The paper highlights the ways in which whiteness and racial violence are imagined in black British writing. Through a study of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, David Dabydeen’s The Intended, and Hanif Kureshi’s The Black Album, it shows that each work imagines and interrogates an expression of whiteness that is declared through the enactment of racial violence. It argues that depictions of racial violence are also deployed in order to foreground the ways in which black hybridity and syncretism defy the racial and cultural bifurcation demanded by whiteness. However, it is debatable whether the use of racial violence in this way is entirely appropriate or successful: are Manichean certainties disrupted or reified?
Much has been made of the need to dispense with race. Unrepentant utopian Paul Gilroy has urged that we think in terms of a ‘planetary humanism’, whilst both Vron Ware and Les Back have begun to chart a journey “out of whiteness.” Yet nowhere is the sheer scale of the undertaking more apparent than in actual and fictive examples of racial violence. From verbal racist abuse to physical assault, from murder to grief, racial violence also demands that ‘local’ paradigms be foregrounded. Using concepts such as David Theo Goldberg’s ‘identity-in-otherness’ and Michel Focault’s ‘biopower’ to examine whiteness and racial violence in the novels described above, the paper makes the claim that, despite our aversion to identities rooted in injury, racial violence must merit singular treatment in fiction if the urgency of thinking beyond race is to be popularly grasped.