Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century

Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions

Veronica Watson, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, Lisa Spanierman

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739192979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Affective Whiteness
• Section Introduction: Feeling White
• Chapter 1: The Emotions of White Racism and Antiracism1
• Chapter 2: Stories of a White Apocalypse on the Romanian Internet
• Chapter 3: Swedish Whiteness and White Melancholia
• Part II: Governing through Whiteness
• Section Introduction: Piercing the Veil
• Chapter 4: Governing through Neoliberal Multiculturalism
• Chapter 5: The Institutionalization of Whiteness in Contemporary Canadian Public Policy1
• Chapter 6: Arizona 20101
• Chapter 7: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
• Part III: Disrupting and Reimagining Whiteness
• Section Introduction: When Heaven and Earth Are Shaken to Their Foundations1
• Chapter 8: Troubling White Englishness in South Africa
• Chapter 9: I Once Was Lost but Now I’m Found
• Chapter 10: Theorizing White Racial Trauma and its Remedies
• About the Contributors