Fractured notes on...
bell hooks. "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination." Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al. London: Routledge, 1992: 338-342.
On postcolonial critics: critique of the ''colonial imperialist traveler''Very little expressed interest by po co critics in representations of whiteness in the black imagination.
Critique of a world where ''evocations of pluralism and diversity act to obscure differences arbitrarily imposed and maintained by white racist domination.''
[What does this tell us of the happy multicultural discourse of the current era?]
How does hooks communicate the cultural character of race?
E.g. race is not a ''natural'' category in her essay. Why?Note: James Baldwin wrote about how race is not a ''natural'' but a ''cultural'' category: ''I find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.
On the issue of recognition and the practice of imperialist racial domination.
On the ''critical" ''ethnographic'' gaze returned.
On the deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness that secures whiteness as the privileged signifier.
The absence of recognition as a strategy that facilitates making a group ''the Other''
How does this work?
[Many white people perpetuate the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated and subhuman lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful."
Even anti-racist liberals unwittingly (e.g. unconsciously? invest in the sense of whiteness as mystery)
Dyer on the problem of cultural markers as fixed in relation to wWhite and bBlack.
What about the safety of the cover of darkness and the danger of exposure to the light?
On metaphorical language as working both ways...e.g. how whiteness most often is a terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts tortures and that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness.
P341 on stereotypes are one form of representation.... created to serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real. They are a fantasy, a projection onto the Other that makes them less threatening. Stereotypes abound when there is a distance. -- as invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken -- are not allowed. (on the way ignorance stands in for knowledge and proximity)
hooks moves to look past stereotypes and returns to memories. She ''re-inhabits a location'' where black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing.
[NB: this process is very analogous to the process of a survivor of sexual abuse moving back in autobiographical time to confront the perpetrator]
Bottom of page 341: on the economic exploitation of the whites...
To name the whiteness of the black imagination is often a representation of terror.... One must face a palimpsest of written histories that erase and deny, that reinvent the past...to make racial harmony and pluralism more plausible.
NB: how families are rewritten.
On the value of 'theorizing black experience' to uncover, restore.
p342 : How do you ask ''the real white people to please stand up''?