This chapter explores the displacement of Othello from his own household. The ‘shaping of the early modern English domestic sphere’ by Desdemona, Brabantio, and others is centred on the expulsion of its nominal head: ‘Home is where the heart of racist ideas and ideologies dwell’. The use of the words ‘domestic’ and other cognates to shape the homestead as an invisibly coercive space, serving the interests of its white inhabitants, reveals an under-explored aspect of Shakespeare’s engagement with race.

This chapter begins the second main part of the book, which sets out a high Christology. I try to explain just what it is that I take myself to be doing by pursuing this kind of account, given doctrinal theology’s besetting problems. I insist that my account is necessarily provisional, one contestable and partial balancing act, worked up in one particular context, making use of materials that I happen to have inherited and that lie to hand for me in my context – and that it must be so provisional, given both the inexhaustibility of its object and the nature of embodied knowledge. I argue that it must, nevertheless, if it is to do justice to its object, be oriented toward love, toward justice, and toward liberation.

This chapter provides detailed commentary on and analysis of director Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma! First produced at Bard College’s SummerScape in 2015, it was then reimagined for an off-Broadway production at St Ann’s Warehouse in 2018 and a Broadway production at the Circle in the Square Theatre the following year. It subsequently toured the US, played at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2022 and transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End for a limited run in 2023. The chapter looks at how Oklahoma! can function as a ‘machine for distraction’, addresses historical contexts for the story, including the Dust Bowl, the Trail of Tears and the Black history of Oklahoma, and shows how whiteness, sexual attraction, gun violence and colour-conscious casting all play important parts in Fish’s Regietheater approach.

Whitewashing and the zealous pursuit of white garments is at the heart of this chapter, a phenomenon entangled with race thinking and a whiteness agenda. This phenomenon grew from the 1600s, altering trade and labour regimes and the need for skilled care Atlantic-wide. This soap saga directed domestic and personal priorities and employed legions of women, typically low-ranked, gendered and racialized. Light, white shirts and shifts carried cultural weight, understood as the social skin. The chapter argues for the skill and stamina inherent in whitewashing, a sector overlooked until recently, demanding attention not least for the colonial dimensions of this history. Whether Hudson Bay or the Caribbean, soap stood out as a colonial feature. The Caribbean was unique in economic and cultural power, where Black women directed the making and remaking of fashion. I present the history of enslaved and free Caribbean washerwomen, with arguments for their cultural force and essential functions. Allied with Black seamstresses, they built a dynamic fashion ecology that informed Atlantic norms. This cohort defied reductionist claims, even as imperial thinking celebrated all things White.

Costumed dress became powerful imperial propaganda, with masquerade balls taking a British form. Their numbers rose sharply from the 1760s, as imperial power soared, a popularity seemingly unbounded. Racial hierarchies were played and displayed, with costumed figures claiming authenticity, echoing territorial claims. This chapter puts the history of cultural cross-dressing into the context of empire and its aims. Britain’s White pedigree was staged in classical and medieval garb, while blackface, brownface and antisemitic tropes were performed. Heroes of empire strutted. Specific costumes paralleled landgrabs and racial ranking. “Masquerade Intelligence” became a staple of periodicals empire-wide, recounting guests’ bejewelled attire from across the social order: royalty through nobility, officers, imperial administrators, industrialists, merchants and families. Apparent frivolity held serious intent, performed in countless private and public affairs throughout Britain, Ireland, India and beyond. Resistance arose among those facing the perils of colonization, differently costumed. Defiance and mimicry were their counterthrusts, pivotal factors in the politics of masquerades.

Chapter 8 discusses the dim future that is implied by the findings of this book. If politicians previously felt that they had to tread lightly when negatively stereotyping minoritized ethnoracial groups and mobilizing white racism, that no longer appears to be the case. We are in the midst of witnessing this change in US politics, with Donald Trump's successful capture of the Republican Party. This book demonstrates, though, that this phenomenon is not specific to any one politician or political moment. Instead, it is inherent to whiteness itself. Understanding the conditions under which negative racial appeals flourish, as this book has sought to do, is a first step in combatting the kind of rhetoric that functions to reify white dominance and the unequal racial hierarchy in the US.

Chapter 7 builds on insights about the contextual nature of a tolerance for negative racial appeals from Chapter 6. This current partisan divide, where the Republican Party has consolidated white voters, mobilized feelings of threat, and is using negative, explicit appeals to motivate their base is not necessarily a “given.” Instead, it is the result of our particular context. This chapter demonstrates the tenuous nature of this relationship with two original survey experiments that test what happens when partisans see a racially minoritized group (here, Latines) as benefitting their political party. It finds that when white partisans are told that the growing number of Latines in the US are increasingly voting for their preferred political party, they reject anti-Latine rhetoric from a co-partisan politician. In other words, when partisans see members of a racially minoritized group as potentially instrumental to their political success (and thus do not see them as a threat), they are less willing to endorse racist rhetoric directed at that group. The findings of this chapter demonstrate the strategic nature of whiteness as an identity rooted in preserving dominance.

Chapter 2 explains why tolerance for negative explicit racial appeals has reemerged in American politics today with the theory of dominance destabilization. Dominance destabilization predicts that when white Americans feel as though their group’s dominance is unstable, their prejudice activities, and they seek to restabilize the unequal racial hierarchy by accepting explicit racial appeals. To draw out this theory, the chapter traces the historical development of whiteness as an identity rooted in the desire for dominance. It draws from the literatures on whiteness, racial ideology, and group threat to motivate a structural understanding of whiteness that helps demonstrate why perceived threats produce such strong reactions. Then, it outlines two contemporary narratives about supposed challenges to white dominance: increasing diversification and the election of the first Black president. These two forces have increased the salience of perceived white status threat today – in a polarized manner. The chapter closes with the theoretical expectations that will guide the empirical analyses in this book.

This chapter focuses the fractures in urban space created by racialized capitalism in the final decades of the twentieth century. Shoop distils discourses of neoliberal-era Los Angeles by drawing into dialogue the contrasting readings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel proffered by Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. Shoop explores Joan Didion’s expression of White paranoia over demographic changes as expressed in The White Album, setting Didion’s racial anxieties alongside the forms of Chicano resistance and historical memory articulated in Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979). Shoop then examines how Carolyn See’s Golden Days (1986) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) satirically criticize racial liberalism and suburban whiteness. The chapter concludes by discussing the fractured, global Los Angeles as it emerges in the wake of the 1992 LA Uprising, in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997).

This chapter analyzes how authors addressed the countercultural and radical scenes that came to prominence in LA during between the late 1950s and the late 1960s. Saul notes that Joan Didion looked back on the 1960s and early 1970s as a period of moral and psychological decay. Meanwhile, though, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964), Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City (1965), and Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) offered a more sympathetic and nuanced approach to the bewildering combination of social upheaval and liberatory promise that the city offered in this period – beyond the powerful dichotomy that Mike Davis would later call “sunshine and noir.” Saul presents the recent resurgence of interest in the works of Gavin Lambert and Eve Babitz as evidence of growing readerly appetites for a richer and more sophisticated literary picture of this complex moment in LA’s history, with Lambert and Babitz functioning as counterparts and counterpoints to Isherwood and Lurie respectively.

The chapter discusses the respective locations and “values” of Indigeneity and Blackness vis-à-vis whiteness and ethnoracial mixings in ideological constructions of national identity in two different Latin American historical periods: “monocultural mestizaje” and multiculturalism. After delving into the ideological foundations of monocultural mestizaje and “racial democracy,” the chapter considers the advent of what has been called “the Latin American multicultural turn,” which began emerging unevenly in the region in the late 1980s. The “turn” brought about new official narrations of the nation, in a move away from the “monocultural mestizaje” ideology of national identity that reifies the mestizo as the prototypical national identity, to instead nominally recognize and “embrace” national ethnoracial diversity in a wave of new constitutions and constitutional reforms. The chapter concludes that both racial hierarchy and the mestizaje ideology of national identity remain alive and well, as the colonial racial order has adapted to contemporary circumstances, including the ideological shift from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”

This chapter is concerned with the question of what whiteness means today. Looking both at history and at Christian nationalism allows us to see that for much of its history, whiteness in the US meant respectable family values. European immigrants were promised the privilege of whiteness for the cost of assimilation, for leaving ethnic markers of clothing and language behind and assimilating into white cultural norms around family and gender roles. While today we tend to discuss respectability politics around people of color attempting to challenge racial stereotypes by practicing white middle-class norms, this discussion shows that Christian nationalism also functions to defend respectability in the form of sexual and familial norms. This commitment to defending respectability is a product of the history of US nationalism and perpetuates a politics of whiteness without ever needing to explicitly say so.

In this chapter, I detail the racial logics of the Anthropocene in its current discursive formation, focusing on three related critiques of the term. First, I show how the Anthropocene logic is derived from the categorization impulse of the geosciences, an epistemic push that has close ties to histories of racial science. A critical reading of geology has shown that the categorization of strata performs a similar pedagogy to the “family tree of man.” Second, this categorization is framed by the progressive narrative of modernity. In the Anthropocene, as an often apocalyptic narrative, the whiteness of historical time shows through and privileges a “colorblind” lens for the Anthropocene. Third, the objective description of the Anthropocene presents a universalizing narrative, one that has trouble detailing the differential experiences of environmental impacts. This universality reifies race into the oncoming environmental crisis even as it attempts to celebrate a world without divisions and differences. Finally, I draw from the critiques of the Anthropocene to highlight the multiple stories that are being told of the geophysical, ecological, and societal changes.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.