Variations and differences in skin colour has been a complex phenomenon around the world. Issues of colour and identity in a postcolonial and post-Apartheid context, is also a significant field of interest. Popular stereotypes portray darker skin pigmentation as undesirable and inferior to lighter pigmentation. The process of ‘lactification’ (Fanon, 1968) remains a question today as much as during earlier colonial times. These stereotypes also bring to the fore, essential questions about hierarchies of power and oppression, culture and identity and how these are shaped to fit popular dominant culture. This study explored peoples’ perceptions around different shades of skin colour and attitudes towards various shades of pigmentation. The study adopted a qualitative approach and explored perceptions around skin colour through in-depth interviews. Fifteen adult participants in Soweto, Gauteng were recruited for the study via purposive sampling. The data collected was analysed using thematic content analysis. The study found that the western idea of attractiveness is still highly regarded. Black women and men take various measures to conform to the western ideal simply to be acknowledged as attractive and stigma is attached to the dark complexion. Self-esteem is affected by the perception of beauty, high perception of attractiveness equals to the high self-esteem.

This short story collection deals with themes of race, kinship, desire, subjectivity, and appearance vs. reality.

This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The blog and the comments reveal important discussions of knowledge production strategies of racialization and racism in popular media. Specifically, these negotiations expose three major registers of whiteness that are continually enacted within the discourses of the blog and the comments. These registers encompass understandings of whiteness as biological superiority and heritage; defining whiteness as a performance of privilege; and whiteness as an enactment of dominance and oppression. Sites of antiracist educational pedagogy are also discussed within this study to reveal the importance of investigating everyday discourses and understandings of race for the future.

This thesis centers around my autoethnographic performance 900 Gallons; it explores the importance of re-membering oppressive family histories and white supremacist legacies in particular. First, I explore the theoretical frame that whiteness studies offers this project, considering the ways in which performance can disrupt hegemonic whiteness, with specific attention to white invisibility, cultural appropriation and supremacy. Next, I discuss the project’s primary methodologies: performance autoethnography and queer genealogy. Performance autoethnography, I argue, illuminates the discursive potential of privileging both critical distance and critical intimacy. Queer genealogy foregrounds the importance of historiographical descent as well as dissent. Together, these methods reveal the resistant possibilities of embodied scholarship. Finally, I investigate the risks and possibilities of re-performing oppressive histories, arguing that when these narratives are performed with a critical difference, they can create radical possibilities. The Appendix includes the complete 900 Gallons script, as it was performed at the University of Texas on November 3 and 4, 2011. / text

During eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the suburbs of southwest Houston, Texas I examined the ways in which White upper class students, teachers, administrators, and parents think about race. As a result of exploring racial language, racial discourse, and racial texts in two US history textbooks, classroom lectures and activities, students' conversations and interviews, and local parents' political organizing, I explored the ways in which White people often think about, construct, and employ race. More specifically I learned the ways in which the White elite residents of this particular suburb know race. I am calling their way of knowing race a "White epistemology of race." I demonstrate how this White epistemology of race has informed, shaped, and guided this particular White community's attitudes toward their own education and residential resources as well as the education and residential resources of their Black and Brown intra-district peers. This dissertation aims to theorize the White epistemology of race and show it to be the unyielding source of a White "redemptive" ideology that is supported and created by the deployment of certain racialized discourses that insist and depend upon representations of Black cultural pathology. / text

A narrative of denial and ignorance of colonial history is pervasive in Canadian school curriculum. Generations of Canadians children learn about history without adequate understanding of Indigenous peoples and of the negative impact of colonialism. Drawing on Indigenous and critical race theories, this research study applied a critical discourse analysis to explore how historical narratives are (re)circulated in school history curriculum. Using the Ontario Grade 7 history curriculum and two history textbooks, the information that is currently being presented to Grade 7 students in Ontario history classes was analyzed. The study found that themes of denial, ignorance, Euro-centrism, racialized sexism and White settler colonial hegemony are pervasive in the history curriculum and textbooks, while information regarding distinct Indigenous peoples and their nations, their histories, and their contributions to Canadian history, are largely absent. These findings highlight implications for curriculum reform and the need for anti- racist, decolonizing pedagogical and curricular approaches. / Graduate / hclausin@uvic.ca

