeois Guilt
• 5. Ventriloquism in the Captivity Narrative: White Women Challenge European American Patriarchy
• 6. “Those Indians Are Great Thieves, I Suppose?”: Historicizing the White Woman in The Squatter and the Don
• 7. “Let Me Play Desdemona”: White Heroines and Interracial Desire inLouisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” and “M.L.”
• 8. “Getting in Touch with the True South”: Pet Negroes, White Crackers, and Racial Staging in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee
• 9. Prison, Perversion, and Pimps: The White Temptress in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Iceberg Slim’s Pimp
• 10. Subject Positions in Elizabeth Bishop’s Representations of Whiteness and the “Other”
• 11. How Can a White Woman Love a Black Woman?: The Anglo-Boer War and Possibilities of Desire
• 12. From Betrayal to Inclusion: The Work of the White Woman’s Gazein Claire Denis’s Chocolat
• 13. The Imperial Feminine: Victorian Women Travellers in Egypt
• 14. Chinese Coolies, Hidden Perfume, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Anna Leonowens’s: The Romance of the Harem
• About the Contributors
• Index of Names
• Index of Terms