Interior Whiteness: Race and the "Rise of the Novel"

Abstract

critical Whiteness studies in the German context has thus far not examined the literature of the Goethezeit with the same detail as the philosophy of the period or literature and culture of later eras. This discipline also frequently draws on foundational work from the anglo-american context; Julia Roth remarks that “most German texts on Critical Whiteness relate themselves (at least on the margins) to Toni morrison’s publications.”1 indeed, although Toni morrison’s 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is concerned specifically with how an “africanist presence” emerges in and defines literature by white american authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she poses a series of questions and calls for further examination that i see as entirely applicable to other (pre)national literatures and periods as well.2 in her preface, morrison questions the relationship between race and notions of humanistic or universal literature: “How is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be ‘humanistic?’” (xii–xiii) Later in the text, she offers an explicit series of calls for projects that she views as essential to understanding literary whiteness. morrison asks, “in what ways does the imaginative encounter with africanism enable white writers to think about themselves?”3 she then elaborates on this question by outlining multiple areas for future study: