Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions

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 Veronica Watson Deirdre Howard-Wagner Lisa Spanierman Part I: Affective Whiteness Section Introduction: Feeling White Melissa Steyn Chapter 1 The Emotions of White Racism and Antiracism Lisa B. Spanierman Nolan L. Cabrera Chapter 2 Stories of a White Apocalypse on the Romanian Internet Adela Fofiu Chapter 3 Swedish Whiteness and White Melancholia: A Diagnosis of a White Nation in Crisis Tobias Hübinette Catrin Lundström Part II: Governing through Whiteness Section Introduction: Piercing the Veil Charles W. Mills Chapter 4 Governing through Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Reconstituting Australian Culture and Cultural Diversity in the Howard Era, 1996–2007 Deirdre Howard-Wagner Chapter 5 The Institutionalization of Whiteness in Contemporary Canadian Public Policy Delores V. Mullings Chapter 6 Arizona 2010 Brandy Jensen Deirdre Howard-Wagner Chapter 7 “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: Reading France’s Recognition Politics through Fanon’s Critique of Whiteness and Coloniality Vanessa Eileen Thompson Part III: Disrupting and Reimagining Whiteness Section Introduction: When Heaven and Earth Are Shaken to Their Foundations George Yancy Chapter 8 Troubling White Englishness in South Africa: A Self-Interrogation of Privilege, Complicity, Citizenship, and Belonging Anthea Garman Chapter 9 I Once Was Lost but Now I’m Found: Exploring the White Feminist Confessional Emily R.M. Lind Chapter 10 Theorizing White Racial Trauma and its Remedies Veronica Watson Becky Thompson About the Contributors

About the Author :
Veronica Watson is professor of English and director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Research at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Deirdre Howard-Wagner is an Australian Research Council discovery early career research fellow and president of the Law and Society Association Australia and New Zealand. Lisa B. Spanierman is associate professor in the Faculty of Counseling and Counseling Psychology at Arizona State University.

Review :
Innovative scholars from an impressive array of disciplines here probe holistically critical dimensions of the world’s interlocking system of white racial oppression. Examining countries across the globe—the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, France, Australia—they demonstrate the oppressive effects of persisting white domination in areas ranging from the extreme emotions of cyberhate, to commonplace revanchist politics retreating from hard-won human rights and multiracial democracy.