Displacing Whiteness

Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism

Ruth Frankenberg, Ruth Frankenberg

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780822382270
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

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

Table of contents

• 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