ABSTRACT
I had not intended to write a chapter on whiteness as death, but it was a topic that kept coming back. In the centrality of the image of death in Christianity, in the presence of death (killing, the desert, hardness and silence) in the Western, in the image of a transcendent dissolution in light, in the mayhem and crucifixionism of the muscleman films, in the despair at but glimpsed sense of redemption in nothingness in The Jewel in the Crown, the subject of death keeps recurring.
