Articulating whiteness

ABSTRACT

In almost three decades of work on whiteness in communication studies, it has developed in a number of different directions. In contemporary cultural politics, whiteness has transformed into an even more powerful discursive force in society. This piece reflects on the history of the journal, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, and argues that one of its legacies, articulation theory, offers a particularly productive approach for the further development of whiteness studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Articulation theory
• cultural politics
• white Christian nationalism
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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2 Trip Gabriel, “Trump Escalates Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric with ‘Poisoning the Blood’ Comments,” New York Times, October 5, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-rhetoric.html.

3 Zoë Richards, “Trump Doubles Down on ‘Iimmigrant Blood’ Remark, Says He ‘Never Read Mein Kampf’,” NBC News, December 19, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-doubles-immigrant-blood-remark-says-never-read-mein-kampf-rcna130535.

4 Ian Angus, “Stuart Hall and the Theory and Practice of Articulation,” Communication Yearbook: Annals of the International Communication Association 15, no. 1 (1992): 535–70; John Clarke, “Stuart Hall and the Theory and Practice of Articulation,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 36, no. 2 (2015): 275–86; Dongli Yang, “Articulation Theory and the Evolution of Cultural Studies,” Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 41, no. 3 (2021): 54–64.

5 Kevin DeLuca, “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 32, no. 4 (1999): 334–48.

6 DeLuca, “Articulation Theory”; Jolanta A. Drzewiecka and Melissa E. Steyn, “Racial Immigrant Incorporation: Material-Symbolic Articulation of Identities,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5, no. 1 (2012): 1–19; Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 112–27 (New York: Routledge, 1996).

7 Ligaya Mishan, “The March of the Karens,” The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2021, updated June 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/t-magazine/white-women-karen.html.

8 Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (The Ohio State University Press, 2020).

9 Jeffrey M. Jones, “Confidence in U.S. Supreme Court Sinks to Historic Low,” Gallup, June 23, 2022. https://news.gallup.com/poll/394103/confidence-supreme-court-sinks-historic-low.aspx.

10 Hassan Kanu, “Even Some Justices are Raising Questions About the U.S. Supreme Court’s Legitimacy,” Reuters, July 10, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/column-even-some-justices-are-raising-questions-about-us-supreme-courts-2023-07-10/.

11 Jia Tolentino, “The Rage of the Incels,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels.

12 Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (HarperCollins, 2020).

13 John Blake, “He left his White Evangelical Bubble. Here’s What He Says It Would Take for Others to Do the Same,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/05/us/white-christian-evangelicals-blake-cec/index.html.

14 Tim Alberta, The Kingdom.