Hewing Whiteness in Early Modern English Literature

My dissertation argues that racial whiteness in early modern English literature is represented through images and narratives of corporeal hewing. By corporeal hewing, I mean the depiction of the body as, on the one hand, prone to fragmentation and disintegration and, on the other hand, available to be molded, disciplined, and reformed. Corporeal hewing designates the capacity of the body to malleable, to be dissolved or refined. The early modern English literary representation of such malleability affords an outlet for racial whiteness's emergent cultural expression and formation. These representations of corporeal hewing create conditions for racial whiteness to attach to ideological notions of possibility, potentiality, aspiration, and futurity. At the same time, racial whiteness's imbrication with such representations also conveys the vulnerable precarity of the body imagined as white, along with the problems of identifying and sustaining whiteness. Finally, racial whiteness's attachment to the depiction of corporeal hewing expresses a racializing temporality that enables the formation of English whiteness to be grounded in a future-oriented temporal openness. However, that orientation in futurity, I contend, is projected through an amending or repairing of, or reconciliation with, the past.