Ladelle McWhorter

Where do white people come from? A Foucaultian critique of Whiteness Studies

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower.

Book review forum

Ladelle McWhorter Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 440 pp.,

Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (review)

27.95 paperback,

Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization

75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-22063-9). Ladelle McWhorter begins Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-Ameri...

Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy

Elizabeth Grosz’s latest anthology, Becomings, is a tightly integrated and very exciting collection of essays by a group of careful and highly gifted scholars from several disciplines. As Grosz puts it in her introduction, the eleven papers gathered here “represent the interests . . . that literary, cultural, political, and social and cultural theory, as well as science and technological studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and contemporary epistemology, have in the replacement of an ontology of being with an ontology of becoming” (7). More specifically, she states, “this collection . . . explores the ontological, epistemic, and political implications of time as a dynamic and irreversible force” (7). In most of the history of philosophy, as well the histories of the disciplines of natural science, social science, and even history itself, time has been taken to be a constant or a passive medium within which events unfold. Our thinking typically privileges the present or presence and often conceives of the future as nothing but the continuation of chains of causality from the present and the past. In other words, we tend not to think of time as creative and not to think of the future, or futures, as truly open. Thus, being takes priority over becoming, and becoming is subordinated to the laws of nature and history, to past cause and/or preestablished telos. Grosz and her contributors have set out to change all that. The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, entitled “The Becoming of the World,” contains essays by Grosz, Manuel De Landa, John Rajchman, and Linda Martin Alcoff. Grosz’s essay is particularly clear and provocative, raising the question: “Is knowledge opposed to the future?” (21). That is, if we conceive of the future as open, as not determined by the past and the present, if we conceive of time as creative, what happens to knowledge? She answers: “If dominant modes of knowledge (causal, statistical) are incapable of envisioning the absolutely new, maybe other modes of knowing, other forms of thinking, need to be proposed” (21). Through an illuminating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, she begins the process of trying to envision such other forms of thinking. De Landa continues Grosz’s project by taking up the question of determinism in scientific thinking and sketching a Deleuzian alternative to determinism in scientific work. Rajchman raises the question of whether democracy can be thought and practiced in ways that do not privilege being and representation. Then, at the end of the section, Alcoff focuses on the problem of representational think-