Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822320215 ISBN 13: 9780822320210

Publisher: Duke University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Displacing Whiteness makes a unique contribution to the study of race dominance. Its theoretical innovations in the analysis of whiteness are integrated with careful, substantive explorations of whiteness on an international, multiracial, cross-class, and gendered terrain. Contributors localize whiteness, as well as explore its sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions.
Approaching whiteness as a plural rather than singular concept, the essays describe, for instance, African American, Chicana/o, European American, and British experiences of whiteness. The contributors offer critical readings of theory, literature, film and popular culture; ethnographic analyses; explorations of identity formation; and examinations of racism and political process. Essays examine the alarming epidemic of angry white men on both sides of the Atlantic; far-right electoral politics in the UK; underclass white people in Detroit; whiteness in "brownface" in the film Gandhi; the engendering of whiteness in Chicana/o movement discourses; "whiteface" literature; Roland Barthes as a critic of white consciousness; whiteness in the black imagination; the inclusion and exclusion of suburban "brown-skinned white girls"; and the slippery relationships between culture, race, and nation in the history of whiteness. Displacing Whiteness breaks new ground by specifying how whiteness is lived, engaged, appropriated, and theorized in a range of geographical locations and historical moments, representing a necessary advance in analytical thinking surrounding the burgeoning study of race and culture.

Contributors. Rebecca Aanerud, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Phil Cohen, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., bell hooks, T. Muraleedharan, Chéla Sandoval, France Winddance Twine, Vron Ware, David Wellman

About this title

From the Back Cover

"This collection will be a substantial contribution to a current and growing body of materials investigating whiteness. As Frankenberg and the contributors know, recent work--even work that brackets whiteness in terms of class--has made little effort to specify the stunning range of particularity in the ways whiteness is experienced. This collection begins such a specification."--Dana D. Nelson, University of Kentucky

About the Author

Ruth Frankenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis and is the author of White Women, Race Matters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0822320215
• ISBN 13: 9780822320210
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Frankenberg Ruth