Whitening Race: Essays in social and cultural criticism

(Paperback)

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Whitening Race comes to fruition at a time in world history and global politics when questions about race require critical investigation and engagement. Since the 1990s international scholars have developed a powerful cultural critique by making whiteness an analytical object of research. Whiteness has become the invisible norm against which other races are judged in the construction of identity, representation, subjectivity, nationalism and the law. With its focus on Australia, the book engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia. Aileen Moreton-Robinson has brought together scholars from a range of disciplines: philosophy, cultural and gender studies, education, social work, sociology and literary studies. All engage critically with the location of the social and discursive construction of whiteness.

Reviews

""Whitening Race" is a challenging and useful collection, which aims at nothing less than remaking contemporary Australian understandings of the cultural construction of race." --Graeme Turner, professor and director, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland
"Australians are witnessing what is perhaps the most successful project of White Restoration ever witnessed in the West. This has triggered new approaches to the study of whiteness that are particularly sharp in the way they combine research, theory and politics. This exciting collection offers some of the best of what these new approaches have to offer." --Ghassan Hage, associate professor of anthropology, University of Sydney

Author Bio

Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Geonpul woman from Quandamooka. Previous to her appointment as an Australian Research Council Fellow, she taught Indigenous Studies at Griffith University and Women's Studies at Flinders University. She has been previously published in the areas of native title, whiteness, race and feminism. She is President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association.