This handbook 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.
This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, advanced students, and scholars in the fields of Education, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Sciences, Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Media Studies, Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Diversity Studies, and African, Latin American, Asian, American, British and European Studies.
About the Author: Shona Hunter is Reader in the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality (CRED), Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her publications include Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance (2015) and various special editions and articles in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, Critical Social Policy, Critical Arts: South-North Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Journal, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, and Policy Futures in Education. She has held posts at the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster, Leeds University in the United Kingdom and visiting positions at the Universities of Sydney, Australia; Mannheim, Germany; Cape Town, Rhodes; and 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.
Christi van der Westhuizen is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD), Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Her publications include the monographs White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007) and Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa (2017), and articles in African Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race and Matatu Journal for African Culture and Society. She has held research fellowships with various universities, and previously worked as an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria. Her research focuses on identity, difference, ideology, and democracy in postcolonial contexts.