Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness

You may wonder why I have a mic and there's no speakers in the room.

The mic is just for the screen.

So if you please allow me to start and you're most welcome to the launch or a launch of

the recently published Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies and Whiteness, edited

by Shona Hunter and Kristi van der Westhuizen.

My name is Olof Engel, I'm with the Institute of African Studies here at Leipzig University.

Let me start from the teaser on Routledge's website.

This handbook offers a unique decolonial take on the field of critical whiteness studies

by historicizing and re-spatializing the study of bodies and identities in the world system

of coloniality.

What was wonderful for the reviewers stated, this collection offers at long last the foundation

of a generally transnational as well as transdisciplinary conversation about whiteness.

Indeed the editors aim at developing a layered argument to show how whiteness works as a

formation, a logic, and an assemblage through which global coloniality is enacted relationally

in the interconnection between materials and public and effective.

Concurring with Achille Mbembe's opposition to the mythologization of whiteness that all

racialized subjects can get lured into, they argue that "there is no such thing as white

people, but there are people racialized as white, humans caught up in the racializing

logics of global colonial forms of subjectification and who are constantly called for the many

material cultural and effective layers of whiteness."

So before we come into the intellectual challenging details of this handbook, let me briefly recap

how we planned to do this tonight.

I will briefly introduce the four speakers, five more or less, five, and we'll then hand

over to Christy who will moderate the team that has worked on the handbook before she

will give back to me and then we have a round of discussion here in the room.

Let me very briefly introduce our four speakers.

Christy van der Westhuysen is currently a guest professor at the Institute of African

Studies here at Leipzig.

She is an associate professor and senior researcher at the Center for the Advancement of Non-Rationalism

and Democracy at Nelson Mandela University in Herpera, South Africa, previously known

as PE, and apologies.

She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Cape Town and we are partners in crime

in a research collaboration in the context of the Research Institute on Social Cohesion

where we are working on political populism in South Africa or Southern Africa.

Shauna Hunter, next to Christy, is a reader in the Center for Race Education and Decoloniality,

leads back at University UK where she is also the program director for research degrees.

She holds a PhD in social policy.

You may be interested, she is also the founder of White Spaces, a blog and a research network

that you can Google with very interesting results.

Sarah Heinz joins us from Vienna on the screen.

She is a professor of English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Vienna.

She holds a PhD in English Literature from Mannheim and her habitation at the same university

was on whiteness in contemporary Irish literature and film.

Mark Schmidt is a research instructor in British Cultural Studies at the Technical University

Dortmund, Germany.

He holds a PhD from Mannheim on the topic of British White Trash.

And our discussant, Evangelia Kindinger, is a professor of American Literature and Culture

at Humboldt University in Berlin.

She holds a PhD in English American Studies from Ruhr University, Bochum, on Greek-American

return narratives.

Over to you, Christy.

Very good to be here with you this evening and wonderful to see such a great turnout

of people to talk today with us about whiteness.

I'm really very delighted that we can also launch the handbook here.

I'm coming to the end of my visiting professorship and it's been very interesting to actually

look at the world from the vantage point of East Germany and also if one is looking at

whiteness, some interesting questions that also arise in relation to whiteness, looking

at both Germany and Europe from this vantage point.

I've really enjoyed it, also wonderful conversations with colleagues that have been really very

enriching.

We have launched the book online globally as one does nowadays and I've also had a couple

of in-person launches in South Africa with the African authors and discussants and it's

good to also then in a sense have a European launch one could say and bring whiteness specifically

to the discussion, the critical discussion of whiteness to this context.

I really want to say thank you to Salva Heinz from the University of Vienna who's with us

online and then Mark that's come in from Dortmund, we are as our discussant.

Thank you so much and in general of course my co-editor, my co-partner in crime here.

Very good.

Thank you to UF for hosting us this evening and to Dr. Ute Riddorf for pulling it all

together so wonderfully as you can see around us and the team as well.

So the Ralpisch International Handbook of Critical Studies and Whiteness was published

last year.

We've got a full 28 chapters plus an epilogue.

You will see that the book is divided in six sections, I'm not going to go into detail

but basically there's a section on onto epistemologies which is a kind of a theoretical framing of

how to understand the critique of whiteness.

Then we look at ideologies that we approach as almost conspiracies, ideological conspiracies

in terms of the reproduction of whiteness, how whiteness attaches itself to certain ideologies

to reproduce itself.

Colonialities of course, a very key term in the study of whiteness, intersectionalities,

governmentalities and then lastly provocations where we look at some of the more difficult

questions that arise when you look at the field by critical whiteness studies.

So in my own work I've been guided by the imperative of looking at the centres of power.

In South Africa we do have a lot of work and really also excellent work of course looking

more at the margins one could say, black people, poor people's position over time in South Africa

particularly through analysis of class relations, capitalism and so forth.

But I believe that if we want to understand the reproduction of power we also have to

look at the centres of power, whiteness being one, heteronormativity of course, masculinity

and so forth.

In the handbook we define whiteness as dynamic, shifting and durable as a form of domination.

It works systemically, structurally, institutionally and also through identities at the level of

the subject.

Shona and I come at critical whiteness studies as one could say friendly critics.

As you can see from the title this is not the handbook of critical whiteness studies

but rather critical studies in whiteness.

So the idea is to approach this field more expansively.

