Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism

by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Editor)

With its focus on Australia, Whitening Race engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Race, Australia, Essays, Philosophy, Indigenous

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is professor of Indigenous studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and is director of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network. She is author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism and editor of several books, including Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters.

Reviews

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a deeply thought provoking read. I really really enjoyed this read.

Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and able. At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race.(1997:3) p.78

To recognise that whiteness has shaped knowledge production means academia would have to accept that the dominant regime of knowledge is culturally and racially biased, socially situated and partial. Such recognition would not only challenge the universal humanist claim to possess impartial knowledge of the Indigenous other, it would also facilitate recognition of the subjects of other humanisms to whom whiteness has never been invisible or unknown. p.88

[Zoe Brittain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great collection of pieces. Crazy this came out over two decades ago and the conversation at large around these issues, and in many academic spaces, is still so juvenile.