Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

By: Dr. Stephanie Li

Abstract: Dr. Li’s talk derives from her recently published book, Ugly White People: Whiteness in Contemporary American Literature (University of Minnesota, 2023). Her monograph argues that due to various political and social shifts, a new awareness of racial identity has forced white people to confront their whiteness. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than as an assumed norm. Ugly White People analyzes how whiteness has become an imperilled identity category that is now far removed from the assumed dominance which once characterized its portrayal in American literature. The six chapters in this book trace three distinct responses to white consciousness, all of which breed shared manifestations of ugliness. These responses are (1) limited racialized acknowledgement in which white people admit their whiteness but largely in a performative manner than obviates meaningful action; (2) escape into a racial other and an attempt to merge whiteness with a fetishized beloved; and (3) a problematic embrace of white identity that leads to isolation and civic neglect.

Speaker Biography: Stephanie Li teaches in AAADS at Duke University and has published six books including the award-winning Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women (2010) as well as Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama (2011), Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (2015), and Signifyin(g) Immigrants: Twenty-First Century Pan-African American Literature (2018). She has also written two short biographies of Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Her latest book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, is entitled Ugly White People: Whiteness in Contemporary American Literature (2023).