We particularly approach scholars that did not necessarily identify themselves as whiteness

scholars but people who have written critically about race and we wanted to expand the focus

away from the global north and the Anglo focus that we've seen very much in critical whiteness

studies as a field over the past 30 odd years to bring in scholars that are differently

located and situated.

So particularly scholars of colour within the global north or the global south, specifically

also scholars from the global south, and many scholars who are not first language English

speakers.

So really trying to de-centre one could say the field itself.

So for us it's important to engage in scholarship that is relevant, that addresses current complex

cities and conundrums and so on.

So particularly part of what we're looking at also in our chapter is at one could say

a newly hyper-visibilised whiteness.

And this of course we see in the upsurge of nationalisms across the globe, frequently

in populist form.

I think the most kind of spectacular version of this was the attack on Capitol Hill in

the United States two years ago.

We can definitely talk about how should we understand Bolsonaro supporters storming government

buildings now in the past few days, which seems like a total copycat action.

So for us, when studying the global racial order, it's important to historicise, to not

make the mistake of saying, well, it's always been the same when sometimes here this kind

of discourse, nothing has changed, things are exactly the same as before, and so forth.

We believe if you historicise racial relations, one can see that things have changed and with

regards to race, really due to effective global anti-racist activism.

So I think one has to give recognition to the concerted feminist, anti-slavery, anti-colonial,

anti-racist and queer struggles of the past, how many centuries that have been confronting

forms of domination and oppression and oppressive forms of power within and also across states.

So we see, we think that what's happening with whiteness now, it's in a kind of a fightback

kind of mode.

We've got a chapter in the book written by Colleen Boucher and Cheryl Matias, where they

talk about an emboldened whiteness that is basically trying to reassert itself.

It wants to claim the national body politic in various countries as white.

It wants to purify the nation of what it sees as foreign objects, whether external or internal

others.

We've got a chapter on 18 Meghan Markle, which might sound at first like a frivolous exercise,

but in fact, in this analysis, you bring post-feminism in relation to white nationalism, and you

see this, the case of what's going on with the British royal family is very much a metaphor

for this attempt to purify the nation or to return the nation to some version of whiteness.

So there's a sense of rationalised others as invaders that are infecting the white nation

and diverting it from its culturally ordained or scientifically verified course of superiority

and domination.

And so we see also a discourse around others that are internal to whiteness, particularly

feminists, queers, anti-racists, and so on, that are deemed to be weakening, in a sense,

the white nation from within.

These are enemies within that have to be expelled if we look at the reaction against critical

race theory, for example, so-called wokeness, et cetera, et cetera.

Just to take a step back, a formative work in critical whiteness studies has been on

the whole notion of whiteness as invisible to white people, that white people themselves

do not understand or cannot see the psychological and material effects of racism.

And there's an invisibility of these effects of racism to whiteness, and that serves then

as a basis for white ignorance, which then serves as a basis for the claim of a white

innocence.

So I can't go into the detail right now, but we analyze this as a kind of invisibility,

ignorance, innocence triad, but we find that while this was how it's functioned in more

liberal politics, currently is being augmented or even displaced by this basically a white

supremacism that reminds one a lot of colonial expressions, actually.

Just to finish off from my side, the part of trying to understand whiteness then is

on the one hand, these kinds of processes that I've been describing around the kind

of a purification, driver, reclaiming of the nation as white and so forth.

And then on the second hand, or the other hand rather, we want to also understand what

is happening internally to whiteness.

And a very useful way of understanding whiteness is to also see how it operates in the plural,

how it arranges itself within boundaries that are continuously adapted according to the

vagaries of power.

And in this sense, you have these shifting positions of one could say lesser whites within

whiteness.

Historically, of course, this would refer to Jewish people, Irish people, Italian whites

and so forth in South Africa to Afrikaner whites.

Also the class dimension, Mark's work for example on white trash, the notion of poor

whites as just about white or in some cases not really seen as completely white.

So you have this internal hierarchical differentiation of multiple whitenesses and you see socio-economic

realities due to the form, if we think of what, whether you want to call it neoliberal

capitalism or late capitalism, so the form of capitalism as taken and the kinds of socio-economic

deprivations that are being caused.

And this is actually serving now as an intra-white point of friction.

One way of understanding these resurgent whitenesses as a kind of a renewed investment in whiteness,

so you see a kind of a clamouring in terms of racial identification to reclaim whiteness

on behalf of those who are positioned as lesser whites.

Therefore a kind of a shift from a class struggle to a race struggle in which your white economic

elites are seeking to mobilise lesser whites with ethnic and cultural markers and in service

of whiteness to prevent interracial class alliances from forming, for example with immigrant

minorities.

So you see a kind of a reinstatement then of whiteness and of people who are finding

themselves on the margins of whiteness, wanting to reclaim whiteness and the privilege and

also particularly the access to resources that they hope that that will bring to themselves.

So let me end on this note, swiftly hand over to Shona who will share more with us on the

chapter that we've co-written in the handbook.

Yeah, thank you.

Thanks, Christi.

OK, so thank you for inviting me, wherever everybody who's been involved in that is,

I can't see, I'll tell you, yeah, this is just really nice to be here.

By way of a bit of an apology, I'm a bit throaty and a bit coughing and trying to stop doing

that.

