Interested in the ideological workings of fiction I study how major avant-garde tropes promote
the potential of permanent renewal as white America's property. Renewal ties to the capacities
to create progress transcend and simply be. From Black critique we know that within
dominant discourse all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since
colonization. Black work has been fetishized appropriated stolen and dismissed in and by
dominant culture while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of
ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual
frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on
progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity
transformative potential and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on
oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation these images
are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that deriving from white
ideology such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the good story of white renewal
rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.
