Performing Purity : Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power

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.

John T. Warren is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.