But partly because of that and also partly because my brain works in one of those traditional

academic ways where it makes so many links, it kind of collapses halfway through, I'm

going to read you some bits from the chapter that are going to speak to the two key points

that I wanted to talk about.

But as I was listening to Christi and always when I'm thinking about how we work together,

the complementarity is so interesting because I suppose I've spent my career really critiquing

liberal benevolence, which may well sound kind of a very different position from where

Christi sits in terms of that consideration of power from the South African point of view.

But of course, it's not, they're totally imbricated.

And really, this is part of, I think, where my starting point is for today and what I

wanted to draw out in relation to the chapter in particular, but the volume as a whole.

So hopefully Christi will let me read everything I need to.

But the two key points that I want to draw out then is that whiteness can't be understood

from a global Northwest vantage point alone.

Coloniality can only, because coloniality cannot be understood from the vantage point

of the global Northwest.

So Christi's already talked about these multiplicities, so we're talking about colonialities through

time but also coterminously operating at the same point.

And the relation between whiteness and coloniality is, for me and for both of us, central to

the perspective that we're adopting in the handbook.

And it's not necessarily central to the perspective of a lot of people who are critiquing, engaging

with and thinking about, explicitly about whiteness.

And I think that's really important.

That is the thing that's important for me, I suppose.

So colonization then isn't one implication of liberalism from that point of view.

So for me, as somebody who's interested in states and the enactment of states, I'm very

interested in liberalism as a lived kind of way of being.

But liberalism is established through coloniality.

So they're totally, you know, imbocated and entangled.

And therefore, whiteness is the enactment of a certain humanity which sustains liberalism.

And whiteness, they're not necessarily as something that's only embodied.

So that's what I want to unpack a little bit through reading from our chapter.

So it puts people in a racial relation, liberalism, whether it announces that or whether it doesn't,

that's its central kind of force.

So the central ideas of liberalism, then bureaucracies, institutions and state are white.

The second kind of point that leads on from that, then, this first point leads us to understanding

something crucial about bodies, identities and subjectivities in a world system.

Subjectification through a world system and how we understand that is fundamentally related

to liberalism.

And this, then, is fundamental to how we understand whiteness as something that's embodied, actually

as a distraction from the enactment of white power, I think, often.

So subjectification, then, is materially, affectively and symbolically dynamically

constituted and enacted, that is, as lived in relation as part, sorry, as not on tick.

So part of our critique and the onto epistemology section, the theory section, if you like,

of the handbook talks about onto epistemology.

So we are bringing ontologies and epistemologies into a fundamental relation and that's the

theoretical basis, the meta-theoretical basis for the handbook.

Am I okay to do my three readings now to elaborate?

They're little.

So these three kind of readings elaborate on those two central points and they come

from our chapter.

So I'm just going to start and we'll see how we go.

So we offer a decolonial analysis, true to the praxis as well as the title, by way of

first showing how the deconstructionist impulse of whiteness, this deconstructionist impulse

in relation to whiteness, must translate into an onto epistemic struggle, which recognizes

and refuses race as the way of organizing and defining the human.

This refusal is in concurrence with members' opposition to the mythologization of whiteness

that all racialized subjects can get lured into.

And we've already heard that direct quote, but it's worth reading again.

Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth.

It is the most corrosive and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere,

that everything originates from it and it has no outside.

So we proceed by developing a layered argument to show how whiteness works as a formation,

as a logic and as an assemblage through which global coloniality is enacted relationally.

So that's this co-terminal and of course it's a multiple set of relations in the interconnection

between the material, the symbolic and the affective.

So from this point of view, there is no such thing as white people, but there are people

racialized as white humans caught up in the racializing logics of global colonial forms

of subjectification and who are constantly called to the many material cultural and affective

laws of whiteness. Whiteness falsely promises self-understanding and this is really fundamental

for the two points I want to make through the chapter in a moment.

So whiteness falsely promises self-understanding and certainty in existence because this self-understanding

can only ever be achieved through the perpetuation of violence on the self and other because

of the mastery which is demanded through a commitment to the idea of race.

So being committed to the idea of whiteness commits us to the idea of race and vice versa.

And in fact, I would probably prioritize if I were pushed to the commitment of whiteness,

prioritize it and kind of feeds the commitment to race and then produces racism.

So it's a complete contrary, if you like, of how we often understand and imagine whiteness

to be produced.

So two minutes. Brilliant. Okay. So quite no, it's fine. You don't believe me. Christy

never believes me. Okay. So we do lots of things in the chapter. We analyze some of

the dynamics in South Africa, lots of institutional dynamics. Think about the moment that we were

writing the murder of George Floyd and all of that sort of stuff. But we also then think

about the ways in which the key terms of critical whiteness studies and that's deliberately

critical whiteness studies as this academic formation, if it can be such a thing, have

been framed more recently through these ideas of fragility. And so Robin DiAngelo's work

is one example of that, which has been taken up and we might want to talk about why that's

been taken up in particular. But so I just want to read where, how we differ in relation

to that. So I might end up with three minutes. Let's see how long it goes. But so DiAngelo

suggests through her ideas of fragility, that the loss of power is what is feared by white

people, but without understanding the relationship of this loss of power to vulnerability. So

we one of the authors that we use in this chapter and that is used by other people in

the handbook is George Yancy. So George Yancy, on the other hand, is crystal clear about

this link. And the fact that terror and pain provoked at the risk of losing power as a

form of domination is about the exposure to the self as vulnerable, as fundamentally unfinished

as only ever in relation. As always, this is from him directly, already beyond ourselves

dispossessed by forces of interpolation, where the idea of automatic self mastery is deeply

problematic. The key to re-humanising through whiteness, which is something that we elaborate

on in the chapter, is coming to realise that the white subject was never the site of mastery

in the first place. By attempting to practice liveness outside of this aspiration to mastery,

a different orientation to the white body might be possible. This un-suturing again

