Re-orienting whiteness

This book brings together historians from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to historicize constructions of whiteness as a colonial formation. Confronting the privilege inherent in the invisibility of contemporary whiteness requires that the historical roots of racial power be interrogated, and the history of European colonialism is of much more than passing significance to this task. This collection functions to read the colonial back into whiteness by demonstrating how this racial category traveled around the routes of empire. It shows how a transnational focus can bring historical and spatial specificity to the study of whiteness and thus re-orients the frames of whiteness for American and non-American scholars alike.

1. Re-orienting ehiteness : a new agenda for the field / Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher and Katherine Ellinghaus -- pt. I. Historians approaching the study of whiteness -- 2. Whiteness and "the imperial turn" / Angela Woollacott -- 3. The strange career of whiteness : miscegenation, assimilation, abdication / Louise Newman -- 4. "Whiteness," geopolitical reconfiguration, and the settler empire in nineteenth-century Victorian politics / Leigh Boucher -- pt. II. Whiteness as a transnational colonial production -- 5. Traveling white / Warwick Anderson -- 6. The question of miscegenation in the politics of English-speaking countries in the early twentieth century / Henry Reynolds -- 7. "Being thankful for their birth in a Christian land" : interrogating intersections between whiteness and child rescue / Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel and Belinda Sweeney -- 8. "I Followed England round the world" : the rise of trans-imperial Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, and the spatial narratives of nineteenth-century British settler colonies of the Pacific Rim / Penelope Edmonds -- pt. III. Whiteness as a settler-colonial identity -- 9. White is wonderful : emotional conversion and subjective formation / Mari…