Marking Whiteness: Modernity’s Self, Modernism’s Other

The collection is divided into three parts to address the practices of Whiteness in modernist studies: Aesthetics, Intersectionality, and Inter/disciplinary Practice. We begin with aesthetics because modernism is the aesthetic produced in dynamic relation to the cultural formations of modernity: perceived rapid changes in labor, transportation, technology, and perceptions of body, mind, and even character. Essays in this section examine how the production of Whiteness is baked in as a positive value in assessing the value of cultural production. The second section focuses on the embodiment of Whiteness, primarily through the gendered and racialized female body, as a deflective practice that unmarks Whiteness while making it central to cultural crises around morality, national borders, and futurity. The third section considers the tacit prioritization of Whiteness as a positive value through institutional structures and pedagogical practice; these case studies ruminate on the generative potential of isolating and marking these effects. In each essay, scholars examine the stakes of marking Whiteness as a category of analysis distinct from, yet wholly imbricated with, racial categorization, given the potential for reification inherent in all strategies of marking.