- that comes from Yancy and we unpack that a little in relation to our own thinking - is

not about returning whiteness and white subjects to comfort or innocence. Instead, the contrary,

this un-suturing relates to remaining open to the threat and pain that potentially produces

change, because the recognition of subjective vulnerability implies the resistance to the

idea of human self determination. So not just white self determination, but human self determination.

It places whiteness and whitened subjects in their fullest responsibility with themselves

and others. This relationality also disrupts the idea of change as coming from within the

white body. Social change is not in the gift of the white master, but achieved through

a relationality where subjectivity is enacted by, at the very least, both in relation. Now,

I probably haven't got time, so I'm guessing I can read Christie's body language well.

So what we do is we think about how we can understand that form of relationality through

the fractured locus and we engage with Maria Lugones's work and various other bits to help

us do that. But that's very important because she has a particular understanding of coloniality

and the colonial relation which aligns with our point of view. So I'm going to leave it

there and I didn't get to read my favourite bit, but I'm sure Christie would have loved

that.

So let's hand over to Soho in Vienna.

Yeah, it's lovely to at least virtually be with you. Thanks for the invitation and for

making this technically possible. Yeah, my chapter was entitled 'Making yourself at home

performances of whiteness in cultural production about home and homemaking practices', and

this chapter grew out of my interest in notions of home and the role of homemaking practices,

especially for the creation and naturalisation of specific forms of subjectivity and community.

Home is where we are made, I assumed, but home is also something that we make in sometimes

mundane and unacknowledged acts every single day. At the same time, I argued that home

is an erratic term. It glows, it promises something and it connects people with their

past and the people they love. So these acts of making home and of being made ourselves

within a home are widely circulated within cultural context as something dear to us,

something to cherish and to defend. Home is seen as a space where a person can be themselves

or as a participant of a workshop once phrased it, home is where the dog nicks my face.

It is this connection between imaginaries of home, the materialities of home, specifically

property and notions of whiteness that I was interested in, in my chapter. Despite its

alleged stability and naturalness, whiteness is not a fixed identity, as Shona and Christy

already pointed out, but rather something we do and perform. This doing is not simply

the choice of each individual. A dispositive of whiteness disposes us towards some rather

than other practices, norms and ideals, and we therefore do whiteness within institutionalised

frameworks that are part of larger structures like a state, as well as part of smaller institutions

like the family. Exactly because whiteness is in constant need of affirmation through

repetition, everyday practices and material contexts like buildings form the basis of

people's performances of whiteness. The family home is a prime setting for such performances.

Although mostly thought of as private space, home is intensely political and shaped by

normative conventions, economic frameworks and social expectations. It thus becomes a

focal point for white lead practices and is configured by the normative position that

whiteness has taken up in Western discourses. In my chapter, I analysed cultural production

surrounding home, specifically property-themed television shows and media about home improvement,

to track how exactly practices of doing home and doing whiteness intersect. Asking how

a good home is presented and who is or is not eligible for such a good home makes it

possible to uncover normative notions of the white subject and its agency that underlie

Western ideals and practices of home and homemaking. Our politics therefore literally find a home

in our houses, apartments and other dwellings and they do so in the practices that are part

of homemaking routines. These politics of home are all the more important to scrutinise

when we consider imaginaries of home in many Western cultures. The term home conjures up

a host of associations such as family, comfort or safety. Of course meanings of home are

dependent on concrete social, cultural and historical contexts and can differ widely

in individual experiences. In addition, home can be a site of negative feelings, exclusion,

a loss of self or even violence, especially for women. Nevertheless, across many Western

cultures since the 18th century, home has remained an often idealised, even romanticised

setting for the self and for communal ties for nostalgia, heimat and heimvi. These imaginaries

of home take on material form, creating spaces in which we do home every day. In that sense

home can be a very white space. However, what is seen as good design, proper ways of living

and properly relating to people within a home is intensely regulated and based on the normalisation

of some forms of behaviour and community rather than others. Here it is specifically salient

that many, if not most, homemaking practices seen as good, normal and proper in contemporary

Western society are connected to middle-class whiteness. From the way I am expected to park

my car, prepare and consume food, to the more complex matters of caring for my child, personal

hygiene and sexual relations or more communal matters like entertaining guests in my house,

likely scripts configure the practices that turn a house into a good or ideal home.

