Book Description

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.