Displacing Whiteness

Displacing Whiteness

Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism

  • Author: Frankenberg, Ruth; Aanerud, Rebecca; Muraleedharan, T.; Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie; hooks, bell
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822320111
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822382270
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 1997
  • Month: September
  • Pages: 368
  • DDC: 305.8
  • Language: English
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

  • Contents
  • Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness
  • Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature
  • Rereading Gandhi
  • Theorizing White Consciousness for a Post-Empire World: Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love
  • On the Social Construction of Whiteness within Selected Chicana/o Discourses
  • Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination
  • Locating White Detroit
  • Brown-Skinned White Girls: Class, Culture, and the Construction of White Identity in Suburban Communities
  • Laboring under Whiteness
  • Island Racism: Gender, Place, and White Power
  • Minstrel Shows, Affirmative Action Talk, and Angry White Men: Marking Racial Otherness in the 1990s
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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