Browsing by Author "Swanepoel, Zane"

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    The spectral being of whiteness : exploring the presence of under-examined whiteness through the work of Clarice Lispector
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Swanepoel, Zane; Mbao, Wamuwi; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The lack of critical examination of whiteness and white racial identity in the work of Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977) is reflective of a larger social and scholarly issue in Brazil and in English scholarship globally, in which whiteness is maintained as hegemony through maintaining the invisibility of whiteness. The presence of under-examined whiteness in Lispector’s work is most notably highlighted in Lucia Villares’ 2011 book entitled Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector through the Work of Bessie Head and Toni Morrison, and is a key text in the development of this thesis. The universalisation of Lispector as a writer for [white] humanity is a conflation of the tendency of whiteness to maintain its unracialized social category through universalizing techniques found in religion, in writing and narrative authority, and through consumer capitalism. Brazil’s racial democracy enforced a silence on race and racism that allowed for the entrenchment of institutionalized racism through the negation of race, a negation that is dualistically intertwined in the ‘hyperconsciousness of race’ (Vargas, 2004). This thesis seeks to investigate some of these moments of under-examined whiteness in Lispector’s work, and in so doing, will attempt to highlight the mechanisms (namely through religion, narrative power, and capitalism) which allow for the maintenance of the hegemony of whiteness and its reach of power.