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.