ENGL 6733 - The Future of Whiteness

(crosslisted) AMST 6733

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with AMST 4733/ASRC 4733/ENGL 4733.

S. Mohanty.

How should decent, anti-racist people respond to the racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States? What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available? Or should whiteness be rejected altogether? How can we form cross-racial progressive coalitions? How should we understand the nature of our social identities and what they make possible? This course is a wide-ranging introduction to these questions with readings from writers such as Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Toni Morrison and Dorothy Allison, as well as relevant anthropological and social-theoretical work (on racial identities, whiteness studies, etc.) and memoirs by, for example, former KKK members. A central text will be the new book The Future of Whiteness by the Latina feminist philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff.