The Everyday Conversation and the Construction of Whiteness in Claudia Rankine and Rachel Cusk

Gould, Thomas (2026) The Everyday Conversation and the Construction of Whiteness in Claudia Rankine and Rachel Cusk. Journal of Modern Literature, 49 (3). pp. 129-148. ISSN 0022-281X

Microsoft Word (OpenXML) (Author Manuscript) - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (82kB)

Abstract

RachelCusk’sOutline (2014)andClaudiaRankine’sJust Us: An American Conversation (2020) both offer ethnographies of the one-to-one conversation. Rankine presents conversations between white and Black Americans as encounters between subjects who are determined by incommensurate histories, but nevertheless conditionally capable of reflecting those differences through ongoing, open-ended dialogue. Throughout the Outline trilogy, Cusk presents the conversation—usually, between white and well-heeled Europeans—as an ahistorical and patriarchal scene of gathering, in which subjects may claim for themselves a contingent sense of narrative identity. These two approaches to the conversation are complementary: Cusk shows the everyday means by which patriarchal, individualistic architectures of whiteness are tacitly constructed in speech interactions, whereas Rankine writes toward a deferred counter-imaginary of these constructions. Both Cusk and Rankine find literary forms to archive conversations and the inequities that conversations reproduce.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	claudia rankine,rachel cusk,conversation,whiteness,literature and literary theory ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1208
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Related URLs:	https://www.scopus.com/pages/publication...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	11 Sep 2026 13:57
Last Modified:	14 Sep 2026 08:44
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104498
DOI:	10.2979/jml.00140

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item