Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism

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 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.