Bodies Under Construction: Architectures of Pleasure and Whiteness in Chesnutt's "Po Sandy"

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2015
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Haverford College. Department of English
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The Newton Prize in English Literature
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
In this work, I examine the intersections of race, architecture, and consumption in “Po Sandy,” a late nineteenth-century work by Charles Chesnutt. Whiteness, in Chesnutt’s conception, emerges through violent performances of its own “naturalized” coherence, often in seemingly innocuous ways. In fact, Chesnutt reveals that even quotidian relationships between bodies and built space embed these types of racialized consolidations. Drawing on critics who have uncovered the white desire to consume an “other” in an effort to secure a racial position, I examine how this exploitative appetite radiates beyond the literal body into the spaces it occupies, which themselves take on corporeal logics. Thus, in Chesnutt, buildings are figured as variously “desirable” or “pleasurable” based on the white racial work they perform—the extent to which they provide a fetishized version of “blackness” as constitutive material for the white self. But Chesnutt, I argue, does more than simply outline the violent construction of whiteness; he also points to the places where the breached black body refuses to be architecturally consumed, where haunting and “sticking” in space disrupt the white form’s appropriative engagement with structures. Ultimately, Chesnutt’s work lends insight into the deeply pernicious attempts to construct whiteness in and through the built landscape and imagines radical, alternative ways of interacting with architectural spaces.
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