Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University

Reviews / Votes

Keval writes an essential reading for all in HE. This book is the first in recent times to really present the state of UK HE from a truly liberatory perspective. He explores the "damaging paradoxes" at play in HE, but is able to tease, instruct, and enlighten the readers all at once. This literary work that is essential in today's incredibly violent and unjust marginalisation of people from the global majority. -- Melanie-Marie Haywood Harshad Keval's "long goodbye" to Higher Education is a powerful, if painful analysis of the university's racial structures. Racial trauma, a self-regarding White Narcissus, the closing down of curiosity, the transformation of white allyship into abolitionist practices, are some of the overarching ideas Keval uses to track the systemic frictions and costs of the neoliberal hustling of race equality. This is an inconvenient book, to use Berlant's term, bursting with generous readings of cultural and sociological criticism. Just what we need. -- Yasmin Gunaratnam This book is an astute, evocative and powerful rendition of whiteness and how white narcissistic structures, as a novel analytic and as an embodiment through consistent self-aggrandizement and its machinery, are omnipresent. To not mull over, pause and reflect on what Harshad has written, does not do his experience, labour and expertise, and what those racialised within whiteness endure as a collective, justice.



How and why those from the Global Majority assimilate into these white narcissistic structures matter;

Understanding ways in which we gatekeep matter; Understanding how white supremacist structures

continue to maintain the violence and power hierarchies via higher education and education systems

all around, matter.... so that actual disruption is possible outwith and within other performative

machineries that many don to 'decolonise within colonialism'...which is IMPOSSIBLE.



Thank you, Harshad, for your labour, and for actually visibilising the systemically invisibilised. -- Pavithra Sarma