Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race

by Seshadri-Crooks,Kalpana

• ISBN13: 9780415192552
• ISBN10: 0415192552
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2000-08-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Desiring Whitenessprovides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often presumed to be a social construction and we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually.Desiring Whitenessexplores this visual discrimination by asking questions in specifically psychoanalytic terms: how do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshadri-Crooks demonstrates that race is a system of differences organized around a privileged term: Whiteness. Contra "Whiteness Studies," she argues that Whiteness should not be understood as the bodily or material property of a particular group, but as a term that makes the logic of race thinkingpossible.

Author Biography

Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College, Massachusetts

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Key to Lacan's works	x
Introduction: on looking	1	(10)
Deciphering Whiteness	11	(46)
The object of Whiteness	57	(22)
Whiteness and the elephant joke	79	(24)
Looking alike: or the ethics of Suture	103	(29)
What's in a name? Love and knowledge beyond identity in ``Recitatif''	132	(26)
Discolorations	158	(3)
Notes	161	(7)
Bibliography	168	(8)
Index	176