Epilogue

Summary

The through line of American history is a persistent trauma of dispossession epitomized in W. E. B. DuBois’s prescient words: “I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and forever, Amen!” This form of whiteness is also the defining feature of the contemporary maelstrom of racial unrest. To acquiesce to only one form of whiteness locks the racialized reader into a narrow, overdetermined praxis aligned with proprietary aggression. This book is, however, rooted in a creative and emancipatory set of antiracist possibilities. These alternate possibilities are assigned the term "forms of whiteness" as a re-imagining of the reader’s positionality in the culture and the world; a resolve to grapple with the multiple ways of disassociating from the malignant monopoly of systemic whiteness; and a determination to undo patterns and practices of denial and discrimination within literary studies. Building on the conclusions of Chapter 5, the Epilogue meditates more fully on scholarly practice within an ethics of coaction that translates research and pedagogic inquiry into lived experience and public life.