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Tropics of whiteness: metaphor and the literary turn in white studies

Abstract A critical analysis of whiteness unavoidably relies on using metaphors in order to understand or apprehend its object of study. In this effort, scholars of whiteness recruit tropes to describe whiteness and in the process discursively constitute its contours, concerns and contradictions. In short, the tropics of whiteness reveal something symptomatic about critical scholars’ ability to intervene in relations of domination through race theory, but they also expose areas benefitting from reflection, such as the link between language use, power and history. Finding purchase in Hayden White’s use of ‘emplotment’, or the literary turn in history, I argue that the literary turn in Whiteness Studies is underutilised yet useful in a critical social theory of whiteness. In this article, I describe three dominant systems of tropes found in Whiteness Studies: tropic of the singularity (whiteness as only one thing), tropic of the multitude (whiteness as many things) and tropic of the journey (understanding whiteness as a form of travel). By appraising the three tropics of whiteness, scholars do not necessarily suggest that race and whiteness may be reduced to the status of metaphor, but that any explanation of them requires the work of metaphor. In the end, changing race relations in education necessitates a new regime of metaphors, predicated on the appreciation and sensitivity to the power of tropes.