White Violence and Spectral Blackness in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

Authors

  • Mariya Dimitrova Nikolova DFG Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms, University of Potsdam, Germany and University of New South Wales, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.320

Keywords:

White Supremacy, Anti-Blackness, Orientalism, Don DeLillo, Narrative, Zero K

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s work is often framed as a visionary and ethical reflection on contemporary crises. Such reception redoubles an idea of white American farsightedness and morality that is already embedded in many of DeLillo’s stories—most recently in his 2016 novel Zero K“. The following article challenges celebratory rhetoric surrounding this narrative both in terms of how texts work to position DeLillo in the line of American writers who address and thus metaphorically dismantle social evils, and how these texts enable visions of American heroism and transcendence despite and due to narrative exclusions, politics of exclusion, and repeated legitimization of white supremacy. I signal towards long-disregarded anti-blackness in DeLillo’s oeuvre, and consider some of its pronunciations in Zero K.“ I thus analyze some of the techniques and technologies through which DeLillo’s novel prolongs narratives of white supremacy.

Author Biography

Mariya Dimitrova Nikolova, DFG Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms, University of Potsdam, Germany and University of New South Wales, Australia

Mariya Nikolova is a doctoral candidate at the Research Training Group "Minor Cosmopolitanisms" with a joint PhD fellowship between Potsdam University and the University of New South Wales (Australia). She holds an MA in Transnational Literature, Theatre and Film from the University of Bremen, and a joint BA in English-Speaking Cultures and Political Science from the University of Bremen and Birmingham City University. Mariya has worked as an interpreter for women affected by HIV at Bremen's Public Health Department and as the coordinator for the Volunteer, English, and Youth Zones Departments of the Bulgarian Youth and Children Parliament. her research interests include Critical Race and Critical Whiteness Theory, Experimental Literature, and Decolonial Humanities. In her dissertation, she investigates tropes of futurity embedded in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American avant-garde and neo-avant-garde's highly racialized canons.

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Published

2020-06-02

How to Cite

Nikolova, Mariya Dimitrova. “White Violence and Spectral Blackness in Don DeLillo’s Zero K”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, June 2020, pp. 92-108, doi:10.5283/copas.320.

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 2 (2019): White Supremacy in the United States and Beyond

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

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