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The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) marks the evolution of Maxine Hong Kingston's vision of whiteness and the very definition of racial categories in her works. In The Fifth Book of Peace, Kingston assumes a much more transnational perspective, reflecting to a greater extent on the enmeshment of whiteness in imperialist and colonizing practices beyond the perimeter of the mainland United States and the territory of the United States as a whole. While in The Fifth Book of Peace Kingston notes the implication of whiteness in colonization and imperialism, she also to a greater extent stresses its potential for transformation. This potential was hinted at in The Woman Warrior, but it is much more explicitly elaborated on only in The Fifth Book of Peace. All of Kingston's works are written in the spirit of transformational identity politics and intersectionality. In all of her works, Kingston notices the intersection of diverse types of oppression, going beyond exposing the stripes of exploitation that immediately affect the major characters of her works. Yet it is in The Fifth Book of Peace that she underscores the need for cooperation between individuals affected by diverse types of trauma stemming from different kinds of oppression. It is also in The Fifth Book of Peace that Kingston envisions the possibility of white Americans cooperating with people of other races and nationalities on behalf of peace rather than in the name of war, expansion and colonialism symbolized in the narrative by the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and the colonization of Hawaii. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article centers on the legal construction of whiteness captured by Maxine Hong Kingston in "The Laws" chapter of China Men (1980), exposing the oxymoron of whiteness, which consists in its simultaneous gesturing towards universality and particularity. On the one hand, the laws passed by white Americans enabled them to cast whiteness as the self-proclaimed standard-bearer, the self-declared legal norm. On the other hand, this self-proclaimed norm rests on the principle of exclusivity and exclusion. Wielding a weapon of exclusion, white people have constructed a legally manufactured white identity that bars non-whites, in this case Chinese and other Asian immigrants from citizenship, economic resources, space, the "mainstream" American society and mainstream American culture. Kingston not only exposes anti-Chinese and anti-Asian legislation, but also shows Chinese immigrants' responses to this legislation, their failed and successful attempts at countervailing various forms of exclusion and "exclusive" treatment they received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the representation of whiteness in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993), in particular on how the aesthetic and the socio-historical strata of the novel intersect, how by saturating the imagery of Bone with whiteness, Ng conveys the first person Chinese American narrator's positionality and the positionality of other Chinese American characters as members of the Chinese American community and members of broader American society. The images involving whiteness compose a kind of the palimpsest overwritten with personal and communal ethnic watermarks as well as repressed, surfacing and semi-articulated history of Leila's family that she channels into the narrative, having engaged in the process of mentally retracing the past events and recovering the material evidence or rather what remains of it and what she believes will lead her to definitive answers. On the level of narrative imagery, whiteness is intricately interwoven with the traumas plaguing the narrator's family. Explicitly, whiteness represents death, mourning, rejection and erasure, entailing marginalization suffered by Chinese Americans because of their non-normative racial and ethnic status. Yet, implicitly, whiteness is also a constituent element of the images which facilitate the process of healing -- mainly bones and paper. Narrative imagery involving whiteness contributes to the bridging of the past and the present, forming a bridge between generations, a kind of rivet that allows to at least partly retrieve personal wholeness and recapture the broken promises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trope of sight has been the central metaphor in North American whiteness studies since its very inception, that is, already before whiteness studies emerged as a separate field of study. The centrality of the trope stems not only from a particular applicability of the sight metaphor to render subject-object relations, but also from the unique presence of "sight" in the very relations between racial groups in the United States, in particular African Americans, and whites. Originally, minorities were cast as objects of the gaze, while white people as subjects of the gaze, exercising the power to look, survey and pass judgment. Apart from exposing practices of looking employed by whites, whiteness studies scholars reverse visual power dynamics, shifting white people to the object position of the gaze. The metaphor of the gaze features as central in Toni Morrison's seminal work Playing in the Dark published in 1992 and effectively inaugurating contemporary literary whiteness studies. Morrison reaches for the gaze metaphor to illustrate the main objective of her study: "My project is to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject, from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers, from the serving to the served" (90). Averting the gaze in Playing in the Dark, Morrison analyzes the construction of whiteness and blackness in canonical and non-canonical works of American literature by white authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]