Re-Orienting Whiteness [Hardcover]

This book brings together historians from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to historicize constructions of whiteness as a colonial formation. Confronting the privilege inherent in the invisibility of contemporary whiteness requires that the historical roots of racial power be interrogated, and the history of European colonialism is of much more than passing significance to this task. This collection functions to read the colonial back into whiteness by demonstrating how this racial category traveled around the routes of empire. It shows how a transnational focus can bring historical and spatial specificity to the study of whiteness and thus re-orients the frames of whiteness for American and non-American scholars alike.This book brings together historians from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to historicize constructions of whiteness as a colonial formation. Confronting the privilege inherent in the invisibility of contemporary whiteness requires that the historical roots of racial power be interrogated, and the history of European colonialism is of much more than passing significance to this task. This collection functions to read the colonial back into whiteness by demonstrating how this racial category traveled around the routes of empire. It shows how a transnational focus can bring historical and spatial specificity to the study of whiteness and thus re-orients the frames of whiteness for American and non-American scholars alike.Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field / Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher and Katherine Ellinghaus * PART I: HISTORIANS APPROACHING THE STUDY OF WHITENESS * Whiteness and 'the Imperial Turn' / Angela Woollacott * The Strange Career of Whiteness:? Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication / Louise Newman * 'Whiteness,' Geopolitical Reconfiguration and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth Century Victorian Politics / Leigh Boucher * PART II: WHITENESS AS A TRANSNATIONAL COLONIAL PROlÐ