Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance

Whiteness,Pedagogy, Performance is an important book at a time when talking about race is growing more urgent, when a shift in race consciousness is becoming increasingly more necessary, when pressures increasingly mount to neutralize or erase race, or when white privilege is denied or minimalized. While we should avoid placing white people at the center of our discussions on race, we nevertheless need to locate how whiteness is implicated in reproducing relations of oppression and exploitation and the global division of labor and in the creation of laboring bodies within the larger totality of capitalist social relations. Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance is a book that can provide educators with a valuable weapon in the struggle for social and economic justice. -- Peter McLaren, Honorary Chair Professor and Director of the Center for Critical Studies, Northeast Normal University, China This edited book is innovative, well organized, and clear. * PsycCRITIQUES, March 2008 * For those interested in the doings of whiteness, this text asks and then tries to answer a series of important questions: How does the performance of whiteness infuse our pedagogy and classroom interactions? In what ways and with what effects does whiteness inform our field and the ways in which we construct, think about, and study communication? What sorts of strategies might we adopt to disrupt the normative functioning of whiteness in these venues? This edited volume gives insight into these questions and more. An important addition to the growing communication scholarship on the performance of whiteness. -- Dreama G. Moon, associate professor of communication, Cal State San Marcos

Leda M. Cooks is associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jennifer S. Simpson is associate professor of drama and speech communication at the University of Waterloo.

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 "Wethe Militant Ones": A Collective Autoethnographic Analysis of Racial Standpoints, Locating Whiteness, and Student/Teacher Interaction Chapter 3 Negotiating White Racial Identity in Multicultural Courses: A Model Chapter 4 "It Is Not My Responsibility to Teach Culture!": White Graduate Teaching Assistants Negotiating Identity and Pedagogy Chapter 5 Pedagogy of the Opaque: The Subject of Whiteness in Communication and Diversity Courses Chapter 6 The "White Problem" in Intercultural Communication Research and Pedagogy Chapter 7 Staging Whiteness: Possibilities for Resistance and Revelation in a High School Production of Simply Maria, or, The American Dream Chapter 8 Coloring Outside the Lines: Unmasking Performances of White Identity Through Role-Play Chapter 9 Race, Inversive Performance, and Public Pedagogy in White Man's Burden Chapter 10 Performing Parody: Toward a Politics of Variation in Whiteness Chapter 11 The Joke's on You? Chapter 12 "Can't We Focus on the Good Stuff?": The Pedagogical Differences Between Comfort and Critique Chapter 13 (Un)hinging Whiteness Chapter 14 Conclusion