Weiße Normalität. Perspektiven einer postkolonialen Literaturdidaktik. Von Magdalena Kißling. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2020. 432 pages. €45,00 gebunden oder eBook.

In Weiße Normalität, Magdalena Kißling seeks to make explicit the power of language to injure and marginalize through literary and educational discourses of representation and instruction. This undertaking is carried out through careful analysis of three well-known works (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Theodore Fontane’s Effi Briest, and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Tauben im Gras) against the backdrop of their didacticization. Kißling’s thorough and thoughtful monograph, which comprises nine individual chapters in three main sections, supplies the reader with the insights needed to embark on a reflective praxis of instruction and literary criticism within a critical-race framework. Extensively researched, the monograph provides many details for instructors and literary critics alike. In this review, I will first discuss the merits of this volume. I conclude with a focus on elements the author may consider in future work concerning the delicate nature of racism and exclusion.

In the first four chapters, Kißling outlines the study’s theoretical constraints and methodological components. The author begins by investigating how canonical understandings of German literary works contribute to inflections of racism through collective and modulated reverberations. Kißling’s enunciations of whiteness (in italicizing white where it refers to ethnicity, I follow Kißling’s own practice in the volume, including its title, which is also currently how I independently demonstrate the markedness of whiteness in my own writing) and Eurocentrism as inextricably linked denounce the application of a Eurocentric lens to constructions of normalcy. The writer auscultates how racism and literature coalesce in the canonical body of German literature. Detecting colonial continuities, Kißling examines conceptions of authorship and representation in such realms. While Chapters One and Two highlight the markedness of whiteness in literature, Chapter Three situates the study as more broadly located within an ambience of ambivalence that highlights language’s potential to harm while also attempting to avoid the risk of denial commonly associated with the deletion of censure. In Chapter Four, the author describes postcolonial discourse-analytic approaches to scholarship and instruction of literary texts.

In Part Two, Kißling’s lens is trained on how the institution of whiteness directly affects both representation and narrative structure in Iphigenie auf Tauris, Effi Briest, and Tauben im Gras. In Chapter Five, Kißling compares what Goethe’s portrayals of Iphigenie and Thoas reveal about how whiteness is embedded into representations of the West and then delves into what the cultural pragmatics of specific terms demonstrate. The implications of classist and racist societal structures are made further apparent in Chapter Six, which sets into even starker relief those discursive patterns related to the physical appearance of the characters in Fontane’s Effi Briest. Here, Kißling contrasts the essentialist exotification of four Speakers of Color in the work against normalizing discourses of whiteness. Although awareness of this discursive polarization continues in Chapter Seven, Kißling shows how Koeppen’s use of montage retains the residues of racism through conscious and consistent usage of racial epithets.

Kißling’s awareness of language continues in Part Three of the monograph, which concerns possible avenues to postcolonial pedagogical approaches to instructing literature. Chapter Eight balances raising awareness of racist language in literary texts with deeper nuances related to reflecting on that very language use. The author seeks to achieve equilibrium through the employment of postcolonial discourse-analytic approaches to gauging learner comprehension of those texts under study. Careful to point out how current modes of assessment veer away from asking about constructions of race, Kißling recommends possible avenues through which an awareness of how language and discourse contribute to and exacerbate racism can be brought into educational contexts. The monograph concludes with a rubric for instructors seeking to create their own teaching materials (353–54).

Kißling’s monograph makes an important contribution to the fields of literary criticism and postcolonial studies and is additionally useful for educators teaching German language and literature. While the first part of the volume provides many useful reflections for discourse analysts, Part Two could be helpful for literary critics wishing to apply critical whiteness and postcolonial frameworks to their scholarship. The last part, which pertains more specifically to the teaching of literature, additionally provides useful and realistic ways for instructors to create and assess those materials they plan to use in the classroom. Kißling’s previous deconstruction of how the institution of whiteness plays out in Koeppen’s Tauben im Gras equips readers with an added awareness of implications that are daily apparent (294–97). As both sets of resources demonstrate, the institution of whiteness goes deeper than the consumption of colonial goods like chocolate and coffee; rather, it is embedded into the inner workings of our everyday social, educational, and linguistic structures.

In many ways, Kißling successfully achieves the aim of interrogating the implications and manifestations of whiteness in constructions of normalcy and citizenship. The monograph provides many useful and astute observations or insights into how the institution of whiteness combined with a Eurocentric perspective sustains the injurious effects of racism, sexism, and class-based violence in literary texts and instruction about them. Observations and reflections of language and discourse likewise reveal how the trajectory continues with trends in education such as overlooking the issue of race, even when it is most apparent. In this instance, the point that a failure to admit the injuries of racism allows the cycle to continue without reflecting on them is well understood. However, one wishes for a more careful and considered treatment of harmful language that causes repeated injury to minoritized and oppressed peoples. Continuous repetition of blatantly injurious racial epithets and language are found throughout the monograph.

Admittedly, the author demonstrates awareness of possible injury by positing that these occurrences make up an integral part of the racist fabric of society and that ignoring this harm does not allow one to come to terms with or avoid its deep historical, systemic, and everyday consequences. Although addressed, the presence of such terms confronts the reader constantly and demonstrates a possible disregard for how it may affect a large number of the readers and human subjects to whom the books and curricular choices presented are directed. As a result, the harmful impact of this linguistic oversight far outweighs the benign intention. The author’s choice to place “white” in italics, for example, demonstrates an awareness of the markedness of whiteness. Consistent with this orthographical consideration, the author should avoid possible injury of others through repetitions of harmful language. This reader pleads with the writer to navigate the white currents of positionality more gingerly in future scholarship in order to more fully realize our shared hope that subsequent worlds of scholarship and instruction counter, rather than amplify, such problematic discursive and societal patterns.