The Dialectical Image of White Masochism and the Fugitive Spectator: On Claudia Rankine’s The White Card

Based on a close reading of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2018), in this article I argue that Rankine offers a political view of the theatre as capable of producing a dialectical image of white masochism in service of a critique of the neoliberal present. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images, I further contend that Rankine’s dialectical image intervenes in helpful ways in the famous debate between Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten regarding how to represent the scene of racial/sexual subjection. In that debate, Hartman decides not to focus on the “intolerable image” that spectacularizes Black suffering to defamiliarize the terror of slavery, concentrating instead on the terror of the mundane. Moten questions that move and turns back to that image to unpack a different kind of agency, which he identifies as the resistance of the object. Rankine’s theatre succeeds, I claim, in rendering both mundane and schocking violence visible without replicating it, while also foregrounding the otherwise compromised and often erased agency of the enslaved. In doing this, I conclude, Rankine’s theatre offers us a fugitive rather than emancipated spectator. Here I question the limits of Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator to address the politics of the theatre, when one understands policing not as an abstract logic of power but as a historically changing technology of racial/sexual subjection.