Re-Orienting Whiteness

Reviews / Votes

"Re-Orienting Whiteness is a bold and lucid intervention into the burgeoning field of whiteness studies . Committed to exploring the operations of racial power within specific historical contexts and localities, the collection is essential reading for historians who currently have reservations about the value of whiteness as an analytical category. Critical of the provincialism of dominant U.S. approaches to the field, its editors productively bring transnational and postcolonial perspectives to bear on re-orienting the field, with a particular focus on white settler colonialisms in the British Empire." - Clare Midgley, Research Professor in History, Sheffield Hallam University

"Sophisticated and adventuresome, this collection brings together leading voices and emerging scholars in the critical study of whiteness; each writing with a rare and healthy awareness of other essays in the volume. Full of comparative insights and attuned to the ways that whiteness was made and is remade in transnational motion, they wonderfully chart the structural and the intimate dimensions of racial formation." - David Roediger, Professor of History, University of Illinois and Author of How Race Survived U.S. History

"The innovative feature of this volume is the editors desire to push whiteness studies toward a more sustained engagement with the history of colonialism and critical post-colonial thought. This is an important scholarly intervention that offers an explicit challenge for work on race in the U.S., historical research on British empire-building, and the more theoretically-inflicted work on the production of difference." - Tony Ballantyne, Author of Orientalism and Race and Between Colonialism and Diaspora

"This finely edited collection harvests the best of recent historical scholarship, drawing together work that illuminates the machinations of whiteness and race inside and outside the parochial borders of the U.S. With this volume, Boucher, Carey, and Ellinghaus have redrawn the boundaries of whiteness studies and seeded the field for the next generation of critical scholarship." - Matt Wray, Department of Sociology, Temple University, and Author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness