Making Whiteness is a profoundly im portant work that explains
how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and
distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In
intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered
analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the
active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white
southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural
system based on violence and physical separation. And in a bold and
transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation for the
nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners'' creation of
modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the
rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy
while at the same time creating the illusion of a national,
egalitarian, consumerist democracy.
By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary
American whiteness and by examining how the culture of segregation,
in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it
possible to imagine a future outside it. Her vision holds out the
difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose
possibilities are no longer limited and disfigured by race.
關於作者:
Grace Elizabeth Hale is an assistant professor of American
history at the University of Virginia. She lives in
Charlottesville, Virginia.