In the post-modern novel Monster , Walter Dean Myers depicts the travails of a young black protagonist within the criminal justice system and the psychic effects of a hegemonic white gaze on this representative figure. As protagonist and narrator, Steve Harmon illustrates, in his journal and in the film script he composes, multiple forms of Du Boisian self-awareness as he attempts to manipulate the empowered wielders of the white gaze. Myers thus reverses the racial lens, exemplifying the potential of young adult fiction to engage readers in productive scrutiny of the effects of de facto white supremacy.
Drawing on recent work in affect studies and on analyses of white masculinity in European American literature and other modes of cultural production, this essay explicates the depiction in Louis Begley’s novel About Schmidt (1996) of a contemporary white male psyche in crisis. Begley’s protagonist, 60-year old widower and recently retired lawyer Albert Schmidt, embodies and enacts the emotional atrophy and consequent “ugly feelings,” in Sianne Ngai’s terms, of a late-twentieth century, self-declared and self-sabotaging White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In this satiric, traditionally literary novel, the central character demonstrates that in part because, in Thandeka’s psychoanalytic terms, he has “learned to be white” via identity-forming imaginings of racialized others, he has yet to achieve a mature degree of compassionate humanity
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