AustLit

'From within literary studies, Alison Ravenscroft puts the notion of whiteness under pressure by asking whether the "white" subject isn't fantasmatic. Perhaps there is no white subject as such but only a subject-who-desires-whiteness, "with all the violent material effects of that desire". This subject will seek to stabilise an "I" as "white" through the reiteration of practices intelligible as white within a particular discursive context. Reading is one such moment of reiteration. Rather than the so-called white reader being "before" the text, forming meanings through reading, this subject might instead be thought of as a reading-effect. He or she is made and made again in such textual processes. In particular, Ravenscroft asks whether "settler" readers might make themselves intelligible as white by fantasising themselves as the "white" spectators of an unseeing "black" other in a scene of their own imagining' (Anne Brewster and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Introduction).