Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance: Dis/Placing Race

Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance is unique in bringing together these three important topics in the context of communication teaching and scholarship with an eye toward interdisciplinary perspectives. In fourteen chapters, the leading whiteness scholars in the field of communication analyze the process of teaching and learning and the complicated intersections of whiteness, racial identity, and cross-racial dialogue. Toward these ends, these essays offer a variety of theoretical and practical approaches to the analysis of identity construction, racial privilege, and pedagogies toward equality and social justice. Above all, for teachers, students, and anyone interested in these issues, this book is a challenge to re-think the ways our curricula, texts, disciplinary boundaries, and moreover, how our interactions and performances re-inscribe racial privileges. Chapters provide innovative and accessible analyses of teaching and learning that will appeal to students, teachers, administrators, and anyone interested in how race works.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 "We—the Militant Ones": A Collective Autoethnographic Analysis of Racial Standpoints, Locating Whiteness, and Student/Teacher Interaction Chapter 3 Negotiating White Racial Identity in Multicultural Courses: A Model Chapter 4 "It Is Not My Responsibility to Teach Culture!": White Graduate Teaching Assistants Negotiating Identity and Pedagogy Chapter 5 Pedagogy of the Opaque: The Subject of Whiteness in Communication and Diversity Courses Chapter 6 The "White Problem" in Intercultural Communication Research and Pedagogy Chapter 7 Staging Whiteness: Possibilities for Resistance and Revelation in a High School Production of Simply Maria, or, The American Dream Chapter 8 Coloring Outside the Lines: Unmasking Performances of White Identity Through Role-Play Chapter 9 Race, Inversive Performance, and Public Pedagogy in White Man's Burden Chapter 10 Performing Parody: Toward a Politics of Variation in Whiteness Chapter 11 The Joke's on You? Chapter 12 "Can't We Focus on the Good Stuff?": The Pedagogical Differences Between Comfort and Critique Chapter 13 (Un)hinging Whiteness Chapter 14 Conclusion

About the Author :
Leda M. Cooks is associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jennifer S. Simpson is associate professor of drama and speech communication at the University of Waterloo.

Review :
Whiteness,Pedagogy, Performance is an important book at a time when talking about race is growing more urgent, when a shift in race consciousness is becoming increasingly more necessary, when pressures increasingly mount to neutralize or erase race, or when white privilege is denied or minimalized. While we should avoid placing white people at the center of our discussions on race, we nevertheless need to locate how whiteness is implicated in reproducing relations of oppression and exploitation and the global division of labor and in the creation of laboring bodies within the larger totality of capitalist social relations. Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance is a book that can provide educators with a valuable weapon in the struggle for social and economic justice. This edited book is innovative, well organized, and clear. For those interested in the doings of whiteness, this text asks and then tries to answer a series of important questions: How does the performance of whiteness infuse our pedagogy and classroom interactions? In what ways and with what effects does whiteness inform our field and the ways in which we construct, think about, and study communication? What sorts of strategies might we adopt to disrupt the normative functioning of whiteness in these venues? This edited volume gives insight into these questions and more. An important addition to the growing communication scholarship on the performance of whiteness.