Race as category crisis: Whiteness and the topical assignation of race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyer's White, the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White, whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.