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This book brings together historians from the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to historicize constructions of whiteness as a colonial formation. The essays examine how this racial category traveled around the routes of empire. A transnational focus brings historical and spatial specificity to the field and re-orients the frames of whiteness for American and non-American scholars alike.
“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
Leigh Boucher is a Lecturer in Modern History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is currently working on a monograph that examines the relationship between graduated sovereignty and suffrage in the nineteenth century British settler world.
Jane Carey holds a Monash Fellowship at Monash University, researching the racial population politics of British settler colonialism. She has published articles in Gender and History and the Women’s History Review.
Katherine Ellinghaus is a Monash Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. She is the author of Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia (2006).
Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field / Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher and Katherine Ellinghaus * PART I: HISTORIANS APPROACHING THE STUDY OF WHITENESS * Whiteness and ‘the Imperial Turn’ / Angela Woollacott * The Strange Career of Whiteness: Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication / Louise Newman * ‘Whiteness,’ Geopolitical Reconfiguration and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth Century Victorian Politics / Leigh Boucher * PART II: WHITENESS AS A TRANSNATIONAL COLONIAL PRODUCTION * Essay to be announced / Warwick Anderson * ‘The Question of Miscegenation in the Politics of English Speaking Countries in the early Twentieth Century / Henry Reynolds * ‘Being Thankful for their Birth in a Christian land’: Interrogating Intersections between whiteness and child rescue / Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel and Belinda Sweeney * ‘I followed England round the world’: The Rise of Trans-imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionism, and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim / Penny Edmonds * PART III: WHITENESS AS A SETTLER COLONIAL IDENTITY * White is Wonderful: Emotional Conversion and Subjective Formation / Marilyn Lake * The Fabrication of White Homemaking: Louisa Meredith in Colonial Tasmania / Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish * Reading the Shadows of Whiteness: A Case of Racial Clarity on Queensland’s Colonial Borderlands, 1880-1900 / Tracey Banivanua-Mar * The Deluded White Woman and the Expatriation of the White Child / Margaret Allen * PART IV: WHITENESS AND THE IMAGINING/MANAGING OF COLONIAL POPULATIONS * ‘Woman’s Objective—A Perfect Race’: Whiteness, Eugenics and the Racial Anxieties of interwar Australia / Jane Carey * ‘Born and Nurtured in Darkest Ignorance': White Imaginings of Aboriginal Maternity / Liz Conor * Re-thinking ‘Squaw Men’ and ‘Pakeha-Maori’: Legislating white masculinity in New Zealand and Canada, 1860-1900 / Angela Wanhalla * Into the White Man’s Kingdom: Whiteness and Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States and Australia, 1880s-1960s / Katherine Ellinghaus * Conclusions / Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher and Katherine Ellinghaus
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