Rhetorics of Race: Mapping White Narratives

Abstract

Ferguson’s notion of the “phantom center” epitomizes the spatial trope that in many ways articulates postmodern sensibilities. Unlike the organizing principle of reasonable certainty within modernism that differentiated one sphere of life from another, postmodernism is represented by spatial arrangements that are often fragmented, slippery, and indistinct. Within these arrangements, we experience broad social, political, economic, and cultural changes; long-held distinctions are being problematized and contested, boundaries between spheres are blurring or collapsing, and centers that once remained invisible and unvoiced are now naked and vocal. The postmodern spatial metaphor— conjuring up images of borders and border crossers, contact zones and safe houses, traveling theories, trajectories, intersections, and margins against centers—both represents and ignites a rethinking of issues of identity and power, including matters of race, as we negotiate the spaces of our material life.

The place from which power is exercised is often a hidden place. When we try to pin it down, the center always seems to be somewhere else. Yet we know that this phantom center, elusive as it is, exerts a real, undeniable power over the whole social framework of our culture, and over the ways we think about it.

—Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” 1990.