Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A “Wokeness” That Never Was: The Affective Economy Of White Innocence And The Possibilities Of Shame, Hannah Murray

Theses - ALL

This thesis critiques white liberal subjectivity, primarily through the work of Claudia Rankine. In Rankine’s The White Card, she critiques white liberal subjectivity through the form of a play, a space of encounter. In the case of The White Card, the play’s primary encounter appears to be about white people encountering Black people, but in actuality the encounter resides in white people encountering their own white liberal subjectivity. In order to further conceive of how white liberal subjectivity functions, I draw from Gloria Wekker’s “white innocence” and Sara Ahmed’s “affective economies” to craft the lens of an affective economy of …