White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness, and: The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy, and: White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (review)

Contrary to the persistent assertions of conservative voices in the culture wars, the critical examination of whiteness is hardly a novel pursuit. In the epilogue of his latest book, The Color of Sex, Mason Stokes reminds us that the roots of whiteness studies can be traced to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American writers like Charles Chesnutt and W. E. B. DuBois, who probed the subject of racism and white identity, and to second wave feminists, who produced the first explicit theoretical accounts of white privilege and its relation to other forms of oppression. Even those more recently published works widely credited with engendering the field have been in circulation for over a decade now, time enough for revised versions of the original titles to have been released; the latest edition of David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1998), for example, includes an afterword in which the author looks back on the critical controversy the book created. Yet although these interventions provide us with some sense of the contours of the field's history, its future is less certain. Together with Stokes's The Color of Sex, two additional contributions, by Renée Curry and Catherine Jurca, present an opportunity to reflect upon the methodological limitations and possibilities of whiteness studies that may very well determine its staying power among literary and cultural critics.

A self-identified feminist, Curry assumes the role of consciousness raiser in White Women Writing White to reveal the ways in which poetic discourse "participate[s] in and facilitate[s] the maintenance of whiteness as an unmarked and dominant force" (170). The central premise of the book is that white women "not only inherit racism, but . . . also fall heir to a language of denial related to that racism" (8). Within the realm of literature, this legacy expresses itself as a "poetics of presumption" in which white women writers "maintain a practiced and determined ignorance regarding white politics infiltrating a text" and a "predilection for prioritizing color aesthetics over color politics" (10). To aid in the larger project of "dismantling" white mastery and privilege, Curry devotes the three chapters that follow her introduction to an analysis of these "color aesthetics" (by which she means color imagery) in the poetry of H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. This approach, however, proves reductive: even if we grant Curry's supposition that "a white mountain peak in poetry is never simply a literal snow-capped mountain" (87), it does not follow that a white peak therefore signifies a racial will to power, as she concludes in readings of H.D.'s "Cliff Temple" (28) and Bishop's "The Imaginary Iceberg" (88). Sections in which poems are situated within their historical or biographical contexts are more compelling, but in the end, the study reaches an interpretive and political impasse: once we make whiteness visible, what do we do with it, and with the poetry where it had lain hidden?

Whereas the writers in Curry's investigation, as she concedes, would not have understood their work as "racially encoded," those in Stokes's study trumpet their racist agendas. Popular nineteenth-century white supremacist texts (including plantation romances, dime novels, religious tracts, and films) provide a rich terrain for analysis of whiteness as a "structural ideology," Stokes suggests...