This proposed panel for the May, 2001 conference of the American
Literature Association seeks contributors who are interested in pursuing
new modes for dealing with whiteness in African American literature with
specific attention to Du Bois's idea of double consciousness. Whiteness
studies in American literature over the last few years has provided
considerations of how African American authors depict and interrogate
whiteness. While recent books and articles have shown, as David Roediger
says, that "African Americans have been among the nation's keenest
students of white consciousness and white behavior," what is lacking in
this scholarship is a model of what whiteness signifies in African
American literature similar to the model for what blackness signifies in
white American literature that Toni Morrison offers in "Playing in the
Dark." Given that a significant part of Morrison's model is the
unconscious way in which blackness informs the white imaginary, any
model for investigating whiteness in African American literature in the
mode of Morrison's theory would have to take into consideration W. E. B.
Du Bois's idea of double consciousness. Because of the experience of
being black in America, according to DuBois, African Americans have a
heightened awareness of both their own blackness and of the whiteness
around them, making it so that the presence of whiteness in texts by
black authors would be much more self-conscious and self-reflexive than
the presence of blackness in texts by white authors.
Please email a one-page abstract by January 12, 2001 to
whitley@wam.umd.edu or kaylen59@hotmail.com
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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