Overview

Based on a two-year critical ethnography, Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power demonstrates the potential of a performative conceptualization of whiteness - a way of seeing whiteness in production, in the process of reiteration. This book builds on prior studies by searching for the repetitions of whiteness in our daily communication. The move to the performative is an explicit detailing of whiteness in and through the repetitious acts that work to reconstitute whiteness as a communicative ideal. Performing Purity creates a critical space of dialogue, shifting the conversation to how we make race, as a construct, matter.

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9780820467542

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This book adds an important voice to current conversations within critical race studies. Using performativity as a powerful critical lens for understanding how white bodies get 'made', John T. Warren helps us avoid getting mired in racial essentialism, while simultaneously allowing for the careful consideration of the material effects of racial inequality. Warren carefully articulates a conceptual map for tracing the production and reproduction of whiteness through everyday performances of the ordinary, the mundane and the prosaic in the classroom. This is an important book, especially for those who struggle with the (re)constitution of the [white] 'culture of power' in the classroom. (Dreama G. Moon, Associate Professor, Communication Department, California State University, San Marcos)

« This book adds an important voice to current conversations within critical race studies. Using performativity as a powerful critical lens for understanding how white bodies get 'made' John T. Warren helps us avoid getting mired in racial essentialism, while simultaneously allowing for the careful consideration of the material effects of racial inequality. Warren carefully articulates a conceptual map for tracing the production and reproduction of whiteness through everyday performances of the ordinary, the mundane and the prosaic in the classroom. This is an important book, especially for those who struggle with the (re)constitution of the [white] 'culture of power' in the classroom.

Author Information

The Author: John T. Warren received his Ph.D. in Speech Communication and Performance Studies from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He has published essays in several education and communication studies journals, including Educational Theory, Communication Education, and Text and Performance Quarterly. Dr. Warren is currently working on a new project investigating critical performative pedagogy.

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