Exceptionalism and Its Discontents

Toni Morrison , Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 47.

For a look at the Annie Leibovitz photograph, see Eric Wilson’s "Gorbachev Made Me Buy It," The New York Times, July 26, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/fashion/26ROW.html . Conspiracy theorists will love Dan Levin’s piece: " Louis Vuitton Ad Shows Gorbachev Accompanied by Subversive Text," The New York Times, November 5, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/business/media/05vuitton.html.

Shaun Irlan , "Unraveling the Rainbow," The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 697.

The definitive treatment of this topic for America remains that of Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book," in Black and White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Mbeki’s May 8, 1996, address to the Constitutional Assembly is quoted in Neil Lazarus, "The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance," The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (Fall 2004 ): 619.

As quoted in M. J. Shapiro, Deforming American Political Thought ( Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 25; the quotation source is David Noble , The External Adam and the New World Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1968), ix.

Giorgio Agamben , Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18-19.

Lazarus , "The South African Ideology," 610-11.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

Jacques Derrida , Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Spillers , "Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe," 205.

Nurrudin Farah , cited in Grant Farred, "The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality," The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 593.