Scholars assessing the imaginative contact between literature and early cinema have largely missed the moviegoer, who wanders off or risks getting lost in the dark. Image, close-up, montage, projection: these and other “technical” elements more quickly cohere, appear more self-evidently formal. As David Trotter put it in Cinema and Modernism, our understanding of literature’s relationship to cinema is all too often “committed . . . to argument by analogy.” Within modernist studies, a film-centered formalism has defined many if not most approaches to charting cinema’s influence. Because film and text have such intriguing affinities—they represent through inscription and are experienced syntagmatically—the temptation is to (merely) conceive both as forms of writing, each with respective “techniques” that the other might imitate, annotate, or disavow. Colin MacCabe’s claim that “it is impossible to imagine the form of either Ulysses or The Waste Land without the developments of film editing” is exemplary of this tendency, but newer, more nuanced incarnations proliferate. Against film’s easily fetishized materiality and imitable techniques, movie going is harder to hold onto. It is modal rather than textual, performed rather than inscribed. In deploying moviegoing as a keyword, my intention is to foreground cinema’s peculiar sociality while moderating scholars’ over-reliance on medium specificity, turning from the hypostases of film form to the variegated practices of attendance. As streaming services proliferate, we can more clearly recognize moviegoing as a specific feature of cinema’s cultural and aesthetic history, rather than its only or purest form. Twenty-first-century viewing habits—at home, in our beds, on our laptops—expose moviegoing’s “givenness” to be anything but. Instead of the axiomatic, invisible, essentially unremarkable means through which cinema is/was accessed, moviegoing is better understood as a historically specific, expressive, and altogether strange modality through which cinema is/was performed. Moviegoing requires and produces a constitutive tension between individual and collective experience, promising both solitude and congregation, absorption within assembly. A moviegoing audience literalizes Michael Warner’s claim that a public “unites strangers through participation alone, at least in theory.” Viewers are gathered in temporary, anonymous, but profound intimacy.

“Venice,” writes Adrian Durham Stokes at the opening of his 1945 study of the city, “excels in blackness and whiteness; water brings commerce between them.” [1] This is a confident blasé opening gambit characteristic of the period and of this Faber and Faber contracted writer earlier heralded by Ezra Pound as one of the “only important writers” living. [2] Venice bothered Stokes throughout his writing and viewing life, yet Venice’s, and other, problematic whitenesses disappear in his writing...

In my recent undergraduate seminar on whiteness in modern American literature at a university in Seoul, most students, aware of America’s history of racial violence and repulsed by Trumpian rhetoric, initially assumed “whiteness” to be something that operates openly and visibly, a deliberate strategy to support white supremacist ends. At a distance, within a largely racially homogenous society, this marked, legible understanding of whiteness impeded students’ recognition of its precarity and...

The cross-cultural scholarship of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Geonpul woman, in The White Possessive chronicles “a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession” that reifies both the white property-owning subject and its attendant formation, the white settler nation-state; such white subjects and states differ, historically and geographically, in form and in practice, yet the iteration of dispossession is structurally essential to these formations of whiteness. [1] In the introduction to the...

This is the shocked retort of Angela, the very light-skinned protagonist in Jessie Fauset’s 1929 novel, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, when Angela’s racial heritage is publicly revealed to her close friend, a new girl at their school. By denying responsibility for policing so-called racial boundaries, Angela challenges a system of morality structured by white supremacy and embedded in histories of Atlantic American modernity. According to this (im)moral system, Angela is required to divulge her racial heritage to protect her hitherto unsuspecting white friend. To pass, even unintentionally, is, in this context, to lie. Angela and the new girl, Mary Hastings, stand on opposing sides of a yawning chasm of cultural silence about the significance of whiteness as it exists between them in their time period, within which whiteness wields an all-encompassing power.

Amid a wave of academic writing about whiteness at the end of the twentieth century, Richard Dyer’s White (1997) helped to make visible the artificial construction of whiteness as a racial imaginary. Before Dyer, it was all too easy for whiteness to remain invisible in a dominant white culture that equates whiteness with normativity: “There is a specificity to white representation, but it does not reside in a set of stereotypes so much as in narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and...

It was not Milly’s unpacified state, in short, that now troubled her—though certainly, as Europe was the great American sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted.” [1] With her ardent quest for an identity-granting disease, Milly Theale, the heroine in Henry James’s 1903 novel The Wings of the Dove, embodies the ambiguous place of women in the neurasthenic discourse of whiteness at the turn of the twentieth century. Milly is sometimes seen as embodying the conflict between a colonial...

This discussion reflects on the politics of whiteness in relation to Jewishness by comparing performances of a play by Gertrude Stein that re-inscribes racist language but at the same time points up performative, non-essentialist, habitual understandings of race. It refracts these politics through a Poet's Theatre performance of Stein’s play in the context of other performance events around Habits of Assembly by Corin Sworn, a contemporary art work exhibited at the 2019 Edinburgh Art Festival...

[Content note: brief discussion and accompanying imagery of racialized propaganda. ] The bodily injury caused by nuclear warfare constitutes a massively collective form of modern suffering. However, for many in the West, it also represents a markedly “foreign” pain, inflicted on distant bodies in other lands. The only instances (thus far) of nuclear weapons being deliberately utilized in combat are the US deployment of the “Little Boy” A-bomb in Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” in Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. The 100,000 immediate deaths and ensuing agonies of radiation poisoning were borne primarily by Japanese soldiers and civilians and Korean slave laborers–­­–who were, for many midcentury British and American citizens, unimaginably “foreign” bodies, caricatured and dehumanized in Allied war propaganda throughout the 1940s (fig. 1).