Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance ─ Dis/Placing Race

Agreeing with the definition of whiteness as "a refusal to acknowledge how white people are implicated in certain social relations of privilege and relations of domination and subordination," Cooks (communication, U. of Massachusetts at Amherst) and Simpson (communication, Indiana U.-Purdue U. at Fort Wayne) present 13 essays that employ methodologies of autoethnography, social analysis, and qualitative research to interrogate whiteness in the classroom through the lens of cultural and performance studies, in which the signification of whiteness is rooted in cultural and historical understandings of race, and these significations are made meaningful through performance. They have organized the contributions into three sections that focus on whiteness as a positioned and representative identity in the communications classroom, the role and pedagogy of whiteness in performance, and the ways in which whiteness is pedagogically routine and possibilities for challenging its inevitability. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.