Whiteness on the Border, or Mapping the U.S. Racial Imaginary in Brown and White

Fellow Project Academic Year
2012

This project is an in-depth investigation of the Mexican-descent peoples location within the U.S. racial imaginary. This book project will examine how popular representations of Mexicans, Chicanos, and the border have been used to construct white nationalist discourses. It will explore how Chicano/a cultural workers have variously embraced, resisted, and negotiated their relationships to whiteness. Working at the heretofore under-examined intersection of Chicana/o studies and critical whiteness studies, this project analyses a variety of discursive practices, from film and novels to popular music and political manifestos. By and large critical whiteness studies have grown out of African American studies and examinations of the black-white binary to explore the formation and machinations of whiteness.

Fellow Project Principal Investigator
Lee Bebout, Department of English