Rhetorics of Whiteness

Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education

Edited by Tammie M Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton and Krista Ratcliffe

358 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 17 illustrations

Paperback
9780809335466
Published: 12/21/2016

$50.00

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eBook
9780809335473
Published: 12/21/2016

$28.99

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For Professors: Exam Copies

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise
Contributors

Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection Category, 2018

With the election of our first black president, many Americans began to argue that we had finally ended racism, claiming that we now live in a postracial era. Yet near-daily news reports regularly invoke white as a demographic category and recount instances of racialized violence as well as an increased sensitivity to expressions of racial unrest. Clearly, American society isn’t as color-blind as people would like to believe. In Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, contributors reveal how identifications with racialized whiteness continue to manifest themselves in American culture.

The sixteen essays that comprise this collection not only render visible how racialized whiteness infiltrates new twenty-first-century discourses and material spaces but also offer critical tactics for disrupting this normative whiteness. Specifically, contributors examine popular culture (novels, films, TV), social media (YouTube, eHarmony, Facebook), education (state law, the textbook industry, dual credit programs), pedagogy (tactics for teaching via narratives, emotional literacy, and mindfulness) as well as cultural theories (concepts of racialized space, anti-dialogicism, and color blindness). Offering new approaches to understanding racialized whiteness, this volume emphasizes the importance of a rhetorical lens for employing whiteness studies’ theories and methods to identify, analyze, interpret, and interrupt representations of whiteness.

Although whiteness studies has been waning as an active research field for the past decade, the contributors to Rhetorics of Whiteness assert that it hasn’t lost its relevancy because racialized whiteness and issues of systemic racism persist in American society and culture today. Few whiteness studies texts have been published in rhetoric and composition in the past decade, so this collection should quickly become mandatory reading. By focusing on common, yet often overlooked, contemporary examples of how racialized whiteness haunts U.S. society, Rhetorics of Whiteness serves as a valuable text for scholars in the field as well as anyone else interested in the topic.

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CONTENTS
Foreword: Unleashed—Whiteness as Predatory Culture xiii
Lilia D. Monzó and Peter McLaren
Introduction: Oxymoronic Whiteness—from the White House
to Ferguson 1
Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, and Krista Ratcliffe
Part One. Hauntings in Popular Culture
Reflection
“Postracial” 19
Annette Harris Powell
1. Not Everybody’s Protest Novel: White Fictions of Antiracism
from Stowe to Stockett 22
Gregory Jay
2. The Help as Noncomplicit Identification and Nostalgic Revision 42
Christine Farris
3. Must(n’t) See TV: Hidden Whiteness in Representations of
Women of Color 54
Anita M. DeRouen and M. Shane Grant
4. Color-Blind Rhetoric in Obama’s 2008 “Race Speech”:
The Appeal to Whiteness and the Disciplining of Racial
Rhetorical Studies 71
Kristi McDuffie
Contents
x
Part Two. Hauntings in Social Media
Reflection
Before #BlackLivesMatter 89
Catherine Prendergast
5. Racialized Slacktivism: Social Media Performances of
White Antiracism 92
Tim Engles
6. The Ghost’s in the Machine: eHarmony and the Reification
of Whiteness and Heteronormativity 112
Sarah E. Austin
7. Facebook and Absent-Present Rhetorics of Whiteness 132
Jennifer Beech
Part Three. Hauntings in Education
Reflections
A Dwindling Focus on Whiteness 147
Jennifer Seibel Trainor
Administering Whiteness Studies 150
Amy Goodburn
8. Washing Education White: Arizona’s HB 2281 and
the Curricular Investment in Whiteness 153
Lee Bebout
9. How Whiteness Haunts the Textbook Industry: The
Reception of Nonwhites in Composition Textbooks 171
Cedric Burrows
10. The Triumph of Whiteness: Dual Credit Courses and
Hierarchical Racism in Texas 182
Casie Moreland and Keith D. Miller
Part Four. Hauntings in Pedagogies
Reflection
Black, White, and Colors in Between—Whiteness
Haunting Feminist Studies 197
Hui Wu
11. On the Cover of the Rolling Stone: Deconstructing Monsters
and Terrorism in an Era of Postracial Whiteness 201
Leda Cooks
Contents
xi
12. The Pedagogical Role of a White Instructor’s Racial
Awareness Narrative 222
Meagan Rodgers
13. Practicing Mindfulness: A Pedagogical Tool for
Spotlighting Whiteness 235
Alice McIntyre
Part Five. Problems Haunting Theories of Whiteness
Reflections
Calling a White a White 253
Victor Villanueva
Calling Whiteness Studies . . . 255
Sharon Crowley
14. Whiteness as Racialized Space: Obama and the
Rhetorical Constraints of Phenotypical Blackness 256
Ersula Ore
15. Color Deafness: White Writing as Palimpsest for
African American English in Breaking Bad Screen
Captioning and Video Technologies 271
Nicole Ashanti McFarlane and Nicole E. Snell
16. Whiteness as Antidialogical 295
Ronald A. Kuykendall
Epilogue 310
Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, and Krista Ratcliffe
Contributors 317
Index 323