Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies

Histories of Whiteness

Carmen P. Thompson

 

Historical analysis provides a necessary framework for considering the social and political moorings that have established whiteness as a category of analysis. Yet, as many of the works listed below demonstrate, this analysis does not always lead directly to clearly discernable black-and-white binaries, nor even to particular historical events. Whiteness as it has developed over time has not been fixed, stable, or deterministic; rather, it has been fluid, malleable, and complex. Historical questions concerning who was considered white, or not, and how these distinctions fluctuated throughout different eras prove useful in determining how whiteness traverses racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, gendered, regional, locational, and sexual lines within the United States and globally. Moreover, investigation of the national and the global, as well as the local and the personal, is where the historical research of whiteness offers its most exciting possibilities. Works listed in this section take issues ranging from slave laws to media representations and historicize their continuities and discontinuities, seeking to illuminate the virtually innumerable elements buttressing the historical construction of whiteness.

 

Allen, Theodore. The Invention of the White Race. II vols. Vol. I,II. New York: Verso, 1994 & 1997.

Babb, Valerie. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.

Bay, Mia. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Bennett Jr., Lerone. Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000.

Berger, Maurice. White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.

Bonnett, Alastair. White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives. Harlow, GB: Prentice-Hall, 2000.

Bontemps, Alex. The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Breines, Winifred. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Breines, Winifred. The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Calmore, John O. “Whiteness as Audition and Blackness as Performance: Status Protest from the Margin.” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 18 (2005): 99-128.

Crouch, Stanley. The All-American Skin Game: Or, the Decoy of Race. New York: Pantheon, 1996.

————. “Race Is Over: Black, White, Red, Yellow-Same Difference.” New York Times Magazine, September 29 1998, 170-71.

Dailey, Jane. Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Dorr, Lisa Lindquist. White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Soul of White Folks.” In Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920.

————. “The Superior Race.” Smart Race 70 (1923): 55-60.

————. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Russell & Russell, 1935.

————. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Dyer, Richard. White. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Eng, David. “Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness: Divided Belief in M. Butterfly.” In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Farley, Anthony P. “Perfecting Slavery.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 36 (2004): 221-51.

Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Goldstein, Eric L. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Gross, Ariela J. “Like Master, Like Man: Constructing Whiteness in the Commercial Law of Slavery, 1800-1861.” Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996): 263-99.

————. “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth Century South.” The Yale Law Journal 198, No. 1 (October 1998): 109-88.

Guglielmo, Thomas A. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno, ed. Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, No. 8 (1993): 1709-91.

————. “Finding Sojourner’s Truth: Race, Gender, and the Institution of Property.” Cardozo Law Review 18, No. 2 (1996): 309-409.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hartman, Andrew. “The Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies.” Race and Class 46, No. 2 (2004): 22-38.

Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. XIII vols. Vol. II. New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823: 167, 170.

————. The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. XIII vols. Vol. III. New York: DeSilver, Thomas, 1823: 87.

Higginbotham, Jr. A. Leon, and Anne F. Jacobs. “The ‘Law Only as an Enemy’: The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia.” North Carolina Law Review 70 (1992): 969-1070.

Hill, Mike. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Hooks, bell. “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 157-164. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Horne, Gerald. “The White Pacific.” In Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

————. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution 19. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Jordon, Winthrop D. White over Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.

Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America.” Journal of American History 89 (2002): 154-173.

Kovel, Joel. White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

LeMenager, Stephanie. “Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain’s Mississippi.” English Literary History 71, No. 2 (2004): 405-431.

Lipsitz, George. “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac: White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism and the New Historicism.” American Literary History 7 (1995): 700-725.

————. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York: The New Press, 2005.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

McKoy, Sheila Smith. When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

McMichael, Robert K. “We Insist-Freedom Now!: Black Moral Authority, Jazz, and the Changeable Shape of Whiteness.” American Music 16, No. 4 (1998): 375-416.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1975.

Moss, Kirby. The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Negra, Diane, ed. The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.

Roediger, David R. History against Misery. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006.

————. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. NY: Verso, 1994.

————. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

————. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, the Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

————. “The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860.” Journal of Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 579-600.

Sallee, Shelley. The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South. Athens: University of GAP, 2004.

Saxon, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso, 1990.

Sherman, Joseph. “Serving the Natives: Whiteness as the Price of Hospitality.” South African Yiddish Literature Journal of Southern African Studies 26, No. 3 (2000): 505-521.

Sokol, Jason. There Goes My Everything. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Spear, Michael. “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination.” International Labor and Working-class History 62 (October 2002): 189-193.

Stowe, David. “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies.” Lingua Franca 6, No. 6 (Sept.-Oct. 1996): 68-77.

Thandeka. Learning to Be White. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1999.

Vaillant, Derek. “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921-1935.” American Quarterly 54, No. 1 (2002): 25-66.

Walters, Ronald W. White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London: Verso, 1992.

Warren, John T. Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.