Racial-liberal reading practices, which conceived reading literature to be information retrieval of the most intimate and immediate kind, made it possible to portray racial-liberal terms of difference as the whole truth of the matter. At the same time, race novel discourse encouraged whites to internalize affective dispositions and to cultivate a race-liberal political identity. Thus, race novel discourse stabilized a field of social and moral value that made it possible for white Americans to comprehend the act of reading a novel as (and as a substitute for) an active politics of social transformation.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p.24.  My emphasis

I’ve been waiting for this book since I first heard about it and am loving it thus far.  Can the clicktivist information-sharing practices of the digital age be the most recent version of this?

Notes

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