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Alien Nation: White Male Paranoia and Imperial Culture in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Liam Kennedy
Liam Kennedy
Affiliation:
Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, England.
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Extract

As “the American century” comes to a close provocative jeremiads have become a growth industry in the United States, with just about every leading newspaper and numerous popular magazines, books, radio and television programmes depicting a nation in serious social and economic decline. A generalised sense of crisis emerges from the myriad causes of this perceived decline at home and abroad. Domestically, commentators feed ideological debates and moral panics about problems of crime, drugs, family values, ethno-racial balkanisation and multiculturalism. Externally, the uncertain endings of the Cold War and emergent economic leadership of Asiatic nations have encouraged requiems for the American Empire. These discourses of decline evidence a public paranoia about significant economic, political and social changes which have disrupted the coherence and cohesiveness of national myths and ideologies of Americanness. One notable feature of this paranoia is that it has led to a growing recognition of whiteness as a social category and more particularly of white male selfhood as a fragile and besieged identity. I want to comment on some general features of this paranoia as a signifier of whiteness and examine how it has been treated as an issue of representation in Hollywood film.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , April 1996 , pp. 87 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Dyer, Richard, “White,” Screen, 29 (Autumn 1988), 45–46Google Scholar. I should add that the significance of whiteness as a social category has long been apparent to people outside of this category. See bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (London: Turnaround, 1992), 165–178Google Scholar. Other recent studies of whiteness, to which I am indebted, include: Saxton, Alexander, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990)Google Scholar; Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar; Frankenberg, Ruth, White Women: Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Pfeil, Fred, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (London: Verso, 1995)Google Scholar.

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9 See “ ‘Falling’ Gives Rise to Protest,” New York Daily News, 3 04 1993, 7Google Scholar. A Newsweek cover story (5 Sept. 1993) on “white male paranoia” was prompted by the film.

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12 Robert Friedman, Warner Brothers spokesman in Los Angeles, quoted in “ ‘Falling Gives Rise to Protest’,” 7.

13 Quoted in Clover, Carol, “White Noise,” Sight and Sound (05 1993), 6Google Scholar.

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18 Ibid., 511.

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20 Clover, “White Noise,” 8.

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