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Good question and easily answered if sitting at a keyboard. Dialing up his CV led me to several quite worthwhile articles that merit at least equal attention to this piece. Journal of 19th century Americanists 6.1 (2018) has a good short essay placing murderer Dylan Roof 1/
as a continuation of 19 century racism and of Reconstruction, citing Foner, Omi/Winant, and Raymond Williams: "historical parallels might enable us to think about the structural operations of racism. We need to understand, I think, not simply how US society enables 2/
racial despotism but how the _experience of that despotism by its ostensible beneficiaries_ [i.e. Dylan Roof] enables its reinvigoration. We need a scholarship not simply of race but of racism. Such a scholarship might begin, I think, by reading newly resurgent racisms as 3/
structures of feeling. As formulated by Raymond Williams half a century ago, structures of feeling offer an analytic for explaining messy, even incoherent, systems of belief. As lived and expressed, such structures appear more often as “a latency” across and between formal 4/
ideologies. Williams: “The new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, that can be traced, . . . yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a new structure of 5/
feeling.” While social, legal, and political structures might pass from generation to generation relatively intact, structures of feeling, partly articulated and even internally contradictory, are invented anew. ... understanding racism as such a structure would enable us to 6/
confront its four primary vectors—
racial terrorism,
state violence,
reactionary politics, and
exclusionary laws
—not as a coherent project to be contested ideologically but a cluster of latent, even contradictory, potentials."
The "contradictions" are evident, in this 7/
racial terrorism,
state violence,
reactionary politics, and
exclusionary laws
—not as a coherent project to be contested ideologically but a cluster of latent, even contradictory, potentials."
The "contradictions" are evident, in this 7/
essay, in racists' recourse, simultaneously, to legal and extralegal "means of realizing their inarticulate longing for renewed despotism."
Recall Bergson, "Tout effet comique impliquerait contradiction par quelque côté. Ce qui nous fait rire, ce serait l’absurde 8/
Recall Bergson, "Tout effet comique impliquerait contradiction par quelque côté. Ce qui nous fait rire, ce serait l’absurde 8/
réalisé sous une forme concrète..." "Comic effects would imply contradiction from some angle. We laugh at absurdity." Except that the absurdity of racism got many killed.
Anyhow, Fraser well worth reading. NB But for Twitter, I'd never have heard of the dude. 9/
Anyhow, Fraser well worth reading. NB But for Twitter, I'd never have heard of the dude. 9/
Oh, Bergson of course goes on to say that the comic requires more than "absurdity." True 'nuf. But his formulation is the one most people remember, perhaps.
