[Commlist] New Book: Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars

  Book Announcement:


  Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars
  <https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Authenticating-Whiteness>


  In /Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars/, Rachel
  E. Dubrofsky explores the idea that popular media implicitly portrays
  whiteness as credible, trustworthy, familiar, and honest, and that
  this portrayal is normalized and ubiquitous. Whether on television,
  film, social media, or in the news, white people are constructed as
  believable and unrehearsed, from the way they talk to how they look
  and act.

Dubrofsky argues that this way of making white people appear authentic 
is a strategy of whiteness, requiring attentiveness to the context of 
white supremacy in which the presentations unfold. The volume details 
how ideas about what is natural, good, and wholesome are reified in 
media, showing how these values are implicitly racialized. Additionally, 
the project details how white women are presented as particularly 
authentic when they seem to lose agency by expressing affect through 
emotional and bodily displays.

The chapters examine a range of popular media—newspaper articles about 
Donald J. Trump, a selfie taken at Auschwitz, music videos by Miley 
Cyrus, the television series /UnREAL/, the infamous video of Amy Cooper 
calling the police on an innocent Black man, and the documentary /Miss 
Americana/—pinpointing patterns that cut across media to explore the 
implications for the larger culture in which they exist. At its heart, 
the book asks: Who gets to be authentic? And what are the implications?


  Reviews

    "/Authenticating Whiteness/ offers a new lens through which to
    understand representations of everyday whiteness. It powerfully
    discusses how whiteness often constructs itself as ‘authentic’ and
    how authenticity functions as a strategy of whiteness. Focusing on
    media and celebrity culture, including representations of white
    femininity, this book has a lot to offer to scholars of race,
    whiteness, and media. This is a highly valuable contribution to the
    literature on media representations of whiteness and particularly
    white femininity."

    - Raka Shome, author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National
    Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture

    "In this book, Rachel Dubrofsky takes an innovative and expansive
    approach to the relationship between authenticity and whiteness. She
    positions her compelling argument that authenticity works as a
    strategy of whiteness within a range of media and popular culture,
    from Taylor Swift to Miley Cyrus, from reality television to
    Twitter, from Karen to Trump. Her detailed and careful analyses on
    the varied alliances of whiteness with authenticity makes a
    substantial contribution to conversations on the roles of media and
    popular culture, affect, and surveillance in understanding the
    powerful relationship between authenticity and whiteness."

    - Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of Authentic™: The Politics of
    Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

    "/Authenticating Whiteness/ is an important exploration of the
    fragile nature of whiteness in its contemporary sociopolitical
    habitat. In examining how whiteness is unapologetically
    shape-shifting, self-protective, and often insecure, Rachel
    Dubrofsky issues a compelling challenge we won’t soon forget in this
    masterful critical-theoretic volume."

    - Ronald L. Jackson II, author of Scripting the Black Masculine
    Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media


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