Surfing the third wave of whiteness studies: reflections on Twine and Gallagher

The influential special issue and overview essay co-edited and co-authored respectively, by Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, set out their interpretation of whiteness studies’ genealogy, development and future. In this essay I identify their arguments and critique them in the light of a further eight years’ work on the racialization of white identities produced by the global academy. Particular attention is paid to the proliferation of micro studies about an ever-increasing array of sites, both in thematic and international terms, and to the corpus’ addressing of power relations. Moreover, I underscore Twine and Gallagher’s prescience on the strand of the work they review that bears on the racial project of recuperating white supremacy in a variety of ways, a project that is enjoying heightened visibility in 2016.