Shades of Whiteness

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. This collection examines the varying constructions of racial whiteness across different historical periods, cultures, and nation states. Discussions are included of whiteness as depicted in cinema, literature, comic books, the internet, photography, and popular television, drawing on perspectives and disciplines such as history, sociology, the law, feminism, discourse analysis and cultural studies. The formation of whiteness is considered across many national contexts, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Sweden, South Africa and Ireland. The intention of the collection is to illustrate the variability of whiteness as a racial construct; the ways in which whiteness is complicated and fragmented by other qualities such as country of origin, religion, language, age and appearance; the extent to which whiteness comes to be located in non-physical qualities, such as education, ethnicity, class, lifestyle, and behaviour, and the extent to which whiteness establishes and maintains its own internal hierarchies.