The Persistence of Whiteness is the third book edited by Daniel Bernardi on the theme of whiteness and American cinema. While the first two books – The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) and Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) – were concerned with earlier periods of formation of white racial hegemony within Hollywood's creative process, this third part focusses on the constant re-formation and reassertion of whiteness as “ a racial code and … implicit discourse” (xv) that structures contemporary US filmic practices and patterns of reception. The visual and narrative shaping of whiteness through Hollywood cinema, and its broader effects on popular notions of race, ethnicity and identity, are analysed through case studies of particular genres (westerns, beach movies, new black cinema, vampire flicks), franchises (Star Wars, The Matrix trilogy, The Lord of the Rings), stars (Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Lopez), filmmakers (Steven Spielberg, the Wayans brothers, Melvin Van Peebles) or films (Mandigo, Romeo Must Die, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner).

The book proposes analysis of the ways artists and audiences both reproduce and resignify whiteness in/at the movies, and one of the central questions raised by the essays here collected is that of the materialization of race. Beginning with Richard Dyer's argument that whiteness is at once pervasive and invisible (to white eyes), various authors investigate how this paradoxical hypervisibility/invisibility constructs particular ways of seeing, perceiving and conceptualizing the materiality of race. But Bernardi's collection is most compelling when it turns to the resistances to racial hegemony enacted within the Hollywood industry. One of the most alluring essays is an in-depth study of the cultural construction of Whoopi Goldberg as a “crossover diva” navigating between black female traditions of comedy, appropriations of male body stylization and agency, and decidedly ambivalent sexual politics. Pointing to the different moments in her career where Whoopi was “de-raced,” “de-sexualized” or “de-gendered” and comparing them to times where Goldberg played wilfully at the intersection of various identities, Bambi L. Haggins gives a fascinating narrative of how the ambiguous position of America's most famous black female comic towards race, sexulity and gender has granted her a star status while, at the same time, disempowering her “socioculturally and industrially” (341). In the same vein, in her essay on the Wayans brothers' subtle (and not so subtle) parodies of whiteness, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade demonstrates how the Wayans confront white hegemony as actors, directors, producers and writers. Their strategy consists in occupying a space traditionally available to African Americans – that of humour and comedy – and filling it with parodies of whiteness based in the long black history of theorizing and critiquing white subjectivity.

Bernardi's book is a must-read for students and scholars working on race, identity and cinema. It contains a selected bibliography of books and essays on white studies and on race in contemporary Hollywood, as well as a very useful glossary of terms defining concepts such as “Caucasian,” “flexible citizenship” and “idealized whiteness.”