Feminist Theory

http://fty.sagepub.com Rethinking Whiteness: Introduction

Sneja Gunew Feminist Theory 2007; 8; 141 DOI: 10.1177/1464700107078138 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fty.sagepub.com

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Rethinking Whiteness
Introduction

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Feminist Theory Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Singapore) vol. 8(2): 141148. 14647001 DOI: 10.1177/1464700107078138 http://fty.sagepub.com

Sneja Gunew University of British Columbia

Debates about whiteness are on the move again in contemporary discussions, and it may be that their particular legacies in the settler colonies are instructive to current feminist concerns. For example, here is a succinct Canadian perspective:
Acknowledging that whiteness is a constant terror in my life, how do I accept the white psychologist, resource teacher, principal or director of health as someone who brings help and hope rather than as a representative of the oppression and terror I survived? (Monture-Angus, 1999: 27)

Clearly one of the pressing ethical issues of our current era concerns the ways in which researchers negotiate whiteness (or the West or European) in relation to postcoloniality, racialization, ethnicity and Indigeneity. The last may be less familiar to many trans-Atlantic readers because until very recently debates were dominated by the frameworks of blackwhite oppositional categories originating in the USA, and these often appear to consolidate a type of paralysing stand-off between so-called whites and their others a model that tends to reinforce those intractable binaries. A trend in recent manifestations of critical whiteness studies has been the systematic effort to trouble a homogeneous notion of whiteness and to distinguish groups who have traditionally not been at the heart of whiteness (the white imperial/capitalist male subject). Many white feminists, for example, would like to position themselves as not part of the unselfconscious (white) universal subject and therefore have their own resentments towards the effects of guilt or shame induced by being asked to articulate their own relations to colonial histories and white privilege (Haggis and Schech, 2000; Monture-Angus, 1999: 1126; Thobani, this issue; Fee and Russell, this issue). An inherent part of such debates is a concern with how categories of Indigeneity and ethnicity are situated in relation to each other and how these in turn impact on the discursive taxonomies of racialization as well as racist practices. What do these blackwhite deployments indicate and how do they relate to terms such as NESB (non-English-speaking background in Australia) or people of colour (in Canada)? In the settler colonies various groups became white in relation to not being black, but how does this position them in relation to
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not being Indigenous? This is a sentiment taken up by Dionne Brand in the Canadian context of the controversial Writing thru Race conference held in 1994:
Inclusion in or access to Canadian identity, nationality and citizenship (de facto) depended and depends on ones relationship to this whiteness. While it is not the only characteristic it is the dominant characteristic. It has a certain elasticity. One can enter not only if one belongs to the so-called founding nationsthe English and the Frenchbut also other European nationalities like the German or Ukrainian. Its exibility and strength allow it to contain inter-ethnic squabbles, like that between the English and the French, without rending its basic fabric of white entitlement. The way in which that squabble dominates and preoccupies the political life of the country, regardless of, say, indigenous peoples claims to the land reveals the predominance of white entitlement. (Brand, 1994: 174)

