The Everyday Conversation and the Construction of Whiteness in Claudia Rankine and Rachel Cusk

RachelCusk’sOutline (2014)andClaudiaRankine’sJust Us: An American Conversation (2020) both offer ethnographies of the one-to-one conversation. Rankine presents conversations between white and Black Americans as encounters between subjects who are determined by incommensurate histories, but nevertheless conditionally capable of reflecting those differences through ongoing, open-ended dialogue. Throughout the Outline trilogy, Cusk presents the conversation—usually, between white and well-heeled Europeans—as an ahistorical and patriarchal scene of gathering, in which subjects may claim for themselves a contingent sense of narrative identity. These two approaches to the conversation are complementary: Cusk shows the everyday means by which patriarchal, individualistic architectures of whiteness are tacitly constructed in speech interactions, whereas Rankine writes toward a deferred counter-imaginary of these constructions. Both Cusk and Rankine find literary forms to archive conversations and the inequities that conversations reproduce.