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’I Treated You White’: Ulysses, gender and the visual culture of ‘race’

Research into the visual culture of ‘race’ in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish popular culture, postmodern and postcolonial readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and critical ‘race’ studies informs Chan's analysis of the novel’s dialectical constructions of gendered formations of ‘whiteness’. She makes on original contribution to Joyce Studies by addressing this omission in recent postcolonial analyses of race’, gender and identity in the novel. The chapter attends to the record Ulysses provides of Dublin’s turn of the twentieth century visual and popular culture, which she shows to have been steeped in anti-Semitic, racialized and racist representations, from which individuals form notions of the Other, and concurrently construct their own identities. It examines the ambivalence which characterises Joyce’s treatment of race in Ulysses- always expressed in gendered terms-whereby the notion of racial purity is disavowed, while race itself remains undefined but is made known by its pernicious effects, and basis in representation. The chapter contributes to visual cultural studies by exploring what Ulysses reveals about the racialization both of visual culture and consciousness in early 20th century Ireland, and by arguing the inextricable role of visual culture in the formation of the novel’s gendered racialized formations of consciousness. It also shows the pitfalls of Cheng’s recourse, in his major book 'Joyce, Race and Empire' (1995), turning to Curtis’s study of representations of political ‘Irishness’ in nineteenth century cartoons for an understanding of racial discourse and Joyce’s response to their implications. The chapter indicates the importance of visual culture to ideologies of ‘race’ while simultaneously demonstrating the pitfalls of a cursory regard for visual studies in literary criticism. Finally, Chan argues the relevance of representations of whiteness as a subordinating position in Ulysses, to contesting contemporary Irish national identity discourses of normalised whiteness.