Brand reminds us of the elasticity of whiteness and this point is also noted by US feminist Robyn Wiegman who, following the inuential work of David Roediger, analyses the whitening of the Irish and other ethnic groups in the US context as part of a foundational gesture of whiteness studies. In Wiegmans view, the political project for the study of whiteness entails not simply rendering whiteness particular but engaging with the ways that being particular will not divest whiteness of its universal epistemological power (Wiegman, 1999: 150). But what if the tables are turned and that universalist epistemological position is taken up by those designated non-white? Roedigers important collection of essays Black on White (1998) assigns this role to African Americans, but in the settler colonies it is more appropriately taken up by Indigenous intellectuals. For example, Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson states that, In academia it is rarely considered that Indigenous people are extremely knowledgeable about whites and whiteness (Moreton-Robinson, 2004: 85). In order to move beyond essentialized and over-determined oppositional categories it is useful to consider the comparative contexts for these debates in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia where a focus on Indigeneity complicates interpellations of whiteness. As Fee and Russells paper indicates, in Canada, the inclusion of Aboriginal people, including Metis, who are explicitly of European ancestry, in the Constitution Act of 1982 meant that they could no longer be ignored in favour of a model of two founding (European) nations, English and French. But as Kristin Lozanski (this issue) argues, these legalities have not necessarily taken root in the national imaginary. The Mabo decision overturning the terra nullius concept foundational to colonization produced a similar situation in Australia. Once Aboriginal peoples are acknowledged to have contemporary claims on land, everything changes, because of the inescapable connection between land and citizenship. As well, because of the lack of another large racialized minority in these places (unlike the Black population in the US), other immigrant groups were differently racialized than immigrants in the US were (although the increased presence of Hispanic/Latino peoples there may eventually change this dynamic in the future). Some of the questions animating this special issue are: does whiteness
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Gunew: Introduction
function as a transcendental signier that no-one can own or is it consistently and intractably deployed as the dening condition of being human? What might it mean to put Indigeneity in the universalist position as the dening condition of being human, at least provisionally? We have some idea about how whiteness has affected Indigeneity but how has Indigeneity transformed whiteness? Have collaborations between white and nonwhite women, for example, produced new models for destabilizing and rethinking whiteness? In an increasingly hybrid world is it more useful to analyse mechanisms of racialization than to try to assign racial allegiances or authenticities? The papers offered here in this special issue do not by any means exhaust or even address all these questions but they do represent important ways in which whiteness studies needs constant feminist re-examination in the contexts of geopolitical changes. In her contribution to this issue Sara Ahmed examines whiteness through the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Whiteness functions as a pre-condition or behind the action of the habitual body, the body that operates comfortably in relation to its familiar space. Like Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2004) she argues that whiteness is the implicit norm for the universal, functioning as an a priori epistemology. MoretonRobinson derives this argument from the work of Warren Montag who has examined the history of whiteness in the context of 18th-century colonialism. As Montag puts it:
Can whiteness be understood not as one possible human attribute or property, distinct from and in opposition to other human attributes of the same class, such as blackness, but instead as the very condition of ones humanity, ones species being? We can begin to glimpse the existence of what would otherwise be a paradox: that the (or rather, a) universal was one of the forms in which the white race historically appeared. In a certain sense, one of the moments in the invention of the white race was its universalization in a movement that replaced the distinction between the black and white races, . . . with the distinction between the human and the animal. To be white is to be human, and to be human is to be white. In this way, the concept of whiteness is deprived of its purely racial character at the moment of its universalization, no longer conceivable as a particularistic survival haunting the discourse of universality but, rather, as the very form of universality itself. (Montag, 1997: 285)

