'Trembling on the Edge of Confession': Racial Figuration and Iconicity in Modern American Culture

This dissertation, ""Trembling on the Edge of Confession:" Racial Figuration and Iconicity in Modern American Culture," considers the century and a half-long preoccupation within American mass culture to at once represent the history of racial dispossession in the nation and disavow its implications. Drawing directly from the work of James Baldwin concerning the significance of expressive representation to the operations of American power, this dissertation reads uniquely popular selections from American literature and culture that circulate as subversive or "racy" due to their explicit or heroic engagement with race. I argue that rather than evincing genuine racial progress, these texts are characteristic of a vulgar traffic in difference that not only discloses the inextricable union of race and capital, but also exposes the profound limits of American democracy. My study treats work in forms as varied as the cinematic, fine art, and the theatrical, and explores the manner in which overdrawn and "cutting-edge" racial figurations (from the early depictions sketched by Harriet Beecher Stowe to those brought to animated life in the racialized comedic performance of Dave Chappelle) are necessarily iconic and continue to serve, much like the dissenting opinion in American juridical practice, as surrogates for dissent diffused throughout society---standing in for more varied and thus less-scripted interpretations of our national history.;This study also examines the logic of the "post-black," tracing the historical quest for racial transcendence in the literature of Jean Toomer and select New Negro artists of the early 20th century, as well in specific political and art historical contexts over the last decade. I suggest that transformations in our viewing culture have enabled the easy and declarative circulation of conceptions of racial difference that while seemingly laudatory reify impoverished identity categorizations under the guise of racial progress. This dissertation traces the development and expressive operation of a well-developed racial anxiety concerning the national experience of a decisive historical calculus of racial dispossession on the one hand, and racialized capital accumulation on the other, a drama routinely reconstructed and refracted on the American popular page and screen in mythic and outsized racial distortions.