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?

The field of communication offers the study of whiteness a focus on discourse which directs its attention to the everyday experiences of whiteness through regimes of truth, embodied acts, and the deconstruction of mediated texts. This book takes an intersectional approach to whiteness studies, researching whiteness through rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, performance studies, and interpretive research. More specifically the chapters deconstruct the communicative power of whiteness in the context of the United States, but with discussion of the implications of this power internationally, by taking on relevant and current topics such as terrorism, post-colonial challenges, white fragility at the national level, the emergence of colorblind discourse as a pro-white discursive strategy, the relationship of people of color with and through whiteness, as well as multifaceted identities that intersect with whiteness, including religion, masculinity and femininity, social class, ability, and sexuality.

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.

A revisionist history of Method acting that connects the popular reception of “methodness” to entrenched understandings of screen performance still dominating American film discourse today. Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries. Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

Talking White Trash documents the complex and interwoven relationship between mediated representations and lived experiences of white working-class people—a task inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in a white working-class family and neighborhood and how she came to understand herself through watching films and television shows. The increasing presence of white working-class people in media, particularly within the genre of reality television, and their role in fueling the unprecedented rise of Donald Trump, has made this population a central subject of U.S. cultural discourse. Rather than relying solely on analyses of mediated portrayals, Dunn makes use of personal narratives, interviews, focus groups, textual analysis, and critical autoethnography to specifically analyze how popular media articulates certain ideas about white working-class people, and how those who identify as members of this population, including herself, negotiate such articulations. Dunn’s work provides alternative stories that are rarely, if ever, found in popular media—stories that feature the varied reactions and lived experiences of white working-class people; stories that talk to, talk with, and talk back to mediated representations and dominant cultural ideas; stories that illuminate the multidimensionality of a population that is often portrayed in one-dimensional ways; stories that move inside and outside the white working-class to better understand their role within, and influence upon, U.S. culture.

Global Trade and Cultural Authentication, edited by Joanne Eicher, showcases the complexity and enduring aesthetic and ingenuity of Kalabari artisans. The Kalabari people, most of whom make their homes in the eastern Niger Delta region of western Africa, are renowned for the artistry in working with globally imported textiles and dress for centuries. The 22 essays in this edited volume feature the work of leading Nigerian and American scholars and offer an in-depth, nuanced understanding of Kalabari textiles, aesthetics, and engagement with past and present global trade networks. Using dress and textiles as a lens, Global Trade and Cultural Authentication explores the Kalabari people's centuries-long role in the global trade arena. Their economic interconnectedness demonstrates that Africa was never a "dark continent" but, rather, critically involved in a global trade built around Kalabari resourcefulness and imagination.

Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop examines white American male literature for its social commentary on the construction of whiteness in the United States. Whiteness has always been a contested racial identity in the U.S., one in a state of construction and reconstruction throughout critical cultural and historical moments. This text examines how white American male writers have grappled with understanding themselves and their audiences as white beings. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop specifically brings a critical whiteness approach to American literary criticism and strengthens the growing interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies in the humanities. Critical whiteness studies shifts the attention from solely examining people and perspectives of color in race discourse to addressing whiteness as an essential component of race ideology. The primary contribution of this perspective is in how whites construct and see whiteness, for the larger purpose of exploring the possibilities of how they may come to no longer construct and see themselves through whiteness. Understanding this is at the heart of contemporary discussions of post-raciality. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop uses the following texts as canonical case studies: Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach. Each underscores the dialectic of formation, deformation, and reformation of whiteness at specific socio-historical moments based upon anxieties about race possessed by whites and highlighted by white fictionists. The selected writers ultimately serve dually as co-constructors of whiteness and social critics of their times through their literature.

Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians. White musicians from a wide range of musical, social, and economic backgrounds looked to black music and culture as the model on which to form their personal identities and their identities as professional musicians. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism. As they describe their relationships with black musicians who are their teachers and peers, white jazz autobiographers display the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, and deference and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to black culture to the present day. Outside and Inside features insights into the development of jazz styles and culture in the urban meccas of twentieth-century jazz in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Reva Marin considers the autobiographies of sixteen white male jazz instrumentalists, including renowned swing-era bandleaders Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Charlie Barnet; reed instrumentalists Mezz Mezzrow, Bob Wilber, and Bud Freeman; trumpeters Max Kaminsky and Wingy Manone; guitarist Steve Jordan; pianists Art Hodes and Don Asher; saxophonist Art Pepper; guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon; and New Orleans–style clarinetist Tom Sancton. While critical race theory informs this work, Marin argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the kind of sustained relationships with black music and culture described in the accounts of white jazz autobiographers. She both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in black culture. Marin opens new paths for study of race relations and racial, ethnic, and gender identity formation in jazz studies.

In Race and the Senses, Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown explore the sensorial and phenomenological materiality of race as it is felt and sensed by the racialized subjects. Situating the lived body as an active, affective, and sensing participant in racialized realities, they argue that race is not simply marked on our bodies, but rather felt and registered through our senses. They illuminate the sensorial landscape of racialized world by combining the scholarship in sensory studies, phenomenology, and intercultural communication. Each chapter elaborates on the felt bodily sensations of race, racism, and racialization that illuminate how somatic labor plays a significant role in the construction of racialized relations of sensing. Their thought-provoking theorizing about the relationship between race and the senses include race as a sensory assemblage, the phenomenology of the racialized face and tongue, kinesthetic feelings of blackness, as well as the possibility of cross-racial empathy. Race is not merely socially constructed, but multisensorially assembled, engaged, and experienced. Grounded in the authors’ experiences, one as a Japanese woman living in the USA, and the other as an African American man from Chicago, Race and the Senses is a book about how we feel the racialized world into being.