Browsing by Subject "racial anxiety"

This thesis analyzes representations of racial anxiety in interracial encounters in the novels Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid and Luster by Raven Leilani utilizing critical race theory. The novels’ depictions of racial anxiety experienced by their respective Black female protagonists are examined using Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of race. I show how the environments depicted in the novels represent specific white spaces which extend themselves differently towards Black and white bodies and therefore produce racial anxiety in the novels’ main characters. Furthermore, I show how the novels describe white racial anxiety as a particular expression of what Shannon Sullivan refers to as white liberalism. While Such a Fun Age depicts white characters whose concern for their public image as morally good drives them to committing covert acts of racism masked as anti-racism, Luster depicts characters whose white racial anxiety, or lack thereof, leads them into acts of nihilistic self-destruction and careless malevolence. This study contributes to the research on new contemporary fiction classified as millennial writing by showing how the experience of racism is represented from the viewpoint of millennial Black women. The novels address both situations of overt racism and covert racism in order to reveal how both of these function conjointly to uphold systems of racial oppression. The emergence of millennial novels like Luster and Such a Fun Age represents a distinct moment in the history of racial justice movements, where rapidly increasing social media activity has accelerated public discourse about subtle racism, performative allyship, and white fragility, alongside a continuous explosion of shared police brutality videos and discussions about institutionalized racism. Growing social media engagement therefore brought on a debate about different forms of racism that are interconnected as they are rooted in the same habits of whiteness. The works of Raven Leilani and Kiley Reid show this duality by depicting Black protagonists exposed to a broad range of covertly as well as overtly racist behaviors.