Now I want to finish with a few words on my material. Taking these conceptualisations

of home and subjectivity as my starting point, I looked at notions of property and material

relations. Here I looked into definitions of property as private, individual property

and how such a definition normalises white subjectivity and Western notions of property

law, for example in settler colonial societies. I then used cultural production on home improvement,

DIY and interior design to assess how property, home and whiteness are not only linked economically,

politically and legally, but also ontologically in producing and maintaining a sense of self

for the inhabitants of a home. In discourses on home improvement, home does not only give

shelter to a person, but is an extension of a person's mood, personality and implicitly

their self-regulation and their relations with the outside world. In my media examples,

I zoomed in on the therapeutic tone of television shows about renovation, home organisation

and buying a home. All these shows take on the character of an intervention, rescuing

the houses as much as their inhabitants from crumbling building fabric and their less than

ideal homemaking practices. And a lot of this is about tidying up. Episodes typically use

editing techniques of before and after to effectively contrast the shocking initial

conditions of houses and interiors with a bright and orderly spaces after the experts

are done. Tearful home owners are repeatedly shown thanking the show host for their new

lives and a happy end that they had been unable to achieve themselves. Here home improvement

becomes a route towards a better life along the lines of a dispositive of whiteness connected

to control, enterprise and responsibility. And I think that very nicely links with Shona's

ideas on liberalism. In a final step, I then link these discourses on ideal homes to the

ideal of being a home owner, bringing the connection between home property and white

subjectivity full circle. The white possessive logic at the basis of settler colonies also

forms the foundation for a white sense of self-possession, agency and self-worth that

valorizes a subject that owns, that is that maintains and regulates itself, its bodily

urges and its environments. Cultural production about the home as property or as a space to

improve is therefore a highly interesting source of how whiteness is supposed to be

done. Just as the homes presented on television or in glossy lifestyle magazines, whiteness

becomes a lifelong DIY project for the enterprising, self-improving subject. So we are indeed making

ourselves at home and Machabte explores why it is worthwhile investigating the enduring

effects of whiteness and its normalization within these practices of home. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Mark, over to you.

So my contribution to the book is titled, what do cultural figurations know about global

whiteness and the aim of this chapter is to show how cultural figurations of racial identities

and of whiteness are an integral part of the social imaginary. That is, they are part of

the symbolic and material processes of identity making and of meaning making. Readers, audiences

and fans engage with these figurations in meaningful ways that structure their perception

of their own and others racial identities. In other words, cultural figurations reflect

and produce knowledge of whiteness and of ethnicity in general. They therefore contribute

to a culture's racial epistemology or the question of how we can know ourselves and

others as racialized. So it's a fundamentally epistemological issue. I consider art and

cultural representations as a diverse set of signifying practices that are at the same

time inherently social practices. And my proposal in this chapter therefore was to look at cultural

representations, not just as representations of a given pretextual reality that we can

study empirically, but to look at how figurations in a more complex way go beyond this conventional

notion of representation in that they more organically relate to the material and symbolic

practices in society, extra textually more generally. I use this concept of figuration

as an epistemological frame by drawing on sociological theories by scholars like John

Hartigan, Imogen Tyler, but also literary studies scholars like Barbara Quater and my

own analysis of figurations of tainted whiteness in my book on British white trash in contemporary

British novels. This approach bridges the gap between the disciplines of sociology and

of literary and cultural studies to comprehensively assess how figurations of whiteness or whitenesses

in the plural sense form a wide-ranging social imaginary that must not be merely regarded

as fictional representations, but indeed interacting with our empirical world and how we know the

world and how we know ourselves. My approach is also fundamentally indebted to work by

the African-American writer Toni Morrison and more recently the Black British writer

René-Edoue Lodge, who have both discussed the invisibility thesis, which means that

whiteness is very often in Western cultural representations the unsaid norm, right, and

it's invisible and therefore unmarked as a racial identity. So, for example, in Playing

in the Dark, her essay collection about whiteness in the literary imagination, Toni Morrison

says about the central character in a text by Ernest Hemingway to have and have not,

to quote, "Eddie is white and we know he is because nobody says so." So for her, basically

the assumption is that whenever a character is explicitly mentioned as racialized, then

usually that character is non-white, right? René-Edoue Lodge more recently remembers

her experience of reading J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels as a young kid growing

up in Britain as a black girl. And she says about this in her book, Why I'm No Longer

Talking to White People About Race, to quote, "After four-year-old me came to terms with

the fact that I would never turn white, I found refuge in white fictional British and

American characters that I could relate to. For so long that fictional heroic character

loved by so many has been assumed to be white because whiteness has been assumed to be universal.

It is in film, television and books that we see the most potent manifestations of white

as the default assumption. A character simply cannot be black without a pre-warning for

an assumed white audience. Black characters are considered to be unrelatable, with the

exception of a handful of high profile crossover black Hollywood stars." So that is René-Edoue

Lodge's assessment of this, of her own relationship with cultural texts and the figurations of

whiteness in these texts. More recently, in an American film by the

director Nikyatu Yuzu called Nanny, which came out last year, 2022, the director mentions

in interviews that she had to retrain her white male editors for the film to not always

cut to the reaction shots of the white face, but constantly had to remember the editors

that the central character of her narrative was a black woman and that therefore she should

be at the center of every shot, rather than the reactions of white people to her.

So in my chapter, I then focus on examples of invisible and hyper visible whiteness,

especially in the James Bond franchise. James Bond is an important area to study whiteness

because you can consider the James Bond franchise as an afterthought to British imperialism.

The franchise and the figure of James Bond are to this very day rooted in the racial

matrix of the British Empire. It would not be possible without the notion of British

imperial whiteness. Producers and audiences of avenue films and spinoff novels can convince

themselves that really the franchise is colorblind only for so long.