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Given this history, to uncouple whiteness from conceptualizations of the universal takes a conscious effort, as Ahmed explores in her paper where she argues that, If to be human is to be white, then to be not white is to inhabit the negative: it is to be not. The pressure of this not is another way of describing the social and existential realities of racism. In the Canadian context Sherene Razack poses the important question: We may know how colonization changed Aboriginal people, but do we know how it changed, and continues to change, white people? (Razack, 1998: 19) and, as indicated earlier, this crucially opens up a whole new area of debate. For example, Aileen Moreton-Robinson proceeds to interrogate non-Indigenous researchers into Indigeneity (albeit that they position their studies as sympathetic and postcolonial) about the place of whiteness in their epistemologies. In other words, she questions them
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about their non-universalist particularism since they themselves do not make this component visible in their analyses and do not feature it as an inescapable element in their research. And she does this, to some degree, by assigning them to a particularism rather than taking for granted that they occupy the position of the universal. Clearly they themselves often remain blind to their own assumptions and perspectives in this regard as those who do not experience systemic racism as situated knowers (MoretonRobinson, 2002: 348), or, in Ahmeds terms, white bodies do not have to face their whiteness. While this is a good starting point is it helpful to take into account how different subjects (or groups) have a differentiated access to both racisms and whiteness? Differentiating amongst those who have access to white privilege is ultimately a useful move but at the same time one registers the fact that not differentiating (at least initially) is an echo of a standard rhetorical device deployed in white research, including, for example, many feminist critiques. In other words, Moreton-Robinsons strategy functions as the rhetorical turn associated with those who have traditionally invoked the power of claiming the universal. None the less, we recognize the fact that many white feminists, for example, would like to position themselves as not part of the unselfconscious (white) universal subject and therefore are particularly resistant to being asked to interrogate their own whiteness. It is a topic explored in Fee and Russells paper in some detail. As well, Anne Brewsters meticulous analysis of Lisa Bellears poem takes us through the processes whereby the poem functions as pedagogical performance that invites the (implicitly white feminist) addressee to acknowledge and interrogate her own whiteness. It is an example of the kind of rhetorical conventions invoked in Fee and Russells paper where they suggest that Aboriginal conventions of address in both Australia and Canada require that speakers (including academic ones) situate themselves (particularize themselves) very carefully before a conversation or dialogue can take place. Central to Thobanis paper as well is the argument that the US-based feminists whose work she engages with do not feel the need to particularize (and historicize) themselves in this manner. Returning to Wiegman, her analysis brings together many of the recent moves in whiteness studies in the US and reveals (in devastating ways) the investments and disavowals hidden within the eld. Wiegman contends the following: The split in the white subjectbetween disafliation from white supremacist practices and disavowal of the ongoing reformation of white power and ones benet from itis constitutive of contemporary white racial formation (Wiegman, 1999: 120), or white liberalism as she calls it elsewhere in her essay. Through an analysis of the popular 1994 lm Forrest Gump she shows Gump to be constructed as discursively black and enabled to transcend the contextualization of his white privilege so that he nally comes to embody an innocent and post-racist subject. The supposed innocence and vulnerability of the white subject in the context of the War on Terror is precisely what Thobani interrogates in her paper. Even with the best intentions, the very different arguments mounted by the three US-based feminists she analyses remain curtailed by
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Gunew: Introduction
their refusal to engage with the historical geopolitical inequalities engendered by US imperialisms. In Wiegmans view, such articulations of innocence can only take place in relation to the concept of universalism. After all, the white subjects claim to nonwhite particularity can be asserted only from the position of the universal, since it is in the space of the universal, and never the particular, that the theoretical mobility of political identication by denition takes place (Wiegman, 1999: 139). Indeed, one could argue that such choices inherently construct the universalist register. Whiteness studies, in her view, is clearly unable (or unwilling) to shed its investment in the universal, because the epistemological status of neither its scholars nor its institutions is ever called into question.
Far from operating as the opposite or resistant counter to the universal, then, the particular is the necessary contradiction that affords to white power its historical and political elasticity. In this context, the political project for the study of whiteness entails not simply rendering whiteness particular but engaging with the ways that being particular will not divest whiteness of its universal epistemological power. (Wiegman, 1999: 14950)

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The implications are somewhat staggering since it indicts as futile many of the well-intentioned labours by liberal white and non-white scholars to unpack whiteness. Turning once more to the Canadian context, the cultural mechanisms of attempting to shed ones white privilege are something Sherene Razack also diagnoses (1998: 10). Razack in a sense transposes Gayatri Spivaks notorious articulation of a colonial trope in which white men are repeatedly depicted as rescuing brown women from brown men to a feminist register in which white feminists are rescuing brown women from both white and brown men. Both versions reinforce notions of the civilized status of the white culture that enables these rescue missions, a point that Thobani also makes in her paper. Razack (1998) also critiques diversity management approaches as often amounting to supercial appropriation of cultural practices of subordinate peoples (p. 9) without meaningfully interrogating the power relations underpinning dominant cultural norms (p. 9), or, in Ahmeds terms, happy stories of diversity rather than unhappy stories of racism. The mechanisms both identify and illustrate the ultimate self-interest and consolidation which underpins much of critical whiteness practices:
These models suggest that with a little practice and the right information we can all be innocent subjects, standing outside hierarchical social relations, who are not accountable for the past or implicated in the present . . . In sum, the cultural differences approach reinforces an important epistemological cornerstone of imperialism: the colonized possess a series of knowable characteristics and can be studied, known, and managed accordingly by the colonizers whose own complicity remains masked. (Razack, 1998: 10)

