After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority |
After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority
New York University Press
January 2004
336 pages, 8 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814735428; Paper ISBN: 9780814735435
Mike Hill, Associate Professor of English
State University of New York, Albany
As each new census bears out, the rise of multiracialism in the United States will inevitably result in a white minority. In spite of the recent proliferation of academic studies and popular discourse on whiteness, however, there has been little discussion of the future: what comes after whiteness? On the brink of what many are now imagining as a post-white American future, it remains a matter of both popular and academic uncertainty as to what will emerge in its place.
After Whiteness aims to address just that, exploring the remnants of white identity to ask how an emergent post-white national imaginary figure into public policy issues, into the habits of sexual intimacy, and into changes within public higher education. Through discussions of the 2000 census and debates over multiracial identity, the volatile psychic investments that white heterosexual men have in men of color—as illustrated by the Christian men’s group the Promise Keepers and the neo-fascist organization the National Alliance—and the rise of identity studies and diversity within the contemporary public research university, Mike Hill surveys race among the ruins of white America. At this crucial moment, when white racial change has made its ambivalent cultural debut, Hill demonstrates that the prospect of an end to whiteness haunts progressive scholarship on race as much as it haunts the paranoid visions of racists.
Read the Introduction here.
Table of Contents
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- INTRODUCTION: AFTER WHITENESS EVE
- I: INCALCULABLE COMMUNITY: MULTIRACIALISM, U.S. CENSUS 2000, AND THE CRISIS OF THE LIBERAL STATE
- 1.1 LABOR FORMALISM
- 1.2 DISSENSUS 2000
- 1.3 THE WILL TO CATEGORY
- 1.4 REBIRTH OF A NATION?
- 1.5 AMERICA, NOT COUNTING CLASS
- II: A FASCISM OF BENEVOLENCE: GOD AND FAMILY IN THE FATHER-SHAPED VOID
- 2.1 OF COMMUNISM AND CASTRATION
- 2.2 MUSCULAR MULTICULTURALISM
- 2.3 WHEN COLOR IS THE FATHER
- 2.4 A CERTAIN GESTURE OF VIRILITY
- 2.5 THE EROS OF WARFARE
- III: RACE AMONG RUINS: WHITENESS, WORK, AND WRITING IN THE NEW UNIVERSITY
- 3.1 BETWEEN JOBS AND WORK
- 3.2 THE MULTIVERSITY’S DIVERSITY
- 3.3 AFTER WHITENESS STUDIES
- 3.4 MULTITUDE OR CULTURALISM?
- 3.5 HOW COLOR SAVED THE CANON
- NOTES
- INDEX
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR