Abstract

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness offers a unique decolonial take on the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by rehistoricising and re-spatialising the study of bodies and identities in the world system of coloniality.

Situating the critical study of whiteness as a core intellectual pillar in a broadly based project for racial and social justice, the volume understands whiteness as elaborated in global coloniality through epistemology, ideology and governmentality at the intersections with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. The diverse contributions present Black and other racially diverse scholarship as crucial to the field. The focus of inquiry is expanded beyond Northern Anglophone contexts to challenge centre/margin relations, examining whiteness in the Caribbean, South Africa and the African continent, Asia, the Middle East as well as in the United States and parts of Europe. Providing a transdisciplinary approach and addressing debates about knowledges, black and white subjectivities and newly defensive forms of whiteness, as seen in the rise of the Radical Right, the handbook deepens our understanding of power, place, and culture in coloniality.

The book will be discussed by the editors Christi van der Westhuizen and Shona Hunter and the contributors Sarah Heinz and Mark Schmitt in conversation with discussant Evangelia Kindinger.

For those not able to partake in person, there is the possibility to join via Zoom by clicking the button below.

Meeting-ID: 612 5527 7762

Code: 107108

Biographical Notes

Christi van der Westhuizen (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa)

Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher, is the head of the Research Programme at Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). She was invited on a Visiting Professorship to Leipzig University, Germany, in 2022.

As transdisciplinary scholar interested in identities, differences, ideologies and discourses with a focus on (post)apartheid South Africa, Christi van der Westhuizen has published widely, both academically and popularly. 

Her scholarly work includes (as co-editor with Shona Hunter) the Routledge International Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2022) and two sole authored books: Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa (2017) and White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007). She has also published a volume of essays and newspaper columns titled Working Democracy: Perspectives on SA’s Parliament at 20 Years (2014).

Professor van der Westhuizen was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, and held research associateships with the University of KwaZulu Natal and Free State University. She previously worked as an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria.

She has served on several global initiatives, including as an expert on globalisation and gender on a project for the World Communion of Reformed Churches. Her working life started at the anti-apartheid weekly newspaper Vrye Weekblad and she worked as a Senior Political Correspondent in Parliament and as an Associate Editor for a not-for-profit global online news agency focusing on social justice.

She is a regular public speaker and columnist, and her public scholarship features in local and international radio, TV, print and online media.

Shona Hunter (Leeds Beckett University, UK)

Shona Hunter is a Reader in the Carnegie School of Education. She is the Programme Director for Research Degrees in the School and is a member of the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality.

Her work is interdisciplinary and intersectional in its approach. She has been writing, teaching and researching into the social, cultural and emotional politics of the state for nearly twenty years, holding academic posts at the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster and latterly Leeds along with visiting positions at the Universities of Sydney, Australia; Mannheim, Germany; Cape Town, Rhodes and currently in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her scholarly interests are framed through an engagement with feminist anti-racist decolonial critique and include all aspects of welfare politics and governance, state practices, identities and the broader material-cultural-affective politics through which ‘the’ state(s) is enacted nationally and globally as a global colonial formation.

This interest in the state brings her to consider questions of whiteness and masculinity as they relate to national ideals and expressions of state power as this gets lived in the everyday through informal cultural practices as well as formal state bureaucratic practice.

In 2009 she established the ‘White Spaces’ research collaboration, now the broader public intellectual project WhiteSpaces. This work is now in its 10th year of moving across academic and public locations, bringing together academics, activists and practitioners from 17 disciplines across 23 countries who have an interest in thinking critically about what it means to be white in global coloniality. Her 2015 book Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance brings together the various cross cutting themes  in Shona Hunter’s work to rethink the state itself. Her current single authored book project (working title) White States of Mind: Fantasies of Power and Vulnerability in the Academy develops this work to consider the way white identities and subjectivities frame neoliberal bureaucratic formations. With Christi van der Westhuizen of Nelson Mandela University she co-edited the Routledge International Handbook of Critical Whiteness Studies.

Sarah Heinz (University of Vienna, Austria)

Literature and other kinds of cultural texts, products, and practices are a central part of our societies and ways of life. In her research and teaching, Sarah Heinz has been interested in the specific role that literary and cultural texts have in shaping our sense of self and our perception of the world and others. Literatures and cultures provide us with scripts and ideals of who (and how) to be and lead our lives, but they can also question norms that we often take for granted.

In that sense, the literary and cultural studies can be an arena in which we can critically engage with how we see, experience, and change the world, ourselves, as well as our relations to others.

Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund, Germany)

Mark Schmitt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Languages, Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund. His transdisciplinary work is situated in contemporary British literature and culture, cultural theory and Critical Whiteness studies among others.

Mark Schmitt’s current research focusses on future studies, counter-hegemonic futures and pessimism in the context of cultural studies. He is working on a book titled Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst (under contract with Palgrave).

He is further engaged in a wider project titled Lost Futures? An Archaeology of Counter-Hegemonic Futures in Britain. A recording of a presentation of the research project held at KWI Essen can be found here.

Evangelia Kindinger (HU Berlin, Germany)

Evangelia Kindinger is Junior Professor for American Literature and Culture at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. She holds a PhD from Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the dissertation titled Homebound – Diaspora Selves and Spaces in Greek American Return Narratives.

Her research interests include for example Critical Whiteness Studies, popular (American) culture and intersectionality.