Then during a 2015 debate, controversy came up when it was debated that the British black

actor Idris Elba could potentially be the next James Bond after Daniel Craig leaves

the franchise. Guardians of the franchise objected to this and said that, like, for

example, Roger Moore, the actor who famously played James Bond throughout the 70s and 80s,

said that, well, Idris Elba is a fine actor, but he should not be James Bond because James

Bond should be English English. By that, he meant, obviously, that he shouldn't be black.

And other commentators responded to this as well and said that maybe Idris Elba is a bit

too street to be James Bond. So even if a black actor was to play James Bond, it should

not be Idris Elba. So there were these racialized assumptions about Idris Elba's credentials

to be able to play James Bond. So to wrap this all up, basically, what is

put into question is that, you know, whiteness is this invisible norm in cultural representations

of that kind up to a certain point. And in the very moment, as René Aédo-Lodge says,

you know, the possibility of a non-white actor playing James Bond, for example, suddenly

whiteness becomes something that is precarious and needs to be guarded in these kinds of

representations. And you can see that audiences and producers have an effective attachment

to preserving a certain notion of white knowledge and identity in these characters and figures.

All right. Great. Thank you so much. Over to Léa. So Léa

is our discussant this evening. And yeah, looking forward. Thank you.

I am a discussant. It's a bit odd because, I mean, I will say something about your book

and you put so much time and energy and effort and everything in it. So it's an interesting

situation. But thank you for inviting me to comment and to discuss.

So I do come from an American studies perspective, which is actually what I don't like about

myself, because if you want to talk about whiteness, and I very much agree with your

approach here is we need to get away from this centrality of the global north, especially

of the UK and the US in critical whiteness studies. But here I am. So I will try to do

both more of an outside look, but also look at specific chapters. So actually, when I

received the book, I think I was very frustrated with being somebody who studies whiteness

as a job next to being a white person myself. When I read the book, I was thinking a lot

about maybe the future of the field. If you want to call critical whiteness studies a

field I certainly do. So where does critical whiteness studies go to? What is happening?

And your book actually offered answers that I will explain in a moment. So I think mainly

it is very impressive in its scope and aim 28 chapters, an epilogue, it shows so many

different perspectives. And you said the relationality of whiteness definitely, but also showing

unexpected relations. So ideally, you want to learn when you read a book. Yeah, and I

know that's a very simple way to start, but I learned a lot. So I learned about and I'm

going to quote authors while I'm offering my comments. So I learned a lot about the relationship

between contemporary white nationalism and Hindu nationalism in the Indian American diaspora,

as Sitara Tobani mentions in their contribution, or for example, the maintenance of a desirability

of whiteness in reproductive tourism, as shown by Amrita Pandey in their chapter. And you

write in your introduction that whiteness, and I'm quoting you too, is a deeply material

matter which must be worked through. And the book really works through it through post-colonial

theory, the study of visual media, as we just heard from Zara and Mark, but also the study

of literature and art, feminism, post-feminism, sociology, philosophy, gender, and also the

study of history. And while Kristi, you said that there is change that we need to talk

about, I thought it was interesting that the book also shows a continuity in the creation

of whiteness in different times and also in different places. And it spans centuries.

So one of the chapters discusses the 16th century writings of Dutch merchant Van Linschoten

about Goa. And the author Arvind Sandanya writes that Goa is an apt place to start thinking

about the emergence of a European will to dominate the entire globe. And then the book

spans to the very contemporary times, and we have contributions that are clearly influenced

by the times they were produced, and so by the Black Lives Matter protests after the

murder of George Floyd, but then also the fatal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for

particularly people of color around the world and the ways in which the pandemic once more

laid bare the inequalities and hierarchies of power that harm them while protecting whites.

So we have a very rich scholarship in this book with very different approaches to whiteness.

And I'm just quoting different authors and how they approach whiteness as a social relation

and identity and ideology as property, an unspoken presence that ties into the invisibility

discourse, an effect of social relations that are structured by inequality and hierarchies

of power, and a location of structural advantage. So this is kind of what the book does. Now

what it did to me and what I went away with after I read it is that what really struck

me was the self-reflexivity that many authors and also you in your introductory chapter

showed about critical whiteness studies itself. So critical whiteness studies emerged in the

1990s, and from what I gather particularly from part six in your book that is called

Provocations is that critical whiteness studies is a bit stuck. And that's also the position

that I had when I started reading the handbook is that it's kind of stuck in some of the

discourses that originated in the '90s, namely the marked, unmarked dichotomy, Mark you just

mentioned that, the invisibility of whiteness that only works for those who actually possess

whiteness. And in critical whiteness studies still in the 2010s, many of the work was just

showing whiteness, making it visible, and that is really not enough. So this discourse

from the '90s, U.S. American scholars Frantz, Windens, Twine, and Charles Gallagher have

termed this the second wave of critical whiteness studies and situated the first wave in the

U.S. in W.E.B. Du Bois' writing. So that's 1920s, 1910s. So the second wave of the '90s

didn't really evolve. And one thing that I noticed particularly is that many chapters

in the book address whiteness also as a performance, the performativity of whiteness. And in your

chapter, viral whiteness, and I was, I don't know whether that's the part that you wanted

to read, but talking about fragility and also talking about privilege, which is one of the

other key words in critical whiteness studies that we address, criticize, act with, is that

very often whiteness is performed in a way that makes it innocence. And it's kind of

stuck in a confession of fragility and privilege, and that often results not in anti-racist

work, but merely in a performative admittance to fragility and privilege to make one feel

innocent, maybe. If I got it right, you name this hand-wringing whiteness in your chapter

that is somehow a desperate awakening to one's own whiteness that then ends up in this performance

of "I am a good white person," but that very often does not end in anti-racist work. And

to reference what Zara said before, these are also ways of doing whiteness. And I think

they very much speak to this maybe backlash that you referenced in your comments.

