Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness

Shona Hunter is Reader in the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality (CRED), Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her publications include Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance (2015) and various special editions and articles in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, Critical Social Policy, Critical Arts: South-North Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Journal, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, and Policy Futures in Education. She has held posts at the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster, Leeds University in the United Kingdom and visiting positions at the Universities of Sydney, Australia; Mannheim, Germany; Cape Town, Rhodes; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Her scholarly interests are framed through an engagement with feminist anti-racist decolonial critique and include all aspects of welfare politics and governance, state practices, identities and the broader material-cultural-affective politics through which ‘the’ state(s) is enacted nationally and globally as a global colonial formation. Christi van der Westhuizen is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD), Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Her publications include the monographs White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007) and Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa (2017), and articles in African Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race and Matatu Journal for African Culture and Society. She has held research fellowships with various universities, and previously worked as an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria. Her research focuses on identity, difference, ideology, and democracy in postcolonial contexts.

1. Viral Whiteness: 21st Century Global Colonialities

Part I Onto-Epistemologies: Theory Against Whiteness

Part I Introduction

2. Emerging Whiteness in Early-Modern India: A Nietzschean Reading of Jan Huygen van Linschoten

3. Whiteness, Christianity and Anti-Muslim Racism

4. Affects in Making White Womanhood

5. What Do Cultural Figurations Know About Global Whiteness?

Part II Conspiracies: Ideologies Reinforcing Whiteness

Part II Introduction

6. Trans/Nationalist Convergences: Hindu Nationalism, Trump’s America and the Many Shades of Whiteness

7. #TradCulture: Reproducing Whiteness and Neo-Fascism Through Gendered Discourse Online

8. Hating Meghan Markle: Drawing the Boundaries of British Whiteness Against Postfeminist Femininity

9. Colour-Blind Ideologies: The Whiteness of Liberalism and Socialism

10. Zionism as a Movement of Whiteness: Race and Colour in the Zionist Project

Part III Colonialities: Permutations of Whiteness Over Time

Part III Introduction

11. How (Not) to Become White

12. ‘Good Sweden’: Transracial Adoption and the Construction of Swedish Whiteness and White Antiracism

13. Japan’s Modernisation and Self Construction Between White and Yellow

14. The Evolution of Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Any White Will Do?

Part IV Intersectionalities: Differences (De)stabilising Whiteness

Part IV Introduction

15. ‘Africa is Not for Sissies’: The Race for Dominance Between White Masculinities in South Africa

16. White Femininity, Black Masculinity and Imperial Sex/Romance Tourism: Resisting ‘Whitestream’ Feminism’s Single Story

17. Paradoxes of Racism: Whiteness in Gay Pages Magazine

18. Between the ‘Left Behind’ and ‘The People’: Racism, Populism and the Construction of the ‘White Working Class’ in the Context of Brexit

Part V Governmentalities: Formations, Reproductions and Refusals of Whiteness

Part V Introduction

19. Assisted Reproduction and Assisted Whiteness

20. British Indian Seafarers, Bordering and Belonging

21. Making Yourself at Home: Performances of Whiteness in Cultural Production about Home and Homemaking Practices

22. Bleeding Through the Band-Aid: The White Saviour Industrial Complex

23. An Ecological Exploration of Whiteness: Using Imperial Hegemony and Racial Socialisation to Examine Lived Experiences and Social Performativity of Melanated Communities

Part VI Provocations: Debates and Dilemmas

Part VI Introduction

24. Curtailing Imagination: Modern African Philosophy’s Struggle Against Whiteness

25. ‘The Feeling in My Chest’: Unblocking Space for People of Colour in Critical Whiteness Studies

26. Integrity, Self-Respect, and White Privilege

27. Whiteness as Resistance: The Intersectionality of the ‘Alt-Right’

28. An Evolutionary Terror: A Critical Examination of Emboldened Whiteness and Race Evasion

Epilogue: Reflections