Mark Schmitt - Böcker

Trumpism and the racially implied Islamophobia of the "travel ban"; Brexit and the yearning for Britain’s past imperial grandeur; Black Lives Matter; the public backlash against Merkel’s refugee policies in Germany. These seemingly national responses to the changing demographics in a multitude of Western nations need to be understood as effects of a global/transnational crisis of whiteness.The Intersections of Whiteness brings together scholars from different disciplines to shed light on these manifestations in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany. Applying methodology stemming from critical race theory’s investment in intersectionality, the contributions of this edited collection focus on specific intersections of whiteness with gender, class, space, affect and nationality.Offering valuable insights into the contours of whiteness and its instrumentalisation across different nations, societies and cultures, this incisive volume creates transnational dialogue and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as critical whiteness and race studies, gender studies, cultural studies and social policy.

Trumpism and the racially implied Islamophobia of the "travel ban"; Brexit and the yearning for Britain’s past imperial grandeur; Black Lives Matter; the public backlash against Merkel’s refugee policies in Germany. These seemingly national responses to the changing demographics in a multitude of Western nations need to be understood as effects of a global/transnational crisis of whiteness.The Intersections of Whiteness brings together scholars from different disciplines to shed light on these manifestations in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany. Applying methodology stemming from critical race theory’s investment in intersectionality, the contributions of this edited collection focus on specific intersections of whiteness with gender, class, space, affect and nationality.Offering valuable insights into the contours of whiteness and its instrumentalisation across different nations, societies and cultures, this incisive volume creates transnational dialogue and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as critical whiteness and race studies, gender studies, cultural studies and social policy.

This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations.Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.