So next to this performativity and self-reflexivity, I mean, the book is published as a Routledge

International Handbook, but sometimes that doesn't hold up. But in this case, this is

really a very international book. So you write in your preface that the pursuit of anti-racism

must be simultaneously intellectual and activist, and you have authors who come from both, well,

they're all often connected, but both intellectual and activist works. So what also became clear

to me is that next to being intellectual and activist, critical whiteness studies must

also be international. So in 2017, critical whiteness studies scholar Steve Garner pointed

out that the field often ends up centering white people's lives and losing sight of the

impacts whiteness has on those of people of color. And he called for intersectional analysis

and international analysis that would pave the future of the field. And the handbook,

I think, is one of the most comprehensive collection of international work in whiteness

with a large focus on work from the global south and by scholars of color, as you pointed

out, Christy. So there is transdisciplinary scholarship from him about Africa, particularly

South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Israel, the UK, the United States, Germany, Sweden and

Japan. So the study of critical whiteness in the future must be self-reflective. It

must be international. It must be concerned with a performative aspect, but it must also

be transnational, which is not the same as international. So I think, Zara, you didn't

really mention all the different shows you write about in your chapter, but in your contribution,

the doing whiteness is happening in almost the same way across the UK, Germany, South

Africa and Asia. So across very different cultures that are nevertheless united by a

middle class ideal of property that is rooted in whiteness. So the last point that really

was crucial for me while reading the handbook is the doing aspect. That very much ties in

with your work on James Bond and the rumors about a new one. And he is, of course, white

and quite young. So we might want to talk about this. So the doing of whiteness is crucial

because Mark, you write in your chapter, the performative aspect of how identities are

figured across different spheres and discourses helps us understand the creation of whiteness

and every figuration or every doing of whiteness. And I think the book is doing as well is shaped

and shapes whiteness by itself. So the three things that really stood out to me when reading

the handbook next to the depth and the width, that's a really odd word, but you know what

I mean, that the authors, the contributors and the chapters display is really that you

do question critical whiteness studies from within. And I think that's desperately necessary

that you make visible the performativity aspect of whiteness and that you stress this international

and transnational scope that hopefully will help advance the field into a direction in

which it will be productive in real life. That's my comment or comment. Thank you for

giving me the opportunity. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate

your observations. It's good to know that what one sets out to do has been communicated

across. We thought that we would have perhaps a bit of a controversial kind of reception,

one could say. Not everybody loves it when you critique a field, but we also wanted to

come in in such a way that it's actually productive rather than simply just a destructive kind

of critique that one unfortunately also finds in academia a lot of the time. So we really

wanted to do something productive with it and our authors of course were wonderful in

making that possible for us. But I'm going to let myself be led by Ulf because we may

want to bring in our musical content. Okay. All right. I think it's worked out very well

to have both Salva and Mark here because I'm seeing very nice connecting points around

the kind of the knowledges that produce whiteness and something that you haven't mentioned specifically

is consumerism in the construction of white identity, which I think is something that

if one is in the European context trying to make sense of it, it's quite useful. In South

Africa, we've started to look a bit in the direction of consumption and consumerism generally

to try and understand particular kind of enactment of what would one call it? I mean, it is a

kind of a desire of a certain kind of way of being in the world with which neoliberalism

or neoliberal capitalism specifically also facilitates. So I wanted to just allow Mark

and Salva to comment on each other's chapters in relation to that because in a way what

Salva is talking about in terms of the production of domestic, it's a form of knowledge that's

being produced in the process and then also the idea of the possessive logic, the expression

of the self through possession and then that kind of fantasy of being completely self-possessed

and in complete control of yourself, which is also a vantage point from which we are

criticizing the work fragility position. But Mark, some comments from your side?

Yeah, I think I find it interesting that you focus on consumption as an important aspect

because that is clearly, of course, what we are seeing in cultural figurations and cultural

production in the cultural industries, especially. So in this chapter, I focused deliberately

on the James Bond franchise because it's still one of the biggest financially very important

cultural franchises where fiction and also people's emotional investment in these fictions

come together and where we can clearly see that certain notions of identity, whether

it's British national identity, whether it's a certain kind of class identity, kind of

historical identity and especially a white identity is being consumed. It's a matter

of consumption. It's a very money heavy thing. When you use another actor to embody James

Bond and to embody the history and whatever its traces are in the present, it becomes

a financial thing. It becomes an ideological thing as well. So how this character, this

figure, is consumed in the cultural industry by the audiences matters in so many ways.