Razack does not nd much hope in the rights approach associated with liberalism which assumes we are all individuals who contract with one another (Razack, 1998: 17), or the cultural difference approach which
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replaces biologism with culturalism, a move familiar to many of us through the work of Etienne Balibar (1991) on racism without race. In her much-cited study, The Claims of Culture, Seyla Benhabib identies one of the meanings for the universal as justication strategies (Benhabib, 2002: 26). Benhabib concludes: I see two challenges to this vision of cultural plurality and democratic contestation: cultural differences that are rooted in ways of life attached to the land and fundamentalist movements that abhor hybridity and deny cultural complexity. In this book I have not addressed the unique life situations and cultural heritages of the worlds indigenous peoples (Benhabib, 2002: 1845). Her study sets up a deliberative democratic model in which cultural contestations proliferate in the public sphere. None the less, part of the success of this project means that epistemologies are no longer the preserve of unmarked subjects or their cultures and this includes all forms of what she denes as multiculturalist theorists who argue for the fundamental purity and discreteness of their own particular cultures. Benhabib sets out a compelling seven-point structure for a pluralistically enlightened ethical universalism on a global scale (Benhabib, 2002: 367) and part of her suggestion is the need not to see cultures as closed entities so that the possibility for dialogue can occur in that one might engage with selective aspects of a culture and not simply condemn it because of one component. Such a model for dialogue is in marked contrast to the clash of civilizations model that is dominating our era in which cultures are conceived and judged as inherently bounded entities. But we need to heed Ernesto Laclaus words here:
If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary contents; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representations. (Laclau, 2003: 367)

In other words, no-one should be permitted to occupy the universalist centre, to own universalism. This continues to be the case even (alas) within feminist discourses. So while a great deal of work has certainly to be done in facilitating and ensuring the articulation of white particularity, this enterprise is not necessarily helped by continuing to homogenize the West or whiteness since this simply reinstates familiar Manichean binaries. The gesture of demanding that white scholars analyse the white component in their work on Indigeneity is certainly a powerful gesture of strategic essentialism but it is important that it should go further to distinguish the histories and practices of various groups in relation to their claims to whiteness. As the work of Sara Ahmed and other contributors to this issue has shown, the mechanisms of racialization need to be analysed rather than preserving one group as transcendent measure or reference point. While we need to remain alert to the reinstating of business as usual, those anxieties should not preclude forever attempts to nd ethical working relations in an unequal world. The conversations begun here are not easy ones, as the responses from Zillah Eisenstein and Phyllis Chesler to the critiques of
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their work in Thobanis essay indicate. Given the deepening global divisions we face, it is surely an enterprise with which we need to persevere.

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References
Balibar, E. (1991) Is There a Neo-racism?, pp. 1728 in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (eds) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso. Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brand, D. (1994) Notes for Writing thru Race, in Bread out of Stone, pp. 17380. Toronto: Coach House. Haggis, J. and S. Schech (2000) Meaning Well and Global Good Manners: Reections on White, Australian Feminist Studies 15(33): 36987. Laclau, E. (2003) Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity, pp. 3608 in L. M. Alcoff and E. Mendieta (eds) Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Montag, W. (1997) The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and Enlightenment, pp. 28193 in M. Hill (ed.) Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York: New York University Press. Monture-Angus, P. (1999) Journeying Forward: Dreaming First Nations Independence. Halifax: Fernwood. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2002) Troubling Business: Difference and Whiteness within Feminism, Australian Feminist Studies 15(33): 34353. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2004) Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation, pp. 7588 in A. Moreton-Robinson (ed.) Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies. Razack, S. (1998) Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Roediger, D., ed. (1998) Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White. New York: Schocken Books. Wiegman, R. (1999) Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity, boundary 2 26(3): 11550.

Sneja Gunew (FRSC) has taught in England, Australia and Canada and has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory. She is Professor of English and Womens Studies and Director of the Centre for Womens and Gender Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada. Among her publications are Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Routledge, 2004). Address: Centre for Womens and Gender Studies, University of British
Columbia, 1896 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada. Email: sneja.gunew@ubc.ca

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