Re-Orienting Whiteness

by Ellinghaus, Katherine; Carey, Jane; Boucher, Leigh

• ISBN13: 9780230618855
• ISBN10: 0230618855
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Leigh Boucher is a Lecturer in the School of Modern History and Political Science at Macquarie University, Sydney and in 2008 he was the Leverhulme Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Research in History and Theory, Roehampton University, London. 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 settler colonialism. She has previously worked on whiteness in the Australian women’s movement and the history of women and science, and 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.  Her publications include Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia (2006) and Blood Will Tell: Native Americans of Mixed Descent and Assimilation Policy, 1887-1946 (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

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