New Books in Intellectual History
Society & Culture
White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior-from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (U Minnesota Press, 2023) explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take.
Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a "majority minority" population and the growing diversification of America's political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives.
The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.
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Rochelle Gurstein, "Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art" (Yale UP, 2024)
Theo Williams, "Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation" (Verso, 2022)
Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Chris Cutrone, "Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory 2006-2024" (Sublation Media, 2024)
Satoru Hashimoto, "Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Roberta L. Millstein, "The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Michael Tilton Williams, "Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta" (de Gruyter, 2024)
Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)
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Iris Jamahl Dunkle, "Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb" (U California Press, 2024)
Kyle Falcon, "Haunted Britain: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and the Great War" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Michael J. Thompson, "Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism" (Routledge, 2024)
Alexandre Lefebvre, "Liberalism as a Way of Life" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (Basic Books, 2024)
Faisal Devji, "Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea" (Harvard UP, 2013)
Camille Owens, "Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America" (NYU Press, 2024)
William Cook Miller, "The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Naomi Seidman, "In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages" (Stanford UP, 2024)
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