American Frictions. How Whiteness Claimed the Future : The Always New vs The Always Now in US-American Literature

Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being. Contents Before chapter one Movement 1 The Spectrum of white violence & spectral blackness in Don DeLillo’s Zero K 2 Reaching the limit, or how Kathy Acker used blackness to abandon Haiti and arrive home safely 3 Against dominant visuality, or the cut as critique* Futurity 4 Ten easy steps to inherit the future. Visualizing renewal and the old prodigal boy in Marylinne Robinson’s Gilead 5 Another town, another story 6 Beloved endings* Newness 7 Newness and negativity in the northern history of the new 8 Instead of conclusion* 9 Acknowledgements Works cited Index