And this is tied in with whiteness, with the history of imperialism and so on. At the same

time, of course, consumption in the wider context of neoliberalism and capitalism is

interesting when it comes to hyper visibility of certain types of whiteness. So white trash,

for example, has become in the present rather than in the past of antebellum America. It

has become this marker of hyper visible whiteness that liberal whiteness wants to distance itself

from. But at the same time, the hyper visibility of this tainted whiteness overshadows class

dynamics. So it becomes a matter of whiteness, of a failed whiteness, of a failed being,

a good liberal white subject. And thereby, questions of class and thereby questions of

exploitation and inequality, material and economic inequality are being concealed with

this element of whiteness and race. And that is the case for white trash in empirical reality,

in social reality, but also in how it is being portrayed in contemporary cultural fictions

as well.

Thanks. So do you want to come in at this point?

Yeah, yeah, I could. I mean, I think a lot of what Mark has been saying very nicely ties

in with my key points. And this I really like this idea of the desire to be in the world

and to be accepted in the world as a white subject that takes the shape of so many minute

and tiny homemaking practices. And it's interesting that, as I already implied, you know, a lot

of these shows that I looked at, Property TV, DIY, Home Improvement, Tidying Up with

Marie Kondo, which was a huge hit on Netflix, is about becoming a more self-possessive,

in-control subject, by taking control and externalizing that control of yourself onto

your external environment, which is your home, how to fold shirts, how to have a neat cupboard,

how to entertain guests nicely, colours to tone down your stressful life. All of that

comes into that need to not be a failing liberal subject, to not fail at being a good white

person, to be a good white middle-class person. And there are, again, interesting margins

to that. On the one hand, the failed citizens of the Home Improvement shows who are helped

by the experts. But what I found increasingly interesting is also the movement of, one could

say, the other margin of that in people saying that the white liberal subject consumes too

much and therefore we should reduce. For example, in the tiny house movement, you know, we consume

too much and our life is not sustainable. So these people in their Twitter feeds and

in their TikToks and whatever, and their YouTube channels, they present a sense of, I'm an

even better white subject because I don't consume that much. I have reduced my life

into this tiny house, yet this tiny house is super tidy and it's very nice and it's

absolutely bright. And I've produced that myself. You know, all of these videos, I have

a very strange addiction to these videos, which say, you know, two years of home renovation

in 10 minutes. And it gives you that sense of, this is what we did with our own hands

and it's sustainable and this is a good home that we created for ourselves. So that sense

of that connection between citizenship, self-possession, ownership and property. I find that really

interesting when it comes to the discourse of being a good white subject and all of its

representations of failing citizens, failing white subjects who are not able to maintain

both themselves and their home, which kind of are mapped onto each other. The home is

an externalization of that. And MTV did have, you know, a few years ago, it had an interesting

show which took that to its extremes, which was called Room Raiders, where a girl was

asked to visit three rooms of boys and only based on how the rooms look, she had to make

a choice about whom to date. That radically externalized that idea that our rooms are

an externalization of ourselves. And I find that connection really interesting.

Thanks. Yes. You'll come in the moment if you wanted to add some of what you wanted

to say earlier, which you didn't have time for.

Actually, it might work to do that at the end. Okay. So, I mean, this isn't directly

related to the, can I just say thank you as well, just for the reflections and the reading

and the engagement. It was, it's really interesting, you know, to kind of learn about through other

people to say thank you. But yeah, this consumptive, as you were asking the question and then as

Mark and Sarah, you were both talking, I was thinking about the consumptive dynamic of

whiteness in relation to activism. And this kind of connects to the charotainment stuff.

It also connects potentially to the antebellum South kind of points that you were alluding

to there. And I'm thinking there about the ways in which white liberal forms of activism

enacted, kind of in the media, all sorts of other kind of contexts, are actually forms

of consumption of the energies of black activism often. And Noemi Michel writes really, really

brilliantly about this set of dynamics in relation to anti-racist activism in the Swiss

context at the moment. I just wanted to raise that. And I think that that, I'm trying to

think does anybody really write directly about that in the handbook? Maybe not. But the dynamics

of consumption between whiteness and blackness and how that constitutes an enactment of whiteness

directly in spaces where we are racialized together and doing those racializations via

our activism, or whether it be online or what have you. She talks about charotainment and

the consumptive dynamics there and the energies that are being used and consumed by whiteness

to actually reproduce itself through this activism and the depletion then of the other

forms of kind of activist. It relates to a lot of the themes in the book rather than

reflects on the chapters. So before the current, and I think it relates to a lot of the points

that have been raised, before the current historical juncture in which anti-racist struggles

have forced the white supremacist underbelly of liberalism to the surface. In retaliatory

defense of whiteness, a white person in the global North could go about their whole life

almost never having any sort of obvious racially ontological disturbance. In the global servant

context, as in South Africa, that is not possible. The embodiedness of the white subject is not

deniable. Even if her quest is to combat racism and live an ethical life, she still cannot

disinvest from whiteness. Instead, like what Samantha Weiss and she, Samantha, writes in

the volume and in her previous work in 2010, she wrote an article that produced all sorts

of controversies in the South African context and more broadly, but is grappling with, she

needs to learn to live through it as a human. This is where connecting the global dots is

fundamental because the repression constitutive of whiteness is no longer possible. Whiteness

here is related to whiteness there. As Aliwali in this volume shows, at the subjective level,

this is a lesson from the volume as a whole. So that was where I was going to end. And

I think it draws together the activism aspect of this, maybe in another sort of way.

All right. Wonderful. Thanks, all.