Scholars in geography are also now beginning
to critically investigate whiteness, though mainly
from a representational, feminist or deconstruc-
tivist position. Yet it remains a historical irony
that such contemporary investigations often fail
to recognize that, within geography at least,
whiteness is not a new topic of research (for
example, Trewartha, 1926; Woodruff, 1905).
The imperial geographies of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries constantly strove to
map out and legitimize white supremacy.
Clearly, it would be wrong to imagine that white
dominance is necessarily subverted by simply
openly talking about, or ‘outing’, whiteness.
Whiteness was very much out (and proud) for a
long time in geography. Trewartha reported on
the unsuitability of white Europeans to muscular
labour in the ‘wet tropics’, concluding that ‘the
brown man is superior to the white in his economy
of sweating’ (1926: 472). By 1931 Dane Kennedy
felt able to comment upon the ‘perils of the
midday sun’ in the colonial interior, leaving him
to ponder why ‘natural laws drove the white race
to control, but prevented them from populating
the tropics’ (1990: 123).
However, whilst whiteness was once treated as
a natural and stable identity, it is now increas-
ingly viewed as something that has a history and
a geography, an impermanent social formation
that can be changed and challenged (Bonnett,
1993; 1997; 2000a; 2000b). An important start-
ing point remains Ruth Frankenberg’s qualitative
analysis of 30 white Californian women in the
US, White Women, Race Matters: The Social
Construction of Whiteness (1994). A chapter
entitled ‘Growing up White: the Social Geography
of “Race”’ is an attempt to show how whiteness
is enacted in small American towns at a neigh-
bourhood scale. Thus, Frankenberg examines
‘the interlocking effects of geographical origin,
generation, ethnicity, political orientation, gender
and present-day geographical location’ (1994:
18) on the lives of her white respondents. Else-
where, Frankenberg has depicted her work to be
a ‘Racial social geography’ that involves ‘the
racial and ethnic mapping of a landscape in
physical terms, and enables also a beginning
sense of the conceptual mapping of self and other
with respect to race operating in white women’s
lives’ (1993: 54). The intertwining of geography
with whiteness is also apparent in the introduc-
tion – entitled ‘Local Whiteness, Localising
Whiteness’ – to Frankenberg’s edited volume
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and
Cultural Criticism(1997).
Schech and Haggis (1998) have discussed post-
colonial forms of whiteness in a time and place
where the circulating currents of globalizationsimultaneously give way to a monocultural
defensiveness, exemplified by Pauline Hanson’s
One Nation Party in Australia. Using Hanson’s
landslide victory in the working-class suburb of
Brisbane in order to assess the popularity of the
One Nation Party and its appeal to whiteness,
their study explores how Australian identity has
been challenged from without by the ‘power-
house’ economies in the Asian–Pacific rim, and
also from within by the claims to Aboriginal land
rights from indigenous peoples. The One Nation
Party has been seen to be successful in articulat-
ing a sense of white unease through claiming that
whites are now the marginalized victims of
society. In this context the authors conclude that,
‘Perhaps postwhiteness is a necessary requisite
for postcoloniality’ (1998: 627).
Another study that combines a national and
local exploration of whiteness is Kobayashi and
Peake’s (2000) examination of press reportage of
the shootings that occurred in Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado, USA. Littleton is
portrayed as a ‘safe’ neighbourhood, far removed
(at least in the white imagination) from the
vividly racialized inner-city ‘hood’ and ghetto.
According to the authors the racialized represen-
tations of these areas show that ‘Place does
matter both because social processes such as
whiteness are bounded, and because the complex
feelings of both racism and antiracism are highly
evocative of particular landscapes’ (2000: 396).
Kobayashi and Peake go on to remark on the
need for geographers to embark upon a critical
engagement with whiteness. They note how ‘the
lives of dominantly white geographers, are sites
for the reproduction of racism, but they also hold
the potential of being strategic sites of resistance’
(2000: 399). Indeed, in a rare disclosure of white
subjectivity the feminist geographer Gillian Rose
has considered how whiteness has empowered
her work in the discipline: ‘I may feel marginalised
in geography as a woman,’ she opines, ‘but my
whiteness has enabled my critique of geographical
discourses by allowing me to get close enough to
them to have a good look’ (1993: 15).
Peter Jackson’s study of shopping patterns has
led him to declare that ‘constructions of white-
ness should be traced at a variety of scales from
the nation to the neighbourhood’ (1998: 100). A
fine example is Paul Watt’s (1998) previously
mentioned interview-based study with 70 young
people (15–21 years) of ‘white’, Asian and Afro-
Caribbean background in the south-east of
England (see also Dwyer and Jones III, 2000). Watt
reveals how it is not only white people but ‘white
places’ that have escaped the geographical gaze.
This perspective is also proffered by McGuinness
(2000) as he seeks to persuade geographers308 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES3029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 308