ABSTRACT
The problem with trying to think about whiteness as a racial category, according to film theorist Richard Dyer, is that whiteness, in film as in other forms of cultural representation, “seems not to be there as a subject at all.” Part of the difficulty is that whiteness seems to stand for so much else besides race: safety and radiance, for example, as opposed to danger and darkness. Moreover, black is almost always particularizing in the way that white seldom is. Books like Waverley or Wuthering Heights or A Moveable Feast are about Jacobite intrigues or tempestuous lovers or American expatriates before they are about white people; Equiano’s Travels or Sula are about black people before they are about eighteenth-century diarists or midwestern women. Generally, black is clearly marked out as a category, whereas white, because it seems to be nothing in particular, manages also to be “everything,” coterminous with the entire range of human diversity (44-46). This makes it hard not only to analyze whiteness but hard even to see it, much less to see its meanings as socially produced and secured through Anglo-Saxon domination.
