Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century

Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions

Edited by Veronica Watson; Deirdre Howard-Wagner and Lisa Spanierman - Contributions by Nolan L. Cabrera; Anthea Garman; Adela Fofiu; Tobias Hübinette; Brandy Jensen; Emily R.M. Lind; Catrin Lundström; Charles W. Mills; Delores V. Mullings; Melissa Steyn; Becky Thompson; Vanessa Thompson and George Yancy

Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions is a tightly interconnected and richly collaborative book that will advance our understanding of why it is so difficult to re-form and reimagine whiteness in the twenty-first century. Composed after the election of the first black U.S. president, post-global financial crisis, more than a decade after 9/11, and concomitant with a rash of xenophobic incidents across the globe, the book distills several key themes associated with a post-millennial global whiteness: the individual and collective emotions of whiteness, the recentering of whiteness through governing and legal strategies, and the retreats from social equity and justice that have characterized the late twentieth and twenty-first century nation state. It also attempts the difficult work of reimagining white identities and cultures for a new era.

Chapters in Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century draw from the fields of African-American studies, English studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, education, and women’s studies. Using transdisciplinarity as a mode of inquiry for the project and responding to the changing phenomenon of whiteness across several continents (Australia, Canada, France, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States), the collection brings together established and emerging scholars and a range of critical approaches to unveil and intervene in the ideologies of whiteness in our contemporary moment. Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates that complex inquiry and activism are needed to challenge new iterations of whiteness in twenty-first-century political and social spaces.

Lexington Books

Pages: 314 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-0-7391-9296-2 • Hardback • December 2014 • $143.00 • (£110.00)

978-0-7391-9297-9 • eBook • December 2014 • $135.50 • (£105.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social Science / Minority Studies, Literary Criticism / General, Social Science / Comparative Cultural Studies, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, Social Science / Black Studies (Global)

Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century

Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions is a tightly interconnected and richly collaborative book that will advance our understanding of why it is so difficult to re-form and reimagine whiteness in the twenty-first century. Composed after the election of the first black U.S. president, post-global financial crisis, more than a decade after 9/11, and concomitant with a rash of xenophobic incidents across the globe, the book distills several key themes associated with a post-millennial global whiteness: the individual and collective emotions of whiteness, the recentering of whiteness through governing and legal strategies, and the retreats from social equity and justice that have characterized the late twentieth and twenty-first century nation state. It also attempts the difficult work of reimagining white identities and cultures for a new era.

Chapters in Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century draw from the fields of African-American studies, English studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, education, and women’s studies. Using transdisciplinarity as a mode of inquiry for the project and responding to the changing phenomenon of whiteness across several continents (Australia, Canada, France, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States), the collection brings together established and emerging scholars and a range of critical approaches to unveil and intervene in the ideologies of whiteness in our contemporary moment. Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates that complex inquiry and activism are needed to challenge new iterations of whiteness in twenty-first-century political and social spaces.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 314 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-0-7391-9296-2 • Hardback • December 2014 • $143.00 • (£110.00)

978-0-7391-9297-9 • eBook • December 2014 • $135.50 • (£105.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social Science / Minority Studies, Literary Criticism / General, Social Science / Comparative Cultural Studies, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, Social Science / Black Studies (Global)

Author

Veronica Watson is professor of English and director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Research at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Deirdre Howard-Wagner is an Australian Research Council discovery early career research fellow and president of the Law and Society Association Australia and New Zealand.

Lisa B. Spanierman is associate professor in the Faculty of Counseling and Counseling Psychology at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Veronica Watson
Deirdre Howard-Wagner
Lisa Spanierman
Part I: Affective Whiteness
Section Introduction: Feeling White
Melissa Steyn
Chapter 1The Emotions of White Racism and Antiracism
Lisa B. Spanierman
Nolan L. Cabrera
Chapter 2Stories of a White Apocalypse on the Romanian Internet
Adela Fofiu
Chapter 3Swedish Whiteness and White Melancholia: A Diagnosis of a White Nation in Crisis
Tobias Hübinette
Catrin Lundström
Part II: Governing through Whiteness
Section Introduction: Piercing the Veil
Charles W. Mills
Chapter 4Governing through Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Reconstituting Australian Culture and Cultural Diversity in the Howard Era, 1996–2007
Deirdre Howard-Wagner
Chapter 5The Institutionalization of Whiteness in Contemporary Canadian Public Policy
Delores V. Mullings
Chapter 6Arizona 2010
Brandy Jensen
Deirdre Howard-Wagner
Chapter 7“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: Reading France’s Recognition Politics through Fanon’s Critique of Whiteness and Coloniality
Vanessa Eileen Thompson
Part III: Disrupting and Reimagining Whiteness
Section Introduction:When Heaven and Earth Are Shaken to Their Foundations
George Yancy
Chapter 8Troubling White Englishness in South Africa: A Self-Interrogation of Privilege, Complicity, Citizenship, and Belonging
Anthea Garman
Chapter 9I Once Was Lost but Now I’m Found: Exploring the White Feminist Confessional
Emily R.M. Lind
Chapter 10Theorizing White Racial Trauma and its Remedies
Veronica Watson
Becky Thompson
About the Contributors

Reviews

Innovative scholars from an impressive array of disciplines here probe holistically critical dimensions of the world’s interlocking system of white racial oppression. Examining countries across the globe—the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, France, Australia—they demonstrate the oppressive effects of persisting white domination in areas ranging from the extreme emotions of cyberhate, to commonplace revanchist politics retreating from hard-won human rights and multiracial democracy.

— Joe R. Feagin, author of White Racism