This thesis analyzes attitudes about race in Brazil in three research sites conducted in 2008 and 2009. The first research site was Salvador, Bahia where I asked a total of twelve students and professors their opinions about the importance of discussing race relations in Brazil and their views on Affirmative Action. These participants were mostly white middle-class students and professors. The second site was in the periferia of Zona Sul in the neighborhood of Capelinha, São Paulo. I interviewed four residents about the importance of race in Brazil. Here, the residents were mostly non-white, from various states in the north and northeast, and were working class. The last research site was Cooperifa, which is a spoken word movement located near Capelinha in Zona Sul. I found that non-white periferia residents subscribed to the same racial attitudes as the middle-class white participants when discussing the importance of race as a social phenomenon. In turn, I found that Cooperifa participants perceived white privilege as a social phenomenon that needs to be challenged. This thesis examines the links across these three sites and draws from theories of whiteness to understand them. / text

The concept of authenticity has been central to the human capacity to communicate for over two millennia, and it continues to enjoy wide usage throughout popular culture today. “Authenticity” typically conveys a sense that one has reached solid bedrock, the unchanging foundation of an object or inner-self that transcends the context of the moment. In this sense, the search or struggle for authenticity is a quest for VIP access to the ineffable “real” that language can only inadequately gesture toward. This study investigates the contemporary struggle for authenticity, or what can be described as the “rhetoric of authenticity,” by exploring the way authenticity is negotiated, constructed, and contested through various symbolic resources. More specifically, it focuses on how authenticity is negotiated in the U.S. blues community, a complex cultural site where the struggle over authenticity is especially salient and materializes in a variety of complex ways. Drawing on a number of philosophical perspectives and critical theories, the study employs the methods of rhetorical criticism and oral history as it seeks to answer three central questions: First, what are the major rhetorical dimensions of authenticity? Second, what does rhetorical analysis reveal about the relationship between authenticity and its various signifiers? And third, what does our desire for authenticity teach us about ourselves as symbol-using creatures? The study employs a case study approach that moves inductively in order to discover the larger rhetorical dimensions of authenticity. The case studies examine the relationship between authenticity and the blues’ larger historical trajectory; between aesthetics and authenticity in the oral history narratives of professional blues musicians in Austin, Texas, especially as they converge along a style/substance binary; between identity and authenticity in the editorial policy of Living Blues magazine; and finally, between imitation and authenticity in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. The study concludes by exploring how authenticity is contextual, aesthetic, ideological, and political, and frames a rhetorical theory of authenticity that can be applied widely throughout popular culture. / text

Recent analyses of creativity in the North American economy have underscored the importance of city-regions in the generation of economic dynamism. These studies have been concerned with at least two principal assertions. The first assertion is that the social dynamics of city-regions constitute the foundations of economic success. The second assertion is that the distribution of human capital (talent) is a crucial element in regional economic prosperity; yet the distribution of human capital across cities is uneven. Therefore, the question emerges: what factors influence the locational choices of talented individuals? In recent years, this question has received considerable scholarly attention. This thesis has identified two existing gaps within this field of inquiry. Conspicuously absent from studies in this area are theoretical insights offered by cultural geographers in the field of whiteness and race. Economic geographers have created an essentialized reading of racial diversity in the economic performance of city-regions. Moreover, work in this area has been constrained by a quantitative focus and a lack of empirical evidence. Accordingly, the purpose of this thesis is to develop a more nuanced understanding of how social processes and institutions underlie and are shaped by the economic performance of city-regions. This is achieved by drawing on insights from an empirical study of 44 semi-structured interviews with academic talent in the City of Kingston, Ontario and 12 interviews with community insiders. The results on the one hand reveal complex dynamics linked to why academics live in particular places, but on the other hand point to one overriding explanation for why academics locate where they do: namely, academics are attracted to Kingston, first and foremost, because of academic jobs, not urban amenities or other characteristics of place. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2009-07-22 11:33:21.839

Silence around ideas of racial diversity in public settings has become normative. Colourmuteness allows for the culture of Whiteness to remain unchallenged, and reinforces attitudes of assimilation and tolerance. This culture manifests itself in institutions of higher learning, and positions these places as sites of cultural domination, such as Queen’s University, site of the current study. The purpose of this thesis was to offer insight into the educational experiences of four female self-identified racialized students at Queen’s University. Together these participants contributed their stories about their thoughts, motivations, and experiences at Queen’s University, and their experiences as members of the student body. The inductive process was used as an analytical framework to allow the experiences of the participants to be the main focus of the work, and the voices of the participants were used as a guide for analysis. Results of this study indicated that the exploration of identity is a complex and layered phenomenon, and that interrelations between different aspects of identity make categorization of individual experience problematic. Each participant presented her personal story of her experiences as a racialized student within the Queen’s context, and together these stories revealed a need for open dialogue around constructions of difference, rather than a silencing of diversity. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-29 19:37:52.329